In this video: The editors of Theater-Historiography.org pulled a few scholars aside at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education 2011 Conference in Chicago and asked them about their current projects. Here’s what they told us.
When I wrote History Takes Time, I was preparing to go up for tenure. I was also advising a number of graduate students who felt they simply did not have time to do their work. I was distraught, as I felt and still do that we are conditioned more and more aggressively to be almost surgically strategic in doing our research. My own experience in largely unorganized archives in Mexico had taught me that some of the most important discoveries in doing historiographical research come from what you do not know is present before you begin that work, from looking at what else is in the file, from what articles and ads surround the newspaper article you had to read to do your work. [Read More]
As teachers of theatre history, theory, and performance theory and practice we engage in crucial public work: the training of future audiences. Our labour, every day, is social activism, whether we call it that or not. The latest issue of Canadian Theatre Reviewcelebrates this work, and explores its challenges from multiple perspectives. [Read More]
About 5 years ago, I started a position as a joint appointment in departments of Theatre and Media Study. My formal training in media was as a more or less traditional film scholar. By contrast, most of my new media colleagues were engaged in more digital-focused projects: virtual reality; robotics; and social media. In conversations with them, I became increasingly aware of and connected to a community that was more than a little technophilic, if not outright utopian. [Read More]
In this video: In November 2010, the University of Kansas Department of Theatre presented Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Original Pronunciation–the first OP Shakespeare presented in North America. The production was the result of a research collaboration between Paul Meyer of the University of Kansas and renowned Welsh linguist David Crystal.
Here, you’ll find a number of resources and scholarly conversations that we hope will be valuable to your research and pedagogy, whether you are a student, emerging, or established scholar. From the beginning, we and the press have envisioned this space as a meeting ground for dynamic conversation about theater history and how we go about practicing it in our classrooms and in our research and writing, as well as about the state of our field today. We’d also like this to be your space for the open exchange of practical ideas and tools.
Borrow generously from the teaching tools in the Faculty Club, and then share some of your own. Tell us about what you’ve been reading in our Ex Libris area. Have an idea for the site? Let us know! And watch the Blog and Mainstage for special commentaries and field reports from scholars and teachers working in the trenches.
JUDITH: The idea for our essay grew out of my two-fold frustration with the field of musical theater studies. First, I had experienced/read bias against what I considered to be one of the most significant shows in contemporary musical theater history, Rent. Specifically, one editor of a prominent journal rejected an article I had written on Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical primarily on the grounds that he did not like the show (it was subsequently published elsewhere), and I read about and heard similar reactions against it. Clearly not everyone echoes such sentiment, and Rent has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention. But I still felt that its complexity and significance remained unexamined.
Second, I was growing increasingly frustrated with my inability, as a theater historian, to explore all aspects of this multivalent, interdisciplinary form, particularly music and dance. The most rewarding conferences I was attending, in terms of gaining new knowledge, were not theater conferences but musicology conferences. I found myself eager to enhance my scholarship on musicals with the knowledge of a musicologist. I was aware of Jessica’s work and had met her at one of those conferences, so asking her to join me in exploring Rent was a no-brainer. Luckily she accepted. Finding a dance historian to join us proved impossible, largely due to the lack of dance scholars focusing on musical theater dance. Perhaps that was for the best, as the first draft of our collaboration was over double our word limit! I am unsure how we could have fit in ideas about the dance in the show.
JESSICA: I was thrilled to accept Judy’s invitation to co-author this chapter, for two reasons (besides the fact that I admired her work and enjoyed meeting her at conferences!). First, I had been having a similar experience to Judy’s: the most fruitful and stimulating musical theater conferences have recently become those that purposely combine scholars from a range of disciplines, resulting in a discussion that brings all sorts of methodologies, backgrounds, and perspectives to the table. Musical theater in the world of musicology is a friendly, interesting, and growing field – but we all know that we can’t do this work alone and we’re all actively seeking voices coming from other directions. How can any one scholar know everything about theater, music, dance, design, and more? My second reason, then, for jumping on board is that musicals are collaborative processes, which means there is no reason why the scholarship on them shouldn’t also be collaborative. Conferences are one model, but Judy’s invitation to write with her became an example of the philosophy we both share: that even published, “formal” scholarship can be (boldly, transparently) collaborative, conversational, and interdisciplinary.
How “past” do events have to be before they’re “history”? I confess I was (and am) a little nervous contributing to a volume about writing theatre history when my primary research (activist performance and US evangelical movements) seems so . . . current. What qualifies my work as historiography instead of performance studies, criticism, or even journalism? For me, historiographic concerns inhere not in the subjects I study but in the questions I address in investigating that subject. I draw on the work of Michel de Certeau, who posits historical research as heterology—an encounter between different entities, between distinct imaginations past and present. Crucial to this encounter, argues Certeau, is the realization that historians cannot (or do not) simply bracket their own commitments in their research. Rather, historians’ present concerns shape and are shaped by their representations of the past.
In my work, I am drawn to performances by groups whose worldviews actively oppose or exclude my own. Beyond requiring that I meet baseline expectations of accuracy, evidence, and argument, my historiographic training pushes me to attend to how my ideological investments influence my representation of groups who stand on the other side of ethical, political, and/or theological divides. In particular, I must be aware of how the words and critical models I use to describe both my allies and my enemies can subtly reinforce my own positions and assumptions. Certeau argues that heterologies ought to be mutually transformative, resituating not merely the object of research but the researcher her/himself. Writing within/for an academic community that generally shares my worldview, I can easily craft technically accurate studies that flatter the assumed rightness of my position. A heterological historiography demands something more. It demands that I de-familiarize my own political assumptions, displacing myself, through encounters with ideological others. It may not be in the past, but it’s historiography to me.
Welcome to Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions—the Website! Here, you’ll find a number of resources and scholarly conversations that we hope will be valuable to your research and pedagogy, whether you are a student, emerging, or established scholar.
Shill-Free Zone. From the beginning, we and the press have envisioned this space as a meeting ground for dynamic conversation about theater history and how we go about practicing it in our classrooms and in our research and writing, as well as about the state of our field today. We’d also like this to be your space for the open exchange of practical ideas and tools. In other words, we’re not using this website to shill for Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions—on the contrary, we want the site to be going strong long after the book has been adopted in classrooms. Instead, think of this as a launching point for conversation alongside and outside the book by a community of visitors who’ll come back again and again to find new content and new discussion. Of course, we’d love it if you bought a copy of the book, which you can do by clicking here, but we’ve built the site to work without it.
So, look around. Borrow generously from the teaching tools in the Faculty Club, and then share some of your own. Tell us about what you’ve been reading in our Ex Libris area. Have an idea for the site? Let us know! And watch the Blog and Mainstage for special commentaries and field reports from scholars and teachers working in the trenches.
Welcome to theater-historiography.org! Here, you’ll find a number of resources and scholarly conversations that we hope will be valuable to your research and pedagogy, whether you are a student, emerging, or established scholar. Read More
Theater historiography means the study of the foundational assumptions, principles, and methodologies that determine how theater history is written. To practice theater historiography means to look beyond the record of “what happened” to analyze how and why such records are constructed. Read More
