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By Marvin Carlson, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Ali Salim, Walid Ikhlasi | A varied collection of Arabic explorations of one of the central dramas of the European canon. < Back The Arab Oedipus: Four Plays Marvin Carlson, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Ali Salim, Walid Ikhlasi Download PDF Edited by Marvin Carlson An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the Western theatre community, and we hope that this collection will contribute to that awareness, not only because of the importance of the dramatists represented, but because of the fascination of seeing a variety of Arabic perspectives on one of the central dramas of the European canon. These varied Arabic explorations of Oedipus range in tonality from dark fatalism to rollicking farce and in time from ancient Greek and Egyptian Thebes to a contemporary computer laboratory, where a super-computer replaces the Delphic oracle as the source of the fatal prophecy. This collection includes: King Oedipus by Tawfiq al-Hakim The Tragedy of Oedipus by Ali Ahmad Bakathir The Comedy of Oedipus by Ali Salim Oedipus by Walid Ikhlasi More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu

PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Devised Theater After COVID With Allen Kuharski and others English 60 minutes 3:00PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open to All American Devised Theater After COVID: Teaching, Archiving and the Practice The past, present, and future of devised physical ensemble theater in the US was the topic of an historic NEH Institute in Philadelphia in June. A diverse group of over 50 professors, artist/teachers, grad students, editors, and archivists from around the country as well as several foreign countries gathered for 12 days to discuss the issues of archiving, criticism, and especially the theoretical and historical teaching of this 60-year-old practice in American and world theater. This exchange was prompted by the recent proliferation of the teaching of the practice of devising in colleges, universities, and drama schools (often without a theoretical, critical, historical framing) and the larger challenges to such innovative live performance following the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the growing impact of climate change. The Institute was initiated by Quinn Bauriedel of Pig Iron Theatre Company's School for Devised Performance, and co-hosted by Allen Kuharski of Swarthmore College. The panel at CUNY will consist of participants in the Institute and will be a report and critical reflection on the larger issues that emerged from the Institute. With Allen Kuharski, Rye Gentleman (NYU), Tracy Hazas (CUNY-Queens College), Rebecca Adelsheim, Tom Sellar (YSD) and/or others. TBC. Content / Trigger Description: Allen J. Kuharski is Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College and teaches in Pig Iron Theater Company’s MFA Program in Devised Performance. Kuharski is a widely published critic and scholar on contemporary directing history, theory, and practice and on modern Polish theater and drama. He is co-editor of the 16-volume Witold Gombrowicz: Collected Writings published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Kraków. He has served as an editor for journals such Theatre Journal, Slavic & East European Performance, Western European Stages, and Periphery: Journal of Polish Affairs. His articles and reviews have been published in Polish, French, Spanish, Norwegian, German, and Bulgarian translations. His own translations from Polish and French have been widely performed in the United States and abroad. As a dramaturg and translator, he has shared two OBIE Awards and a Fringe First Award, and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage has awarded him the country’s Order of Merit. Kuharski was a Fulbright Scholar in Theater to the Polish Academy of Arts & Sciences in Warsaw in 2017-18. With Quinn Bauriedel of Pig Iron, he was Co-Director of the 2023 NEH Institute in Philadelphia titled “Preserving and Transmitting American Ensemble-Based Devised Theatre.” Tom Sellar, a writer, curator, and dramaturg, is Editor of Theater magazine and Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale University. His writing and criticism have appeared in national publications including Artforum, BOMB, the New York Times, the Guardian, 4Columns, and American Theatre. From 2001-2016 he was a frequent contributor to the Village Voice, where he covered theater and performance art nationally, serving as an Obie award judge and for two terms as chief theater critic. He has also contributed to numerous book anthologies including The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy; Joined Forces: Audience Participation in Theater; Curating Live Arts: Global Perspectives, Envisioning Theory and Practice in Performance; and the history BAM: The Next Wave Festival. He has curated programs for American Realness, Queer Zagreb, the Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue (with Anna Deavere Smith), Prague Quadrennial, Philadelphia Fringe Arts, and other organizations. With Antje Oegel, Tom co-curated Prelude 2015 (What Could We Build, or Is the Future Already Behind Us?) and Prelude 2016 (Welcome Failure). Rebecca Adelsheim is a doctoral candidate in Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale where they study queer theater and performance, and lecturer at Tufts University. As a new play dramaturg and producer, Rebecca has worked for companies including Audible Theater, Steppenwolf Theater Company, Baltimore Center Stage, the Goodman Theater, Philadelphia Theater, and Barrington Stage, among others. Recent credits include co-adapator for Affinity based on the novel by Sarah Waters with director Alex Keegan and dramaturg and researcher forsoldiergirls by Em Weinstein. Their writing has been published in Theater magazine, where they also serve as the associate editor. They have received research grants from the Beinecke Library and theFund for Gay and Lesbian Studies (FLAGS) at Yale University and is the recipient of the John W. Gassner Memorial prize and the G. Charles Niemeyer Scholarship. Rebecca is originally from Pittsburgh, PA and received their B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and their M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. Rye Gentleman is the Librarian for Performing Arts in the Division of Libraries. He holds a PhD from University of Minnesota's Theatre Arts & Dance Department and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Gentleman conducts research at the intersection of performance studies, transgender studies, and new media studies. His dissertation-based book project explores the ways transgender embodiment is conceptualized in and shaped by digital media and shows how actual and imagined transgender bodies are enmeshed in digital systems that exert a normative pressure, while also offering the capacity to materialize more expansive actualizations of gendered embodiment. He is also currently working as contributor and co-editor on an anthology focused on transfeminist theatre and performance. His writing has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre (Routledge). TRACY HAZAS is an actor and movement director. She has performed at NYC theaters including New York City Center, Dixon Place, Abrons Art Center, and Theater for the New City; most recently, she was seen in Preparedness, co-produced by the Bushwick Starr and HERE Arts Center. Hazas is an affiliated artist with Counter-Balance Theater. She is the voice of the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, and has appeared in commercials for Xbox, Tide and others. She made her feature debut in White Rabbit at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Currently she’s designing movement for The Wolves at Queens College; and developing an original work, Los Kentubanos, which reconstructs moments from her family’s history in Cuba, utilizing archival documents and her father’s digital collection of roughly 30,000 family photos dating from the early 1900s. Hazas teaches performance, movement, collaboration and voice at Queens College (CUNY). Previous academic positions include Lecturer of Acting and Movement at Stanford University, and work at Emerson College Los Angeles, Montclair State University and others. Photo credits: Allen J. Kuharski. Credit by Ted Kostans. Tom Sellar. Photo credit by the artist. Rebecca Adelsheim. Photo credit by the artist. Rye Gentleman. Photo credit by the artist. TRACY HAZAS. Photo credit by the artist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Maya Roth Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Revolutions in Performance and Theatre / History Now Maya Roth By Published on April 27, 2023 Download Article as PDF Maya Roth, Editor Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances By Jill Stevenson Reviewed by Rob Silverman Ascher Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age By Duška Radosavljević Reviewed by M. Landon Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre By Cecilia Josephine Aragόn Reviewed by Jeanne Klein Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times Edited by Kendra Capece and Patrick Scorese Reviewed by Ansley Valentine The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945 Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto Reviewed by Clay Sanderson Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past By Ariel Nereson Reviewed by Jada M. Campbell Books Received The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 2 (Spring 2023) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2023 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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Erica Stevens Abbitt Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Erica Stevens Abbitt By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF EMILY MANN: REBEL ARTIST OF THE AMERICAN THEATRE. Alexis Greene. Guilford, CT: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2023; Pp. 391. Alexis Greene has written a timely, accessible biography of one of America’s greatest living theatrical icons, playwright,director and artistic visionary Emily Mann.The creator since the 1970s of a unique brand of documentary theatre featuring the contradictory, impassioned testimony of real people in crisis, Mann is also an award-winning director, and one of a handful of successful female theatre administrators in this country, recognized for her 30-year tenure asartistic director of Princeton’s McCarter Theater. As the title suggests, Greene argues that Mann’s allergy to preconceived assumptions and the status quo (both politically and theatrically) has been the engine of her achievement. For Greene, Mann’s career does not simply represent triumph over personal trauma, chronic illness and a patriarchal theatre establishment: it provides a testament to the power of radical resistance. In Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater , Greene has wisely used an approach akin to Mann’s own “theatre of testimony.” After hours of interviewing family, friends, associates and the artist herself, Greene uncovered a series of compelling (but sometimes contradictory) narratives. These rich conversations, woven into a deceptively simple chronological structure, provide the reader with a nuanced view of a complex artist and activist. Well-illustrated, with an excellent bibliography and index, the text is divided into a series ofshort, readable chapters. The first third of the book moves briskly through Mann’s family history and its Jewish roots, the influence of her activist parents, her coming-of-age in Chicago in the1960s, and her early theatrical experiments as a student at Radcliffe. In the next section, Greene provides a valuable overview of Mann’s evolution as a creative artist,as she developed techniques for representing real people threatened by forces larger than themselves. The arc of Mann’s early work, from Annulla: An Autobiography (regarding a Jewish woman in post-Holocaust Britain) to Still Life (featuring a Vietnam vet, his mistress and his abused wife) and the landmark drama Execution of Justice (exploring the 1978 assassination at San Francisco City Hall of Harvey Milk and George Moscone) reveals two key insights on Mann’s aesthetic and social praxis. The first insight involves the way Mann gradually widened her perspective and added characters to her plays, creating a vast, polyphonic and more explicitly political dramaturgy. The second is how Mann’s youthful experience of violence (as the victim of sexual assault) drove her need to represent both victim and perpetrator, and sharpened her emphasis on the process of reconciliation and recovery. The final third of Greene’s book hones in on Mann’s tenure as Artistic Director at the McCarter Theatre, her development of translations and new works exploring race and social legacies in America (such as Having Our Say and Greensboro: A Requiem ), and her forays as a director to regional and Broadway stages. Here, Greene gives readers a perceptive take on the patterns of failure and success that have marked Mann’s career— bruising challenges, including her struggles with multiple sclerosis and conflicts with her board, juxtaposed with artistic successes and national recognition. Greene reads Mann's career to exemplify ongoing gender inequity in theatre, despite many generations of women’s achievement and advocacy. But persistence is all, and that is what Mann has contributed. As Greene puts it, "Sometimes being a rebel simply means staying the course" (131). Well-documented and engaging, Greene’s Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater will appeal to a wide range of constituencies. Those concerned with identity and performance in an era of cancel-culture will find descriptions of Mann’s techniques reaching across divisions of race, class, gender and ideology to represent difference (including Blackness and queer experience) relevant in ongoing debates on a core issue of contemporary theater practice. In this, the book interacts with several recent publications on race, equity, diversity and performance,such as Casting a Movement (edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks), as well as the innovative"calling in” movement developed by educator/activist Loretta J. Ross. Unexpected tidbits in this biography will provide keen theatre-goers with lively insights, including descriptions of Mann’s encounters with Winnie Mandela, and her long-standing friendship with leading performers, activists and advocates, from John Spencer to Nadine Strossen and Gloria Steinem. Themes of advocacy, alliance building and mentorship run through the volume, furnishing the reader with a vivid sense of the generous, collectivist process that may be one of Mann’s least acknowledged, but most important accomplishments. Greene’s exploration of Mann’s experience with chronic illness during some of the most productive years of her career provides an important contribution to a growing scholarship on trauma, disability and theatre, as well. Her treatment of Mann’s work as part of a national conversation on truth and power should prove valuable to"discourse in the public square" (ix) and to those committed to the study of theatre as civic practice. For students and emerging artists, especially, Greene’s text is an excellent resource, providing a detailed critique of Mann’s major works and methodology in clear and accessible prose. The book’s depiction of the travails of a theatre administrator on the shop floor of the industry should prove enlightening to would-be producers and artistic administrators, especially those from under-represented groups. Indeed, this biography serves as both a cautionary tale and a blueprint for success, reminding outsider aspirants to positions of power the strategies they may need to transform a supposedly “liberal” theatre establishment. For theatre scholars in general (and feminist scholars in particular), Greene’s examination of this significant artist fills a gap in the literature, providing a much-needed comprehensive and updated appraisal of Mann’s career and legacy in the 21st century. Greene, author of Lucille Lortel: Queen of Off-Broadway , and a novelist, educator, critic and theatre practitioner in her own right, notes that one of the major goals in her work is to reveal the everyday lives (as well as the extraordinary achievements) of women in the field. In the end, Greene’s approach for this volume, sympathetic but never sycophantic, is resonant with Mann’s own process and vision. It reminds us that keen observation and empathetic representation are at the heart of effective theatrical expression. This volume validates the career of a woman whose focus on theatre as means of advancing social justice has never wavered—and it underscores, for theatre-makers, students and researchers alike, the potential of performance as a radical force for change. References Greene, Alexis. Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater. Guilford: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2023. About The Authors Dr. Erica Stevens Abbitt is Professor Emerita in the School of Dramatic Art. From 2015-17, she also served FAHSS as director of the Humanities Research Group. A native of Montreal, Erica earned a BA in political science from McGill before training as an actor. Her theatre career in Canada, the US, New Zealand and the UK included the BBC series OPPENHEIMER, stage roles in London and Off-Broadway and directing, writing and producing credits in regional theatre. In 1999, she returned to her studies, receiving an MA in Theatre History from California State University, Northridge and a PhD in Critical Studies from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. Joining the University of Windsor in 2004, she focused on revitalizing the theatre studies curriculum to include contemporary thinking on race, nation, gender, power and identity, as well as performance. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

A chat and conversation between Frank Hentscker and Stefanie Batten Bland about proscenium, immersive performance, and all the in-betweens in our new covid making times. PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK Stefanie Batten Bland Discussion English 30 minutes 4:00PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All A chat and conversation between Frank Hentscker and Stefanie Batten Bland about proscenium, immersive performance, and all the in-betweens in our new covid making times. Content / Trigger Description: September 2023 Dance Magazine Cover-girl, and Creative C2023 Creative Capital Winner and 2022 BAM Next Wave Artist, Stefanie Batten Bland Child of a jazz composer/producer father and writer mother, and raised in Soho when it was still led by artists, was clearly destined for a future in the arts. A global artist, Batten Bland exhibits a unique blend of African American flamboyance and European sensibility. Her work is situated at the intersection of dance-theatre, film, and immersive creations, with a focus on the interrogation of symbols in contemporary and historical culture. Undeterred by convention, the emotional content of Batten Bland's choreography is directly accessible; its social and philosophical message is visceral. As artistic director of Company SBB, Batten Bland established the company in France in 2008 while positioned as head choreographer at the Paris Opéra Comique. Upon returning to New York City, she received the support of Mikhail Baryshnikov and his residency program at Baryshnikov Arts Center, where she continues as a resident artist. Before establishing her own company, Batten Bland danced for Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Tanztheater Wüppertal Pina Bausch, Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, Hungarian Pal Frenák and Ivorian Coast creator Georges Momboye. Known for her unique visual and movement aesthetic, Batten Bland served as curator for the 2023 edition of E-Moves at Harlem Stage, movement director for Eve’s Song at the Public Theater (Forbes 2018 Best Theater) and is currently casting and movement director for Life & Trust Emursive Productions spring 2024 creation, as well as their performance and identity consultant for Sleep No More. Her article in Dance Magazine details her advocacy in immersive theater for performers, through costuming, character direction and lighting approaches. She has created for fashion and lifestyle partners Fleur du Mal, Louis Vuitton, VanCleef & Arpels, Hermés, and Guerlain. Her choreography is currently in active repertory at American Ballet Theater, Alvin Ailey II, Transitions Dance Company in the UK, and Frontier Danceland in Singapore. Batten Bland has created 14 dance cinema films that have been shown in international festivals from South Africa to Buenos Aires and Greece to Germany. Her latest dance film, Kolonial, has received thirteen US and international film awards, and was nominated for 3 Bessie Awards. Her work has been presented at the Park Armory, BAM, ADF, Lincoln Center Restart Stages, The Yard at Martha’s Vineyard, La MaMa Experimental Theater and internationally at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, Danse à Lille in France, and Tanztendenzen in Germany. Awards include a New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project Production. A Jerome Robbins Award, six Jerome Robbins support grants, three Bessie nominations, a Bessie Schonberg Fellowship at The Yard, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Center for Ballet Arts Fellow at NYU, and Toulmin Creator at NYU Center for Ballet Arts. She has been featured in The New York Times, New York Times Style Magazine, Dance Magazine, Marie Claire, and Dance Europe. Batten Bland received her MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College and is currently an Assistant Professor at Montclair State University’s Department of Theatre and Dance and lives in SoHo with her family. URL: companysbb.org IG: sbb_land Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Leche Hervida is a Solo Performance created in 2023. The work involves meticulous detail around all objects floor to ceiling. The foam floor is first laid below the meticulously constructed lighting rig by the artist. All of the objects in the work are created by IV Castellanos. The wearables are deconstructed during the production of this performance. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Leche Hervida IV Castellanos Dance, Performance Art English. Spanish, Quechua 20mins 2:30PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Leche Hervida is a Solo Performance created in 2023. The work involves meticulous detail around all objects floor to ceiling. The foam floor is first laid below the meticulously constructed lighting rig by the artist. All of the objects in the work are created by IV Castellanos. The wearables are deconstructed during the production of this performance. Content / Trigger Description: The performance goes to complete darkness at one point. Abstract Performance Artist and Sculptor. I create solo, collaborative and group task vignette performances. The objects in my performances are all constructed/deconstructed by myself and/or the collaborator/s I am working with. In addition, I create stand alone sculptures not meant to be activated by performances. I am a Three Spirit Queer Trans* Bolivian-Indige / American. www.ivcastellanos.