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The Great Lakes Theater needs no introduction. It has been at the forefront of the regional theatre movement since the 1960s, with luminaries like Arthur Lithgow at the helm. Its impact both regionally and nationally makes it an ideal choice to stage a new production of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. Writer-composer Dave Malloy is a Cleveland native, and his strong connection to the artistic community of Cleveland and its suburb Lakewood runs parallel to the Great Lakes Theater’s.
As the afternoon began, the stage was set for a blurring of lines between company and audience; the curtain was raised before the house was even open. The Hanna Theatre already boasts bar and lounge-style seating, perfect for a musical that takes place in a Russian club. Onstage bar seating was available for a few lucky ticket holders, and the seats nearest the stage had been reimagined as art-deco bar seating so that audience members could place their elbows on the stage itself. The vibe created by the set continued for the entire evening, drawing us into a sense of being somewhere we shouldn’t go—but as long we were there, we might as well enjoy ourselves.
The dark red tones of the set bled into the theatre as backlit shelves full of liquor bottles hinted at the boozy haze that the characters would inhabit. For its 2016-17 Broadway run at the Imperial Theatre, the set design for Great Comet was positively Seussian in its deconstruction of the theatre space. Regional theatre may not have the freedom or the means to take sets quite that far, but the Great Lakes Theater still masterfully blurred the liminal spaces between stage and house, company and audience.
Bussert’s cast and a live (though hidden) orchestra conveyed an immediacy that sat within the script’s nineteenth-century setting. The ensemble transmitted a strong contemporary energy that defied gender binaries while evoking the panache and energy of a bygone era of tsarist grandeur. Their performances teasingly cajoled us into audience participation, clapping along and becoming part of the club scene that animated the entire performance.
Alex Syiek (Pierre Bezukhov) and the ensemble of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. (Photo courtesy of Great Lakes Theater.)
From the beginning, the ensemble made a strong case for the continued relevance of the material. Then, as now, a war was on. Still, ordinary people, while
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Mechtild Widrich, professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, demonstrates in her scholarship the major overlap between performance studies and art history. Her first book, Performative Monuments (2014), expands traditional conceptions of monuments, theorizing that they work as speech-acts engendering community building, especially following historical atrocities. Her second book, Monumental Cares, is an appraisal of the materialization of public history through and by a multidirectional (as opposed to site-specific) approach that addresses how “real and digital sites overlap and connect in subtle, capillary ways” (34). Widrich’s conceptualization of art geographies (how the physical environment, culture, history, and social dynamics of a place influence the creation, interpretation, and representation of performance art) coupled with her discussion about transparency and opacity (via screens and mirrors) demonstrate how bodies (engaged in performance art) activate cultural memory as well as acts of commemoration and activism in twenty-first-century performance artworks. She is especially concerned with how we express public care and how we care about our monuments. Wid-rich’s work resides in the multidisciplinary realm of public history, performance, and contemporary art, and thus, she often infers co-performance without using that specific term. Instead, Widrich uses words like “co-produce” and “co-presence” to describe something that a performance scholar would label as “co-performance”—especially in alignment with Dwight Conquergood and D. Soyini Madison’s pioneering work on co-performance and critical ethnography. [End Page 261]
Monumental Cares contends that sites of contemporary art are also performances of history, activism, and commemoration and that these performances, as well as their documentation and ephemera, are the materials of history—the materialization of public memory and social justice. In crafting her thesis, Widrich engages with social justice activism, political art, performance studies, architectural studies, public history, and memory work under the umbrella of art history, theory and criticism. A brief introduction and a conclusion bookend six chapters that alternate between Widrich’s theories and her case-study analyses. The odd-numbered chapters, then, are quite dense with Widrich’s conceptions for how history materializes in public performance/contempo
In 2007, Jean Graham-Jones coordinated a special issue of Theatre Journal dedicated to the topic of translation vis-à-vis theatre and performance. To my knowledge, it still remains the only occasion when a substantial discussion of that topic has taken place in the pages of the journal, including the recently published seventy-fifth anniversary issue. This brief essay is an effort to revisit that earlier, groundbreaking issue in the spirit of how Laura Edmondson ends her extensive editorial comment for the recent anniversary issue: as a coarticulation of “critique with desire,” a wish list for what might appear in the journal over the next seventy-five years.1
Graham-Jones has long been interested in theatre and translation, but the explicit point of departure in her editorial vision for that special issue of Theatre Journal was the contemporaneous developments in the fields of translation theory and practice. In what follows, I attempt to offer not just a review but also a reading, necessarily telegraphic, of what Graham-Jones variously calls “the complexity” intrinsic to “theatrical translation practices,” or “translation in performance,” to suggest that in any attempt to think “theatrical translation in performance,” the underlying, not always productive, disciplinary tension between the fields of theatre studies and performance studies might necessarily come undone.2
