UW Center for Performance Studies

The Caravan of Central American Mothers in Mexico
2022-05-20 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Vancouver) | CMU 120
Lecture by Ana E. Puga
The School of Drama, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Department of Dance are glad to invite you to a talk by performance historian Ana E. Puga from Ohio State University. Her talk, titled “The Caravan of Central American Mothers in Mexico: Protesting Migrant Disappearance on a Transnational Stage-in-Motion” examines the artistic and activist performances of women commemorating the lives of lost relatives who disappeared while traveling as undocumented migrants from Central America to Mexico.
Ana E. Puga is an associate professor at the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at Ohio State University. She has published widely on the history of theatre and performance in Latin America. In 2021, she and her co-author Victor M. Espinosa, received the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, for their book Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration: Heroes, Martyrs, and Saints (Palgrave 2020).

Thank you to the Simpson Center for co-funding this event.

The Lost Play of Fergus, a talk by Odai Johnson
2022-04-15 14:00 - 16:00 | Hutchinson Hall – Room 154, BOX 353950, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
The Center for Performance Studies is glad to announce that the Coffee and Concepts series is returning to an in-person format this quarter. On Friday, April 8, 2:00 to 4:00, we resume our conversations about performance with a talk by Odai Johnson, titled “The Lost Play of Fergus, and the Violence of Re-enacting Memory.” The talk is from the book project that Dr. Johnson is currently working on, tentatively titled “Missing: Lost Plays and Deep Culture Memory.”
We look forward to seeing you!

Dis-Orient: Autumn Talks; Landscapes of Erasure and Presence
2021-11-18 18:00 - 19:30 | CMU 120
“Dis-Orient” is an encounter whereby a series of presentations | papers are delivered by the members of the cluster and by external Guests and Alumni. The latter will deliver purviews of artistic disciplines practiced at their homeland and that challenge the dominating grand narrative.
Having as a title “Landscapes of Erasure and Presence”, the first encounter of “Dis-Orient: Autumn talks” will host three panelists sharing their research practices around architecture & theatre. Thus, choreographies of spaces as architectural manifestations of monumentality, bigness and Mega-presence are negotiated and reshaped by the disenfrenchized in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. On a similar vein, on the stage, racial politics – most notably blackface performances – transform to be a vehicle for national identity building, modernization and decolonization in China while in Turkey, Karagoz a phallic shadow theatre figure during the Ottoman empire is subject to castration during the Modern Turkey.

Presentations:
“Censoring the little man- a Karagoz story” | Duygu Monson Erdogan
“Beyond Bigness: Landscapes of the disenfranchised in Mega Cities” | Lamis Ashour
“Performing race in early modern China” | Weiyu Li

We would be happy if you can attend. For reservations, please sign up here/
PS: Reservation on Eventbrite is required. Seating is limited due to Covid-Safety measures.
About C.O.M.R.A:
C.O.M.R.A – an acronym for Conjecture | Other | Meet | Reckon| Acknowledge – was founded by a group of international graduate students at the University of Washington. Decentering the dominant narratives in the Humanities’ field is one of the germane foregrounds hoped to be achieved by the Cluster’s members. C.O.M.R.A’s main objectives are to challenge the Eurocentric approaches to Literature, Arts and Social sciences by highlighting the scope of aesthetical practices elsewhere and by unfolding other ways of knowing.

Earth Matters on Stage: a Book Talk with Theresa J. May
2021-10-22 14:30 - 16:00 | Hutchinson Hall – Room 154, BOX 353950, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
You’re invited to join us for a book talk and conversation with Theresa J. May, a professor and director/devisor/ecodramaturg at the University of Oregon and an alum of our PhD program in Theatre History, Theory and Criticism.

