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A newsletter for
the community of
the Ph.D. Program in Theatre
at The CUNY Graduate Center
Published
twice yearly by the
Doctoral Theatre Students Association (DTSA)
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Upcoming DTSA Events
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Open Executive Committee Meeting Thursday, December 6, 2007, 4:15 pm
End of the Year Party
Immediately following
Beginning of the Year Party
(Fall 2008)
Tuesday, August 26, TBA (late
afternoon)
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Faculty News |
Marvin
Carlson
writes: I have done quite a bit of traveling
this spring. I spent a week in Vienna in
January, mainly to see part of the major
Shakespeare festival under way at the
Burgtheater, writing up my observations for
Western European Stages. While there,
I gave two talks on current American theatre
at the University of Vienna and spent a day
in Bratislava, Slovakia, where the Theatre
Institute will be publishing some of my
essays on recent German theatre. In February,
I presented a paper on Performance Studies
at UCLA which is adding that area to its
theatre program. In March, I attended a
conference at the University of Calabria in
Italy helping plan for an exchange program
between CUNY and twelve European
universities. In April, I presented the
All-Conference response at the “Crossroads
of the Humanities” conference at
Northwestern. Participants were invited to
lead a seminar and to bring one of their
graduate students to aid in this. Amy
Hughes went with me and made an
important contribution to the conference.
Later in April, I attended a celebration of
the 50th anniversary of the opening of the
current University Theatre at the University
of Kansas and was presented with the
University’s Alumni Honor Citation “for
outstanding contributions to the field of
theatre history and theory.” In May, I will
be going as usual to Berlin for the annual
theatre festival, closely connected with my
current major research project on
contemporary German directing. Essays
published this winter and spring were “A
Difficult Birth,” the lead article in the
50th anniversary edition of Modern Drama,
“National Theatres Then and Now” in the
collection National Theatres in a
Changing Europe, “Intercultural Theory,
Postcolonial Theory, and Semiotics” in
Semiotica, “Has Video Killed the Theatre
Star?” in Contemporary Theatre Review,
“Mixed Media and Mixed Messages” in the
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
and “Al-halqa in Arabic Theatre,”
co-written with Khalid Amine, in Theatre
Journal. My book, Theories of the
Theatre, appeared in Turkish, its eighth
language.
Daniel
Gerould
writes: I participated as moderator in two
outstanding programs at the Martin E. Segal
Theatre this season. The first was an
evening with Target Margin Theater at which
I talked with David Herskovits, the Founder
and Artistic Director of the group. The
evening featured excerpts from their
two-year series, “On the Greeks.” The second
program, an evening with the New York
theatre company The Civilians, included
excerpts from their new production The
Paris Commune. After the performance, I
led a discussion with Michael Friedman,
composer/lyricist, and Steve Cosson, founder
of The Civilians, about the creative process
for this piece. I also gave a paper on
“Hemingway’s Fifth Column and Drama
about the Spanish Civil War” at a symposium
(co-sponsored by the Segal Center) at the
Cervantes Institute as a part of the Mint
Theater’s Hemingway Project. A highlight
of the year occurred on Monday, April 7,
when the Segal Theatre Center celebrated its
Fifth Anniversary. We hosted this
celebration with a cocktail party for 200
guests who included Martin and Edith Segal,
Robin Wagner, Blythe Danner, as well as the
many Ph.D. candidates who work at the Segal
Center and collaborate with us on our
programs. There was a performance by cabaret
singer KT Sullivan, and complimentary copies
were available of a commemorative booklet we
published for the occasion that documents
the Center's accomplishments. The booklet
was written by Alexis Greene (Ph.D.
1987) and prepared by Frank Hentschker,
Jan Stenzel, and me. I recently
returned from a visit to Mount Holyoke
College where Roger Babb (Ph.D. 2003)
directed a double bill of Sławomir
Mrożek's
Fox Hunt and Caryl Churchill's Far
Away. With Una Chaudhuri of New York
University I talked with students in the
theatre program at Mount Holyoke about the
animal themes and ecological imagery in the
two plays, and after the performance we
participated in the talkback. In Vol. 30,
No. 1 of PAJ (88) there appears my
article, "Playwriting as a Woman: Prosper
Mérimée and The Theatre of Clara Gazul,"
accompanied by my translation of Heaven
and Hell, which Mérimée wrote under the
pseudonym of the Spanish author and actress
he invented.
