Announcements
MAY 2012
Ryan Hartigan PhD 14' awarded position in the 2012 Global Theatre and Performance Research Workshop, University of California at Santa Barbara
Ryan Hartigan PhD 14' has been awarded a competitive position in the 2012 Global Theater and Performance Research Workshop this coming June at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This is a research workshop with invited scholars in the field of transnational theatre and performance studies. As the website says: "By exploring the notion of 'global' in a most flexible and dynamic way, we hope to explore the various types of trans-regional and trans-temporal relationships that shape the term 'global.'" Congratulations Ryan!
MAY 2012
Congratulations to Christian DuComb PhD '12 for receiving the
Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award
for the 2011-2012 academic year
It is a great honor to be recognized by the university as a whole in this way -- and very well deserved! There are but four Ph.D. candidates who receive this award each year at commencement, one each in the humanities, the life sciences, the physical sciences, and the social sciences. Our very own Christian DuComb PhD '12 wins across the humanities this year!!
April 2012
Pulitzer Prize winners announced. Brown alumni Quiara Alegria Hudes MFA '04 wins Pulitzer for "Water by the Spoonful" and Brown Alumni Stephen Karam '02 is a finalist for "Sons of the Prophet."
April 16, 2012
Brown alumnae Quiara Alegria Hudes MFA '04is given the Pulitzer Prize for drama for her recent play, "Water by the Spoonful," the second in a trilogy of plays including "Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue" which was previously a finalist for the prestigious award.
The New York Times writes that: "'Spoonful' pivots between Elliot’s adjustment to life back in Philadelphia, where he works in a sandwich shop, and a group of other characters sharing their own struggles in an online Narcotics Anonymous chat room. Researching the play, which is based on a cousin’s life, Ms. Hudes dipped into recovery meetings and found them 'riveting and horrifying and funny as hell.'"
The Pulitzer jury described her writing as “an imaginative play about the search for meaning by a returning Iraq war veteran.”
Brown alumni Stephen Karam '02, author of the wildly popular "Speech and Debate," was awarded finalist status by the Pulitzer jury for his work "Sons of the Prophet."
February 2012
The Architecture of Great Cathedrals, written by Professor and Head of Playwriting Erik Ehn, to be performed in New York
March 7, 2012
Written by Erik Ehn
Directed by Laurie O'Brien
Sound Design by Kari Rae Seekins
Puppeteers: James Simmons, Charlie Del Risco,
Jeanette Plourde, Eric Lindley, and Emily Oliveira
The Architecture of Great Cathedrals explores US policy in Guatemala from the point of view of a drunk prison executioner from Texas gone AWOL. Rory’s on a spree, with second thoughts about industrialized killing, thinking he is free (out from under the shadow), but he discovers wide reaching entanglement. A brief and swirling adventure; puppets. One of the seventeen plays that make up the Soulographie cycle, premiering at La MaMa in November 2012.
Dixon Place
161a Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002
Wednesday, March 7, 2012, 7:30pm
January 2012
Don Wilmeth, Professor Emeritus, to be honored with the 2012 Theatre
Museum Award for Theatre History Preservation
Don B. Wilmeth, the Asa Messer
Distinguished Professor Emeritus and professor emeritus of Theatre and
English, will be honored with the 2012 Theatre Museum Award for
Theatre History Preservation. This is one of four prestigious awards
given by the Theatre Museum, located in New York City.
An American theatre historian and editor, Wilmeth retired in
2003 after 36 years of teaching at Brown and 16 as chair of the
Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance. He serves on the Brown
Library's Board of Friends and selects an annual speaker for the
Don Wilmeth Endowed Lecture in American Theatre and
Entertainment, established in his honor.Please join us in
congratulating Don Wilmeth -- recipient of the 2012 Theatre
Museum Award for Theatre History Preservation! Wilmeth will receive the
honor at a reception on April 30, 2012 (6-9 p.m.) at The
Players Club in Gramercy Park, New York City.
