Sonja Arsham Kuftinec

Educating the Creative Theatre Artist

A few months ago, I had a revelatory experience about theatre education. I invited Michael Rohd to conduct a late afternoon workshop employing Image Theatre techniques and storytelling to explore community and conflict. As always I was worried about attendance, given the setting of the University of Minnesota: a large state university with an overabundance of programming and a student population with many live-at-home commuters.

Prose and cons: theatrical encounters with students and prisoners in Ma'asiyahu, Israel

This article details how a unique educational project conducted through Tel Aviv Universitys Community Theatre program tackled the complex dynamics of the prison-political system over nine months in 2005–2006. The program focused on theatrical facilitations between mainly female students and male prisoners—two more or less homogenous groups that represent polarized social sub-cultures. Drawing on the work of Martin Buber, Carl Rogers, and Augusto Boal, the prison theatre project proposed that theatrical encounters between these two polarized groups allows for deeper knowledge of oneself and ones subject position in relation to society. This activist therapeutic theatre model differs from most Boal-based Theatre of the Oppressed practices that tend to work mostly with isolated oppressed groups. The Tel Aviv program also differs from other prison theatre projects in Israel by moving from a model of individual transformation towards the examination of social structures, and in involving students as equal partners in the group process. The students represent the ‘normative society’ to which the prisoners will return. Thus, the prisoners rehearse being in ethical, rather than ‘normative’, relation to this society, working out ways of being—and being with one another—rather than merely adhering to externally determined guidelines for behaviour.

Staging the City with the Good People of New Haven

In 1997 Long Wharf Theatre’s newly appointed Artistic Director, Doug Hughes, arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, driven to discover his adopted city’s “center of civic energy.”2 This energy seemed absent from a site whose diverse neighborhoods appeared disconnected from each other and from a cohesive sense of urban identity. Theatre, he believed, could draw together the urban community and allow the city to look at itself.3 Yet, Hughes understood that the historical relationship between New Haven and its professional resident theatres had been as fraught and disconnected as the urban terrain seemed to be. Both the Yale Repertory and the Long Wharf theatres focused their energies on producing classical texts and new works, unreflective of New Haven, and cast mainly with New York actors. In order to begin revising the relationship between the theatre and the city, Hughes decided he needed not only to reflect New Haven via a representational narrative and semiotically resonant production, but also by inviting the city onstage, casting local residents alongside professional actors. And he knew just the company to work with: Cornerstone Theater.

Viewpoints on Israeli-Palestinian Theatrical Encounters

Operating from distinct geographical and experiential locations, the authors of this chapter have, over several years, exchanged ideas about adopting Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques with youth in conflict regions. Having identified dialogue as the fundamental principle of TO, they deploy a conversational format to propose how interactive theatre can productively work with both occupied (Palestinian) and threatened (Jewish Israeli) youth. This dialogue illuminates how adaptations of TO generate situations of identification with the Other and raise consciousness about the operations of power and oppression in the region while modeling political alliance within the facilitation context. In Viewpoints Theatre and follow-up programming, the medium promotes the message of creative collaboration while also prompting reflection and transformation from the youth spectators. The young people come to understand the political situation of the Other, particularly the dynamics of occupation, through direct and indirect encounter. These theatrical encounters reflect an expansion of Boal’s TO model. While Boal mainly focuses on homogenous groups of the oppressed, the authors work with encounter, believing that both groups of Palestinian and Israeli youth gain a fuller humanity through this process that acknowledges and transforms power relationships.

Introduction: Reflections on DREAM Acts—Performance as Refuge, Resistance, and Renewal: ATHE Conference, Scottsdale, Arizona, 24–27 July 2014

Annual ATHE convenings can have the feel of contemporary nomadism. I have awoken in curtained bedrooms or paused in well-appointed lobbies wracking my brains to recall whether I was in San Francisco, Denver, or Dallas. We flow through such hauntingly similar hotel spaces that we can become ungrounded by location. ATHE conference vice presidents have worked to counter this sense of what cultural theorist Zygmunt Bauman has characterized as “liquid modernity” with, for example, offsite play dates in Orlando or inhouse playwrights in Toronto. Yet, our comfortable base locations have on occasion provoked productive discomfort—about hotel unionization in San Francisco, or Stand Your Ground legislation in Florida. While no site is unburdened by historical or legislative complexities, our chosen location in Arizona provoked more visible dissent, more profound questions, and more forcefully stated proposals to boycott the conference in the face of the state’s discriminatory legislation.

Theatre for women's participation in sustainable development

‘creative’ and its use in government policy and the business sectors. Harvie examines the government’s turn towards looking to nurture and train artists and people as creative entrepreneurs. She alludes to both the positive and, predominantly, negative outcomes of this shift, namely the emphasis on personal improvement, profit-making and individual success over more collective aims, an approach that encourages a stratified, disproportionate society and negates a sense of fairness and egalitarianism. In Chapter 3, Harvie concentrates on space. She marks this as a contentious issue within our urban environment, both theoretically and physically. Highlighting the process of gentrification that sweeps through our nation, she critiques the ‘creative city’ phenomenon and questions its motives and consequences. She notes a tendency to displace communities and further widen the gap between rich and poor: those who are socially mobile and those who are socially static. Here she displays a struggle that art within this context has at its core – the practice of socially engaged art holds the possibility to advocate change, empowerment and social interaction but, in the same vein, can inadvertently advocate and promote what Harvie describes as ‘neo-liberal governmentality’. In this chapter there is also important attention paid to housing with an interesting section devoted to contemporary art work that utilises home and structural habitat as its stimulus, including work by Michael Landy, Rachel Whiteread, Roger Hiorns and Marcus Coates. In the closing chapter of the book, Harvie focuses on funding and capital, examining the sustainability of the arts in the UK amidst austerity cuts and privatisation. Rather than solely and fruitlessly condemning governmental actions, Harvie looks forward – for opportunities – and discusses ways of adapting within the current climate for the arts to not only survive, but also flourish. Throughout the study Harvie highlights her theories and establishes clear concepts but does so with an air of open invitation. Rather than committing to a fundamental argument that drives the book down a one-way street, Harvie encourages us as the reader to question and contemplate her words and in turn question our own practice, art and research. She is prompting us to critically engage with the material conditions that surround art and performance today. The book is engaging and develops fluidly, articulating its theoretical voice, interspersed with artistic examples which both illuminate the points made and provide an opportunity to revisit notable work, exploring their material surroundings and contextualising them in an age of neoliberalism.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival (review)

Several recent studies in dance and performance scholarship have dwelt on the complexities of historical re-performance both on and off the stage. Yet, perhaps because the practice is deemed so normative, at least since the emergence of the auteurdirector in late-nineteenth-century Europe, what it means to re-perform dramatic texts in theatre has not been addressed with as much focused attention. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s (OSF) 2012 season— its seventy-seventh—offered several opportunities to think through re-performance, as well as how the festival stages history in the present. The season reengaged classical Shakespearean and Greek plays and various iterations of a Chinese folktale while also commissioning new productions exploring turning points in US history. Taken together, these retakes on classic plays and past events enabled a reexamination of the limits of the state in legislating civil rights, international conflicts, family structures, and appropriate gender roles.