Jean
Graham-Jones
writes: I’m currently on research leave and
well into my three-month stay in Buenos
Aires. The theatre season is ramping up
here, so I'm taking in an average of six
shows a week in addition to working on
current research and translation projects.
Before leaving for Buenos Aires, I delivered
a keynote address at the Latin American
Theatre Today conference at Virginia Tech.
In January my translations of four
Argentinean plays were published by the
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, thanks in no
small part to the great efforts of the Segal
staff and my assistants Gad Guterman
and Elisa Legon. I recently completed
a translation of Lola Arias's play China,
commissioned for the upcoming Steirischer
herbst Festival in Graz, Austria; and my
translation of Daniel Veronese's Women
Dreamt Horses will receive a staged
reading at the Accidental Festival, taking
place later this month at London's Institute
of Contemporary Arts.
Samuel
Leiter
(Emeritus) writes: I chaired a panel,
"Rising from the Flames: the Rebirth of
Theatre during the Occupation of Japan,
1945-1952," at the ATHE conference in New
Orleans. My own paper was on Kabuki
during the Occupation. I am editing a book
for Lexington Books that will include most
of the panel's papers, supplemented by seven
additional ones covering all forms of
Japanese theatre. My recent Encyclopedia
of Asian Theatre was selected as a
Choice Academic Title of 2007, and was
designated an Outstanding Reference Source
of 2007 by the American Library Association.
On March 1, I gave a paper, "Edo Kabuki: The
Actor's World," at the "Designed for
Pleasure" symposium, in conjunction with the
Asia Society's spring 2007 exhibition of Edo
period woodblock (ukiyo-e) prints. It
will be published in a forthcoming issue of
Impressions.
In January,
Judy Milhous gave a paper at the
conference “John Rich and the
Eighteenth-Century London Stage: Commerce,
Magic, and Management,” held at the elegant
Royal College of Surgeons, as near the site
of the three incarnations of the Lincoln’s
Inn Fields theatre as it is now possible to
get. Ana Martínez also participated
in this conference, which was more focused
than many conferences, and full of people
who wanted to say things about the creator
of English pantomime. The conference ended
with a tour of the Garrick Club, which is
worth doing, if you ever have an entrée.
It’s chock full of portraits of British
theatrical notables, and because the club
sold its quarter of the rights to Winnie the
Pooh to Disney some years ago for a very
large sum, the pictures have all been
cleaned and re-hung and are looking quite
splendid. The house in State College is now
occupied, though Judy does not expect to be
fully unpacked and organized until the
summer.
Gloria
Waldman
(Emerita) writes: I look forward to
completing the manuscript, Papo Márquez:
Obrero de la cultura (Terranova Editores,
Puerto Rico, 2008), an anthology of the
plays, poetry and fiction of this Puerto
Rican popular theatre dramatist and actor,
who tragically died in 1988 at 36 years of
age, author of the 1980's controversial
work, Esquizofrenia Puertorricensis.
This October, I will be presenting the book
at the 8th Conference of the Puerto Rican
Studies Association at the Center for
Advanced Studies of the Caribbean in Old San
Juan, as well as having organized the panel,
"Charting Cultural Spaces: Anarchists,
Dramatists, Archivists—Luisa Capetillo, Papo
Márquez, Carmen Rivera and Doña Angélica
Meléndez." Ph.D. theatre student, Jason
Ramírez, will participate in this panel
discussing the playwright he is completing
his dissertation on, award-winning Carmen
Rivera ("Carmen Rivera: Nuyorican Playwright
Reclaims La Lupe and Celia Cruz").
From
Visiting Scholar Sophie Proust: I am
an Assistant Professor in Performing Arts (Lille,
France), and I have been an assistant
director for years in France, Quebec, and
Italy for Matthias Langhoff, Yves Beaunesne,
and Denis Marleau. I also served an
internship as observer of the theatrical
creative process for one of Robert Wilson's
productions. My main field of research is
the theatrical creative process and, more
particularly, directing actors. I wrote a
book in French on the subject, based on my
Ph.D., with a preface by Patrice Pavis. It's
entitled La direction d'acteurs dans la
mise en scène théâtrale contemporaine [Directing
Actors in Contemporary Drama] (L'Entretemps,
2006). In order to advance my research, I
have had the great honor and pleasure of
being a Visiting Scholar, invited by Marvin
Carlson, at the Martin E. Segal Theatre
Center from March 18th until May 6th 2008.