December 2011
Marcus Gardley's Play, The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry will be produced at the Latino Theater Company in Los Angeles
October 2011
Marcus Gardley, Visiting Assistant Professor Receives 2011 PEN Literary Award
Marcus Gardley, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies,
Visiting Assistant Profesor ,
has won a prestigious PEN Literary Award, granted to an American
playwright in mid-career.
The PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for
Theater Awards recognize a master American dramatist and an American playwright in
mid-career, both of whose literary achievements are vividly apparent in
the rich and striking language of their work. The awards were developed
to reflect Laura
Pels’ dedication to supporting excellence in American theater, as well
as PEN’s commitment to recognizing and rewarding the literary
accomplishments of playwrights. The judges of the Pels Awards are all
distinguished members of the theater community.
Marcus Gardley is a poet-playwright whose most recent 
play every tongue confess premiered at the Arena Stage starring Phylicia Rashad and directed by Kenny Leon. It has been nominated for the Steinberg New Play Award and the Charles MacArthur Award for outstanding new play. His play On The Levee premiered last summer at Lincoln Center in July and was nominated for 11 Audelco Awards including outstanding playwright. His play And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi was produced at the Cutting Ball Theater last spring and received both critical acclaim including a SF Bay Area Theater Critics circle Award nomination for outstanding new play and was one of the top ten plays in the Bay Area in 2010 with two sold-out extensions. His Bay Area plays This World in a Woman’s Hands (October 2009) and Love is a Dream House in Lorin (March 2007) have been hailed as the best in Bay Area theater. The latter was nominated for the National Critics Steinberg New Play Award. He has had six plays produced including: dance of the holy ghost at Yale Repertory Theatre (now under a commercial Broadway option,) (L)imitations of Life, at the Empty Space and like sun fallin’ in the mouth at the National Black Theatre Festival. He is the recipient of the SF Bay Area’s Gerbode Emerging Playwright Award, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre Award, the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Scholarship, and the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale Drama School and is a member of New Dramatists, The Dramatists Guild and the Lark Play Development Center. Gardley, a native of West Oakland, was recently chosen as one of 50 writers to watch by Dramatists Magazine. Gardley teaches Playwriting and African-American studies at Umass Amherst.
October 2011
Winter Institute 2012: Perfoming Shanghai Application
January 5-20, Shanghai, China
Scholars, practitioners, and students from the US and China will be gathering in Shanghai to explore the physical, theoretical, and theatrical geographies of contemporary performance, and to contribute to this city's ongoing transformation, sharing experiences from other metropolises and other traditions. This event is not just about Shanghai. It's about the macrocosmic shifts and potentials coming to light here on this unusual stage. The Institute is hosted by Shanghai Theatre Academy and co-sponsored by Brown, NYU, Princeton and Yale universities.
Link for more information and to download application.
October, 2011
TAPS Receives Grant From Mellon Foundation for Dance Studies
Brown University's Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies is partnering with Stanford University and Northwestern University on a multiyear project that will fund postdoctoral fellowships and summer seminars designed to advance the field of dance studies. The initiative is supported by a $1,420,700 grant to Northwestern from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project, “Dance Studies in/and the Humanities,” will fund fellowships at each school from 2012 to 2016. The week-long summer seminars will allow Mellon fellows to work alongside other recent Ph.D.s, advanced graduate students, and junior faculty to formulate strategies for interdisciplinary research and teaching in the field. “The summer seminars will engage rigorous thinking about the live body as archive as well as engage efforts to develop digital technology for teaching and research in dance,” said Rebecca Schneider, co-director of the project and chair of theater arts and performance studies at Brown. The summer seminars will rotate among the three schools, beginning with Northwestern in 2012.
June, 2011
Marcus Gardley to Join TAPS
The Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies is pleased to welcome Visiting Assistant Professor Marcus Gardley to our teaching faculty in playwriting next year.