Theresa May will be our guest in the Friday afternoon PhD seminar on October 22. She’ll talk about her recently published book, Earth Matters On Stage: Ecology and Environment in the American Theater (Routledge, 2020), a study of the way American theatre and performance has helped shaped views of the environment and vice versa. She’ll also engage with us in conversation about her academic journey as a scholar, director, and co-founder of the Earth Matters on Stage ecodrama playwrights festival.
Theresa May is Professor in Theatre Arts at the University of Oregon where she received the Thomas F. Herman Distinguished Teaching Award in 2021. She teaches Native theatre, Latinx dramatic literature, ecotheatre, as well as devising and performance courses. Her publications include two books: Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology, Environment and American Theater (Routledge 2020) and Salmon Is Everything: Community-based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed (OSU Press 2019); an edited volume, Readings in Performance and Ecology (edited with Wendy Arons) (Palgrave 2014); as well as articles and chapters that bridge performance studies and environmental humanities. She is co-founder of the EMOS Ecodrama Playwrights Festival, and is currently working on a new play in collaboration with Native tribal members of Oregon. She received her PhD in from the University of Washington’s School of Drama in 2000; and also holds an MFA in Acting from the University of Southern California.

Coffee & Concepts Talk
2021-05-07 13:00 - 16:00 | Online
Meditations on Captive Performances of Denmark’s Colonial Children circa 1905

May 7, 2021 – 2:00pm
The Center for Performance Studies is hosting the last talk for the 2020-2021 academic year on May 7, from 2 to 4 pm.

Our speaker is Dr. Rashida Shaw McMahon who joins us from Wesleyan College in Connecticut, where she teaches African American and Black transnational performance at the English Department. She is the author of The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship in Black Popular Theatre (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, March 2020). Her talk is titled “Meditations on Captive Performances of Denmark’s Colonial Children circa 1905.”

Coffee & Concepts Talk
2021-04-30 14:00 - 16:00 | Online
‘Outrageous American Home Truths’: Blackgirl Wit, Imagination, and Folklore in Contemporary Musical Theatre
The Center for Performance Studies at the School of Drama is happy to announce that LaDonna L Forsgren, a performance scholar from the University of Notre Dame, will share her new research about blackness and the musical stage on April 30, from 2 to 4 pm. Her talk is titled: “‘Outrageous American Home Truths’: Blackgirl Wit, Imagination, and Folklore in Contemporary Musical Theatre.”

La Donna L. Forsgren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance (Northwestern UP 2020) and In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement (Northwestern UP 2018). She is the recipient of the 2016 Robert A. Schanke Theatre Research Award and 2020 Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize for her research on Black queer feminist spectatorship and The Wiz. She serves as Associate Editor for Theatre Survey, a theatre history journal chartered by the American Society for Theatre Research. When she is not working on her current monograph—tentatively titled Black Girlhood on the Musical Stage—she spends hours and hours playing an original game called “Creepy Mommy” with her kids. “Creepy Mommy” is a cross between the video game “Hello Neighbor,” hide and seek, and the movie Tangled. Please feel free to ask follow-up questions after her talk.

Coffee & Concepts - "Creeps and the Critics: Disability Theatre’s Challenges for Journalism"
2021-02-19 14:00 - 16:00 | Online
Kirsty Johnston – “Creeps and the Critics: Disability Theatre’s Challenges for Journalism”
Kirsty Johnston, a disability performance scholar from the University of British Columbia, will offer a talk entitled “Creeps and the Critics: disability theatre’s challenges for journalism.” Recently produced in both Seattle (2014) and Vancouver (2016), David Freeman’s 1971 New York Drama Desk award winning play Creeps has posed significant critical challenges for both artists and critics. The play is important for disability theatre and performance scholars not least because it is the first offered by Victoria Ann Lewis in her landmark 2006 collection, Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights. Emphasizing Freeman’s pioneering decision in Creeps to feature many different disabled characters in cahoots and argument together, Lewis argues that Creeps “prematurely [bore] theatrical witness to wrongs that would not find political analysis and advocacy until later in the decade” (xxxiv). The recent staged readings and productions have generated complex artistic and critical responses.

Is Euripides Dead?
2021-01-15 14:00 - 16:00 | Online
The Coffee and Concepts Series begins the new year with a talk by Hallie Marshall, a theatre and classics scholar from the University of British Columbia. Her talk, “Is Euripides Dead?” takes inspiration from T. S. Eliot’s essay “Euripides and Professor Murray”, a scathing attack on Gilbert Murray’s translations of ancient Greek tragedy. At the time Eliot was a relatively unknown poet working in a bank, while Murray was the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and had a significant public profile as a translator and political activist. This talk explores the extent to which Eliot’s essay has come to shape Murray’s posthumous reputation, but also poses questions about how scholars read decades-old criticism across the shifting tides of individual reputations and the larger cultural and socio-political context.