My aim was to attend rehearsals of some New
York directors I was specifically interested
in and to consider the possibility of making
comparisons (of method, not of quality) with
European theatre artists. So I attended the
rehearsals of Caden Manson (The Big Art
Group), John Collins (Elevator Repair
Service), and Elizabeth LeCompte (The
Wooster Group), and also conducted an
interview with each of them and with Richard
Foreman and Richard Schechner. Because I
had to wait the first two weeks for the IRB
exemption in order to attend rehearsals, I
had the opportunity to attend student events
at the Graduate Center and other events in
CUNY, which were obviously very interesting.
I have to say that I have been quite
impressed by the way students are able to
organize themselves here. I also attended
Richard Schechner’s Experimental Theatre
course at NYU.
I will
present the results of my research in a
paper at the annual conference of IFTR
(International Federation for Theatre
Research) at the University of Chung-Ang
Seoul (South Korea) in July 2008. Also this
summer, my essay entitled "Written Documents
of the Assistant Director: A Record of
Remaking" will be published in TRI (Theatre
Research International). I'm happy that
finally some of you will be able to read a
portion of my research in English. I will
have some papers in different international
conferences when I go back to France, still
on the theatrical creative process, and for
the first time I will have the opportunity
to present my work in Italian because Marco
De Marinis invited me to the DAMS in Bologna
(Dipartimento di Musica e Spettocolo) to
present my book on June 11th. I thank
each of you for the warm welcome I had here,
which contributed to my wonderful stay.
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The Doctors Are
In!
Dissertations Completed, 2007-08 |
Kimon Keramidas, Ph.D.
“The Pay’s The Thing: Intellectual Property and the
Political Economy of Contemporary American Theatrical
Production”
May 2008
David Savran, Chair; William Boddy (Baruch, CUNY);
Richard Maxwell (CUNY, Queens); Stuart Ewen (Hunter, CUNY)
Milton Loayza, Ph.D.
“The Plays of Ricardo Monti and the Production of Space”
May 2008
Jean Graham-Jones, Chair; David Savran; Gloria Waldman
(Emerita)
Sarah Standing, Ph.D.
“Human/Nature: Eco-Theatre Politics and Performance”
May 2008
Marvin Carlson, Chair; David Savran; Jane Bowers (John
Jay, CUNY); Una Chaudhuri (NYU)
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Michael Aman writes: My play The
Unbleached American will be produced at
the Emelin Theatre in Mamaroneck next
season. The play is about the
nineteenth-century composer/comedian Ernest
Hogan.
Meg Araneo recently got back from the
Kontrapunkt Festival in Szczecin, Poland,
where she saw some exciting Polish, German,
Belgian, and Spanish projects. In August
she’ll be presenting a paper at ATHE on
posthuman theory and performance along with
Steve Luber—both projects an
outgrowth of Jean Graham-Jones’s
exciting “posts” class last year. Summer
will be spent in the stacks preparing for
her Second Exam. She’s looking forward to
the fall semester, when she’ll be presenting
at ASTR on a panel dedicated to the East
European diaspora. In December she’s headed
to the University of Puerto Rico where she
will be co-facilitating workshops and
presenting a production of Woyzeck,
which was recently shown as a
work-in-progress as part of the 2007-2008
Mabou Mines artist residency program.
Jessica Brater is about to move into
her fourth apartment in her fourth
neighborhood in Brooklyn, where she will
spend the summer studying for the First
Exam. She will also be working on developing
her newest directing project which is about
fish, mermaids, plastic, and the destruction
of the ocean environment. And she will be
going to the pool in Red Hook. Frequently.
Kevin Byrne (Level III) delivered a
paper at the Graduate Student Conference put
together by the DTSA, and would like to
thank everybody who participated in,
attended, and organized it. He also was
recently awarded the Olshan Dissertation
Fellowship by the Graduate Center. And he
won't shut up about minstrelsy or Theodor
Adorno.
Boris Daussà Pastor writes: This has
been a very intense and exciting first year
at the Graduate Center. Last semester I was
bold enough to co-organize with Prof.
