Category: Theory
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Ethnodrama and Her Opponent: The Drama in the Data
Originally published on HowlRound on May 26, 2017 Johnny Saldaña, author and Professor Emeritus of Theatre in the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts’ School of Film, Dance, and Theatre at Arizona State University (ASU), began his plenary speech on the second day of the NYU Steinhardt Program in Educational Theatre’s Forum on Ethnodrama by asking…
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Feminist Theatre: What Does it Do and How Does it Do it?
Originally published on HowlRound on September 14, 2016 It’s a fascinating time to be a feminist in the theatre. Thanks to The Kilroys, The Count, and women like Sumru Erkut and Ineke Ceder, we’ve made incredible progress in raising awareness of the lack of equity for women in our field. Actual change has been slower…
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So Diversity Is Important to You …
I wrote this satirical piece the other night out of frustration with Chicago’s Porchlight Theatre, which is doing In the Heights with white actors playing leading characters of color. Companies like Porchlight have oversimplified what it means to do diversity, believing apparently that saying they “tried” is enough. This is an oversimplification because it is actually complicated, difficult, and…
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Playing Shakespeare’s Men
Originally Published by HowlRound Though Shakespeare created around 798 male characters, his dramatic corpus contains only about 149 female ones. That’s a ratio of roughly sixteen to three. Yet every year the best conservatories accept at least as many women as men—if not more—and every year they graduate both men and women trained to act…
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Gender Flipping in Hollywood
Originally posted at Ms. It’s no secret that this summer’s movies suck for women. It’s been mentioned on Vulture. NPR did a story about it. The New York Times covered it. Even Fox News ran a piece about it. Yet Jodie Foster has a leading role in the new action movie Elysium. How’d she score…
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Feminism, the Internet, and the Imagination
To think it thinkable shortcuts no work and shields one from no responsibility. Quite the contrary, it may be a necessary prerequisite to assuming responsibility, and it invites the honorable work of radical imagination. — “On Being White,” by Marilyn Frye This paper was originally presented as part of WAM! LA’s 2013 Conference. 30 years…
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pedagogy of the non-oppressed
Since I rediscovered and posted one of my favorite bell hooks quotes the other day, I have been thinking about whether her pedagogy or any of those based on Paulo Freire‘s Pedagogy of the Oppressed are actually relevant to teaching today’s American college students. I asked this question once before, when at Marlboro College I…
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is this feminist?
Check out this hilarious tumblr.
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Style
“Style is knowing what kind of play you’re in.” – Sir John Gielgud
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Destabilizing Gender Through Performance
Part of a a collaboration between The Good Men Project and Role/Reboot on a special series about the End of Gender. Cross Posted at Ms. I am gendered, just not in all the ways you might think. Whatever part of my brain makes me like makeup and sparkly jewelry isn’t going away any more than…
Holly L. Derr 