Representing Actors/Defining Acting: the Role of Arbitration in the Actors' Equity Association
2020-11-20 14:00 - 16:00 | Online
On November 20, 2020, Ann Folino White, Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and Directing at Michigan State University, will present her research about the Actor’s Equity Association as part of the Coffee and Concepts Series. Her talk is titled “Representing Actors/Defining Acting: the Role of Arbitration in the Actors’ Equity Association”

Dr. Ann Folino White is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and Directing in the Department of Theatre at Michigan State University. Dr. Folino White is editor of Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas. Her scholarship on early-twentieth century U.S. theatre, protest, and political performance has appeared in TDR, TPQ, Theatre Survey, and Performance Research. She is contributing co-editor of Food & Theatre on the World Stage (Routledge, 2015). Her book Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America (Indiana University Press, 2015) received the CLR James Book Award from the Working Class Studies Association. In 2017, Dr. Folino White was named a Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year by the Michigan Association of State Universities.

Coffee and Concepts: "Theatre and Peace"
2020-01-31 14:00 - 16:00
Coffee and Concepts: “Theatre and Peace”
The Center for Performance Studies is inviting you for a conversation with the Iranian playwright and theatre scholar Naghmeh Samini on Friday, January 31, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, at Hutchinson Hall 154.
Naghmeh Samini‘s plays have been internationally produced. More than twenty of her dramas have been staged in Iran, France, India, Canada, and the United States. Her scholarly research explores the connections between Iranian drama and Iranian mythology.
We look forward to seeing you.

Coffee and Concepts - LeAnne Howe, playwright
2020-01-24 14:00 - 16:00
Native American playwright LeAnne Howe will be a guest at Coffee and Concepts next Friday, January 24, 2:00-4:00, at Hutchinson 154.
On Wednesday, January 22, 6:00 – 8:00 there will be a staged reading of her new play Savage Conversations at the Henry Art Gallery, directed by School of Drama MFA Directing student Andrew Coopman . At Coffee and Concepts, LeAnne Howe will talk about her creative process and her sense of current developments in Native American playwriting.

Coffee and Concepts - Seattle amongst Avant-Garde Geographies
2019-11-22 08:00 - 17:00
“Seattle amongst Avant-Garde Geographies”

Jasmine Mahmoud’s talk “Seattle amongst Avant-Garde Geographies” considers the role of Seattle within her book project, Avant-Garde Geographies: Race, Austerity, and Experimentation in the Urban Frontier. The book investigates the trend of experimental theater and performance practices making (and taking) space in urban margins in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle. It examines how, from 2001 to 2017, many practitioners of avant-garde theater, performance art, social practice, and experimental dance moved into urban margins often called frontiers, and interacted with pre-and-post-collapse political economies, austere policy, and processes of urbanization and racialization including gentrification, erasure/displacement, and “renewal.” Critically, this work integrates theories on settler colonialism, race, and the avant-garde to theorize “avant-garde geographies,” that is, that the avant-garde is a geographic practice that imbues aesthetic and racial meanings into geographic space, and that policy influences embodied geographic practices, including avant-garde performance.

This talk will focus on the manuscript’s chapter on Seattle: on Seattle-based artists and venues including DK Pan, Sara Porkalab, Implied Violence, Annex Theatre, The Satori Group, and King Street Station, as well as the enduring, colonial role of the “frontier” in claiming urban space in Seattle.

BIO:

Jasmine Mahmoud (PhD, Performance Studies, Northwestern University) is Assistant Professor in Arts Leadership in the Department of Performing Arts & Arts Leadership at Seattle University. A performance historian and urban ethnographer, her work engages contemporary artistic practices, arts/cultural policy, black aesthetics, embodiment, and spatial racism. Her writing has been published in Modern Drama, Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, and Women & Performance, and in the anthologies Theater and Cultural Politics for a New World and Postdramatic Theatre and Form. Invested in public scholarship and art criticism, she has also written for Canadian Art, The Common Reader, Hyperallergic, and the Urban Cultural Studies Blog, where she is an Assistant Editor. In 2009, she co-founded and edited The Arts Politic, a magazine dedicated to solving problems at the intersection of arts and politics. She is currently co-editing the book Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theatre and Performance with Megan Geigner (Northwestern University) and Stuart Hecht (Boston College), under contract with Northwestern University Press.