Claudia Orenstein a study abroad program
in India (a total of 18 students joined,
including four from our own Ph.D.). I
rounded off the trip giving two papers at
different conferences in India. This
semester I am preparing an article for
Asian Theatre Journal (will they want to
publish it?) called “Re-thinking Asia in
Theatre Studies” (anyone want to guess what
it deals with?). I am also finalizing all
the IRB paperwork to gather the information
for an article or series of articles with
the tentative general title “In and Beyond
Corporeal Mime: Heirs of Decroux.” During
the summer I will be in India again,
studying Kathakali and the local language of
Kerala, Malayalam. I have been asked to
write a little book on Kathakali body
exercises (some sort of training guide), and
I am working on it. I may come back from the
summer with a first private edition of such
guide... exciting, isn’t it?
Robert Davis is finishing his
coursework and his term as DTSA Curriculum
Committee Representative. He would like to
thank everyone who provided input and voted
on courses this year. His first publication,
"The Riddle of the Oedipus, Practicing
Reception and the Early American Theatre"
will be coming out this spring in the
e-journal New Voices in Classical
Reception Studies. Otherwise, he is
preparing for the fun that will be an
ancient Greek language exam in the fall.
Rick DesRochers writes: I will be
directing a new play by James McLindon at
the PlayPenn Theatre Conference in
Philadelphia this summer where I am an
artistic associate. I presented a paper in
April at the Northeast Modern Languages
Association that will be published in
TheatreForum’s Summer/Fall 2008 issue
entitled "Looking Behind the Mirror of Life:
The Subtext is the Surface in Ivo van Hove's
production of Molière's The Misanthrope."
I also presented a paper for our own
Graduate Student Conference in April
entitled "The Future of the American Canon
or the Shape of Plays to Come in the
American Regional Theatre," which Richard
Schechner asked me to submit for publication
in TDR. My wife Ashley and I are due
with a new baby somewhere around May 14th!
Zack Fuller teaches Introduction to
Theatre Arts at Baruch College, training
future financial wizards to appreciate the
performing arts. He is preparing for his
Second Exam by immersing himself in the
fields of intercultural performance,
postmodern dance, and Japanese theatre. His
article "Rethinking Dance: Farming, Hakushu,
and the Avant-garde," will be included in
the upcoming edition of Theatre India.
Zack recently appeared in the role of Zhan
the Magnificent, supreme ruler of an army of
mutant crabs, in the off-off Broadway play
Robohamlet.
Jane House (Ph.D. 1988), Associate
Director of Publications at the Graduate
Center, published "Moscow Art Theatre School
at Baryshnikov Arts Center: A Report,"
Slavic and East European Performance
28:2 (Spring 2008). She will be presenting a
paper on "Raffaele Viviani: from Vaudeville
to Musical Theatre" at a joint conference
between the American Association of Italian
Studies (AAIS) and the American Association
of Teachers of Italian (AATI) in Taormina,
Sicily, May 22-24, 2008.
Stephen Huff (Level III) passed the
Second Exam in February. He has been
teaching Voice and Diction at Bronx
Community College and Theatre History at
Marymount Manhattan College this semester.
In August, he will present a paper entitled
“Disciplined Heads: Eighteenth Century
British Culture and the Lecture on Heads”
on the Theatre History Debut Panel at ATHE.
He is currently working on his dissertation
proposal, which will focus on performance in
and around Richmond, Virginia, and
Charleston, South Carolina during the Early
Republic/Antebellum period. Not content to
merely study and write about performance in
the region, he will be relocating to Memphis
this summer after sixteen years of living in
NYC. He is bracing himself for the culture
shock by attempting to regain his accent.
Y’all come on ‘n’ visit now, ya hear?
Amy E. Hughes (Level III) writes: In
September, I began a tenure-track position
in the Department of Theater at Brooklyn
College—I teach theatre history and theory,
and serve as advisor to the MFA Dramaturgy
students. I’m still completing my
dissertation (“Sensational Excess:
Spectacle, Affect, and Activism on the
Nineteenth-Century American Stage”),
so it’s been a busy year of writing,
teaching, and learning. Supported generously
by a Martin S. Tackel grant, I spent much of
January doing archival research at the
American Antiquarian Society in
Massachusetts. This spring, I presented a
paper on freaks, Foucault, and normalcy at
MATC, and also co-facilitated (with Prof.
Marvin Carlson) a workshop on
postcolonial theatre and translation at
Northwestern’s “Crossroads of the
Humanities” conference. In addition, I gave
two talks and one workshop at the Center for
Teaching at Brooklyn College this year.