Marcus Gardley is a poet-playwright whose most recent play every tongue confess premiered at theArena Stage starring Phylicia Rashad and directed by Kenny Leon. It has been nominated for the Steinberg New Play Award and the Charles MacArthur Award for outstanding new play. His play On The Levee premiered last summer at Lincoln Center in July and was nominated for 11 Audelco Awards including outstanding playwright. His play And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi was produced at the Cutting Ball Theater last spring and received both critical acclaim including a SF Bay Area Theater Critics circle Award nomination for outstanding new play and was one of the top ten plays in the Bay Area in 2010 with two sold-out extensions. His Bay Area plays This World in a Woman’s Hands (October 2009) and Love is a Dream House in Lorin (March 2007) have been hailed as the best in Bay Area theater. The latter was nominated for the National Critics Steinberg New Play Award. He has had six plays produced including: dance of the holy ghost at Yale Repertory Theatre (now under a commercial Broadway option,) (L)imitations of Life, at the Empty Space and like sun fallin’ in the mouth at the National Black Theatre Festival. He is the recipient of the SF Bay Area’s Gerbode Emerging Playwright Award, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre Award, the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Scholarship, and the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale Drama School and is a member of New Dramatists, The Dramatists Guild and the Lark Play Development Center. Gardley, a native of West Oakland, was recently chosen as one of 50 writers to watch by Dramatists Magazine. Gardley teaches Playwriting and African-American studies at Umass Amherst.
May, 2011
Professor Lowry Marshall receiving
Charles Sullivan Award for Distinguished Service in the Arts
Lowry Marshall, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, will be the 2011 recipient of the Charles Sullivan Award for Distinguished Service in the Arts at the annual Pell Awards to be held at the historic Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet on June 11th. Now in their second decade, the Pell Awards were established to honor Senator Claiborne Pell and recognize artistic excellence in Rhode Island and on the national level.
March, 2011
TAPS Chair Rebecca Schneider’s new book, Performing Remains:
Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, Now Available
Rebecca Schneider, Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, has published a new book, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. 
Across seven essays, Schneider presents a forensic and unique examination of both contemporary and historical performance, drawing on a variety of elucidating sources including the "America" plays of Linda Mussmann and Suzan-Lori Parks, performances of Marina Abramovic and Allison Smith, and the continued popular appeal of Civil War reenactments. Performing Remains questions the importance of representation throughout history and today, while boldly reassessing the ritual value of failure to recapture the past and recreate the "original."
Jerome de Groot of the University of Manchester says, “I have often wondered where the big, important, paradigm-changing book about re-enactment is: Schneider’s book seems to me to be that book. Her work is challenging, thoughtful and innovative and will set the agenda for study in a number of areas for the next decade.”
Performing Remains is available from Routledge, Amazon.com, and other retailers.
March, 2011
Theatre Communications Group Awards Erik Ehn
Inaugural Global Connections Grant
Theatre Communications Group recently announced the recipients of Global Connections, a new international grant funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Erik Ehn, Head of Playwriting, has been awarded one of three In the Lab grants to further pre-existing international collaborations.
Erik will present and expand the third annual Centre x Centre Theatre festival (Kigali, Rwanda), which will include workshops and performances from around the world, co-produced with local artists. His hope is to expand the festival to include Kampala, Uganda where he and his collaborators have a long-term relationship with the National Theater and Ugandan theatre professionals.
At the core of Global Connections is the desire to build bridges between U.S. theatre professionals and counterparts abroad, to further the growth and advancement of the theatre community, and to create opportunities for the U.S. theatre community to engage in international conversations. The program encourages reciprocity and cultural exchange throughout the world.
March, 2011
Soulographie: Our Genocides
Erik Ehn's current commemorative performance cycle, Soulographie: Our Genocides, has a new website, soulographie.org. Information about each play in the cycle is available, as well as performance updates, video, and the cycle blog.