The translational turn in comparative literature and cultural studies and the cultural turn in translation studies in Anglo-US academia in the 1990s were marked by an extra- ordinary flourishing of theoretically inflected writing on the practice of translation that continued well into the next decade. Consider the following examples: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s now classic essay “The Politics of Translation” was published in 1992, as was Tejaswini Niranjana’s field-shaping book Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context; Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility was published soon after, in 1995, followed by Naoki Sakai’s influential Translation and Subjectivity in 1997. Among the most prominent books on the topic to appear in the following decade were Susan Bassnett’s widely read introduction to the field, Translation Studies (2002), Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), and Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood’s coedited volume Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (2006).3 These attempts at theorizing translation would often but [End Page E-11] not always appear under the sign of poststructuralism and deconstruction, a pattern that can perhaps be traced a
Abstract:
This essay takes as its central concern the historical transmission of Reza Abdoh’s performance works via their circulation in the artist’s retrospective exhibit at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in 2019. I analyze two interlaced defining features in the KW exhibition—archival remixing and viscerality—that the curators used to honor Abdoh’s artistic legacy. Focusing on the exhibit as a medium of performance historiography in diaspora, this essay argues that the multimedia installation of Abdoh’s archival work in the exhibition format utilized performance archives to create a haptic and visceral site of historiography and memory.
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Written and compiled during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Taylor Mac Book is a celebration not only of the legacy and work of performance artist Taylor Mac but also of the magic and power of live performance as a form of communal ritual and queer kinship. This comprehensive collection surveys the life and career of one of New York’s most celebrated performing artists, offering a much-needed critical and contextual analysis of Mac’s work from the early 2000s to present day, especially their pathbreaking immersive marathon performance A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (added as a documentary to HBO’s streaming platform MAX in 2023). Expertly edited by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb, two of the field’s leading scholars of queer performance, and published in the LGBTQ-focused Triangulations Series, the book positions itself as one that not only celebrates the dazzling career of a singular artist but also recognizes the collaborative nature of both queer [End Page 258] performance and scholarship, advancing theoretical conversations surrounding queer legacy, time, kinship and mentorship, intergenerational exchange, and the importance of a queer archive—themes that dovetail with the previous scholarly contributions of its distinguished editors.
While the volume’s structure mainly follows a chronological path through Mac’s life and career, the editors playfully encourage readers to forge their own queer path in our engagement with the book. While this is a welcome invitation (especially in the age of digital consumption), I urge readers to engage with the book in its entirety, in any order, to fully glean Mac’s theatrical legacy and influence on queer performance and scholarship more broadly. While the editors recognize that no single study could be fully comprehensive, they have ensured a multifocal study on Mac’s theatrical genius that features nearly two dozen diverse contributors, ranging from scholars, artist-collaborators, and Taylor Mac themself.
Mac is known for their genderfuck style of performing, actively deconstructing binary gender norms onstage while questioning society’s hetero-normative values. Mac’s chosen stage pronoun, “judy,” reflects their dragging of gender onstage, although the editors remind us that Mac is not trans-gender in daily life. In a 2019 interview quoted in the book’s introduction, Mac states, “my gender is performer because I feel like I
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The words “Byggmeister Angst” flashed in neon above the stage throughout Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s eight-and-a-half-hour performance of Henrik Ibsen’s Byggmeister Solness (The Master Builder, 1892). The production was the ninth installment of the duo’s Ibsen-Saga (2006-), a self-proclaimed six-hundred-year project to stage Ibsen’s œuvre as interconnected performances unified by a singular aesthetic. The two performances of Byggmeister Solness I attended uncharacteristically abandoned the Saga’s use of artistic ambition as a pretext to challenge institutional limits. Now on their second production of a five-year residency at Oslo’s Det Norske Teatret, Vinge and Müller officially reside in the resource-rich belly of the institutional beast. Emerging from Oslo’s free scene—and the relatively permissive environs of Berlin—the Saga’s oppositional aesthetics now share a season with a major theatre’s marquee production of the Disney musical Frost. Rather than stage a grand Ibsenian conflict, Vinge and Müller dramatized their angsty acquiescence to the institution hosting them by transforming The Master Builder into a musical about safety.
Ragnar and the builders sing the opening overture in Byggmeister Solness. (Photo: Ole Herman Andersen.)
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Solness oversees his builders in Byggmeister Solness. (Photo: Ole Herman Andersen.)