At Seattle University, co-curates the quarterly Arts Leadership Book Club, and teaches courses including “Public Policy and Advocacy in the Arts,” a course in which she and her students launched the Seattle Arts Voter Guide.

The Face of God: A Historiographic Fugue on Performance and Flight
2019-10-18 14:00 - 16:00
Professor Scott Magelssen‘s talk The Face of God: A Historiographic Fugue on Performance and Flight, is excerpted from his book-length study about the cultural and political significance of aviation and space flight in the United States. Here is what he would like to share with prospective listeners:
“I draw the title of this talk from the last line of pilot-poet John Gillespie Magee, Jr.’s poem “High Flight,” which describes the sublime experience of the aviator in divine terms. A rendition of “High Flight” accompanied a short Air Force film (with an F-15 fighter jet conducting aerobatic maneuvers against the backdrop of heavens) that played every morning on network television as I grew up in the 1980s, immediately following the National Anthem that began the broadcast day. For kids of my age, in the late Cold War’s most angstful years of doomsday rhetoric, our televisions delivered such performative montages of poetry, patriotism and the jingoistic sublime as a daily ritual of indoctrination of Americanness. Yet the idea that airplanes could be weaponized in September, 2001, as spectacular divine tools to bring down skyscrapers and rewrite the narratives of American history and experience still came as a shock. Taking up Heather Nathan’s invitation to compose “fugue histories,” this talk seeks to brings together several Deleuzean “lines of flight” into a meditation on the stakes of performing aviation, war, and space travel.”

Coffee and Concepts: "Truth, Storytelling, and the Ethics of Dramatic Editing"
2019-04-26 14:00 - 16:00
The Center for Performance Studies is inviting you for coffee and conversation with Laurie A. Frederik, a cultural anthropologist and performance scholar from the University of Maryland. Professor Frederick will share material from the book she is currently writing. The title of her talk is “Truth, Storytelling, and the Ethics of Dramatic Editing.”

Laurie Frederik is a cultural anthropologist and an associate professor of performance studies and ethnography in the School of Theatre, Dance, & Performance Studies, University of Maryland. She was director of the Latin American Studies Center from 2014-2017 and remains a member of the advisory board. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Departments of Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, Women’s Studies, and the Consortium for Race, Gender, and Ethnicity.
Dr. Frederik has been conducting ethnographic research in Cuba for twenty years. Her first book, Trumpets in the Mountains: Theater and the Politics of National Culture in Cuba, published by Duke University Press, received Honorable Mention for Outstanding Book of 2012 by Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). Her newest article about Cuba is titled “Poetic Imaginings of the Real Guantánamo (No, Not the Base),” published in both English and Spanish in Guantánamo and the Empire of Freedom: the Humanities Respond (Palgrave 2017). Dr. Frederik co-edited Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power(University of Michigan Press 2017).

Coffee and Concepts: "Words and Images"
2019-04-19 14:00 - 16:00
The Center for Performance Studies is inviting you for coffee and conversation with Sara E. Freeman, a theatre historian from the University of Puget Sound. Professor Freeman will share an excerpt from her current book project. Her title is “Words and Images” an excerpt from Poetic Images and Dramatic Spaces: Staging Caryl Churchil, Naomi Iizuka, and Sarah Ruhl.“

Sara Freeman is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Puget Sound. Previously she taught at the University of Oregon, Illinois Wesleyan University, and Columbia College in Chicago. She holds an MA and PhD in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her historical scholarship concerns alternative British theatre and contemporary playwrights, and she maintains an active creative practice as a director and dramaturg.

Theatre in China in the 1950s
2019-02-15 14:00 - 16:00
Steven Liu, from the University of British Columbia, will engage us in conversation about theatre in China in the 1950s. Come and enjoy coffee and cookies as you listen to Professor Liu present new research.
