Project Description

Comprehensively, across the American theatre – in training institutions, community theatres, and professional theatres of every size and caliber – the imperative to address institutionalized racism and sexism internally and in outward-facing programming has registered. The pandemic years provided opportunities for theatre-makers, scholars, and artist-scholars to consult, reimagine, and reset this cultural industry (as Columbia University professor Anne Bogart calls it, initiating “Theatre 2.0”). Whereas hiring and casting, season planning and outreach, and conceiving and rehearsing productions during the current period of reflection aptly embrace repertoires more likely to feature work by living artists from historically under- represented communities, there is an equally powerful charge to “decolonize” theatre’s history. Repertoire from the period associated with global entrenchment of colonialism and the unprecedented wealth resulting from conversion of virgin lands into agriculture coincides, in Europe and the Americas, with the creation of stunningly beautiful works of Baroque opera and dance as well as the proliferation of drama and comedy. During the long eighteenth century (1650–1830), plays, libretti, choreography, and scores – as creative documents of social consensus and dissensus – absorbed and enacted the paradoxes of the ongoing terror of slavery, emerging relations between social categories determined by early capitalism, religious and ethnic biases, consequences of environmental change across the Americas, and disappropriation and genocide of Indigenous peoples. The repertoire reflects its times; these times impact our society; so, to understand this repertoire is to reckon with the legacies of the past and to tell their truth.

As challenging as it can be to reexamine this repertoire, what it shows about the past is not to be bemoaned or ignored, but to be faced, understood in its complexity, and added to the cultural work of truth and reconciliation. In this spirit, this Seminar series asks how the interpretation and performance of repertoires from the long eighteenth century  can, in Christina Sharpe’s words “observe and mediate this un/survival” and expand the scope of historical understanding and affective experience in the twenty-first century by “imagining otherwise” based on “what we know now.” Like Shakespearean repertoire, its potential for interpretation is boundless. Unlike Shakespearean repertoire, which is considered de facto universal, work from the long eighteenth century can be approached with fewer preconceptions about conventions, meanings, and usages. The USA’s history as both colonized and colonizer, and its entanglements with imperialization as both recipient and perpetrator, suggest an imperative to undertake this cultural work.

By combining multiple skillsets and points of view, “On Decolonizing Theatre” explores ways to advance this compelling inquiry. This must be neither monolithic nor fixed to a single perspective. Allowing myriad stances from which to examine the motives, desires, conduct, and consequences of the past and to relate it to the present will facilitate a process of cultural rediscovery and self-critique allied to the critical practices of making performances.

Sometimes, a work’s engagement with “decolonizing” or “deimperializing” strategies occurs by recoding elements for performance. And sometimes a “decolonizing” critique is already at the forefront of a work. Much repertoire from the period contains critique (or counter-positions) that question the values and consequences, human costs, and mores of multi-vectoral colonialism. For example, Handel’s   Tamerlano (1719) and Aaron Hill’s Zara (1736) challenge orientalist stereotypes of Sultanic despotism, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Such Things Are (1787) and Mariana Starke’s The Widow of Malabar (1791) critique British colonial policy in India. While many critiques tilting to the East and can be redirected and reset to make a different analogy today, the complex history of colonization in the Americas was equally in question in works from the period and can be updated to address the topics anew. John Gay’s ballad opera Polly (1729) makes dark fun of corrupt and greedy colonists and dramatizes the outlaw counterculture of violence and racism that colonialism created in the Caribbean; these premises have a long tail into the present. In Aphra Behn’s The Widdow Ranter (1689), American colonists struggle amongst themselves for power while seeking to destroy Indigenous monarchs; a gender- bending widow emerges as the hero amidst colonial chaos and conflict. In such a case, casting and stylistic choices can sharpen critique to become trans-historical. Through frequent reperformance in Europe and America, such repertoire reflected as well as challenged contemporaneous opinions, mores, and behaviors. It can still speak to these circumstances, as well as the legacies of what is depicted.

Dialogues between theatre-makers and scholars will explore how modern production practice can broach the historical past to foster understanding of how scholarship and theatrical practices produce perspectives that can resist and decenter eighteenth-century ideologies. This cross-sector involvement and cross-temporal focus are crucial to ensure that multiple skill sets are involved; equally importantly, minoritarian and subaltern perspectives are recentered, respecting best practices for building anti-racist, diverse, and inclusive performance and scholarship. The faculty partners will bring many institutional and regional communities into the project – to do otherwise, however well-meaning, has a potential to perpetuate rather than rupture exclusionary or marginalizing forms of erasure – yet given that Northwestern University is a predominantly white institution there is a lot of reparative work to do that involves white-identifying faculty, and it is crucial that they come to the table too. This is not  intended to induce what Stó:lō theatre scholar Dylan Robinson calls shxwelítemelh (hungry listening) among participants with dominant-culture identities, but rather to embrace a “zone of awkward engagement” wherein there are different affinities to the idea of engagement itself. Only by attempting this can Black, Indigenous, LGBTQIA, and other perspectives be feasible across academic and  artistic spheres.