THE WPP WEBSITE!
by Emily on OCTOBER 10, 2006:
Welcome to our new site! Keep checking back because
there's much more coming.
JOHN O'NEAL
by Joe Roach on OCTOBER 16, 2006:
John O'Neal, master American story-teller and founder of the Free Southern Theatre, is the best artist I can think of to get the World Performance Project at Yale off to a good start, because the world begins at home.
John and I met in New Orleans ten years ago. We worked together on a project, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Tulane Law School, to use popular performance to raise consciousness in the community about issues of environmental justice. We collaborated with the Roadside Theatre, a troupe from Appalachia, on "Junebug / Jack," a two person show, which put John's celebrated character, "Junebug Jabbo Jones," in cahoots with "Jack," the archetypical poor white. The point of the show, made with the toe-tapping infusion of the Blues and Blue Grass, was that poor people, black and white, are the most likely to be downriver and downwind of toxic waste, seeing as how PCBs are an affirmative-action, equal-opportunity carcinogen. Their effects are at once worldwide and close to home.
This sounds pretty solemn and serious-minded, and it needed to be - before Katrina Louisiana had a higher infant-mortality rate than Sri Lanka's or Costa Rica's - but it was also a hand-clapping, foot-stomping, get-out-the-vote blast.
Now John is touring with "Don't Start Me Talking or I'll Tell You Everything I Know: Sayings form the Life and Writings of Junebug Jabbo Jones (Volume 1)," and we are very lucky to get him to lead off the World Performance Project at Yale, which we also intend to be a serious-minded blast, as research projects in the Arts and Humanities ought to be more often.
Spells
by Joe Roach on OCTOBER 21, 2006:
In the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, audiences hear magical silences
coming
between even more magical words. She calls these moments "spells."
They
dramatize her notion of "the Great Hole of History." Digging itself
into a
memory hole, insidious history competes with flagrant simulation as a
way
of forgetting the past. So her stories must look for other languages
to
effect their retelling-languages of evocation, of image, of gesture,
of
sound, and especially of silence-languages, in short, spoken fluently
only
by the spellbound. In this quest, her languages seek the theater even
as
they resist surrendering their unsettling meanings to its reassuring
but
inhibiting conventions of time, place, and action. They seek the
theater
because they depend on its fateful intersection of persons, times, and
places astride the abyss of a history that disappears before it can be
written and then reappears only as performance. They seek the theater
because it is the last, best place where the enormity of the
consequences
of certain historic geographies can still be vividly enacted if not
precisely mapped. They seek the theater, finally, because it is the
place
where spells can either follow significant revelations or create
the
emotional space into which revelation can enter. At any instant, any
audience member can break the spell of the theater; conversely, it
takes
everybody in the theater to cast one.
E. PATRICK JOHNSON
by Joe Roach on FEBRUARY 15, 2006:
E. Patrick Johnson chairs the department of performance studies at Northwestern University. He also performs--in spoken word, in gesture, and in song. I first met him when he acted in all of those capacities simultaneously. The occasion was a most solemn and moving one, the memorial service for our mutual friend and inspiring colleague, Dwight Conquergood, late professor of performance studies at NU. A performance ethnographer, Dwight developed observer-participant methods of interactive fieldwork, engaging communities of the dispossessed from Hmong refugees in camps along the Thai border to multi-ethnic gangs in the Chicago projects. Over his thirty-year career in the classroom and in the world, he encouraged the transformation of the academic field of oral interpretation, which pursues the expressive elocution of serious literature, to performance studies, which undertakes the serious interpretation of expressive behaviors of all kinds.
Dwight may have been the best speaker I ever knew; he was certainly the best listener. His untimely death in 2004 at age 59 was a needle to the heart.
Directing the service, which involved a number of Dwight's students offering tributes and sharing memories, Professor Johnson, an angel-voiced tenor, also sang the eulogy. His offering to his mentor prompted me to reflect on the meanings of the word voice. As distinctively particular to each of us as our eyes, voice is a capacity to produce sound by the action of lungs, larynx, and resonators that is shared by all vertebrates. Voice is also what lucky poets find when they become most unlike all other poets. Voice is cognate to invocation, evocation, and most urgently, vocation. Voice is thus a call, drawing people together, and a calling, drawing them individually along their chosen or fated paths.
In Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke, 2003), and in Black Queer Studies (Duke, 2005), co-edited with Mae Henderson, E. Patrick Johnson has introduced us to his scholarly voice--eloquent, critical, and authoritative.
The enthusiastic reception of Appropriating Blackness is attested to by book prizes from both the Speech Communication Association and the American Society for Theatre Research. One can see why the judges responded the way they did. A well-written combination of ethnography and memoir, in which the dialogic exchange with the informants flows from the empathic but assertive presence of the investigator, Appropriating Blackness applies Conquergood's observer-participant model, developed in his work with displaced persons and urban gang-bangers, to the experiences of a black, gay, gospel-singing, world-traveling grandson of Hickory, North Carolina. Chapter 4, "Never Had Uh a Cross Word," for example, in which Johnson recounts life of his grandmother in domestic service, is a gripping essay. Tautly narrated, scrupulously fair to the informants, and finally devastating, it slowly reveals the message it carries about race and society in America through a series of harrowing unmaskings, like removing a bandage from a festering wound. But it also adheres to a most rigorous protocol of performance ethnography: to listen without empathy, without a dialogic imagination, is to fail to hear the voice of the informant.
Thus possessed of a most distinctive voice of his own and a fine ear for others, E. Patrick Johnson has assembled an extraordinary collection of previously unheard voices--those of men who grew up black and gay in the Deep South. "Sweet Tea: An Oral History of Black Gay Men in the South" is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press, but Dr. Johnson is also publishing his findings alive, aloud, and in person as "Pouring Tea," his one-man show based on his fieldwork, which is coming to Nick Chapel in Trumbull College on Monday, February 26. We are glad to partner with the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities and African American Studies to bring Dr. Johnson to Yale.
2007-2008 WPP Season
by Joseph Roach & Emily Coates on , OCTOBER 12, 2007:
The 2007-2008 World Performance Project season is nothing if not unexpected. With artists from the Netherlands, Peru, the Czech Republic, West Africa and the United States, our series of performances, symposia, and courses will challenge you to reconsider the relationship between the performing arts and scholarly research at Yale.
This year, we launch our partnership with the Yale Repertory Theater with a new international series. Complementing these events, a program of symposia and smaller-scale performances will take place at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. Joseph Roach’s DeVane Lectures explore the critical methods of performance studies that allow students to engage with the ideas at stake in performance. Finally, a stellar lineup of Theater Studies courses offers students the opportunity to dig deeply into the history and theory of dance, theater, and design.
There is a master plan behind the World Performance Project. Drawing from the laboratory-based, collaborative methods of the sciences, WPP aims to pioneer a new model for humanistic research that brings together scholars and artists as they create new knowledge. Such a laboratory would enable both publications marked by an intimate understanding of art forms and top-notch performances profoundly engaged with ideas.
Bring your thoughts, creativity, and dreams! This laboratory awaits your presence.
Joseph Roach, Principal Investigator
Emily Coates, Artistic Director