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Derek Miller Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage On Bow and Exit Music Derek Miller By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF by Derek Miller The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 30, Number 1 (Fall 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center To begin at the end: actors land in a tableau; lights fade; curtain falls. In the American musical theatre, a final chord sounds in the orchestra. End of play. But not end of production, nor end of performance. For the curtain rises again; lights come back on; actors pose for their bows. And, in many musicals, the orchestra accompanies this whole sequence. This ultimate, non-diegetic musical moment stamps indelibly the fate of some shows.[1] Recalling the industry run-through of The Music Man, the show’s creator Meredith Willson noted that curtain call as particularly memorable, a sign of good things to come for his masterpiece: The piano started “Seventy-Six Trombones.” Out came the dancers playing their pantomime trombones, swinging cross that stage as proud as you'll ever wanta see anybody be. That’s when the audience burst into spontaneous rhythmic applause as though cued to do so—as it has happened with every audience from that day forward. (Walter Kerr described it a year later in a Saturday Evening Post article on the theatre, saying that “the rhythmic hand-clapping which greeted the finale of The Music Man on opening night was the only time I have ever felt a single irresistible impulse sweep over an entire audience and stir it to a demonstration that could not possibly have been inhibited.”)[2] While that show’s curtain call aroused an unusual level of fervor in its audiences, Willson’s story exposes the importance of “bow music,” the music that plays while the cast takes their bows, and “exit music,” which plays as the audience leaves the theater. This essay explores the role of bow and exit music in the American musical. Bow and exit music—arriving as they do at the liminal moment when the preceding narrative gives way to everyday life—help audiences interpret the musical as an artistic phenomenon and encourage a particular audience relationship to the show as a commercial product. Performing this dual function, bow and exit music resemble film and television music for title sequences, end credits, and trailers. As a recent essay on that topic summarized, “Title and credit sequences link the inside and outside of fictional texts, the acknowledgement of the real-world origin of a film with its story and storyworld. In doing so, they also connect the institutional and economic reality of a film to its story.”[3] As a form of popular mass entertainment, American musicals, like film and television, must always negotiate “economic reality.” Indeed, the strain between the twin domains of art/commerce is audible in much research on the American musical.[4] Bow and exit music announce with particular poignancy the musical’s struggle for both cultural significance and financial success. The pages that follow provide an interpretive framework for understanding how bow and exit music work in the musical theatre. First, I consider how bow and exit music both sustain and disrupt extant theories of the non-musical curtain call. I then explore productions that use bow and exit music to reinforce or inflect the preceding narrative, either by emphasizing a show’s theme or by reshaping how audiences interpret characters. Shifting to commerce, I attend to shows that rely on bow and exit music to create economic demand. Finally, I argue that bow and exit music allow us better to recognize the strangeness of the creative labor that makes and performs musicals. Throughout the essay, my readings of individual shows model how we may better understand the American musical’s attempts to reconcile art and commerce when we listen carefully to the musical’s final moments. Studying Liminal Performance Events It is hard to know both where bow and exit music come from and how frequently they were heard in any given period of musical theatre history. The practice’s origins remain entirely obscure, though Michael Pisani’s herculean research into music from the nineteenth-century theater suggests that recovering this history may be possible.[5] Available evidence suggests that, at least since the so-called Golden Age (roughly 1940 to 1965), bow and exit music have been as normal a part of the American musical as choruses and eleven-o’clock numbers. For the analyses that follow, I examined 34 piano-vocal scores for musicals that opened between 1930 and 1984, among which only two (Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel [1945] and Allegro [1947]) included neither bow nor exit music. Because most scores are available only by rental from licensing agencies, my survey favored successful shows by well-known composers, that is, works that the major university libraries I consulted saw fit to purchase for their collections. I expanded that archive beyond published scores to include printed production scripts, as well as two film recordings. It is not impossible that my haphazard sample overestimates bow and exit music’s importance. However, given that bow and exit music derive from standard Broadway production practices (as I explain below), my sample likely provides an adequate view of bow and exit music’s normal place in the American musical theater. Indeed, while no archive speaks fully to the performances it documents, bow and exit music are so completely artifacts of production—that is, they come out of such particular production circumstances—that wherever bow and exit music appear in the archive, they most likely sounded in performance. I hazard that my archival explorations underestimate both the practice’s prevalence and the nuance with which it has been deployed. Why then, despite this prevalence, have these musics received so little scholarly (or even lay) attention? For one thing, bow and exit music exemplify liminal performance elements, elements that occur at the border between the theatrical event as such and the broader performance event that encloses it.[6] Other musical examples of such liminal performance events include overtures and entr’actes. Non-musical practices such as curtain speeches and intermissions fit into this category. Bow music, of course, underscores the paradigmatic liminal event in the theater, the curtain call, during which performers offer themselves to the audience for recognition and applause. Critical attention to curtain calls, while scant given the practice’s ubiquity, acknowledges the practice as a peculiar mélange of the semiotic field of the theatrical illusion and the phenomenal field of the performance. On the one hand, curtain calls provide finality, ending the play and the theatrical event. Yet the curtain call, as part of the performance event, also remains susceptible to audience interpretation; we cannot help but “read” the curtain call and its meanings just as we read the play. For Terence Hawkes, the curtain call thus manages an important kind of double “closure,” referring both to the audience’s ability to read a play as a meaningful semiotic system (to “close with” a play) and to the final moment of the play itself (“closure” as in “the end”). The curtain call has particular force, according to Hawkes, on the modern stage, which invites the audience to interpret everything they see and encourages a state of "total semiotization" in which there exists no “event, no matter how gratuitous or unsought for. . . that a modern audience would be unable to close with.”[7] In other words, Hawkes believes that the circle of meaningful representation in theatre now encompasses any event that takes place in and around a performance, which includes the curtain call, despite that practice’s traditional closure “to critical discussion.” Moreover, Hawkes suggests that curtain calls, far from signifying only unconsciously and accidentally, often reflect explicitly on the semiotic system that preceded them. “Actors rehearse” their bows, Hawkes notes; they circumscribe their behavior to suit the moment. Having just played Hamlet, an actor will not “laugh or caper about as a man might who has scored (in the soccer fashion) a success.” In short, the theatrical event that precedes the curtain call limits what performers can do in the curtain call itself. The curtain call represents, then, not a moment after the play so much as the play’s “edge,” which appears to the audience immediately before the play's ultimate disappearance.[8] Director William Ball emphasizes that theatrical traditions and actors’ egos play their own crucial role in staging a proper curtain call. For instance, Ball insists that curtain calls be kept short and also create a natural dramatic arc by inspiring a crescendo of applause. He identifies the curtain call as a “disciplined ritual,” in which performers should bow simply, accepting audience praise “with ritual gratitude.”[9] Ball's emphatic reuse of the word “ritual” underlines the curtain call’s obedience to codes of behavior as strict as those that mark the performance of the play itself. Moreover, to actors, the curtain call adds an essential layer of meaning that Hawkes leaves out. The order in which actors bow and the strength of the audience’s applause reveal to the actor the relative success of her performance. This fact challenges a director staging the bows for, say, Romeo and Juliet, in which Mercutio’s performance has likely inspired more audience adoration than Romeo’s. Ball recommends directors bring the two lovers out together after Mercutio, thus ensuring the necessary crescendo.[10] In determining the order of the curtain call, the director gives a “profoundly significant signal of approval” to the actor.[11] Doing right by performers when staging the curtain call influences the quality of an actor's performance: “if the actor feels betrayed, he won't act well.”[12] Ball thus reverses Hawkes’ line of causality between play and curtain call. For Hawkes, the performance determines the actor’s possible behavior during the curtain call. Ball emphasizes rather that the curtain call’s staging affects the actor’s ego and, therefore, the quality of the actor’s performance. Bert States, like Hawkes, recognizes that character persists during the curtain call, “remain[ing] in the actor, like a ghost.”[13] Yet States also stresses that the bowing actor performs not only herself and the character, but also her vulnerability as a performer, particularly by revealing the residual effects of her labor. In States’s words, the actor cannot, “refuse to display his ‘wounds’: the paint, the perspiration, the breathlessness, all the traces of having been through the role—or the role, like a fever, having been through him. Even the trace of fatigue . . . is in order because it suggests that this was hard work.”[14] These theorists of the curtain call all agree that the curtain call means something in relation to the play that it ends. They view the curtain call as a multi-layered performance that inflects the quality of the theatrical event that preceded it, reflects the tenor of the dramatic proceedings, and offers the labor of performance for the audience’s consideration. At this “seam” between the “fiction of the play” and the “fiction of manners,” audiences and actors alike return to the real world through this ritual that sews together reality and dream.[15] As Nicholas Ridout summarizes, the theater’s “machinery of representation. . . still generat[es] sparks of representation that contaminate. . . a straight face-to-face encounter” between actors and audience.[16] The curtain call, far from a merely pro forma theatrical ritual, still shimmers with meaning accrued from and borne by the just-concluded performance. All of the elements that these writers—Hawkes, Ball, States, and Ridout—recognize in the curtain call resonate, too, in bow and exit music. Yet bow and exit music, far from merely duplicating the above functions, retune the way audiences interpret the production, receive performers’ labor, and transition from the play back into the rest of their lives. Typology To understand how precisely bow and exit music expand the rich phenomenal experience of the non-musical curtain call, we must first address the fact that bow and exit music are, as a rule, not original musical compositions. Rather, they repeat (sometimes with variations) music that the audience has already heard in the show. Bow and exit music thus present a fundamentally different interpretive problem than the related practice of end credit music in film and television. End credits for today’s prestige television programs often employ a popular song that shapes how audiences interpret the episode that has just ended.[17] But that song only rarely features in the episode itself. These “novel musical postfaces,” as musicologist Annette Davison names them, speak from entirely outside the show, offering an external, sometimes jarring, commentary.[18] Musicals, by contrast, provide their own musical material for the curtain call. As post-show underscoring, bow and exit music may not be part of the theatrical performance, but the songs they rehearse were part of that performance. Bow and exit music thus also diverge from historical uses of music at the end of a performance. Music, of course, plays an important role in most Western theatrical traditions dating back to Greek tragedy. Many theatres use song (and sometimes dance) to close an evening’s entertainments. Such songs may be chosen for their energy, to provide the audience with an extra dose of good cheer on their journey home. Bow and exit music are often selected for the same purpose. But where other traditions draw on popular music from outside the show, bow and exit music are composed from internal musical ideas. They do not simply extend the performance event by providing extra music, but rather extend the music of the theatrical event into the performance event. The musical relationship between bow and exit music and the musical itself takes four basic forms. The first type of bow and exit music is no music whatsoever. Porgy & Bess, Carousel, Allegro, and West Side Story include no bow music in their printed scores.[19] These shows follow closely the operetta or opera tradition, in which, after the final chord, one neither can nor should say more, musically. The second and third types (the most popular) feature a single song for the bow music, often a show’s trademark number. The song can appear either with lyrics or without. A charming example of a single song with lyrics comes from Kiss Me, Kate, in which the cast sings “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” as they bow, but with new a couplet: “So tonight just recite to your matie / ‘Kiss me, Kate, Kiss me, Kate, Kiss me, Katie.’”[20] Babes in Arms ends with a full cast version of “Where or When”; Cabaret's cast bows to a company rendition of the title song; and Damn Yankees closes with everyone singing about “Heart.”[21] Alternatively—the third category—the single song might appear without lyrics, in a purely orchestral guise. This is the case for Guys and Dolls, in which a reprise of the title song serves first as the finale, sung by the entire company. Composer and lyricist Frank Loesser then repurposes the same number for the bows. The score notes simply: “Repeat Orch[estra] only for Curtain calls.”[22] My Fair Lady harps on “I Could Have Danced All Night”; The Music Man trumpets “Seventy-six Trombones”; Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music circles back to “Night Waltz I” from the Entr'acte.[23] Finally, some shows feature a medley, as Sondheim's Follies does, with bow music that includes fragments of “Who’s That Woman?” and “Beautiful Girls.”[24] Funny Girl's bows take place mostly to the rousing “Don't Rain on My Parade,” but transition to the ballad “People” near the end.[25] Summarizing bow music’s four general categories, we have: none; single song with lyrics; single song without lyrics; and medley. Each of those forms encourages a different array of interpretations, as the short examples above hint. Thus, the choice among these types, as well as the specific songs chosen, reflect and inflect our understanding of a musical. Representational Strategies Single Songs and Themes Let us consider now how bow music sustains the fundamental dichotomy of all curtain calls, that between the representational apparatus of the text and the phenomenal experience of the performance. The simplest way to bring closure to the theatrical event is simply to restate the central theme of the musical, usually with a single song. While, as I explain below, productions pick single songs for non-artistic reasons, too, a well-chosen single song can neatly reinforce the intellectual and emotional experience of the play. For example, the single song without lyrics accompanying Fiddler on the Roof's curtain call is, unsurprisingly, “Tradition.”[26] The same song opens the show, serves as the show’s thematic center, and represents a natural choice for the bows. Yet the choice of an upbeat and rousing final tune can also work against the rest of the play. Man of La Mancha's “The Impossible Dream” became that show’s popular standard, yet the title song appears as the bow music, selected perhaps for its driving rhythm. That choice is particularly odd given that the play’s final moments depict Cervantes and his servant’s departure to face the Inquisition, while the cast sings “Impossible Dream.” The driving bombast of the title song, repeated as the bow music, tramples “Impossible Dream”’s memorable rising melody and drowns out the play's stoic and moving final strains.[27] The show’s creators might well have heeded one Broadway music director’s warning that the selection of bow and exit music “should be made with regard to the audience's experience of the show.”[28] For some concept musicals of the 1970s, the single song’s emphatic closure was itself a dangerous trap. Unlike Golden Age musicals with clear resolutions, concept musicals often thrive on uncertainty and open-endedness. Nonetheless, many of those same shows sought to retain ties to the earlier tradition and devised new strategies for using bow and exit music to reinforce their shows’ thematic opposition to closure. Consider, for instance, A Chorus Line, one of the finest examples of the musical as meta-theater. The show's subject—the life of a Broadway chorister—organized and inspired the show’s creative process and determined the musical’s narrative structure. Strikingly, the show maintains its vertiginous metatheatrical sensibility in the curtain call, or rather, in the lack thereof. As the playscript notes: “Lights fade on ‘Rockette’ kick line [at the end of ‘One’] . . . . After singers cut off, orchestra continues vamp phrase, very loud, until cut off cue from stage manager. There are no additional ‘Bows’ after this—leaving the audience with an image of a kick line that goes on forever.”[29] The stage directions suggest both the oppressive repetitiveness of the chorister’s life in the “very loud” vamp, and, in the refusal to offer the performers for bows, a gesture towards the absence of closure as the show’s meaning. That is, although an individual chorister’s career may end, the chorus line “goes on forever.” A Chorus Line acts against audience expectations about the curtain call-as-closure to deny the finality that the moment usually provides, while still working within the single-song paradigm described above. Pippin, like A Chorus Line, is a highly metatheatrical show. The printed piano-vocal score of Stephen Schwartz’s work includes No. 36 “Bows,” consisting of the opening number, “Magic to Do,” with lyrics.[30] Schwartz seems to have imagined traditional bows, in which the company closes by celebrating the illusions they had promised the audience at the start of the show. The play, however, ends in a state of extreme anxiety about the “magic” of play-making and needed a different kind of sonic curtain call. In director Bob Fosse's ingenious staging—as captured on video of the touring production—the bows make meaning not through music, but through speech.[31] The play, a sort of bildungspiel about a sensitive son of King Charlemagne, takes place within the frame of a commedia troupe’s performance. Everything goes drastically awry in the musical’s final scene when Pippin declares his independence from the show. The Leading Player then strips Pippin, his wife Catherine, and their son of costumes, lights, and music. “Orchestra, pack up your fiddles. Get your horns. Let’s go,” orders the Lead Player. Then, to the pianist, who has been vamping throughout the last scene: “Take your damn hands off that keyboard.” The Leading Player then snarls at Pippin, “You try singing without music sweetheart.” Pippin complies, singing a few a cappella bars of the finale. Catherine speaks: CATHERINE Pippin ... do you feel that you’ve compromised? PIPPIN No. CATHERINE Do you feel like a coward? PIPPIN No. CATHERINE How do you feel ...? PIPPIN Trapped ... but happy ... (He looks from one to the other and smiles) which isn't too bad for the end of a musical comedy. Ta-da! [32] The three then bow and “the curtain comes down.” At this point, the curtain call is extremely fraught. The end of the play hinges on Pippin and his family’s escape from the mode of representation, a fact wryly acknowledged in Pippin’s reference to “a musical comedy” and in their bowing. If the production returned to the typical mode of closure for a musical, using Schwartz’s music cue for the bows, it would have evacuated the meaning that the show’s final moments had so carefully constructed. Fosse solved this problem by having the cast members announce each other with a handheld mic, to no musical accompaniment. Only after introducing the cast (and then the conductor) by name, does the company sing a reprise of “Magic to Do.” This curtain call thus has an unusual soundtrack: the names of the performers. Fosse’s choice emphasizes actors over characters and assumes a stance explicitly outside the make-believe world of the play. Pippin thus continues the tradition of the sonically scored curtain call, and even returns to the single-song format eventually. But by replacing music with the actors’ names, Fosse’s Pippin production closed in the metatheatrical spirit that pervaded the rest of the play and defined its ending. Medleys and Characters While Pippin uses sound during the curtain call to question the possibility of closure and to critique representation itself, other shows use music to reinforce the representational apparatus. Music, for instance, can act like a costume, a residue of character that clings to the actors as they receive the audience’s applause. The Harold Prince/Chelsea Theater version of Candide, for example, uses medley to rich effect, as the principals take their calls accompanied by songs associated with their characters.