Soulographie is a durational performance event looking at 20th century America from the point of view of genocides in the States (the Tulsa Race Riot), in East Africa (Rwanda, Uganda), and Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador). The 16 plays make meditative space for considering the nature of genocide directly.
January, 2011
Reviewers love Radiate, directed by Kym Moore
Jomama Jones: Radiate, the new show from Daniel Alexander Jones '93 and his cousin/creation Jomama Jones, directed by Gerard Visiting Assistant Professor Kym Moore, is winning wide praise from critics. 
Theatre Mania calls the show an "impressive new work" and what "may well be the feel good show of the year for the downtown crowd." The New Gay says of this "honest, joyful" show: " During the darkest days of the year, I can think of nothing better to do with an evening than to warm your soul by the roaring fireside of Jomama Jones’ Radiate." Backstage says "[D]irector Kym Moore ... never permits the onstage action to flag, and she finds just the right balance between silly poses and heartfelt moments." New York 1's Time Out Theatre Review says that "Jomama Jones is a wonderfully unique creation" and is "directed with panache" by Kym Moore. The Feminist Spectator says, "Kym Moore's subtle but confident direction helps Jomama establish a physical connection with the audience."
Directed by Kym Moore, with music direction by Bobby Halvorson, Jomama Jones: Radiate features Jomama Jones and her Sweet Peaches. For tickets and more information about the show, visit sohorep.org.
December, 2010
Scholarship Money Now Available through the
Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Arts Award
Through the annual Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Arts Award, $50,000 per year will help students earn a graduate degree in the performing or visual arts or creative writing. The criteria are: outstanding artistic and creative ability, an excellent record of academic achievement, "the will to succeed," and involvement in campus and community activities. The fellowship is open to seniors or recent graduates (within the last 5 years) who plan to begin graduate school next year. Students must have unmet financial need to qualify. For more information, please see jkcf.org.
Brown can nominate 2 students for this award, so interested students should send a letter stating graduate school plans and the student's fit for the criteria, along with a CV, to Rebecca_Schneider@brown.edu by January 20, 2011. The subject line should be: Jack Kent Cooke Award.
November, 2010
Social Text's Periscope Dossier on Queer Suicide,
Edited By Eng-Beng Lim, Now Available
Eng-Beng Lim, Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, has edited the latest 
Periscope dossier, focusing on gay teen suicide. Lim writes that the dossier "features an eclectic collection of essays, blogs, position papers, and op-eds from a multidisciplinary group of scholars zeroing in on a spectrum of issues, from gay rage and new technologies of sexuality to anti-bullying legislation. It organizes a kind of online teach-in, a portal to the multiple conversations and action happening around the country about gay teen suicide."
The dossier is available at socialtextjournal.org/periscope.
June, 2010
Carl Hancock Rux to Join TAPS
The Department of Theatre Arts and PerformanceStudies is happy to welcome Visiting Lecturer Carl Hancock Rux to our teaching faculty in playwriting next year.
Carl Hancock Rux is an accomplished and award-winning playwright and experienced teacher. Heis former Head of the MFA Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts where he worked with Erik Ehn. He has taught or been in residence at UCSD, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Hollins University, the University of Iowa, Stanford University, and The New School. Rux’s plays and performance works for theater have been produced and or commissioned throughout the United States and internationally at various venues including the Joseph Papp Public Theater, the Robert E. Fischer Center for the Performing Arts, PS 122, and the Kitchen. His plays include the OBIE award-winning "Talk" (TCG), "Geneva Cottrell, Waiting for the Dog to Die," "Mycenaean," "Chapter & Verse," "The No Black Male Show," and the libretto for two operas: "'The Blackamoor Angel" and "Mackandal."
