Project Abstract
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-18th 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-18th 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 21st 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-18th 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.
Investigators
Tracy C. Davis
Tracy C. Davis (Barber Professor of Performing Arts) specializes in the historiography methodologies of theatre and performance research, 19th-century theatre history, economics and business history of theatre, performance theory, gender and theatre, museum studies, and Cold War studies. She has published a dozen books and over 100 articles in journals dedicated to the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She is the Theatre Department’s Mentoring Champion and has provided trainings for faculty, undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs to improve mentoring skill, at Northwestern and at universities across the globe. Two books are forthcoming: Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires: Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform and The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies (both with Cambridge UP).
Ivy Wilson (Ph.D. Yale University) teaches courses on the comparative literatures of the black diaspora and U.S. literary studies with a particular emphasis on African American culture. His book, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism (Oxford UP), interrogates how the figurations and tropes of blackness were used to produce the social equations that regulated the cultural meanings of U.S. citizenship and traces how African American intellectuals manipulated the field of aesthetics as a means to enter into political discourse about the forms of subjectivity and national belonging. Along with articles in ESQ, Arizona Quarterly, and PMLA, his other work in U.S. literary studies includes edited volumes on James Monroe Whitfield, Albery Allson Whitman, Walt Whitman, and on the emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the “long” nineteenth century. His current research interests focus on the solubility of nationalism in relationship to theories of the diaspora, global economies of culture, and circuits of the super-national and sub-national.
Jesse Rosenberg is a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century Italian opera, with articles published on Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi and papers read at national and international conferences on opera and film music history. His research interests include musical aesthetics and the convergence of music with fields such as literature, poetry, and theology. Rosenberg is a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (Macmillan, 1992), Pipers Enzyclopädie des Musiktheaters (Pipers, 1996), and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Macmillan, 2000). He received the Outstanding Dissertation Award and Excellence in Teaching Award from New York University and is on the Faculty Honor Roll at Northwestern University.