[33] The company bows first to “Battle Music,” Paquette and Maximillian to “Life is Happiness Indeed,” the Old Lady to the Spanish chorus from “Easily Assimilated,” Candide and Cunegonde to “Oh Happy We,” and Voltaire to “Bon Voyage.” The entire company then sings the latter song’s final chorus. Music works here almost leitmotivically; the songs index character. But unlike a truly Wagnerian leitmotiv, which metamorphoses along with the changing circumstances of its referent, the melodies in the bow music remain fixed to specific conceptions of character. The music therefore restricts how we read character while the actors bow. Consider particularly Candide and Cunegonde, who find redemption in their final musical number when they accept a simple, quotidian existence and embrace the nobility of work and family. When the couple bow, they do so to the music of their Act I duet, in which Candide's dream of a modest life clashes with Cunegonde's fantasies of wealth. Certainly, “Oh Happy We”’s elegant, spry melody makes livelier bow music than the hymn-like finale, “Make Our Garden Grow.” But the journey of these two characters to arrive at the finale’s insights washes away in the return of the former tune, which, even if we have forgotten the lyrics, evokes instability in its irregular meter. The choice of music suggests an actor playing Oedipus who, before bowing, washes the bloody makeup from his eyes and changes into a clean tunic. The bloodied costume that clings to a bowing actor signals the Oedipus who has been through a journey. But the choice of music for Candide and Cunegonde here erases their journey. The selection of “Oh Happy We” for the bows may very well be self-consciously ironic. Whether the production used this tune wittingly or not, the musical underscoring instructs us to read character in a particular way. A slightly different effect arises from the leitmotivic medley at the end of Trevor Nunn’s revival of Oklahoma![34] The curtain call is a dance number, fully choreographed by Susan Stroman. First, the men’s and women’s choruses and featured dancers bow to “The Farmer and the Cowman,” then Ali Hakim to his solo number, “It's a Scandal! It's a Outrage!,” then Will and Ado Annie to “All er Nothin’.” Aunt Eller, then Curly and Laurey all bow to “Beautiful Mornin’,” a fittingly bucolic tune that was also the show’s finale. Before this final trio appears, the antagonist, Jud, bows to the bathetic duet he sings with Curly, “Poor Jud is Daid.” The noble theme, as sounded in William David Brohn’s orchestration for brass choir, underscores not Jud’s function as a melodramatic villain, but rather his humanity. Indeed, the song reminds us, if we recall the words, that Jud is dead, and that Oklahoma! resolves at the expense of Jud’s life. If Jud bowed instead to his aria, “Lonely Room,” a twitching, minor key number, full of clustering dissonances, our reception of that character during the bows would differ significantly.[35] Nunn adds one further flourish after all the actors have bowed: the entire company gathers in a group to reprise the choral section of the title song. As a quick key to the implications of this gesture, consider Andrea Most's reading of Oklahoma! Most suggests that “anyone willing and able to perform the songs and dances can join” the community of a musical.[36] But neither Jud nor Ali Hakim is on stage to sing “Oklahoma” during the play’s wedding scene. Nunn’s decision to have them sing with the full company here thus suggests that these two characters, identified by Most as outsiders, are actually integral to the community, as I have argued elsewhere.[37] When Jud and Ali Hakim sing “Oklahoma” with the full company, the tensions necessary to create a stable community come to the fore. The audience recognizes that the community cannot make Oklahoma without the internal pressure provided by Jud and Ali Hakim. In the full company reprise of the title song during the bows, those two purported outsiders perform their true status as insiders. The Nunn production’s bow music helps us better interpret these characters. Bow music can thus be another residue of character, like a costume. Medleys prove particularly useful forms for this use of bow music because the medley allows the bow music to speak directly to each character by playing that character’s best-known tune. But by selecting a melody for each character, bow music cues specific aspects of a character, adding a last moment of semiotic representation that draws on and revises what we have experienced in the rest of the show. Commercial Strategies The original production of Oklahoma!, as captured in the score and in a published playscript, ends not with the now-famous title song, but with a full company reprise of the duet “People Will Say We're in Love.”[38] In many ways, the song is a bizarre choice for the bows, being neither an anthem for the show nor for the company, but rather a private song for Curly and Laurey. Indeed, the number’s conceit is that the lovers should not show public affection because the community might comment on it. Yet during the bows, the whole cast sings it. Why? Because the production team expected the song to be a hit. This factor, the song’s potential economic afterlife, is the final—and perhaps most important—function of the musical curtain call. That is, bow music cues the audience to buy a cast album. In this respect, the musical theater’s bows differ significantly from those of non-musicals. As Nicholas Ridout observes, although all curtain calls “conclude a market transaction,” because the actual economics of the performance were “sorted out before the curtain even rose,” the curtain call’s applause (and the performers’ acceptance of applause) forms part of a gift economy.[39] But in many musicals, both musical motifs and commercial motives underscore this gift exchange between the audience and the actors. Bow music, for such musicals, answers the demands of commerce: which tune is most salable? Thus, Gershwin’s Girl Crazy wraps up with “Embraceable You” before jumping to “I've Got Rhythm”; Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey signs off with “I Could Write a Book” (in fairness, about half of the songs from that show have hit potential); and the same authors’ The Boys from Syracuse goes back to “Falling in Love with Love.”[40] I noted above that Funny Girl’s curtain call music transitions from “Don't Rain on My Parade” to “People.” I conjecture that the change in tune cued star Barbra Streisand’s entrance. Both songs became huge hits and remain associated with Streisand, but only “People” put Streisand on Billboard charts in 1964. Indeed, she had recorded that number as a single even prior to the show’s premiere.[41] This economic imperative is so insistent that the great production team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II refused to let bow music’s commercial potential pass them by, even in their shows without bow music. As noted above, some of the pair’s most high-minded works, such as South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music, follow the operatic tradition and include no bow music. Those shows do, however, include scored exit music, music to be played while the audience leaves the theater. Exit music does not distinguish itself enough from bow music formally to merit a separate discussion. It does, however, underline how much these last two musical numbers speak to the musical theater’s commercial interest. For if bow music, due to the presence of the actors, contains traces of its representational function alongside its economic imperatives, exit music seems to have given up representation entirely. Exit music exists almost solely to worm a catchy tune into the audience’s ear. One guide to writing a musical explains that exit music supplies “the flavour that will be left in the public’s ear, the one you want them to keep humming as they make their way to the lobby and perhaps buy on cassette or compact disc.”[42] Thus, South Pacific’s exit music is “Some Enchanted Evening” (a number one hit for Perry Como in 1949), which leads into “Bali Ha'i"; The King and I features “Whistle a Happy Tune” and then “Shall We Dance”; and The Sound of Music essentially repeats the entr’acte with a medley of the title song, “Do Re Mi,” and “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.”[43] In the 1950s, these shows were big business; the albums for all three sat high on the Billboard Charts at various times.[44] And although these three shows offer themselves for the audience’s approval in silence during the curtain call, accepting the purer gift relationship suggested by Ridout, they immediately assume an actively commercial stance as the audience files out of the theater. Thus, if a show’s representational economy recedes in the final moments of a performance event, through the use of bow and exit music, the economics of representation come to the fore. Musical Labor Exit music—and some bow music—thus faces as much towards the audience as towards the actors. That is, if one regards bow and exit music's “sparks of representation” (to use Ridout's phrase) as fundamentally coloring the fictional world of the play, the economic imperatives that undergird these musical numbers project outwards, into the audience, now figured as consumers. As I suggested above, the naked commercial desires in bow and exit music differ meaningfully from the ghosted economic exchange in the non-musical curtain call, as theorized by Ridout. But the dual model I have described thus far for bow and exit music remains fundamentally the same as that theorized by Hawkes, Ball, States, and Ridout. There remains one significant element of the curtain call hinted at by Ball and States that I have not yet addressed: labor. Unlike non-musical curtain calls, curtain calls underscored by bow and exit music conspicuously divide labor between two groups of performers: actors and musicians. The usually invisible labor of technicians, not to mention the persistent but forgotten labor of countless other creative and administrative performers (house staff, casting agents, etc.), always ghosts the curtain call, and merits consideration in the general theory of curtain calls. But the case of musicians who play bow and exit music differs from that of backstage workers accustomed to having their labor go unacknowledged. In other circumstances, musicians can and do accept their own applause, not only for non-theatrical performances, but even in other categories of music drama such as opera. Silent curtain calls, by allowing on- and off-stage performers to rest together, equalize the labor of instrumentalists and stage performers.[45] Such unity becomes more apparent when compared to musical theater’s bow and exit musics, which undermine the integration of music and drama in the so-called integrated musical by so clearly dividing the laboring performers into two camps. During musical curtain calls, the actors transition towards their leisure time while the musicians continue to work. And in shows with exit music, a particularly speedy actor may be out the theater door before the musicians have played their final chord. Just as William Ball suggests that the order in which actors bow can impact the quality of their performances, James H. Laster, advising aspiring music directors, suggests that exit music’s liminality also informs its quality. A “young, inexperienced orchestra may feel that the exit music is not important,” Laster warns. “But they need to be informed that their job is not finished until the cut-off at the last note of the exit music.”[46] Steve Suskin, author of a book on Broadway's orchestrators, hears not boredom or inattention, but rather joy in exit music. Embedded among the musicians for a performance of Sweeney Todd, Suskin explained the end of the show thus: Everybody leaves; everybody except the orchestra, which plays the exit music. But it is a lighthearted group of musicians playing now: the drama is over, the tension is gone, the spell is broken. It is now merely music. [The music director] gives the final cutoff, the music ends with a crisp button from the brass, and we file out of the pit.[47] Whether the musicians celebrate bow and exit music as a moment for relaxed improvisation or let their minds wander at the seemingly unimportant (and often unhearable, beneath applause and chatter) end of a long performance, the fundamental disparity remains: musicians continue their labor in the musical theater well after other performers have ceased their own work. And what of the labor that goes into creating bow and exit music? A show’s orchestrator and her staff traditionally select and arrange the bow and exit music, often only in the last moments of a show’s rehearsal process. Yet, while the final decision about such music occurs quite late, the tunes are frequently among the first written for the show because bow and exit music often derive from among a production's “utility” arrangements, arrangements made during the rehearsal period to fulfill practical needs in the rehearsal room. As Robert Russell Bennett, the dean of musical theater orchestrators, explains, “You take three, four, or five of the principal melodies and arrange them (with the tune in its original form complete in each case) so that, at the direction of the conductor, they may be played” by any section of the orchestra at any volume.[48] Such utility arrangements provide placeholder music for scene changes and underscoring, as well as the overture, entr'acte, and the “Chaser, Exit or Outmarch.”[49] Each of these categories later receives “special treatment” as the production takes final form and as the orchestrator has time to focus on them individually. In Bennett’s general narrative of an orchestrator’s work, however, that time might arrive only during the final few preview performances.[50] Two points here deserve underlining. First, in bow and exit music the orchestrator and team of arrangers announce themselves as essential members in the vast peripheral, artisanal workforce that crafts a Broadway show.[51] Their work on bow and exit music enhances both the artistic value of the show, when bow and exit music addresses the play’s representational apparatus, and the production’s economic value, when the exit music helps inspire sales of recordings. Second, bow and exit music, though the last elements of a show in performance, appear very early in the production process (at least, in their form as utilities). This fact strongly differentiates bow and exit music from the non-musical curtain call, which directors rarely think about until dress rehearsals. Although the production staff might settle on bow and exit music quite late in the process, the tunes from among which the staff chooses, far from being an afterthought, literally underscore the show’s rehearsals. The practice of relying on utilities codifies those melodies as essential to the entire structure of the show: they are the beginning (overture), middle (entr’acte), and end (exit music), well before the company sets the rest of the show. As a result, songs written early, songs that captured a relatively primitive conception of a show, occupy a large sonic space in the rehearsal period.[52] Fundamentally, utilities reveal how much work a show’s purely orchestral music does for the rest of a production. It is no coincidence that utilities are so called: they are, first and foremost, useful. Even if they later sound differently (or disappear entirely), they noisily—and, paradoxically, inconspicuously—underscore a significant portion of the production process. The utilities that become bow and exit music may end up as the musical last word or as an afterthought, but they are often also part of a show's origin. Take a Bow This article has considered how bow and exit music affect our interpretation of the musical theater, and particularly how these musical practices amplify the often discordant relationship between the musical’s artistic and commercial aspirations. Like the curtain call that bow music underscores, bow and exit music occupy a strange border at the end of the theatrical event and near the end of the performance event. Despite a relatively narrow set of formal types available for bow and exit music, productions have used those musics to reinforce the show's theme, to revise the audience's understanding of character, and to promote the show’s commercial afterlife in recordings. A longer analysis of a specific show might benefit from exploring more the choice of songs (particularly in relationship to the overture), and the details of tempi (usually moderate to fast), meter (usually duple), or arrangement (usually the same key and orchestration as an earlier iteration). One might also consider bow and exit music as utilized by a particular orchestrator, composer, director, etc. With a more comprehensive data set, one might explore how bow music changes from era to era, or from subgenre to subgenre. As I hope this sketch of bow and exit music’s functions makes clear, musicals do not cease making meaning when the curtain falls, but actively and consciously continue to do so until the moment that an audience member steps out of hearing range of the orchestra. In other words, music performs in the musical theater longer than any other medium. And when we listen to that music, we might have to reinterpret some shows. To conclude with one example, consider The Pajama Game, the Richard Adler and Jerry Ross musical of 1954. In a recent history of the musical theater, Larry Stempel accuses George Abbott, the show’s original director and co-book writer, of avoiding politics. The plot concerns a struggle between management and labor at a pajama factory, a struggle that constrains the romance between a foreman and a shopworker/union leader. As Stempel notes, the show opened in the midst of the McCarthy hearings, a climate not amenable to claims for strong workers’ rights. Citing Abbott’s own statement denying any “propaganda” in the show, Stempel declares Pajama Game “militantly apolitical,” with “no serious intent of any kind.”[53] As far as most of the show goes, Stempel is right, the politics are tepid. Even the finale plays up romantic fun rather than politics, with a version of the title song that accompanies a fashion parade, culminating with the appearance of the leads, Babe and Sid wearing only a pajama top and bottom, respectively. That number also functions as a curtain call; the principals appear in the appropriate order. The entire company then sings the title song’s chorus.[54] This is charming, but, as Stempel complains of the entire show, emphasizes the romantic plots at the expense of the management-labor conflict. But then the company sings a different tune. They do not sing the ballad “Hey There,” a hit for Rosemary Clooney in 1954.[55] They do not sing the catchy love duet “There Once Was a Man.” They do not sing the jazzy “Steam Heat,” which featured iconic Bob Fosse choreography for Carol Haney. No, they sing none of the show’s hits. Rather, the entire cast sings a march in six-eight time, which, while certainly energetic, is not memorable enough to sell an album. They sing the show’s rallying labor cry: Seven and a half cents doesn't buy a helluva lot, Seven and a half cents doesn’t mean a thing, But give it to me every hour Forty hours every week That's enough for me to be Livin’ like a king.[56] This number’s return, at this moment, is a striking political gesture, a reminder that behind the play’s love stories lurks a serious economic struggle. This message, moreover, occupies what is traditionally the most overtly commercial moment in musical theater. We might, then, hear this bow music’s explicit turn to economics as a wry wink at the function of bow and exit music itself. The number says in all seriousness that economic circumstances are at the root of contemporary life, even as it asks you to buy the recording when the performance ends, that is, when the music finally stops.[57] Derek Miller is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University where he teaches courses in theater history and dramatic literature. His articles on theatrical and musical performance have appeared in publications including Theatre Journal and Studies in Musical Theatre. His book, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. More information at scholar.harvard.edu/dmiller. [1] Diegetic music forms part of the narrative world of a play; characters within the narrative frame can hear it and/or produce it. Only the audience hears non-diegetic music. For example, in The Pajama Game, “Steam Heat” is a diegetic number, a literal performance in which three characters dance and sing for their fellow union members. “Hey There” is non-diegetic: the character Sid Sorokin does not sing; the actor does. [2] Meredith Willson, But He Doesn’t Know the Territory (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 153-154. [3] Phil Powrie and Guido Heldt, “Introduction: Trailers, Titles, and End Credits,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8 (2014), 111. [4] See, for example, Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg, The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art (New York: NYU Press, 1993) and Steven Adler, On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). [5] Michael V. Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London & New York (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014). [6] For a theory of the boundaries between the theatrical and the performance event, see Richard Schechner, “Drama, Script, Theater, Performance,” in Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 2003). Scholars of film titles and end credits seem to prefer Gérard Genette's language of “paratext” to describe those musical practices. See Powrie and Heldt, “Introduction: Trailers, Titles, and End Credits,” 111-112. [7] Terence Hawkes, “Opening Closure,” Modern Drama 24 (1981), 355-356. Hawkes offers the example of a pimple on an actor's nose as an unintentional element that audience members might “be prepared to acknowledge, interpret, and even perhaps to applaud.” [8] Hawkes, “Opening Closure,” 356. [9] William Ball, A Sense of Direction (New York: Drama Publishers, 1980), 143. [10] Ball, A Sense of Direction, 145. Ball cites other plays such as Othello, The Three Sisters, and The Man Who Came to Dinner that pose similar problems in balancing star supporting turns against the work of a relatively unsympathetic lead. [11] Ball, A Sense of Direction, 145. [12] Ball, A Sense of Direction, 146. Dressing room assignments are, Ball notes, similarly loaded status symbols for actors, and, like curtain calls, can affect an actor's work on stage. [13] Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 199. [14] States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, 203. [15] States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, 203. [16] Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 162. [17] See Annette Davison, “The End is Nigh: Music Postfaces and End-Credit Sequences in Contemporary Television Serials,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8 (2014) for an explanation of this practice's origins and uses in The Sopranos. [18] Davison, “The End is Nigh,” 197. Davison observes that some shows have begun linking end credit music more closely to the preceding episode's “sound world” (212). [19] George Gershwin, Du Bose Heyward, and Ira Gerswhin, Porgy and Bess (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Gershwin Publishing Corporation/Chappell & Co., Inc., 1935); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Carousel (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1945); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Allegro (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1948); Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins, West Side Story (Piano Vocal Score) (New York: G. Schirmer, Inc. and Chappell & Co., Inc., 1959). [20] Cole Porter, Kiss Me, Kate (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell & Co., Inc., 1967), No. 24a “Grand Finale—Last Curtain.” [21] Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Babes in Arms (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell & Co., Inc., 1960), No. 23 Curtain Calls; John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cabaret (Piano-Vocal Score) Times Square Music Publications Company, 1968), Curtain Calls (No. 29); Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Damn Yankees (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1957), No. 33 Heart (Bows). [22] Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1953), “The Happy Ending.” [23] Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappel & Co., 1958), Music for Curtain Calls (No. 27); Meredith Willson, The Music Man (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1958), Curtain Call Music (No. 26); Stephen Sondheim, A Little Night Music (Piano-Vocal Score) Revelation Music Publishing Corp. & Rilting Music, Inc., 1974), Bows (No. 33). [24] Stephen Sondheim, Follies (Piano-Vocal Score) Range Road Music Inc., Quartet Music Inc., Rilting Music Inc., and Burthen Music Compnay, Inc., 1971), No. 20 Bows. [25] Jule Styne, Funny Girl (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell-Styne, Inc. and Wonderful Music Corp., 1964), Curtain and Exit Music (No. 30). [26] Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, Fiddler on the Roof (Piano-Vocal Score) Sunbeam Music Corp., 1965), Music for Bows (No. 34). [27] Mitch Leigh, Joe Darion, and Dale Wasserman, Man of La Mancha (Piano-Vocal Score), Revised ed. (Greenwich, CT: Cherry Lane Music Co., 1965), Bows (No. 30). The show does, however, conclude No. 31 Exit Music with “The Impossible Dream.” [28] Joseph Church, Music Direction for the Stage: A View from the Podium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 240. [29] James Kirkwood, Michael Bennett, and Nicholas Dante, A Chorus Line (New York: Applause Books, 1995), 145. [30] Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson, Pippin (Piano-Vocal Score) CPP/Belwin, Inc., 1988). [31] Pippin, His Life and Times, dir. David Sheehan (Tulsa: VCI Home Video, 2000), DVD. [32] Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson, Pippin: A Musical Comedy (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1975), 83. [33] Leonard Bernstein et al., Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Schirmer Books, 1976), Bows (No. 22). The printed score includes stage directions and dialogue from the Prince production. Those directions indicate that, when the curtain rises after the finale, “the COMPANY pours out onto the ramps [around the seating area] as the PRINCIPALS take their bows in the order of their precedence to the following music” (230). Bracketed character names above particular measures in the score indicate when in the number each character appears. The score of the original production included no bow music (Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman, and Richard Wilbur, Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: G. Schirmer, 1958)), while the authorized Boosey & Hawkes edition (Leonard Bernstein, Hugh Wheeler, and Richard Wilbur, Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Jalni Publications, Inc. and Boosey & Hawkes, 1994)) does include No. 28 Bows. That number appears to be the final section of the Overture (bars 231-287), minus ten bars of melody from the upper woodwinds. [34] A film documents this production’s incarnation at the Royal National Theatre in London. Oklahoma!, dir. Trevor Nunn (Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2003), DVD. [35] Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, actor Shuler Hensley's performance as Jud was exceptionally well received. Hensley received multiple awards for his performance, including the Olivier, Tony, and Drama Desk Awards for Supporting Actor in a Musical. "Awards," Oklahoma! (2002), Internet Broadway Database, http://ibdb.com/production.php?id=12938, accessed 26 May 2015. [36] Andrea Most, “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (1998), 79. [37] Derek Miller, “‘Underneath the Ground’: Jud and the Community in Oklahoma!,” Studies in Musical Theatre 2, no. 2 (2008). [38] Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma! (New York: Williamson, 1943), Finale Ultimo (No. 29). [39] Ridout, Stage Fright, 162, 164. [40] George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Guy Bolton, and John McGowan, Girl Crazy (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: New World Music Corp., 1954), Final II (No. 25); Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and John O'Hara, Pal Joey (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Chappell & Co., 1962), Curtain Calls (I Could Write a Book); Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and George Abbott, The Boys from Syracuse (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Chappell & Co., 1965), No. 20 Curtain Music. [41] As one biographer explains, “Barbra agreed to go into the studio and record [‘People’] as a single. But since Capitol Records, not Columbia, was to record the cast album, Columbia executives were reluctant to do anything to promote Funny Girl. In the end, they agreed to release the single only if ‘People’ was on the B side of the record. Columbia would do little to promote the song, instead focusing their efforts on the A side, ‘I Am Woman.’” Christopher Anderson, Barbra: The Way She Is (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 119. Despite Columbia’s lack of interest, that single spent 12 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number five. Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1986). [42] Stephen Citron, The Musical: From the Inside Out (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 257. The author notes, even more practically, that up-tempo exit music also “facilitate[s] clearing the aisles” more quickly. [43] Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1949), Exit Music (No. 49); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The King and I (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1951), Exit Music (No. 46); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The Sound of Music (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1960), No. 47 Exit Music. “Some Enchanted Evening” spent five weeks at number one for Perry Como (his B side, “Bali Ha’i,” hit number five), while also reaching the top 10 on recordings by Bing Crosby, Jo Stafford, Frank Sinatra, Ezio Pinza (the song's originator in his role as Emile de Becque), and Paul Weston. Whitburn, Pop Memories. [44] South Pacific appeared on the pop charts at number seven on 21 May 1949; number one was Kiss Me, Kate. Within two weeks, South Pacific was the best-selling popular music LP in the country, where it remained for 69 weeks, ultimately spending 400 weeks on the top charts. Laurence Maslon, The South Pacific Companion (New York: Fireside, 2008), 153. The King and I performed the least well, hovering around number four (for both 75s and 33s) in summer and fall 1951. The Sound of Music spent 276 weeks on Billboard’s Top 200, including 16 weeks at number one. Joel Whitburn, The Billboard Albums, 6th ed. (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 2006). [45] I sense some condescension in how conductors accept audience accolades on behalf of the orchestra, particularly when the conductor joins the actors or singers on stage, leaving the musicians in the pit below. The disparity between conductor and instrumentalist seems slightly less wide in musicals, even if the conductor bows quickly for the audience during the bow music, perhaps because such a gesture permits the orchestra a fleeting moment of performance without the conductor’s guidance. Or, as one writer makes the same point negatively: “Providing the playing of the bow music will not fall apart if the conductor stops beating time, he can acknowledge [the actors’ pointing at the orchestra during bows] by turning and bowing to the audience.” James H. Laster, So You're the New Musical Director!: An Introduction to Conducting a Broadway Musical (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2001), 146. [46] Laster, So You’re the New Musical Director!, 127. [47] Steven Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 289. Broadway music director Joseph Church affirms Suskin’s view that exit music achieves an “informality” that “reflects the relaxation of the theater experience in its closing moments.” Church, Music Direction for the Stage, 240. [48] Robert Russell Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking (Melville, NY: Belwin-Mills Publishing Corp., 1975), 107. [49] Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking, 107. Bennett suggests that, among these standard orchestral numbers, only the overture regularly merits careful attention, and not much care at that. Even a “fancy permanent” or “New York overture,” as Bennett wryly calls it, earns little more than a single orchestral read-through before opening night. A 1951 New Yorker profile of Bennett opens describing the composition of The King and I’s overture, completed mere hours before the first tryout in New Haven. Herbert Warren Wind, “Another Opening, Another Show,” The New Yorker (1951), 46. Today, overtures have become quite scarce, according to Joseph Church. Church, Music Direction for the Stage, 239. [50] Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking, 111. Conductor Rob Berman recently affirmed that, while “composers might have some input” in choosing exit music, the selection derives usually from among the utilities. Exit music remains “one of the last pieces of music created for a show.” Robert Simonson and Kenneth Jones, “Ask Playbill.com: A Question About Exit Music and Musicals,” Playbill.com, http://www.playbill.com/features/article/ask-playbill.com-a-question-about-exit-music-at-musicals-187760. [51] Suskin, Sound of Broadway Music provides an excellent account of orchestrators and arrangers, who occupy the strange liminal space between creative artistry and technical labor that defines so much backstage work. [52] The situation differs, of course, for revivals, for which the score already exists. In such cases, the production staff may have even more creative energy to expend on overtures or bow and exit music, as evidenced by the Candide and Oklahoma! revivals discussed above. [53] Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: Norton, 2010), 424. [54] Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, The Pajama Game (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1955), No. 25 “The Pajama Game—Closing.” [55] “Hey There” spent 24 weeks on Billboard’s “Honor Roll of Hits” (issues of 24 July 1954 to 1 January 1955), reaching number one in the 2 October 1954 issue (survey week ending 22 September) and remaining there through the issue of 13 November (survey week ending 3 November), for seven weeks at the top. Another song from the show, “Hernando's Hideaway,” spent 18 weeks in the top twenty (issue of 29 May 1954 to 25 September 1954), but never reached number one. The “Honor Roll of Hits” combines sales of recordings and sheet music with juke box and radio performances. [56] Adler and Ross, The Pajama Game, No. 25a “Seven and a Half Cents—Reprise.” [57] For a list of piano-vocal scores consulted, many of which are also cited in the body of the essay, see my personal website, http://visualizingbroadway.com/broadway/bow_and_exit_music_table.html. “On Bow and Exit Music" by Derek Miller ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 30, Number 1 (Fall 2017) ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Jessica Adam Editorial Assistant: Kirara Soto Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800" by Jeanne Klein "The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project" by Paul Gagliardi "On Bow and Exit Music" by Derek Miller “Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation" by Jordan Schildcrout www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Marvin Carlson, Safi Mahfouz, Robert Myers, Nada Saab | This collection contains four full-length works by Sa‘dallah Wannous, available in English for the first time. < Back Four Plays from Syria: Sa‘dallah Wannous Marvin Carlson, Safi Mahfouz, Robert Myers, Nada Saab Download PDF Sa‘dallah Wannous, generally considered the leading Syrian dramatist of the twentieth century, was selected in 1996 by UNESCO and the International Institute of Theatre as the first Arab playwright to deliver the keynote speech on International Theatre Day. This collection contains four full-length works, available in English for the first time: Rituals of Signs and Transformations, The Evening Party for the Fifth of June, The Adventure of the Mamluk Jaber’s Head, and The Drunken Days. Together they represent almost thirty years of Wannous’s remarkable career, and indicate the range of his political, social, personal, and metatheatrical contributions to modern drama. More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu

PRELUDE Festival 2023 CEREMONY PRELUDE Award Celebration 9:30PM Saturday, October 14, 2023 The Tank, West 36th Street, NYC, NY, USA RSVP The 2023 PRELUDE Award for significant, important and meaningful contributions towards theatre and performance in New York City will be given this year not to an individual but to a group of distinguished leaders in the field. PRELUDE 2023 AWARDEES Alex Roe,  METROPOLITAN PLAYHOUSE Awoye Timpo, CLASSIX Anita Durst, ChaShaMa Jim Nicola, NEW YORK THEATER WORKSHOP Keith Josef Adkins, THE NEW BLACK FEST Kristin Marting, HERE ARTS CENTER Linda Chapman, NEW YORK THEATER WORKSHOP Lucien Zayan, THE INVISIBLE DOG Manuel Antonio Morán, INTERNATIONAL PUPPET FRINGE FESTIVAL Morgan Jenness, Dramaturge Mark Russell, UNDER THE RADAR Meghan Finn THE TANK Nicole Birmann Bloom, VILLA ALBERTINE/FRENCH CULTURAL SERVICES in the US Robert Lyons, THE OHIO Theresa Buchheister, THE BRICK Jeffrey Shubart, LUCILLE LORTEL THEATRE FOUNDATION Named and created by Caleb Hammons in honor of Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Executive Director and PRELUDE founder Dr. Frank Hentschker, the FRANKY Award was created to recognize artists who have made a long-term, extraordinary impact on contemporary theatre and performance in New York City. Content / Trigger Description: Alex Roe Next to his work as a director, actor, and playwright in New York City Alex Roe’s artistic leadership of The Metropolitan Playhouse has been a shining example of the liveliness and diversity of the New York theatre and performance landscape. Since 2001, Roe has directed over 60 productions. He created the Alphabet City monologues, solo performances based on interviews with the theatre’s neighbors, East Village Chronicles, new one-act plays by emerging playwrights inspired by the life and history of the theatre’s East Village neighborhood, the Living Literature series, new plays and adaptations produced by guest artists and companies celebrating the writing of American authors who worked primarily outside of the theatrical genre, and the Virtual Playhouse, bringing graphically enhanced video performances to audiences around the world. The Metropolitan Playhouse closed its own theatre in 2023, but will continue to produce work. Awoye Timpo, CLASSIX Awoye Timpo created CLASSIX—together with Brittany Bradford, A.J. Muhammad, Dominique Rider, and Arminda Thomas—to explore the classical canon through an exploration of Black performance history and dramatic works by Black writers--engaging artists, historians, students, professors, producers and audiences to launch these plays into the public imagination and spark productions worldwide. Awoye Timpois a New York-based director. She received her M.A. from the University of London/British Institute of Paris. Anita Durst, ChaShaMa Since 1995 Anita Durst has been working toward securing studio and presentation space in Midtown Manhattan for thousands of struggling artists by partnering with Property Owners that provide unused space to Chashama—while honoring the legacy of theatre visionary Reza Abdoh. Durst believes programs like Chashama are the vital building blocks to ensuring cultural capital in New York City. She was born in New York City. Keith Josef Adkins, THE NEW BLACK FEST Keith Joseph Adkins gathers artists, thinkers, activists and audiences who are fiercely dedicated to stretching, interrogating and uplifting the Black aesthetic experience in theatre. Adkins's commitment to celebrate, advocate and showcase diverse and provocative work in a festival of Black theater artists from throughout the Diaspora is a shining example of the liveliness and diversity of the New York City theatre and performance scene. His leadership, mentorship and close personal work with playwrights over a decade, especially during the Time of Corona, is a shining example of how just one theatre can make a difference and contribute to real change. Adkins's is a playwright, screenwriter and artistic director working in New York City. Kristin Marting, HERE Kristin Marting has been presenting over decades at HERE ARTS CENTER groundbreaking hybrid performance, dance, theater, multi-media, music and puppetry since 1993. HERE has been at the forefront of directing, producing and presenting independent, innovative, multidisciplinary works in New York City that do not fit into conventional programming agendas. Marting handed over the artistic leadership for HERE ARTS CENTER in 2023. Linda Chapman, NEW YORK THEATER WORKSHOP Linda Chapman's work at the New York Theater Workshop over many decades has been an excellent, shining example of the real impact just one theatre can have in a neighborhood, within the landscape of theatre and performance in New York and the nation. Chapman, in close collaboration with Jim Nicola, gave birth to hundreds of important theatre works and your support made a crucial difference to the careers of thousands of writers, directors, actors and artistic directors. Lucien Zayan, THE INVISIBLE DOG Lucien Zayan has made a significant, important and meaningful contribution towards theatre and performance in New York City with his unique art space THE INVISIBLE DOG. With exhibitions, performances, and public events featuring visual artists, performers, and curators from New York City and around the world you are an example of a space dedicated to a successful integration of innovation in the arts with profound respect for the past—while presenting, producing and serving emerging and established artists. Mark Russell, UNDER THE RADAR Since 2006, under the artistic leadership of founder Mark Russell, UNDER THE RADAR, has been a unique and urgently needed theatre festival in New York City presenting new and cutting-edge performance from the U.S. and abroad during APAP, the national service, advocacy and membership organization for the performing arts presenters. UNDER THE RADAR successfully presents international contemporary theater, richly distinct in terms of perspectives, aesthetics, and social practice, and pointing to the future of the art form. Especially the lasting global connections created by Russell and the UNDER THE RADAR represent a most significant contribution to the liveliness and diversity of the New York theatre and performance landscape. Morgan Jenness, DRAMATURGE Morgan Jenness has been a pioneer dramaturge in American theatre and her work with leading US theatres and independent performance groups has been groundbreaking. Her real support for young, experimental and emerging artists—especially, but not limited to playwrights--as well as her fierce loyalty over decades to artistic friends and collaborators has been exceptional role model for generations of NYC theatre makers. Jenness's work serves as a shining example of what impact just one dramaturge can have within the landscape of theatre and performance in New York City and how urgently such work is needed. Manuel Antonio Morán, NYC INTERNATIONAL PUPPET FRINGE FESTIVAL Manuel Antonio Morán is the founder and artistic director of The International Puppet Fringe Festival-- New York’s only global fringe festival dedicated to puppetry with over 40 performances in one week. Founded in 2018, the IPFF festival has had 3 editions since its inception, most recently in August 2023. It is a unique contribution to the diverse landscape of New York puppetry and object theatre. Morán is a Puerto Rican actor, singer, writer, composer, puppeteer, theater and film director and producer. He is also the Founder and Artistic Director of the Latino Children’s Theater, Teatro SEA, (Society of the Educational Arts, Inc.) in New York City. Teatro SEA has become a prominent institution in the performing arts landscape for youth audiences, curating diverse theatrical performances, including puppet shows, plays, and musicals. Meghan Finn THE TANK As the Artistic Director at THE TANK for the past six years, Meghan Finn has supported the work of thousands of multidisciplinary artists. The Tank was awarded an OBIE AWARD for institutional excellence, under Finn's leadership as Artistic Director and for presenting, producing and serving emerging New York City artists. The Tank removes economic barriers from the creation of new work for artists launching their careers or experimenting within their art form, while being inclusive and accessible. Nicole Birmann Bloom VILLA ALBERTINE/CULTURAL SERVICES OF THE FRENCH EMBASSY IN THE UNITED STATES Nicole Birmann Bloom’s work at the French Cultural Services over the decades within the landscape of theatre and performance in New York City has long been an excellent, shining example of meaningful cultural diplomacy with a deep impact through the years. With great knowledge and emotional intelligence, Birmann Bloom has connected countless French and American theatre artists, companies and institutions, playwrights and directors, dancers and stages. She contributed to the creation of performances, tours and public events across creative disciplines and facilitated exploratory residencies in New York City and across the United States. Her work supporting, les Rencontres, la Recherche et la Création had a real impact in the field and is highly respected and beloved by her American friends and colleagues. Robert Lyons, THE OHIO Since 1988 Robert Lyons developed and presented some of the boldest and most innovative work from NYC’s diverse independent theatre community. His New Ohio Theatre, a pillar of the downtown independent theatre community, actively expanded the boundaries of what theatre is, how it’s made, and why. For 30 years Lyons' ICE FACTORY festival has been serving NYC's diverse indie theatre community—the small, inspired, artist-driven ensembles and the daring producing companies who operate without a permanent theatrical home. Robert is also a playwright with more than twenty NYC premieres. In 2023 New Ohio Theatre closed its doors for good. Theresa Buchheister, THE BRICK As the Artistic Director Theresa Buchheister made a significant, important and meaningful contribution towards theatre and performance in New York City at THE BRICK--developing and presenting with an open-door policy the work of countless pioneering emerging artists and career experimenters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Buchheister (They/Them) is a Kansan New Yorker and founder and also the co-director of Title:Point, founder and Artistic Director of The Exponential Festival, and co-founder of Vital Joint. Theresa directs, produces, performs, curates, facilitates and writes for theatre and theatre-adjacent performance realms. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Ariel Nereson Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 3 Visit Journal Homepage History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition Ariel Nereson By Published on November 16, 2014 Download Article as PDF Ariel Nereson/ In 2007 the Ravinia Festival of Chicago commissioned the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (BTJ/AZ) to create a work for inclusion in their 2009 bicentennial celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.[1] In the process of creating the bicentennial work, Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray, the company generated a Lincoln trilogy including the evening-length concert dance Serenade/The Proposition (2008) and a large community piece at the University of Virginia, 100 Migrations (2008).[2] This trilogy examines Lincoln’s legacy in terms of how we (understood as a capacious American public) feel about him as a figure and the effects of his history on our lives today. Here I am concerned with the first work in the Lincoln trilogy, Serenade/The Proposition, and its use of metaphor as choreographic strategy. BTJ/AZ dancer Leah Cox describes Serenade as “a more poetic, less linear type of work” and indeed the piece is heavily imagistic, identifying critical phrases or images from the Lincoln archive, and abstracting movement responses from these fragments.[3] Much of the work’s movement was generated by the company and then directed by Jones, with a script by Jones and Janet Wong, the company’s associate artistic director. The choreography is defined by an impulse to travel through the space; moments of stillness are few and thoroughly earned by an almost relentless drive to move laterally across the stage. The work includes live music incorporating military marches, ballads, hymns, and songs composed from fragments of Lincoln’s letters, as well as projections of American landscapes and prominent figures from the Civil War era. Additionally, Serenade features live narration by Jamyl Dobson of critical events from the Civil War, such as the Richmond riots, speeches and letters of Frederick Douglass, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and others, and also of the company’s own moments of contact with Lincoln. Recordings of company members recollecting their own and other dancers’ memories are also critical to the work’s engagement with the past through movement. These recordings contextualize the choreography and reflect the personal relationship the company members had to the work. This essay addresses Serenade’s focus on the metaphor “history is distance,” and its implications not only for understanding how historians use the conceptual categories of time and space to craft histories, but also how this metaphor interacts with the notion of a usable past.[4] This focus positions the dancers squarely as historians, choreographing relationships to history that clarify the role our emotions and embodiment play in the proximity of the past from our present selves. In Serenade, using the past is not a matter of rhetoric, but rather of creative practice, of mining the archives (both official Lincoln archives and “unofficial” embodied archives) to make something new. The company’s approach foregrounds the cognitive scientific concept of embodied emotion as a way of reckoning with history and of understanding intellectualized “ideas” (like freedom, liberty, equality) as grounded in lived experience. I place the company’s History is Distance metaphor alongside other metaphors that appear in Serenade, particularly those that occur in Lincoln’s own rhetorical archive, such as his metaphor of the “House Divided” and “Young America” conceit.[5] BTJ/AZ’s engagement with metaphor reflects its cognitive function while pushing forward its use as a narrative, sense-making tool applicable to the work of artists, historians, and the hybrid artist-historians that BTJ/AZ become. Metaphor Across Disciplines Historian John Lewis Gaddis asserts, “science, history, and art have something in common: they all depend on metaphor, on the recognition of patterns, on the realization that something is ‘like’ something else.”[6] BTJ/AZ perform this very commonality in their meditation on Lincoln, engaging with choreographic, historical, and cognitive scientific modes of inquiry. From a cognitive scientific perspective, the use-value of metaphor easily crosses disciplinary boundaries. To generate metaphors about x being y (or like y) is to shape meaning; humans do this unconsciously and could not organize their experiences without doing so. All people involved in understanding the meaning of human experience, and why the social world works as it does, are actively engaged in creating and using metaphors (along with similes, images, and other similar techniques). Metaphor is employed to give shape, often accompanied by narrative, to “facts” so that they might make sense and be meaningful, whether they be scientific facts about how the brain works, historical facts about what decisions were made where and when, or artistic representations of people, places, and things. As one of our primary ways of making sense of our world, metaphors originate in our embodied experience of the world. Serenade is abundant with company-generated metaphors that concern what exactly history is. The most striking and persistent of these metaphors is “history is distance.” In the performance of Serenade, a recorded version of this phrase plays over a quartet for the women of the company. This metaphor is in conversation with a disciplinary one, that of history as the “usable past.” Jones himself sees history through this metaphor, positing the major question of this work as “How can we use Lincoln and his time as a mirror through which we look darkly at ourselves?”[7] If history can be both distance and the usable past, what is useful about that distance? How can distance be characterized through elements of historical inquiry like time and space?[8] Serenade builds on the metaphors generated by Abraham Lincoln himself that are used in a number of speeches to prompt Americans to engage on an emotional level with the state of the union. Throughout Serenade BTJ/AZ’s dancer-historians use metaphor as a sense-making engine driven by embodiment and emotion that revises not only Lincoln’s legacy but also how historical inquiry might be performed. History—the hope of making sense of the past—has often sought to be objective, and objectivity’s corollary, unemotional. As Gaddis explains: “We’re supposed to be solid, dispassionate chroniclers of events, not given to allowing our emotions and our intuitions to affect what we do, or so we’ve traditionally been taught.”[9] Two particular theories, cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio’s somatic-marker hypothesis and philosopher Mark Johnson’s embodiment hypothesis, point to empirical evidence for Gaddis’s skepticism of historians actually adhering to a doctrine of objectivity in practice. Damasio’s experiments have shown that “reason,” if it is truly possible to separate it from emotion, cannot in fact operate without emotion. The somatic-marker hypothesis proposes that “selective reduction of emotion is at least as prejudicial for rationality as excessive emotion . . . on the contrary, emotion probably assists reasoning.”[10] Philosopher Mark Johnson’s embodiment hypothesis echoes Damasio’s claims: “meaning is shaped by the nature of our bodies, especially our sensorimotor capacities and our ability to experience feelings and emotions.”[11] Johnson is even stronger on the connection between emotion and supposed higher-level processes than Damasio, claiming, “there is no cognition without emotion.”[12] Damasio’s somatic-marker hypothesis and Johnson’s embodiment hypothesis have real ramifications to consider for anyone investigating practices of sense-making, history being one such practice and art being another. One such consequence is the realization that activities usually considered under the moniker of the aesthetic are involved directly in cognition, often foregrounding modes of meaning-making outside of, or in complement to, the linguistic.[13] It strikes me that dance, in always already foregrounding the body in motion, makes explicit the implicit connection between movement and emotion, a term whose very definition includes “to cause to move.”[14] BTJ/AZ’s choreographic methodologies are founded upon a recognition that embodiment and emotion underlie our capacities to make sense of the past and present, to reckon with history. “History is . . . ” is a popular refrain throughout Serenade. It isn’t always a metaphor: indeed, often these pre-recorded words are followed by a rather literal history that follows a single person’s biography, sometimes drawn from company members’ lives, and sometimes wholly fictional. The first is Jones’s own history: “It could be said that this history is a person born in 1952 who wakes up in the backseat of a car crowded with children, looks out at the misted morning street, as his father says, ‘We’re in Virginia. Richmond, Virginia.’”[15] The narration consistently refers to history as a human subject—a person born in 1981, a woman, etc. This motif builds to a quartet for the company’s women, danced in front of columns featuring images of American women abolitionists. During this section Cox’s recorded voice speaks a series of poetic phrases culminating in the metaphor “It could be said that this history is distance.” In moving from the personally specific retelling of Jones’s experience to the more generalized metaphor of “history is distance,” the company travel through their own memories of and relationships to Lincoln. Earlier iterations of this “history is” motif follow a central section of choreography, “The Spill.”[16] “The Spill” includes the full company and is a traveling section where dancers move laterally across the stage in staggered distances, so the effect is one of bodies spilling out and covering the space in an expanding amoeba-like formation from the group pose that precedes this action. This choreography introduces two histories, the first embodied by LaMichael Leonard, Jr.: “He thought he was going to attack a theory about history. He remembers a class in third grade about the great man. And it’s not that he’s forgotten it. He just doesn’t remember it. It could be said that this history is someone born in 1981.”[17] Shayla-vie Jenkins dances the second history: “She thought she was going to attack a theory about history. There was the history class in third grade. The class about the great man. But what she remembers is [gesture]. It could be said that this history is a person born in 1982.”[18] “The Spill” is both compelling choreography and a metaphor for the relationship between public and personal histories. The personal histories we hear as Leonard and Jenkins dance solos that utilize the same movement vocabulary come out of a shared choreography wherein our orientation to history is not one of learning and compartmentalizing facts within a linear narrative, but rather navigating the past in a messy, weaving action that necessarily takes place in a present populated with other people. Jenkins’ solo also significantly recalibrates a sticky relationship between history and memory by introducing gesture as the conduit between them. In this section of Serenade “The Spill” bookends Leonard and Jenkins’ solos, framing historical investigation via archive and memory as an embodied endeavor, as well as a pursuit that can, and does, fail occasionally. The solos reflect the emphasis on lateral, right-left travel shared by “The Spill” but demonstrate a more controlled approach to the movement, an attempt at coherent narrative rather than the break, or spillage performed in “The Spill.” In Leonard’s Serenade history, he experiences both a failure to remember but also to forget, occupying a middle ground of ambiguity and ambivalence, with undefined feelings towards and memories of Lincoln’s story. The relationship of Serenade to Lincoln is also ambiguous here: as the company begins the first iteration of “The Spill” a projection of the White House with flames behind its windows frames their action—they thought they were going to attack a theory about history, that of Lincoln as hero.[19] The actual relationship between the work and Lincoln’s legacy is, of course, much more complicated and the choreography references this reality in its shift to the solos, which take place in a rectangle of white light without any projection, mirroring the meditative focus with which Leonard and Jenkins approach their performances. When Jenkins picks up the solo, she expresses a different relationship to history and memory—rather than incomplete forgetting and remembering, her memories are expressed in the body, in motion: what she remembers is a gesture, an arc of one arm over the head and around the shoulder to meet the other arm that turns her body on the spot. This gesture’s meaning is also ambiguous. What I find significant is that this solo’s memory of Lincoln, an alternative to the attack on the theory of history, is embodied first and foremost, and perhaps can only be expressed through embodiment, eschewing the linguistic. As a literally embodied metaphor, “The Spill” reflects the reality that metaphors are not simply imaginative turns of phrase; they are evolutionarily adapted mechanisms for explaining the world around us through language that reflects our embodied, emotion-driven experiences. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work on primary metaphors posits our sensorimotor experiences, such as holding or grasping an object, understanding an object as above or below us, etc., form the basis of the primary metaphors that structure our thought and language. Crucially, these metaphors develop from our embodied nature and human tendency to focus attention on emotion-inciting stimuli. Examples of primary metaphor include Happy is Up, Important is Big, and Affection is Warmth.[20] “The Spill” makes sense as a piece of choreography because its movement reflects our embodied experience of actual spilling. Bodies tumble across the stage from a previously established boundary of static poses on stage right with a relatively fast, haphazard quality. Primary metaphors are structured through our lived experiences of space and time (think of “The Spill” and its use of expansion and speed), however, as cognitive narratologist Patrick Hogan cautions, these experiences are far from objective, no matter how objective time and space may seem as ideas: “our experiences of both space and time are encoded non-homogenously. The principles by which objects and occurrences are selected, the principles by which they are segmented, and the principles by which they are structured, both internally and in embedded hierarchies, are crucially (though of course not exclusively) emotional.”[21] BTJ/AZ’s deployment of expansive and quick movement in a seemingly random trajectory relates to the emotional qualities of spilling as a metaphor: think of memories spilling out, or the literal description of tears spilling over. Spilling implies a failed containment, a movement beyond a boundary, and these actions have emotional implications. The fact that the choreography of “The Spill” leads directly from and into company memories strengthens its emotional impact and suggests a surplus of embodied responses to and memories of Lincoln’s legacy recovered from the archive of the company itself. History is Distance History is Distance is a conceptual metaphor, more sophisticated than primary metaphors but composed from these basics as molecules are formed by atoms.[22] Conceptual metaphor takes place in our consciousness, but, as Lakoff and Johnson remind us, “not all conceptual metaphors are manifested in the words of a language. Some are manifested in grammar, others in gesture, art, and ritual.”[23] BTJ/AZ develop gestural sequences that embody and express the emotional saliency of metaphors like Important is Big or Happy is Up. The complexity of the metaphors in Serenade does not diminish their reliance on embodied emotion in order to make sense. The company’s conceptual metaphor History is Distance builds upon the primary metaphor of Intimacy is Closeness. The intimacy metaphor originates in our lived experiences of vitality affects, such as being physically close to, or near, people with whom we are intimate, such as the experience of infants being held and comforted by people, often family members, with whom they will develop emotional intimacies.[24] These formative experiences also encompass sharing a space with siblings and later roommates, lovers, and other persons with whom we will usually develop emotional intimacy. However, the metaphor History is Distance plays on the intimacy metaphor at its opposite—we are unfamiliar with those things far away from us in both space and time. We use “distance” as a description of our sensorimotor experiences of space and time, such as the terminology of the distant past, or distant lands. If, in Serenade, History is Distance, then there is a necessary emotional repercussion to this formulation in which we are not only removed in time and space from capital-H History, but due to this spatio-temporal distance, we are also distanced emotionally from History and less invested emotionally due to this decreased proximity. The experiential determinants of this metaphor are relatively straightforward: generally speaking, we do not need to emotionally invest in experiences defined by distance in the way we must in those defined by proximity—i.e., it’s in my best interest to invest in people that are emotionally significant to me, like my mother, rather than in people who cannot provide that level of close intimacy, like a celebrity (or indeed a historical celebrity, like Lincoln). Thus History is Distance is not simply a metaphor about the familiar historian’s experience of being distanced in time and space from his or her subject, but also about an emotional distance that spatio-temporal proximity (or lack thereof) prompts. The company reframes this metaphor of History is Distance in ways that circumvent spatial, temporal, and emotional distance in order to make history relevant, personal, and meaningful in the present. As artist-historians, BTJ/AZ are capable of the activities of Gaddis’s historians: “Individual historians . . . are of course bound by time and space, but history as a discipline isn’t. . . . They [historians] can compress these dimensions [of time and space], expand them, compare them, measure them, even transcend them. . . . Historians have always been, in this sense, abstractionists: the literal representation of reality is not their task.”[25] BTJ/AZ move into the world of figurative metaphor rather than literal representation in the poetry of Cox’s text, which works in tandem with the choices of choreography, costume, and set to perform leaps of logic that foreground that, like all human experiences of spatiality and temporality, “distance” is relative: It could be said that this history is a person . . . a woman A woman who is able A woman who is able to say goodbye A woman who is able to fix you right A woman who is able to fix you right after you die It could be said that this history is distance. The distance between that woman and me.[26] This formulation of history refers to an actual historical experience of womanhood during the Civil War—that of women, often the only ones left in a given community, properly dressing and burying the dead.[27] Cox’s words seek a path through the density of historical people and events that lie between the contemporary woman (actually Cox onstage, though the average spectator may not know this) and the historical woman charged with burial of the dead (and represented visually on the columns). Because History is Distance plays on Intimacy is Closeness, this path can be an emotional route, undercutting the impossibilities of time-travel the historian faces. The last line of this short poem is significant, adding a layer to the relationship of History is Distance by making this metaphor, derived from universal primary metaphors, incredibly specific: the distance between that woman and me. The company proposes a common solution to the disciplinary challenge of history: focusing on a figure in order to collapse distance, to develop an emotional intimacy of sorts with a character from the past.[28] BTJ/AZ’s strategy makes sense as a method of making history meaningful because of the spatial schema that structures human experience: Source-Path-Goal. We conceive of achieving any goal through this spatial schema of traveling along a path towards that goal. Our logical systems also build on Source-Path-Goal reasoning, such as the logic of “If you travel from A to B and from B to C, then you have traveled from A to C.”[29] If we think about BTJ/AZ’s logic of “history is the distance between that woman and me” as a variation on the Source-Path-Goal schema, then “me” functions as the source, the starting point of the contemporary time and place, with “that woman” as our goal. History is something that happens in between these things, both intentionally and incidentally on our route to feel towards and to know as much as we can about “that woman.” Meet Me in the Middle Many historians do this kind of activity, focusing on a figure as a way into a larger historical moment. BTJ/AZ intervene in this process by demonstrating how embodiment and emotional response structure the paths between source and goal. A quick review of other primary metaphors shows how fundamental embodiment and human movement abilities are to how we understand the world: Time is Motion, Change is Motion, Causes are Physical Forces, Understanding is Grasping.[30] Our observation and performance of physical actions (walking, grasping, pushing, etc.) structures how we perceive these fundamental aspects of historical inquiry—time, change, and causality. Our understanding of these elements is filtered through selection processes that in turn are guided by emotional response, be it to existing stimuli or emotional memories. If we understand time through motion metaphorically, are there ways to reckon with the temporal distance between the past and present through motion? Can we move into another time, not literally but within a space of understanding? BTJ/AZ attempt this movement through choreographies of entry in and out of historical figures that are structured by the performance of metaphors. BTJ/AZ not only perform heightened conceptual metaphors derived from their lived experiences of primary metaphor, but also demonstrate why Abraham Lincoln’s own linguistic metaphors have such efficacy. The company focuses on two “Lincolnisms”: Young America and the house divided. Lincoln’s “house divided” refers to the Union and its division into warring factions, and its coinage took place preceding the Civil War conflict, which would become the literal manifestation of the ideological warfare to which Lincoln refers in 1858. Serenade’s most significant re-imagining is of the Union as a felt concept, as well as multiple sides united in a common enterprise. The company persistently asks, “What do union and division feel like?” Because of the embodied realism that grounds the company’s approach, feeling and moving are consistently united as processes of understanding. Serenade opens with a long section entitled “Meet Me in the Middle” where dancers face off along the battlefield of the stage, performing phrases that respect an invisible center stage boundary that separates the two sides—perhaps into Union and Confederacy.