The production retained the Saga’s hallmark aesthetics and associative dramaturgy. Directed by Vinge, designed by Müller, and composed by Trond Reinholdtsen (all of whom performed in the piece as well), the production combined cartoon-ish artificiality (hand-painted scenography and masked performers gesturing to prerecorded text and sound effects) and extreme reality (destruction, excreta, and stunts). Solness was an old vampiric god in a diaper; his gory crimes and the lives of his victims were presented in stage action and in live and prerecorded films. Solness drank the blood of his apprentice Ragnar Brovik and beat Old Brovik to a pulp, used his assistant Kaja as a canvas for his “artistic juice” (ejaculate), sexually abused the prepubescent Hilda Wangel in spectacles evoking coprophilia and suicide, and, with the help of Dr. Herdel, sedated his wife Aline, who mourned their deceased daughters. These brutalities were filtered t
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For nearly half a century, South Africa’s National Arts Festival (NAF) has been the premier platform for the artistic state of the nation. Its most recent outing in 2023 marked a hearty post-pandemic rebound, with ticket sales doubling from the previous year’s initial tentative return to live performance. At the same time, COVID’s long interregnum also allowed the festival’s organizers to take stock and adjust the status quo, most notably by substantially curtailing the number of productions featured on the fringe program. This contraction marked a striking departure from the fringe’s previous centrality to the festival’s identity and branding as the second largest after Edinburgh’s. The decision was at its root pragmatic: plagued by years of nationwide rolling blackouts (also known as load-shedding) interrupting performances, the NAF would now limit all performances to venues with a backup generator. Nevertheless, this ethos of strategic contraction had a galvanizing effect on the eleven-day festival as a whole. In prioritizing smaller-scale, local stories and idioms over spectacle and size, the festival thrived with a tighter, more personal focus. Playing to its strengths of combining multiple forms and incubating new voices, 2023’s festival strikingly foregrounded work by Black feminist artists, often working in Indigenous languages.
A broader trend toward responsive, genre-bending, site-specific performance was apparent in the work of the winners of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Awards. Given a platform at the festival to execute their visions, the winning artists—and their work—provided a model for how constricted performance aesthetics can often inspire spatial reimagination. As an illustrative example, three of the six artists honored—all Black women—staged performance installations at the hulking Settlers Monument complex, a location where generators could be depended on to keep the lights on. Lady Skollie, an Indigenous artist of Khoi descent, used the apartheid-era arts center built to memorialize British colonizers to interrogate the absence of her ancestors from the historical and artistic record. Transforming the bowels of the building into an exhibition of Indigenous rock art, which has largely been destroyed in South Africa, Groot Gat (Big Hole) re-created cave art in situ. The result—referencing capitalist extraction in the famed Big Hole Kimberly diamond mine while also celebrating women’s vaginas as a creative force— served as a South African iteration of the Great Hole of History (introduced in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play). Rather than depicting the ar
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In the wake of tremendous upheaval at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), from leadership turnover to the COVID-19 pandemic to wildfires to audiences balking at a reduction in plays by Shakespeare in favor of new works by diverse playwrights, OSF produced a “Season of Love” in 2023. This season featured five live productions, down from eleven in previous years: Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Rent, The Three Musketeers, and the one-person tour-de-force Where We Belong. Showcasing beloved titles aimed at bringing back audiences still reluctant to go to live theatre, the “Season of Love” generally avoided the hard-hitting contemporary socio-political issues recent productions have explored (institutional racism, gender identity, queer love) and focused instead on widely appealing themes of romance, connection, and family (both found and biological).
Despite the move toward programming with broad appeal, no doubt intended to boost the organization’s financial outlook, OSF emailed patrons in April 2023, on the eve of opening, with a plea entitled “Save Our Season,” informing the theatregoing community that the entire 2023 season might be shut down due to lack of funds: “Right now, OSF is in crisis. . . . We see the path forward to sustained success, but we need your help to get there. We have set an ambitious goal of raising $2.5 million dollars over the next four months in order to save our season and to help us continue producing the world-class theatre that keeps you coming back home to OSF year after year.” Two months later, the organization had met that goal and issued another, more ambitious one: $7.3 million to complete the season. Robust community support for the festival, paired with a crowd-pleasing season, generated a better financial outlook for the festival than it has enjoyed in recent years.
But financial woes are only one of the challenges the organization faced this season. After a series of separations and furloughs in January, Artistic Director Nataki Garrett stepped into the position of interim executive director, a role she juggled with her artistic director duties and her work as director of Romeo and Juliet. Yet, on the eve of the production’s opening night, it was announced that Garrett was stepping down as artistic director, ending a tumultuous three years at the helm of the 88-year-old festival. In July, Tim Bond was announced as Garrett’s successor. He is a familiar face at OSF, having directed How I Learned What I Learned in 2022 and serving as the festival’s associate artistic director for eleven seasons, from 1996 through 200
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