Rux has written for (and performed with) several dance companies including the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. As a radio journalist Rux has been a guest commentator on WNYC and for XM radio's The Bob Edward's Show, as well as co-writer and host of National Public Radio's "Walt Whitman: Songs of Myself," winner of the New York Press Club Journalism Award for Entertainment News. He has recorded three cds: "Rux Revue" (Sony 550), "Apothecary Rx (Giant Step), and "Good Bread Alley"(Thirsty Ear). Rux is the recipient of many awards, including the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts Prize, and the Bessie Schomburg Award. He is the author of the Village Voice Literary prize-winning poetry collection "Pagan Operetta"(Fly By Night Press/ Autonomedia) and the novel "Asphalt" (Simon & Schuster).
June, 2010
Christian DuComb Wins Two Research Fellowships
Christian DuComb, Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies, has been awarded fellowships from the Winterthur Museum and Library and the American Society for Theatre Research to support his dissertation research in 2010-2011. Christian’s dissertation, “From the Meschianza to the Mummers Parade: Racial and Gender Impersonation in Philadelphia,” explores the construction of identity and difference through racial and gender impersonation in Philadelphia’s theatre and performance history, with individual chapters on Revolutionary-era festivity, antebellum racial caricature, nineteenth-century blackface masking (on both stages and streets), and the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Philadelphia Mummers Parade.
April, 2010
Sock & Buskin's
2010-2011 Season Announced
The Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies is pleased to announce Sock & Buskin's 2010-2011 Season shows. The 2010-2011 season will be:
A Lie of the Mind
by Sam Shepard
directed by Lowry Marshall
Pippin
music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
book by Roger O. Hirson
directed by Kym Moore
musical direction by Andrew Hertz
Kaspar
by Peter Handke
directed by Ioana Jucan '11
As You Like It
by William Shakespeare
directed by Nicholas Ridout
Talk
by Carl Hancock Rux
directed by Erik Ehn
Watch for audition dates for Pippin at the start of next semester! Dates and more information about each show will be available soon.
April , 2010
Ryan Hartigan Wins Awards
Ryan Hartigan, PhD graduate student, was awarded runner-up in the 
TaPRA(UK) PostgraduatePrize 2009. This prize includes publication in an upcoming issue of Routledge's "Contemporary Theater Review." In addition, his paper "Affective Temporalities: The Haka, Rugby, and Aotearoa-New Zealand in the UK," was selected for the upcoming ATHE Performance Studies Focus Group Emerging Scholars Panel, 2010. As with the previous success that Brown students have had in being selected for this panel, this award includes being paired with a mentor in the field in order to support and develop his research. An earlier version of that same paper has led to an award from UCLA, as one of three graduate students selected as Spotlighted Scholars. UCLA will soon fly Ryan to LA to present his paper at their Performance Studies graduate conference "Anxieties of Overexposure: Enlargements, Contagions and the Dark," and they will publish his essay in the Center for Performance Studies journal "Extensions."
April, 2010
Eng-Beng Lim to Join TAPS
The Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies is happy to announce that we will welcome Assistant Professor Eng Beng Lim to the faculty beginning in the 2010-11 school year.
Eng-Beng Lim specializes in theater, drama and performance studies with a focus on transnational, Asian and queer issues. His teaching and research areas include critical and performance theory, queer and racial performance, and international drama. He has lectured widely at universities in the U.S., U.K., and Asia, and has published essays and reviews in Theatre Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, and Social Text. He recently published “Performing the Global University” in Social Text where he is a member of the editorial collective. He is working on a book-length manuscript titled “Tropic Spells: Performing Queer Encounters in the Asias” that examines how the queer erotics of colonial encounter inform Asian performance in global perspective. Lim’s work has been recognized with several competitive fellowships, honors and awards, including those from the American Society for Theatre Research, Association for Theater in Higher Education, University of Washington-Seattle, Cornell University, and the Mellon Foundation.