[31] The dancers are dressed in rehearsal clothes that place them in our contemporary moment, thus the association of Union and Confederacy is an oblique one. The focus instead is on the concept of meeting in the middle. This concept relies heavily on our spatial understanding of the middle as an equidistant point between sides that requires equal effort on all sides to reach. This phrase has come to represent not only a literal meeting in the middle but also felt processes of emotionally arriving at a middle ground with someone who feels oppositely. The opening choreography is a series of propositions for what the process of meeting in the middle feels like in the body. The movements are abstract and travel toward and away from the center, never crossing its boundary. A strong preoccupation with turning, spinning, and circuitous motion characterizes this sequence. All of this circular motion contributes to a sense that the dancers function similarly to Gaddis’s notion of historical figures as “molecules with minds of their own”; whirling subjects that articulate membership in opposing sides but whom nonetheless exist as individuals.[32] Moreover, the direction of circular motion changes frequently, with dancers asked to turn outside over the right then outside over the left before the first turn has been completed. These frequent directional shifts reflect the ability of humans to change, to shift direction and opinions. The shifts also imply an emotional turbulence, of turning an idea around inside the mind, looking at it from all sides, and the emotional response of frustration that process can inspire. The path to meeting in the middle is rarely direct in the company’s vision, and often when one person gets to the middle, nobody is there to meet them. “Meeting in the middle” becomes a challenging activity with little assurance of success, yet the dancers’ choreography continuously compels them to seek this action out. The sequence concludes with a single dancer, Paul Matteson, crossing the boundary. Matteson will later portray Lincoln, suggesting this figure as a case study in “meeting in the middle,” in uniting a divided house. A House Divided Lincoln’s iconic words, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” delivered in Springfield, Illinois on 16 June 1858, rely upon embodiment in order to make sense.[33] Our notion of standing comes from our own experiences of standing on two feet as stable, resistant, and strong; trying to stand for long on a single foot reveals how important the union of our two feet is to our successful movement through the world. Our spatial reasoning allowed for the evolution of dwelling structures that might also “stand,” depending upon the integrity of beams (or legs). In Serenade BTJ/AZ enact the “house divided” as a trio between Jennifer Nugent, Peter Chamberlin, and Matteson that foregrounds embodiment and emotional response as the foundation of metaphor. Nugent plays mediator between Matteson and Chamberlin as they enact dueling sides. A repeated choreographic motif is of the three standing, linking arms as if in a square dance, with Nugent in the center. Nugent looks out at the audience, and Matteson and Chamberlin look across her body at each other, ready to spring. This tableau, always threatening to strike into action, is a corporeal representation of a house divided, as Nugent plants her feet and tries to stand while the opposing forces of Matteson and Chamberlin repeatedly yank her off balance. This sequence feels like a boxing match with Nugent caught in the middle. The sound score uses the sound of a bell to coincide with each time the trio reaches the motif tableau, and these bells bring a second of stillness, the calm before the storm, before the trio whirls into action again. The metaphor “a house divided” encompasses the entirety of the nation into the conflict: a house divided into opposing sides rather than the opposing sides existing outside of the structure. The company juxtaposes Lincoln’s metaphor with one from Frederick Douglass’s 1862 “The Reason for Our Troubles” speech: “It is something of a feat to ride two horses going the same way, and at the same pace, but a still greater feat when going in opposite directions.”[34] Douglass delivers this metaphor after directly citing Lincoln’s, and while the two turns of phrase share the basic notion of division and opposition, Douglass’s words imply an external figure to the action of opposing sides that Lincoln’s do not. A person rides the two horses, existing separately from them, whereas in a house divided all agents are contained with the house. The dancers embody Douglass’s metaphor as Nugent climbs on the back of Chamberlin, attempting to balance as Matteson pulls her forward towards him. The juxtaposition of these two metaphors reveals how important our material and social environments are in influencing what metaphors will make sense to us and be useful for describing our experiences. In a body-based model of cognition body, mind, and environment, including social and material environments, all work in tandem to produce a meaningful world. This model encompasses an understanding of emotional response as a bioregulatory process that is cross-cultural and transhistorical, though the meanings it may produce vary due to the specific relationships between body, mind, and environment that are historically situated in time and place. Neurological and biological processes impact this understanding as well, but are not deterministic of experience to such a high degree that they cancel out environmental factors. Social and material environments influence individuals’ feelings of belonging and access to various narratives and metaphors as sense-making tools. As Hogan claims, “not every individual or group has the same degree of authority or impact with respect to the social evaluation and preservation of stories.”[35] What is available for selection and inclusion into a historical narrative shifts with socio-cultural embeddedness in time and space. For example, what gets preserved in an archive is certainly a product of a hierarchy of social identity that is grounded in a specific historical spatio-temporality. Individuals’ access to that archive is also a product of a hierarchy of identities. Thus availability of experience is influenced by social identity, which in turn influences the selection of episodes from which an individual constructs a history. Narrative, metaphor, and identity are strongly connected as “narrative organizes both individual and communal identities, [and] shapes and composes memories and expectations” but also as identity influences availability and selection of narrative.[36] While the universal human experiences of gravity, balance, tension, and opposition are consistent in both men’s metaphors due to their necessary grounding in embodiment, Lincoln and Douglass’s varying social environments (though certainly in this point in history they overlapped considerably) and the situatedness of their metaphors in time and space impact how these men use metaphor to describe experience. Lincoln in 1858 was a political insider, active in politics and, as a white male, at the top of a social hierarchy that positioned America as his birthright, as his house. Lincoln’s metaphor clearly displays this sense of ownership over the house and the feeling that the two sides belong to the same “house,” the same nation. Contrastingly, Douglass’s speech positions a third party to the two opposing sides, an outside agent who must attempt to master both horses, both sides. Douglass’s sense of himself as a black former slave likely contributes to his positioning of a third outside figure who nonetheless has agency within the relationship between the opposing sides. Douglass’s metaphor also encapsulates a tension between riding the horses as mastery and riding the horses as challenge, and has an urgency of action embedded within it that likely has to do not only with the stakes of his own past as a slave but also with the different national circumstances of 1862 and 1858.[37] This urgency is reflected in the trio’s choreography with a heightened sense of risk as Nugent attempts to “ride” Chamberlin and Matteson, caught in a bind between needing to alternately control and depend upon them. These two metaphors suggest that lived experience impacts which metaphors seem particularly apt to describe a given person, event, or situation. Moreover, the subtle distinctions between these metaphors speak to how metaphors describe the feeling of a situation like the failed Union and Civil War with an emotional factuality grounded in embodiment. Young America The connection between metaphor and emotion is strengthened through the company’s choreography of “Young America.” Lincoln’s rhetorical figure “Young America” is the trope of his Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, delivered 11 February 1859. It begins, “We have all heard of Young America. He is the most current youth of the age. Some think him conceited, and arrogant; but has he not reason to entertain a rather extensive opinion of himself? Is he not the inventor and owner of the present, and sole hope of the future?”[38] Lincoln’s tone throughout the lecture is winking and Young America’s “horror . . . for all that is old, particularly ‘Old Fogy’” is positioned as a foolish belief that the past has not had any effect on him.[39] The gist of Lincoln’s speech is that we must look backward in order to look forward, that the forward momentum from our great inventions springs from patterns of thought from the past: “To be fruitful in invention, it is indispensable to have a habit of observation and reflection . . . acquired, no doubt, from those who, to him [Young America], were old fogies.”[40] Lincoln’s anthropomorphizing of Young America and Old Fogy concern the relationship between the past, present, and future but also characterize this fraught relationship as one that is emotionally driven. Young America’s “horror” at the past is matched by his “great passion—a perfect rage—for the ‘new.’”[41] Lincoln’s sophisticated conceptual metaphors are necessarily undergirded by Lakoff and Johnson’s primary metaphors, particularly understanding motion as change, since one of Lincoln’s primary topics within the speech is the burgeoning railway system. They are also bound, as are all metaphors, to embodied emotion, to making sense of lived experience via emotional response with the aim of revitalizing history, of accessing “the warm artery that ought to lead from the present back into the past,” in Van Wyck Brooks’s notion of “the usable past.”[42] This “warm artery” gets at the embodied connection between the company’s contemporary moment and the historical time of Lincoln that is choreographed in an opening sequence of Serenade. The section, entitled “Young America,” features Jamyl Dobson as a narrator figure who recites the first paragraph of Lincoln’s second lecture as the company dresses dancer Paul Matteson onstage. The moment before consists of the company dancing “Meet Me in the Middle,” in what look like ordinary rehearsal clothes, sweatpants, tank tops, etc. When Matteson appears center stage in a tight beam of light he wears only briefs, and during the speech company members help to dress him in a deconstructed vision of Lincoln’s sartorial figure. This slow, deliberate transformation through and on Matteson’s body foregrounds corporeality as a route into the past. The rest of the company has already changed offstage into their nineteenth-century garb during the preceding scene change, thus the effect is a literalization of Lincoln’s notion that the past lays the patterns for the future. The “past” in Serenade, cued by a costume change, dresses “Young America.” Interestingly, BTJ/AZ’s use of Lincoln’s metaphorical figure collapses a bit of distance between past and present, as the “past” characters dress Matteson’s “Young America” not in the garb of the future but so that he might time-travel backwards to their own time. The overarching metaphor of Serenade, History is Distance, is not, I believe, meant to be discouraging. For Jones, distance is an opportunity to expend effort in the same direction as someone else: “Why do I distance you like that? I distance you so that you and I have to work to come back together, because I believe that this is the metaphor for what all human intercourse is really about. Falling apart and fighting back together.”[43] The company choreographs these interactions, falling off one another’s shoulders and fighting gravity and balance to get back together again. For Jones, the work it takes to meet in the middle is an emotional labor in addition to a physical one. To be intimate with the past, to fight this distance, requires an emotional closeness that already exists in personal memory. History is Distance structures much of the choreography but is not the only notion of history in the work; histories are also “a place,” “a woman,” “a person born in 1952,” etc. What BTJ/AZ do so well is using personal pasts as entry points into public histories, as paths toward meeting in the middle with Lincoln. In public historians Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s poll of public attitudes toward American history, they found “No more than 24 percent of any racial or ethnic group answered that the history of the United States was the past they felt was ‘most important’ to them, as opposed to 50-60 percent who identified their family’s past.”[44] Moreover, these responses correlated with an increase in “the rhetoric of intimacy that respondents used in discussing the pasts that matter to them.”[45] Thus it would appear that History is Distance accurately describes the emotional value of the past to most contemporary Americans. To return briefly to the entrenched cultural dualism between reason and emotion, despite recent attempts by historians to characterize their discipline as at least somewhat subjective, it’s clear from the reviews of the Lincoln trilogy that the general public still views history as belonging to the realm of reason.[46] Lines like “It helps for audiences to be versed in Lincoln history, but Jones is more interested in their emotional responses”[47] and “Clarity isn’t his goal so much as an absorbing emotional experience”[48] belie the common assumptions that reason and emotion are separate (even oppositional) phenomena and, moreover, that history has more to do with processes of reasoning than emotion.[49] For these reviewers, the wealth of feeling performed onstage undercuts or even negates the work’s stated engagement with history. These critics are not noting failures of the work but rather replicating a familiar dichotomy between history/reason and art/emotion in order to categorize what they viewed. Significantly, these are conscious descriptions of the work, and our conscious articulations are often shaped by prevalent social ideologies (including Cartesian dualism) that may reframe our unconscious emotional responses in a socially suitable way. To my mind, these comments have less to do with an actual opposition between “History” and emotion in the work, and more a conceptual opposition between what we think the work of history is and what emotions do. Civil War historian Nina Silber also reviewed Serenade and expresses an alternate vision of what history might be that articulates how BTJ/AZ’s work moves notions of history forward: “As a historian, I think what I appreciate most about Jones’s work is his very self-conscious understanding of the idea that history is not just something that happened, but is also the story—and often a deeply imagined one at that—that we tell about the past.”[50] Characters are a vital part of storytelling. By focusing on people/characters rather than events as a narrative strategy, BTJ/AZ are able to connect present experiences of “history” to the actual past; for example juxtaposing dancer LaMichael Leonard, Jr.’s attitude towards his classroom introduction to Lincoln, summarized by Dobson as “He thought he was going to attack a theory about history,” with historical accounts of the storming of Richmond.[51] Moreover, tapping into company members’ emotional memories of Lincoln, such as the velvet painting of Lincoln that hung on Jones’s wall as a child, plays on the sense-making metaphor “Intimacy is Closeness” in order to traverse history’s distance. Approaching Lincoln through this metaphor requires an emotional investment on Jones’s part, and emotions are not fixed but rather situational and changeable. Jones describes his own process: “I thought it [the trilogy] would be investigative, prosecutorial . . . about the misinformation of history. I would liberate myself from my own sentimentality. As I began to work with the material, I became more compassionate toward the man and the American project. It made me think about my own heart and my own time.”[52] The History is Distance metaphor worked, for Jones, as a method of connecting the past to the present, of finding the mirror through which we look at our own time. Brooks’s urgent claim, “What is important for us?...The more personally we answer this question, it seems to me, the more likely we are to get a vital order out of the anarchy of the present” finds surprising support in a framework wherein embodied emotional response motivates decision-making and structures sense-making concepts of metaphor and narrative.[53] Jones’s own approach to making the past meaningful in the present adopts “personal” strategies of tracking shifts in situated embodied emotion between Lincoln’s time and our own, in order to discover what is important for us now, when “us,” as a united nation, is longed for but still distant. Ariel Nereson is the Interdisciplinary Arts Coordinator at Vassar College. She recently received her doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, where her dissertation focused on the relationship between embodiment, historiography, and cognitive science in the work of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Theatre Journal, Studies in Musical Theatre, Theatre Survey, and Slavic and Eastern European Performance. [1] With gratitude, I wish to acknowledge the generosity of Leah Cox and Ella Rosewood at New York Live Arts in providing the archival material upon which this essay builds. Thanks also to Naomi Stubbs, whose feedback strengthened the structure of the essay significantly. [2] BTJ/AZ dancer and education director Leah Cox likened the process of creating Serenade and Fondly to Picasso creating sketches for Guernica before attempting the final painting. While there is substantial overlap in choreography and theme between the two works, Serenade stands on its own and tours as a full work separately from Fondly. Together these works bookend 100 Migrations. Personal interview, 4 June 2013. Cox developed and danced this work alongside fellow company members Antonio Brown, Asli Bulbul, Peter Chamberlin, Shayla-vie Jenkins, LaMichael Leonard, Jr., I-Ling Liu, Paul Matteson, Erick Montes-Chavaro, and Jennifer Nugent. The work remains active in the company’s repertory and is occasionally remounted on university companies. [3] Personal interview with Leah Cox, 4 June 2013. [4] Historian Van Wyck Brooks coined this terminology in “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial: A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information 64 (11 April 1918): 337. [5] This essay focuses fairly narrowly on BTJ/AZ’s Serenade and specific moments from Lincoln’s history, and does not attempt an overview of Lincoln as a cultural figure in American history and memory. Several studies do so, including Merrill D. Peterson’s Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Barry Schwartz’s Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), among others. [6] John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2. [7] Interview with Bill Moyers. Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal: Bill T. Jones Reimagines Lincoln Through Dance. Aired 25 Dec. 2009. Accessible via http://www.billmoyers.com . [8] See Charlotte Canning and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010) for the argument that historical inquiry can be differentiated into five interrelated areas: time, space, archive, narrative (or causality), and identity. [9] Gaddis, The Landscape of History, 16. Historian David W. Blight echoes this association in his claim, “History is what trained historians do, a reasoned reconstruction of the past rooted in research.” “If You Don’t Tell It Like It Was, It Can Never Be as It Ought to Be,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, eds. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (New York: The New Press, 2006), 24, emphasis mine. Blight contrasts history with memory, arguing “History asserts the authority of academic training and canons of evidence; memory carries the often more immediate authority of community membership and experience.” Ibid. See Patrick Hogan’s Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide For Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003) for an account of our evolutionary predisposition to forming narrative structures as a sense-making practice, and Hogan’s Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011) for an extension of this argument. [10] Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 41. Damasio’s somatic-marker hypothesis results from studies done on patients who, due to injury to areas in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, “lost a certain class of emotions and, in a momentous parallel development, lost their ability to make rational decisions,” here identified as “the ability to decide advantageously in situations involving risk and conflict.” Ibid. [11] Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9. [12] Ibid. [13] See Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, chapter 10, for more of this argument, specifically his rejection of Kantian aesthetics. [14] See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “emotion” as verb, 1. This particular definition has become obscure in contemporary parlance, yet remains in other linguistic expressions, such as being moved by a performance. The notion of emotions as a causal force, inciting us to literal action, is backed up by the neuroscience of emotions, discussed in Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, chapter 3. Johnson states that emotions function to appraise specific situations an organism finds itself in, “often initiating actions geared to our fluid functioning within our environment. It is in this sense that emotional responses can be said to move us to action” (61). [15] Script of 17 July 2013 performance of Serenade. Provided by BTJ/AZ. All subsequent quotations of the production text are from this version unless otherwise noted. [16] Leah Cox introduced me to this terminology of “The Spill.” Personal interview, 4 June 2013. [17] Serenade script. [18] Ibid. [19] In the beginning stages of the work, the company as a whole was very antagonistic toward the common narrative of Lincoln as a heroic figure. As Leah Cox recollected, “None of us believed in heroes.” Personal interview, 4 June 2013. [20] See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 50-54 for an extensive list of primary metaphors including the specific subjective and sensorimotor experiences from which they derive. [21] Hogan, Affective Narratology, 41. [22] Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 60. [23] Ibid, 57. [24] See Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, chapter 2 for a discussion of vitality affects and Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985) for the role of emotion and embodiment in the development of a sense of self in infants, including studies of vitality affects. [25] Gaddis, The Landscape of History, 17. [26] Serenade script. [27] Personal interview with Leah Cox, 4 June 2013. [28] Empathy as a historical strategy is a well-known theory of historian R.G. Collingwood. See R.J. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946) as well as Bruce McConachie, “Reenacting Events to Narrate Theatre History” in Canning and Postlewait, eds., Representing the Past, 378-403 for the relationship of empathy to historical inquiry. [29] Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 33. [30] Ibid., 52-54. [31] Leah Cox positions the opposite sides of the stage as Union and Confederacy as concepts the company used in the generation of this choreography, in addition to a felt concept of “democracy” that guided the shaping of this section: “A bit of a democracy figuring out who will be on stage, sharing the stage.” Personal interview, 4 June 2013. [32] Gaddis, 111. [33] Abraham Lincoln, “A House Divided: Speech delivered at Springfield, Illinois, at the close of the Republican State Convention. June 16, 1858,” in Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, ed. Roy P. Basler (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1946), 372. [34]Serenade script of 17 July 2013. See Frederick Douglass, “The Reason for Our Troubles,” University of Rochester’s Frederick Douglass Project, accessed 6 August 2014, http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=4381. [35] Hogan, Affective Narratology, 134. [36] Ibid.,19. [37] For a historical account of Lincoln and Douglass’s overlapping lives and agendas, see Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick’s Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union (New York: Walker & Company, 2008) and John Stauffer’s Giants: the Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass & Abraham Lincoln (New York: Twelve, 2008). [38] Abraham Lincoln, “Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 3, ed. Roy P. Basler (Springfield, IL: The Abraham Lincoln Association, 1953), 356. Emphasis in original. [39] Ibid., 357. [40] Ibid., 358. Emphasis in original. [41] Ibid., 357. Emphasis in original [42] Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” 340. [43] Ann Daly interview with Jones in Art Performs Life (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1998), 123. [44] Qtd. in Casey Nelson Blake, “The Usable Past, The Comfortable Past, and the Civic Past: Memory in Contemporary America,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 3 (August 1999): 431. See David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig, The Presence of the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) for a detailed analysis of the interviews that Thelen and Rosenzweig supervised at the Center for Survey Research at Indiana University in the early 1990s. [45] Ibid. [46] See Gaddis, The Landscape of History; see also William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001). [47] Kerry Clawson, “Performance remembers Lincoln,” Akron Beacon Journal, 21 January 2010. E14. [48] Sarah Kaufman, “New Works Redefine Political Movement,” Washington Post, 18 October 2009, accessed 10 October 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/16/AR2009101601485.html. [49] I suspect there is also a significant prejudice against the performing arts’ relationship to reasoning processes that tends to close down that avenue before it has been opened. [50] Nina Silber, “Judicial Review #2: Serenade/The Proposition at Jacob’s Pillow,” The ArtsFuse: Boston’s Online Arts Magazine, 6 August 2010, accessed 6 August 2014, http://artsfuse.org/9241/judicial-review-2-serenadethe-proposition-at-jacob%E2%80%99s-pillow/#nina_silber_review. [51] Serenade script of 17 July 2013. [52] PBS’ American Masters, “Bill T. Jones: A Good Man.” Aired 11 November 2011. Accessible via http://www.pbs.org . [53] Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” 340. History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition by Ariel Nereson ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 3 (Fall 2014) ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Table of Contents: Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre by Karen Bowdre History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition by Ariel Nereson Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives by Vanessa Campagna “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with "The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour" by Tamara L. Smith www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. 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Watch The Great Grand Greatness Awards by Jo Hedegaard at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. 3000 people are not gathered in the Asteroid Theatre on the night of the big award show. In fact, not a single soul could attend The Great Grand Greatness Awards. Not the host, not the presenters, not the winners, not the bands, not the products in the ‘commercials’. This presents a mounting challenge to host May Lifschitz, who finds the show descending into bizarreness and pure poetic chaos. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Great Grand Greatness Awards At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Jo Hedegaard Circus / Movement, Film, Mime, Multimedia, Music, Performance Art, Spoken Word This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Denmark Language English Running Time 57 minutes Year of Release 2023 3000 people are not gathered in the Asteroid Theatre on the night of the big award show. In fact, not a single soul could attend The Great Grand Greatness Awards. Not the host, not the presenters, not the winners, not the bands, not the products in the ‘commercials’. This presents a mounting challenge to host May Lifschitz, who finds the show descending into bizarreness and pure poetic chaos. Starring: May Lifschitz, Goyo Pomphile, Mirza Poturovic, Andrea Marcellier, Anne-Marie Curry, Kirsten Kamp Cadovius, Connie Hedegaard, Malik Grosos, Troels Thorsen, The Waiter, Makaia Salomon, Anette Støvelbæk, Søren Mühldorff, Jan Elle, Nana-Franciska Schöttländer, Jordan Jackson, Tomas Skovgaard, Jesper klinge Christen, Jacob Andersen, Jo Hedegaard. Written, directed and produced by: Jo Hedegaard Editor: Nicolaj Monberg Editor assistant: Jasmin Falk Jensen Sound design: Kristian Møller-Munar Photography: Peer Jon Ørsted, Lasse Gottlieb Karstensen, Ivan Cuevas, Daniel Leeb, Mark Grotkjær Lauritzen, Menno van Winden VFX: Kristian Møller-Munar, Ricardo León, Alexander Hjalmarsson, Esther-Sofie Hede CGI: Michael Vrede Colourgrader: Morten Pelch Graphics: Jo Hedegaard Post production: Jo Hedegaard Post production consultant: Mia Bang Stenberg Artworks: Jo Hedegaard, Hartmut Stockter Best boys: Martha Jes, Johan Sarauw, Kamma Hansen, Christian Hedegaard Music by: Kristian Møller-Munar, Casper Christiansen, August Campeotto, Andreas Svendsen, Bill Gross, Leonor Rib, Christine Raft, Daniel Nicholas Mølhave, Fredrik Hjulmand, Erik Danciu, Jo Hedegaard. Music mixing: Kristian Møller-Munar, Luiz Karlsen About The Artist(s) Jo Hedegaard (b. 1994) is a multi media visual artist working in film, sculpture, drawing, coagulated poetry and (public) performance. He has lived and worked in London, New York and Amsterdam, but is now based in Copenhagen, where he runs an art studio and makes visual work, experimental films and theatre. Get in touch with the artist(s) johedegaard@hotmail.com and follow them on social media www.johedegaard.com https://instagram.com/johedegaard_sunmanstudios Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here.

Casey L. Berner Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton Casey L. Berner By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton takes a broadly sociological look at notable Broadway shows of the last 30 years, constructing a rough lineage from Angels in America’s 1993 Broadway opening to Hamilton’s runaway success in 2015-16. The book opens with a compelling prologue detailing former Vice President Mike Pence’s notorious visit to Hamilton only days after the 2016 election. Then, Rise Up!’s fourteen chapters tackle one notable Broadway play or musical and an attendant event or movement in US politics (or within the larger theatre industry). Each chapter is titled for the year of the play’s Broadway opening from 1993 through to 2016 (with a notable gap from 2002-2007). In doing so, Jones builds an historical image of Broadway in which each show discussed represents a unique and important lesson or development that would lead, almost inevitably, to Hamilton as Broadway’s cultural and political peak. Jones’s clear journalistic prose takes readers inside the various Broadway houses where each show played. At its best, Rise Up! moves seamlessly from huge events of political prominence, to the local context of New York theatre, to the particular production on which the chapter is focused. The book’s first chapter, “1993: An Angel Lands,” does this beautifully, taking readers into the Broadway of the 1980s and the AIDS crisis, discussing Larry Kramer’s activism and artistry to serve Jones’s discussion of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America. Chapter twelve, which focuses on the notorious flop musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, is similarly compelling, guiding readers through the backstage turmoil and the on-stage errors and injuries that plagued the production in a way that is both sensitively handled and entertaining to read without feeling sensationalized. At the same time, the book is mired by Jones inclination toward tangents that never quite weave back to his overarching argument. Hamilton serves as a prominent but ultimately weak binding agent for the history this book constructs; Jones mentions each featured play’s connection to the hit show, but the tone is more winking gesture than compelling narrative thread. In some cases, these gestures distract—chapter five contains a lengthy description of the historical duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, connected loosely to August Wilson’s King Hedley II via gun violence. Missed opportunities to more clearly cohere this narrative abound. I was particularly struck that Jones makes only passing remarks on Oskar Eustis, perhaps the figure who connects Angels in America most directly to Hamilton. Similarly, Jones discusses Frozen at length in chapter seven without mentioning that the show shared a composer with Avenue Q, the primary subject of that chapter. While Rise Up! is an enjoyable read, it presents readers with an oversimplified history without ever quite connecting its many dots. This often renders thinner analysis for theater historians and scholars. I was struck especially when chapter five, on August Wilson, ends with a comment that the playwright “did not live long enough to see the first show staged [at the August Wilson Theatre]: Jersey Boys” (80). Some hint toward Jones’s perspective here would have been useful to me as a reader—was this an appropriate choice, given the show’s grounding in a specific location much as Wilson’s plays were? Or was it inappropriate to open Wilson’s eponymous theatre with a musical about a white doo-wop group performing in the early 1960s that largely evades the politics of the period? While Jones’s journalistic prowess makes the read interesting, the breezy tone allows him to evade deeper evaluation and critical analysis of topics. Some hint at Jones’s perspectives on these works and their cultural significance might have helped guide the reader and connect the volume’s disparate threads. My reader’s copy was also riddled with typos and minor factual errors—such as incorrectly naming The Little Mermaid in a discussion of Beauty and the Beast (59) or a reference to 2011 that, in context, must actually refer to 2001 to make sense (92)—that left me equal parts confused and distracted. These errors and misclassifications affect the very structure of the book; for instance, the seventh chapter is entitled “2002: The Pull of Vegas and the Rise of the Meta,” but the chapter details events set largely from 2004-2006 and in fact makes no reference to events in the year 2002 beyond the title. This was particularly notable, as the chapters jump from 2002 to 2007, and the contents of this chapter would fill that gap. While these errors may reflect on the editing or publisher as much as author, they raise concerns for me about the historical narrative that Jones’ book constructs when this narrative is at odds with the basic facts he presents. This book is perfect for those developing an initial interest in musical theatre or Broadway history, and could be used as a launching point for discussing commercial theatre and politics with undergraduate students, or as an entryway for further research into any one of the works included. It is also excellent for refreshing one’s memory of recent Broadway shows, especially musicals, as most major successful works since 1993 are mentioned in some capacity. Scholars aiming for a more rigorous investigation of these issues could pair Rise Up! recent volumes on musical theatre and US American culture; for instance, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past can provide greater insight into Hamilton as a cultural juggernaut, while Stacy Wolf’s Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America plucks musical theatre from New York City and examines it in the context of communities and societies across the US. Ultimately, Rise Up! is an enjoyable and sometimes insightful read that is simply not geared toward academic readers or audiences well-versed in either musical theatre or recent political history, but can be read, used, and enjoyed with that in mind. Casey L. Berner City University of New York The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 1 (Fall 2022) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2022 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Natka Bianchini Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Natka Bianchini By Published on March 9, 2014 Download Article as PDF Alan Schneider, one of the most important American directors of the twentieth century, was know for being a "playwright's director." He believed it was his responsibility to interpret the script as a faithful representation of the playwright's intent. For this reason, so many major playwrights [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700074 key=key-171aa737vjlfcqtl6q57 mode=scroll height=930 width=600] References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Winners Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Winners By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Errol Hill Award is given by the American Society for Theatre Research in recognition of outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, as demonstrated in the form of a published book-length project (monograph or essay collection) or scholarly article. The book or article must deal with African American theater history, dramatic literature, or performance studies (research on dance, acting and directing, public performances, i.e., parades, pageants, etc.). 2020: Kemi Adeyemi, University of Washington, Seattle, "Beyond 90°: The Angularities of Black/Queer/Woman/Lean," Women and Performance 29:1 (February 2019). 2019: Joshua Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer Color of Life, New York University Press Honorable Mentions Joanna Dee Das, Washington University in St. Louis, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, Oxford University Press Christian DuComb, Colgate University, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia, Michigan University Press Shane Vogel, Indiana University, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze, University of Chicago Press 2018: Kellen Hoxworth, Dartmouth College, "The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman," Theatre Survey 58:3 (September 2017). 2017: Renee Alexander Craft, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama (Ohio State University Press, 2016). Honorable Mentions Christen Smith, University of Texas at Austin, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016). T. Carlis Roberts, UC Berkeley, Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration(Oxford University Press, 2016). 2016: Uri McMillan, UCLA Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York University Press, 2015). Honorable Mention Adrienne Macki Braconi, Harlem’s Theatres: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2015). 2015: Paige McGinley, Washington University in St. Louis, Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism (Duke University Press, 2014) Honorable Mention Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2014). 2014: Kathleen Gough, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic (Routledge, 2013). Honorable Mentions E. Patrick Johnson Ramon Rivera-Servera, Solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews and essays (Northwestern University Press, 2014). Macelle Mahala, Penumbra: The Premier State for African American Drama (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 2013: Diana Rebekkah Paulin, Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in US Drama and Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 2012: Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Early Years 1807-1833 (University of Rochester Press, 2011). Honorable Mention Brandi Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind] (Univesrity of Michigan Press, 2011). 2011: Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (University of Michigan Press, 2010). 2010: Tavia Nyong'o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 2009: Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008). 2008: Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theatre and Film before World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 2007: Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2006). 2006: Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840 - 1895 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 2005: Harry Elam, The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (University of Michigan Press, 2004). 2004: E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2003). 2003: Thomas DeFrantz, Dancing Many Drums (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 2002: David Krasner and Harry Elam, Jr., eds., African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (Oxford University Press, 2001). 2001: Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (Routledge, 2001). 2000: George A. Thompson, Jr., A Documentary History of African Theatre (Northwestern Univeristy Press, 1998). 1999: Jill Lane, "Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840-1868." Theatre Journal 50, no. 1 (1998). 1998: David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910 (Macmillan Publishers, 1997). 1997: Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Wesleyan University Press, 1996). The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. 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Watch WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA by Magdalene Remoundou at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Actors, directors, theatre theorists demonstrate the man that reconfigured the Art of Theatre. An account on the world renowned director and theatre theorist Eugenio Barba’s unique approach to the theatrical art. In July, 2019, Εugenio Barba was conferred a honorary doctorate at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Peloponnese. A three day conference to the prominent theatre practitioner was held concurrently at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. At the same time, Teatret ODIN’s troupe staged legendary performances. Moreover, Teatret ODIN’s actors, but also Εugenio Barba himself, carried out some of the acclaimed workshops of ODIN Teatret. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Magdalene Remoundou Theater This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 18th. About The Film Country Greece Language Greek, English Running Time 62 minutes Year of Release 2020 Actors, directors, theatre theorists demonstrate the man that reconfigured the Art of Theatre. An account on the world renowned director and theatre theorist Eugenio Barba’s unique approach to the theatrical art. In July, 2019, Εugenio Barba was conferred a honorary doctorate at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Peloponnese. A three day conference to the prominent theatre practitioner was held concurrently at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. At the same time, Teatret ODIN’s troupe staged legendary performances. Moreover, Teatret ODIN’s actors, but also Εugenio Barba himself, carried out some of the acclaimed workshops of ODIN Teatret. Selection and participation in the following International Film Festivals: Film Arte Festival -March 2021 London Greek Film Festival- June 2021 Toronto International Women Film Festival -June 2021 Cannes International Cinema Festival -July 2021 Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival - June 2021 West Side Mountains Doc Festival - October 2021 Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival - November 2021 Berlin lndie Film Festival - December 2021 London International Monthly Film Festival - January 2022 Tokyo Lift- Off Film Festival - April 2022 Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival January 2023 International Epidaurus Film Festival - November 2022 Awards and nominations (if any): Film Arte Festival- March 2021 -Semifinalist London Greek Film Festival - June 2021- Finalist London International Monthly Film Festival January 2022 -Finalist West Side Mountains Doc Festival - October 2021-Honorable Mention Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival November 2021- Honorable Mention Berlin lndie Film Festival - December 2021- Best Director Documentary Award International Epidaurus Film Festival - November 2022-Honorable Mention About The Artist(s) Magdalini Remoundou is TV Director, Director, Script writer, and Production Manager for over thirty years in various Audiovisual Productions: TV shows, TV series (sitcom, comedies, soap opera), live shows, theatrical plays, broadcast news, documentaries. Also she has been Production Manager in theatrical and music productions in open and close venues, since 1990-todate. Magdalini Remoundou is certified tutor for adults in Film and Media studies, she is Dean of Faculty of Culture & Communication Studies in Metropolitan College in Athens since 2012, Programme Leader of the BA Media Production/ Film Directing since 2002. Also, she was official examiner of Greek Ministry of Education regarding the Diploma Examinations for the Film and TV Directing and Audiovisual Production Management. Get in touch with the artist(s) harris@rgbstudios.gr and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/magdalini.remoundou/, https://rgbstudios.gr/?lang=el Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here.