Otherwise, I’m looking forward to spending
the summer writing, and to presenting a
paper on temperance lecturer John B. Gough
at the American Studies Association (ASA)
conference in October.
Eero Laine spent the month of January
in Germany where he reviewed Schauspiel
Frankfurt’s Medea and Death of a
Salesman for the winter edition of
Western European Stages. In March, he
presented a paper on fight choreographer
David Brimmer at the Mid-America Theatre
Conference in Kansas City. In April, Eero
presented a paper at the Graduate Center
Film Conference on Neil Young’s sound score
in Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man. He
is currently taking a class leading to a
skills proficiency test in sword and shield
with the Society of American Fight
Directors. Eero was recently awarded a
travel bursary by the International
Federation of Theatre Research to attend the
annual conference this summer in Seoul,
where he will present a paper on Benjamin
Baker’s A Glance at New York and
Howard Korder’s The Lights. Also this
summer, Eero will marry his fiancée,
Christine, in her home country of Germany.
Elisa Legon writes: After getting my
dissertation proposal approved in December,
I’ve been gradually focusing on the ensuing
endeavor. In addition, I am working as
adjunct lecturer this semester at LaGuardia
Community College. I am teaching “The
Drama,” a great introductory course to
dramatic literature in the English
Department. By now you’d know that I never
limit my choices to UK/US drama when I
design a syllabus. Thus, my students work
hard not to butcher the names Gambaro and
Plaza de Mayo. In all fairness, they do
prefer to ponder the anguish of having one’s
dreams deferred. I am looking forward to an
extended trip to Brazil and Argentina (both
research and pleasure) in the summer after
such a remarkable year. A fascinating Booth
Award honoree, a successful conference, a
series of guest speakers, and multiple teas
and professionalization gatherings: the
range of accomplishments should make all
students proud. I am very grateful to the
wonderful DTSA officers who so generously
and efficiently served the theatre students
and made all these events possible. I also
thank students, faculty, and Lynette
Gibson, all of whom helped us accomplish
these objectives. After this fruitful year,
I am ready to pass the torch to the incoming
president.
Donny Levit enjoyed working on the
2008 Booth Award Ceremony with Karen Finley.
He is grateful for all of the help and
support he received from the theatre
community. Additional spring highlights
include his participation in the “Theorizing
Blackness” Conference. He presented a paper
entitled “The Inextricable Link Between Jazz
and the Black Arts Movement.” In early May,
he had a staged reading of his new play,
kempt and shevelled, at the Construction
Company. In addition to writing and
directing, he is working on an original
guitar score. radio cure is the title
of his newest play in development.
Lindsay Adamson Livingston is looking
forward to having the entire summer to study
for her Second Exam. She will also
participate in two conferences this summer:
at ATHE, she will present a paper entitled
“The Haunting of Grey Gardens: Doubleness of
Perception and the Musical (Re)Construction
of the Beales” as part of the Musical
Theatre Debut Panel; at the International
Auto/Biography Association’s annual
conference, she will deliver a paper as part
of the panel “Staging Life Stories.”
Additionally, she is very pleased that her
article concerning performance biographies
of Oscar Wilde will be published this fall
in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.
Having passed her First Exam, Ana
Martínez is very much enjoying reading
books in her Second Exam fields:
Site-Specific Performance; Theories of Space
and Memory; History of Scenography and
Theatre Architecture; and Performance in
Mexico City. She is also very excited about
her forthcoming publication of a conference
paper on John Rich’s 1744 inventory of sets
and costumes at Covent Garden. She served as
the department representative in the
Doctoral Student Council Association this
year.
Hillary Miller is finishing up a very
full semester: wading knee-deep in
theatrical theory with her fellow
first-years, enjoying a foray into early
cinema in Film History I, teaching Public
Speaking in Communications Studies at
Baruch, and becoming acquainted with their
Communications Institute as a Fellow as
well. She participated in an exceedingly
productive Spanish translation course with
Elisa Legon, and gave her first-ever
conference presentation ("Anthropomorphism
and Pantheism in Ibsen and Lesya Ukrainka")
at the DTSA's stimulating canon conference.
(Many, many thanks to all of the ladies and
gents who worked so hard to create such a
successful day, from start to finish.) This
summer she's looking forward to a little
rest...in the library studying for the First
Exam. Away from the Grad Center, she
continues to do research for Vox3 films, an
independent production company, and to
diligently hone her burgeoning cooking
skills.
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