Lim received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Theatre (Critical Studies) and his B.A. (Hons) in Theatre Studies from the National University of Singapore where he also majored in English. He has participated in Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory and the Mellon seminar on Queer Transnationalism, and has taught at the performance institutes of Northwestern University and the University of California Multi-Campus Research Group on International Performance and Culture. He comes to Brown University having taught in the Drama Studies Program at SUNY-Purchase and the Department of English at the Michigan State University.
March, 2010
Michelle Liu Carriger Recieves
Paul Mellon Center Grant
Michelle Liu Carriger, graduate student in TAPS, is the recipient of a research support grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, to facilitate dissertation research in the UK.
February, 2010
Kym Moore's The Other Shore
Named One of Providence's Top 10 Plays of Last Year
Kym Moore, the Gerard Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, directed The Other Shore by the playwright Gao Xingjian in 2009. The production was named in the Providence Phoenix as one of the top 10 Best Plays in Providence last year.
The image is of Gao viewing the poster for the production in Paris. Gao is the recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature. Congratulations Kym and Sock and Buskin for making the Top Ten!
May 27, 2009
John Emigh Wins
ATHE
2009 Career Achievement in Educational Theatre Award
John Emigh, the newest Professor Emeritus at the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, has been selected by the Awards Committee of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education to receive the 2009 Career Achievement in Educational Theatre Award. This award is one of the highest honors bestowed by the ATHE. It is given annually to indicate a career of distinguished service to the field.
John says, "I will treasure this recognition of my own efforts over the years, but will do so in full knowledge that whatever has been accomplished has taken the effort and good work of many, many others. Think of this then - as I surely will - as in very large part a recognition of all that we have accomplished together. Congratulations to us!"
John Emigh is the second Brown Theatre Arts and Performance Studies professor to win the Career Achievement in Educational Theatre Award; Don Wilmeth was also a winner in 2001.
May 19, 2009
Erik Ehn Named Head of Playwriting and Playwriting Professor
The Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University is excited to announce the hiring of Erik Ehn as Professor and head of the playwriting program at Brown.
Erik Ehn is a professional playwright. Always somewhat hallucinatory -- offering poetic, imaginative and engaged theatricality -- Ehn’s plays are nevertheless grounded in real relationships. His sixty plays have been produced in theatres throughout the U.S. He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Grant, a McKnight Fellowship and a Whiting Award, all major recognitions for a playwright. In addition, Ehn proposed and co-founded the highly significant Regional Alternative Theatre movement (RAT). Of his published work, he is probably best known for his “Saint Plays,” an ongoing project of rare elegance in its conception and writing. For the past six years Ehn has served as Dean of the School of Theatre, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles.
Erik Ehn’s work is distinguished by both its reach (the range of his writing and intellectual inquiry) and its outreach (its social consciousness and ethical conscience). American Theatre magazine devoted a cover story to Ehn, focusing not only on his playwriting but on his personal investment in making the world a better place in which to live. While at Cal Arts, Ehn took a group of students and faculty to Rwanda and Uganda each summer to study the genocides and explore the role art is playing in healing. Ehn has also written a staggering work concerning a Rwandan nun, Maria Kizito, who was responsible for the murder of the many people who came to her for refuge from the genocide being perpetrated in their country. Matching these trips to Africa are the Arts in the One World summer conferences that Ehn has organized to discuss a range of subjects on the spectrum of art and social change.
Ehn himself has written:
This is a promising hour for the arts. There are new, global drives to form social groups centered on ideals (this, at the heart of performance). After years of innovation in media technology, there is a sharp hunger for immediacy (at the heart of performance). After decades of important skepticism there is a new search for ways of making meaning (and the word is armature for expression and capture of comprehension). Even our hard times play into an option for the arts. There is a reordering of public space, physically and virtually. Performance shapes and avails of new room (theater both matches and reforms the urgent, present social space).
I believe text for performance sets forth ethical contracts. A writer asks groups of people to behave in particular ways for a while, and then to carry manners and missions learned through enactment into ongoing conduct. The study and teaching of the potentials of writing, as a means to clarified knowing and action through a changed heart, center my life. I believe in the life of Brown, and that life may match life in every prospect.