A Panel Performance Next to developing and presenting the work of pioneering emerging artists and career experimenters The Brick Performance Space actively support global artists without work permits or permanent visas in their dream to live and work in New York City. Now Theresa Buchheister turned the work-in-process into a panel performance. Artist will apply during the session for their visa, panelist will talk about the impossible procedure of obtaining a visa, work permit or a green card for global artists. Audiences will get a close look at the the innumerable complex challenges diaspora artists face in New York City. The panelists are M. Can Yasar, Lianne Elsouki, Rawya El Chab, John Phillip Faienza and HanJie Chow. Moderated by Karuna Shinsho. Produced by Theresa Buchheister and The Brick Theater With Performances from the Panelists Theresa Buchheister will receive their PRELUDE’23 Award after the VISA — Mon Amour presentation. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE VISA - Mon Amour Theresa Buchheister, The Brick, Karuna Shinsho Theater English 60 Mins 7:00PM EST Thursday, October 19, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All A Panel Performance Next to developing and presenting the work of pioneering emerging artists and career experimenters The Brick Performance Space actively support global artists without work permits or permanent visas in their dream to live and work in New York City. Now Theresa Buchheister turned the work-in-process into a panel performance. Artist will apply during the session for their visa, panelist will talk about the impossible procedure of obtaining a visa, work permit or a green card for global artists. Audiences will get a close look at the the innumerable complex challenges diaspora artists face in New York City. The panelists are M. Can Yasar, Lianne Elsouki, Rawya El Chab, John Phillip Faienza and HanJie Chow. Moderated by Karuna Shinsho. Produced by Theresa Buchheister and The Brick Theater With Performances from the Panelists Theresa Buchheister will receive their PRELUDE’23 Award after the VISA — Mon Amour presentation. Content / Trigger Description: HanJie Chow (he/him/his) Multidisciplinary theatre artist: Webster’s Bitch (Playhouse on Park), Boxes (Creating Apart ’21, London), Sky of Darkness (TheatreLab), Bike America, The Richard Project, Lady Lucy, “Virtual Love in Lockdown” (Fentress Films), “Ondeh Ondeh". American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Company 2019. Collaborates behind-the-scenes in costuming and as a photographer: Merrily We Roll Along (Broadway & NYTW), POTUS (Broadway), KPOP (Ars Nova), Underground Railroad Game (Ars Nova), hanjiechow.com M. Can Yasar is a New York based Turkish actor, writer, and singer/songwriter. His shows written and performed by him include, "A Hundred Dollar Bill,” at the United Solo Festival at Theater Row, received the “Best Autobiographical Show” award; "Smoke Point" performed at Interrobang!? at The Brick; an extended draft of "A Hundred Dollar Bill," part of the New Works Series at TADA Theatre; "Master of Time", including Yasar’s original songs, at the New York Theatre Festival at Theater Latea, where he was nominated as "Best Singer." Yasar most recently created “Only Place I Belong”, an autobiographical musical written and composed by him and opened at The Tank. Later the musical had the following concert performances at the Brick Theater. He graduated from Marymount Manhattan College in Theater Arts, and received his MFA from University of South Carolina where he also taught beginning acting for two years. Lianne Elsouki is an actor, theater maker and teaching artist based in Brooklyn. Hailing from Beirut where she innately found herself indulging in surrealist and absurdist theater, her approach of working with youths and teaching theater sharpened her psychological lens and influenced her artistic process. Her most recent work-in-progress that previewed at the Brick’s :?!New Works Festival was a psychomagic act titled PANICMOM. Lianne has performed in One Night at the Target Margin theater. For the Exponential Festival, she collaborated in creating Epikononia as well as staged managed The Gambler. Rawya El Chab is a theater maker and teaching artist based in New York City. Growing up in post-Taef accord Beirut following the civil war, Rawya recognizes the role of art as a critical space for suspending states of emergency and fostering social, ethical, and aesthetic reflections. She values art as a means to generate an oral history that escapes the control of power. Since relocating to New York, Rawya has been actively engaged with Target Margin Productions, contributing both as a performer and a dedicated teaching artist. Additionally, she has co-created three notable productions: "The Meltdown," featured in the Global Forms Fest, "The Gambler," and "Epikoinonia," both integral parts of The Exponential Festival. Currently, Rawya is in the process of developing her inaugural solo piece titled "Loula, The Pearl of the Bekaa," scheduled for presentation at La Mama Theater in February 2024. In her continued artistic journey, Rawya El Chab remains committed to pushing the boundaries of storytelling and performance, offering unique insights and experiences to her audiences. John-Philip Faienza is a Canadian theatre and video artist of Argentinian and Italian settler descent living and working in NYC. His performance work has been included in the SummerWorks and Rhubarb festivals for contemporary performance in Toronto, and the Exponential Festival in Brooklyn. He’s spent a lot of time supporting new artistic works as a technician and Production Manager, including as an Associate Producer for the Performa Biennial, Production Coordinator for LMCC’s River to River Festival, and as Technical Coordinator at Rooftop Films. In Toronto, he’s worked with companies Aluna, Crow’s, Obsidian, Nightswimming, ARC, Public Recordings, the Theater Centre, and at the gloriously dead Videofag. He’s a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab. He likes to walk, drive, and bike long distances, often in search of really good food. Karuna Shinsho is an award-winning broadcast journalist that has worked for various international news organizations throughout Asia and the United States. From 1989 to 2001, she was anchor and/or reporter for NHK Television, Japan and New York, Asia Business News, Singapore and CNN International, Hong Kong, then in 2004 for Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Singapore. Her writing on "Japanese Management" has been published in Asia's New Crisis: Renewal Through Total Ethical Management (Asia: John Wiley & Sons Pte Ltd., 2004). After her career in journalism, Karuna pivoted to focus on her passion for music. She released her debut album of jazz standards and bossa nova classics in 2021. Her album, To Love Again, with songs in English, Portuguese, and Japanese, was nominated for Best Jazz Album at the 2022 WAMMIE Awards in Washington, D.C. She is currently working on her second album of bossa nova tunes which will be dedicated to the Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. Karuna obtained a Master of Arts degree in International Affairs with a regional concentration in East Asia from the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University in New York and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the Department of Comparative Culture, Sophia University in Japan. Theresa Buchheister is the Artistic Director of The Brick Theater, Co-Artistic Director of Title:Point, Founder and Co-Curator of The Exponential Festival. In addition to writing, directing, performing and producing theater, Theresa works as a voice over director, performer, engineer and teacher. Theresa has directed hundreds of audiobooks (How Music Works by David Byrne, Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus, The Short Stories of Lydia Davis, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky) and some fun cartoons (BoyGirlDogCatMouseCheese, Pokemon, Winx Club, Denver), as well as narrating spicy novels and voicing villains. Theresa teaches at HB Studio. https://www.bricktheater.com/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Inga Galintyé and Chloé Bellemère Kayla Farrish (a Nina von Maltzahn Fellow) Fana Fraser PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE In Process Open Studios at The Watermill Center Multimedia 6:00PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 39 Water Mill Towd Road, Water Mill, NY 11976, USA Free Entry, Open To All In Process Inga Galintyé and Chloé Bellemère Kayla Farrish (a Nina von Maltzahn Fellow) Fana Fraser Content / Trigger Description: The Watermill Center is a laboratory for the arts and humanities providing a global community the time, space and freedom to create and inspire. Founded in 1992 by avant-garde visionary Robert Wilson, The Watermill Center is an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities situated on ten acres of Shinnecock ancestral territory on Long Island’s East End. With an emphasis on creativity and collaboration, The Center offers year-round artist residencies and education programs, providing a global community with the time, space, and freedom to create and inspire. The Watermill Center’s rural campus combines multifunctional studios with ten acres of manicured grounds and gardens, housing a carefully curated art collection, expansive research library, and archives illustrating the life and work of Artistic Director, Robert Wilson. The Center’s facilities enable Artists-in-Residence to integrate resources from the humanities and research from the sciences into contemporary artistic practice. Through year-round public programs, The Watermill Center demystifies the artistic process by facilitating unique insight into the creative process of a rotating roster of national and international artists. https://www.watermillcenter.org/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Jennifer Mogbock and company in Toni Stone at The Huntington. Photo: T. Charles Erickson Prayer for the French Republic Joshua Harmon (7 Sep-2 Oct) Fat Ham James Ijames (22 Sep-22 Oct) The Band’s Visit Itmar Moses and David Yazbeck (10 Nov-17 Dec) The Heart Sellers Lloyd Suh (21 Nov-23 Dec) Yippee Ki Yay Richard Marsh (27 Dec-31 Dec) Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight John Klovenbach (20 Jan-23 March) John Proctor is the Villain Kimberly Belflower (8 Feb-10 March) Toni Stone Lydia R. Diamond (17 May-16 June) In July 2023, Christopher Mannelli became Executive Director of The Huntington, following Michael Maso’s forty+ year run as Managing Director. Mannelli took over a strong organization, fully recovered from the pandemic, that offered an extensive season performed in three venues. The Huntington’s first full season with Loretta Greco as Artistic Director opened on the main stage in grand style. Prayer for the French Republic is an expansive three-hour journey across five generations of French Jews. Everything about The Huntington’s production matched the play’s ambitions that began with full color, enlarged (8.5”x11”) program books at a time when some theatres shifted to QR codes. The set featured a rotating dining table that provided critical clues to following the sprawling story. Tony Estrella, as the narrator, delivered historical context directly to the audience, while the remaining cast enacted their private trauma. Carly Zien, as Elodie, delivered an astonishing stream-of-consciousness monologue that illustrated humans’ complex discrepancies. Meanwhile, at The Calderwood, 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner, Fat Ham served up a comedic rap on Hamlet at a Black family backyard barbeque in the American South. Each character bears attributes of their Shakespearean equivalent, plus invented twists. Juicy: misunderstood; moody; and contemplative as any Hamlet, was also obese and gay. The production shredded the fourth wall, fed off our familiarity with Shakespeare’s play, and then skewered it with potato salad, sausage, and pulled pork. The comedy was often broad, always inciteful. Juicy’s karaoke number began so badly it was hilarious, until it turned chilling. Standouts among the cast included Lau’rie Roach as Tio and James T. Alfred at Rev/Pap. Shaken with laughter, I wondered how Fat Ham could mirror Hamlet to the end. Let it be said that death visits the barbeque in ways both funny and fitting. “Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect,” Dina, an Israeli kibbutznik, suggests to Tewfiq, the Egyptian band leader. The sentiment encapsulates the simple pleasure of The Band’s Visit . The Huntington, in collaboration with Speakeasy Stage, delivered unexpected beauty in this musical that infuses traditional Middle Eastern music with a Broadway sound. Director Paul Daigneault highlighted music and broad comedy over the slim plot of this feel-good confection, where scenes unrolled as cross-cultural vignettes that elevated shared humanity over political differences. The Huntington celebrated a non-traditional Thanksgiving. Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers emphasizes comedy over pathos when Filipino immigrant Luna (Jenna Agbayani) and Korean immigrant Jane (Judy Song) come together on this strange holiday in a strange land in 1973. When Luna utters, “So, we’re the lucky ones,” with a profound sigh, she pierces the comic surface of baffled immigrants trying to cook a frozen turkey to reveal two lonely souls. The set was remarkably appalling: a messy studio apartment lined with glossy wallpaper, boxed in a black frame, elevated above the stage. One wall incorporated a sliding glass door, the only opportunity for variable light. Whenever they dreamed of a larger life, the women drifted toward the light. An equally unconventional holiday gift, Yippee-Ki-Yay , is part reenactment of the classic 1980s film, Die Hard ; part confessional of a Die Hard geek; part stand-up comedy; all unspooled in awful meter. Uninitiated audience members were probably perplexed by Darrel Bailey’s zany performance: fluffing imaginary big hair from his bald head; turning the bloodthirsty villain into a pirouetting diva. Those of us familiar with the source, however, anticipated every corny cliché and witty takedown of the movie’s profligate confusions. I received an email a few days before Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight , directing me to enter the theatre through the back alley. Street construction, I figured. On a drizzly January night, one stark light from a small door illuminated the dark alley and beckoned me up two flights and into the rear of the Michael Maso Studio, littered with dusty furniture, clouded mirrors and consignment-quality rejects. Eventually, an old man walked among the clutter and began. Several times. Each diversion was humorous. When wiry, wonderful Jim Ortlieb proclaimed such witticisms as, “Two pots near each other never boil. Make pasta in the space between,” I understood this as a play about nothing. Turns out, the back-alley intimacy was critical to the show’s success, so willingly did supposed grown-ups participate in silly hijinks. It might seem a stretch to legions of high school students burdened with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that John Proctor could be the villain. Yet playwright Kimberly Belflower makes a convincing case that John Proctor is the Villain . This remarkable resetting shifts witch hysteria in seventeenth-century Salem to a twenty-first century Georgia high school, where coming-of-age girls are treated as suspect while male authorities are exalted, despite whatever horrifics they’ve performed. The ensemble cast featured five outstanding women drowning in adolescent torment and triumph. Their friendships and jealousies ricocheted around the stage, exposing the emotional complexity of becoming adults. Yet, the stand out was Benjamin Isaac as Lee Turner, the school nobody, whose character realizes the greatest emotional growth. It was pure delight to watch this man-boy (potentially the next generation’s adulterer) find new understanding of himself and his relationship to women. Toni Stone , the season’s finale, was a hit. The Huntington’s long affiliation with playwright Lydia R. Diamond ( Stick Fly, Smart People, The Bluest Eye ) scored in this funny, poignant bio of Toni Stone, the first professional female baseball player who played in the Negro leagues in the 1950s. As Toni, marvelous Jennifer Mogbock told us straight up she’s no good at telling stories in the right order, then launched an opening monologue that fast pitched the joys of baseball. She also held her own against the supporting cast of ten men playing an array of characters. The second act made a few errors, perhaps because accurate biography doesn’t align with theatrical climax. Two production numbers, fabulously choreographed by Ebony Williams, provided the buoyancy of a Broadway musical, while Diamond’s sparkling script and crisp direction beautifully modulated the euphoria and struggles befitting a lonely woman playing in a dwindling league. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References About The Authors PAUL E. FALLON is an architect who spent over thirty years designing housing and healthcare facilities. A commitment to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake became the focus of his first book, Architecture by Moonlight . In 2015-2016, Paul bicycled through each of the 48 contiguous states and asked everyone he met the same question. How Will We Live Tomorrow? became his second book. Returning to Cambridge, MA, Paul continues to write blog essays, plays, and NETIR articles about Boston-area theatre companies. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

This event will take place in the Art History Screening Room in GC CUNY from Wednesday, October 11 to Saturday, October 14, everyday from 3pm to 8:30pm EST. Imagine that the American Theater is dead, or Downtown at any rate is dead, or both, or maybe no one can find the body but it's probably dead, anyway there was definitely a crime, or series of crimes; the place is a mess, and someone has watered down the whisky. You are a detective, or a prime witness, or a culprit, or all of the above, and you have been invited to contribute to one of those great evidence or murder boards/crazy walls they have on cop shows...sometimes in the stationhouse, sometimes in the serial killer lair... bring your questions, your theories, your schemes, your accusations, your confessions, your factoids, your manias; bring your hard won diagnosis, bring your intricately worked out solutions. We will supply: index cards, felt tips, crayons, red string. PRELUDE Festival 2023 INTERVIEW Murder Room - Day 4 Anne Washburn, Many Others including, perhaps, yourself. Theater, Other, Discussion, Multimedia English 5 min - 55 min, your choice. 3:00PM to 8:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Sign Up to Contribute This event will take place in the Art History Screening Room in GC CUNY from Wednesday, October 11 to Saturday, October 14, everyday from 3pm to 8:30pm EST. Imagine that the American Theater is dead, or Downtown at any rate is dead, or both, or maybe no one can find the body but it's probably dead, anyway there was definitely a crime, or series of crimes; the place is a mess, and someone has watered down the whisky. You are a detective, or a prime witness, or a culprit, or all of the above, and you have been invited to contribute to one of those great evidence or murder boards/crazy walls they have on cop shows...sometimes in the stationhouse, sometimes in the serial killer lair... bring your questions, your theories, your schemes, your accusations, your confessions, your factoids, your manias; bring your hard won diagnosis, bring your intricately worked out solutions. We will supply: index cards, felt tips, crayons, red string. This room has received material support from Playwrights Horizons, and New Georges, with numerous numerous contributors throughout the field. Content / Trigger Description: Anne Washburn is a playwright whose works include 10 out of 12, Antlia Pneumatica, Apparition, The Communist Dracula Pageant, A Devil At Noon, I Have Loved Strangers, The Internationalist, The Ladies, Little Bunny Foo Foo, Mr. Burns, Shipwreck, The Small, and transadaptations of Euripides' Orestes & Iphigenia in Aulis. Her work has premiered with 13P, Actors Theater of Louisville, the Almeida, American Repertory Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, Classic Stage Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theater, The Folger, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, Two River Theater Company, Vineyard Theater and Woolly Mammoth. Other contributors include: playwrights, box office personnel, artistic directors, literary managers, actors, designers, program directors, development directors, producers, interns, audience members, stage managers, directors. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Sarah Alice Campbell Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Sarah Alice Campbell By Published on May 23, 2020 Download Article as PDF References About The Authors Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.