Brown and the Department of Theatre arts and Performance Studies welcome Erik Ehn to the faculty!
May 18, 2009
Professor Patricia Ybarra's book Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History, and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico now available
Patricia Ybarra, Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, has published a new book, Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History, and Identity in Tlaxcala. Diana Taylor, of New York University, calls the book "[a]
new and important analysis of the ways in which plays, festivals, pageants and political events have long exhibited public conformity while, at times, critiquing and challenging their own performance. It will be enthusiastically received by those who study performance, Latin America, and resistance movements."
Tlaxcala is unique among the states of Mexico. Because of its fierce independence during the pre-Columbian era (it was never conquered by the Aztecs) and its strategic alliance with the Spanish invaders in Cortez's conquest in the early sixteenth century, Tlaxcala has played a significant role in Mexican history. Performing Conquest examines the distinct Tlaxcalan identity that has evolved over the last five centuries and the way that performance---especially political speech---has been inextricably linked to its creation. The book focuses on theatrical performances, political events, texts that "perform" despite themselves, and state-sponsored performances designed to foment local and/or national identity. The theatrical strategies included the re-imagination of civic space, the combination of aural, oral, and visual means of communication to create meaning, and the blurring of the line between representation and reality, which made everyday citizens into "actors" in their spectacles. Performing Conquest shows not only that these strategies were deeply embedded cultural practices, learned from and developed within religious conversion plays, political entry ceremonies, festival displays, tragic hero dramas, and state-sponsored patriotic pageants, but also that they transformed at crucial historical moments in response to various wars, national cultural policies, and debt crises.
Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History, and Identity in Tlaxcala is available from the University of Michigan Press, Amazon.com, and other book retailers.
May 4, 2009
John Pannill Camp Wins
Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award
John Pannill Camp's dissertation was selected to receive the Joukowsky Family Foundation outstanding Dissertation Award for the 2008-2009 academic year. Of the approximately 200 PhD candidates who will receive their degrees this month, only four were selected to win the award.
Congratulations to Pannill on his achievement.
April 24, 2009
Deptartment of Theatre, Speech, & Dance now officially
the Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies
The Department of Theatre, Speech, & Dance has officially changed its title to the Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies, effective immediately. This new name has been chosen to more accurately reflect the Department’s current scholarly practices; to retain our commitment to our nationally recognized theatre program, including dance and design; and to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between departments which will contribute to the field of performance studies.
Because we are already teaching a significant number of courses that overlap between Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, the name change will better reflect our current practices. Our highest goal in the name change is to continue and encourage the cross-fertilization, development, and enhancement of our programs in Theatre studies, Dance studies, and Speech. These changes will also provide us with the opportunity to interact more often and fully with other Departments across campus.
Adding the word “Arts” to Theatre will reflect the broadness of our scope of performance in the department. The Theatre Arts include not only dance, speech, and theatre, but design, directing, and technical work, as well. We hope that this will welcome students interested in performance other than theatre to find a concentration home in our Department.
By adding the phrase “Performance Studies” to the name of the Department, we hope to give a name to the broad spectrum of performance which is already being studied at Brown. “Performance Studies” is not limited to the study of performances of canonical dramatic texts, nor to performances on high art stages. Rather, Performance Studies looks to performance in its multiple occasions from rituals of everyday life to sports events to popular entertainment, social dance, political spectacle, religious and civic ritual, as well as theatre and dance proper.
We in the department are excited to welcome everyone at the University to the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies.
March 17, 2009
Christian Ducomb Wins ATHE Award
Christian Ducomb, ABD Doctoral Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies, just won the Theory and Criticism Focus Group's annual paper competition granted by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) for a paper delivered at ATHE in 2008. His essay is titled: "Resounding Towers: Heather Woodbury's Tale of 2Cities."