Past Events
November 19, 2009
Show & Tell / Q&A with Maury Yeston
Maury Yeston is an American composer, lyricist, arranger, educator and musicologist.
He is best known for writing the music and lyrics to Broadway musicals, including Nine in 1982, and Titanic in 1997, both of which won Tony Awards for best musical and best score. He also won a Drama Desk Award for Nine. Yeston serves on the Board of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is also President of the Kleban Foundation, serves on the editorial boards of Musical Quarterly and the Kurt Weill Foundation Publication Project and on the advisory board of the Yale University Press Broadway Series.
Yeston's current projects include producing his musical version of the film Death Takes a Holiday and the film version of Nine, staring Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, and Sophia Loren.
November 12, 2009
Chhau Lecture and Workshop
Chhau is a genre of masked dance from Eastern India. Drawing on the tales of the Ramayana, this form uses spectacular costumes and masks to bring to life the epic characters. The universal good versus evil story is told through an episodic structure using live music & highly stylized bodily movement.
Pradhuman Nayak will be leading the workshop and discussion. He is a native of Jharkhand, India and has performed in the tradiional dance and music forms of the region since childhood. Nayak is currently an artist-in-residence with Akhra: the Dancing Grounds, Inc., a Boston-based organization presenting Contemporary World Music and Dance artists.
The lecture will take place from 1:00-2:20pm in Lyman 211. The workshop will take place from 6:00pm-8:00pm in Ashamu.
November 3, 2009
Tim Crouch performs An Oak Tree
According to playwright andperformer Tim Crouch, "An Oak Tree is a play for two actors. I am one of
them. Each night the second actor will change: for each performance I will be joined by an actor who has neither seen nor read the play they are about to be in. The story we will tell on stage will be as new to him or her as it is to the audience."
The Obie-Award winning play will be presented November 3rd at 8:00pm in Leeds Theatre. For more information on Tim Crouch, visit his website at newsfromnowhere.net.
October 30, 2009
Performance/Lecture by Big Dance Theater
Founded in 1991, Big Dance Theater is known for its inspired use of dance, music, text and visual design to expand and refract literary texts, weaving disparate sources and forms into seamless theatrical wholes.
Big Dance Theatre will be performing and speaking in Ashamu on Friday, October 30th at 4:00pm. For more information, visit bigdancetheatre.org.
October 24-November 1, 2009
RPM Open Playlabs
The Department of Africana studies will be presenting the work of undergraduate RPM playwrights this October 24th through November 1st at the Rites and Reason Theatre. The shows will be:
Out of Bounds, by Isissa komada-John - Oct 24, 7:00pm
No Comment, by Kathleen Braine - Oct 25, 3:00pm
Sore, by Janine Heath - Oct 30, 7:00pm
Mask Dances, by Franny Choi - Oct 31, 7pm
Skin Deep, by Liz Morgan - Nov 1, 3pm
and, coming in March of 2010, Road Map, by Fedna Jacquet.
The Playlabs, which focus on creative process, support undergraduate RPM playwriting students in the development of plays. Each playlab will be followed by a Folkthought: a post-play discussion with the playwright, director, mentor, audience, cast and designers.
For more information, visit the Department of Africana Studies
October 28, 2009
Professor Mitra Presents: "Safdar Hashmi: Marxist/Martyr"
Shayoni Mitra, visiting assistant professor in Brown's Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, will give a presentation on the life and work of street theater activist Safdar Hashmi.
Her focus will be on the thorny contradictions thrown up by his highly publicized murder by assault during a performance in Delhi, and the relative anonymity of large parts of his own creative oeuvre. Gifted writer, playwright, lyricist, artist, actor, singer, director, Hashmi was committed to and informed by Left ideology in every instance of his work. Yet his death has moved far beyond the realm of electoral party politics to become a symbol for the very freedom of creative expression in contemporary South Asia.
Mitra comes to this topic as a scholar and actor, having performed with Jana Natya Manch, the group Hashmi started, from 2000-2003. In the years since she has been returning to Delhi each year to further her research and continue her collaborations with the theater community there.
Visuals and footage from Hashmi's funeral and Lalit Vachani's film "Natak Jari Hai" (The Play Goes On, 2006) will be used.
This event is part of the Brown Faculty India Presentations sponsored by the Year of India. It will take place on Wednesday, October 28 at 12:00PM, in the Anthropology Department, Room 212, Giddings House, 128 Hope Street.
October 22, 2009
Ana Elena Puga presents: "Poor Enrique and Poor Maria,
or the Political Economy of Suffering in Two Migrant Melogramas"
Professor Ana Elena Puga, of Northwestern University, will be speaking on October 22 at 2:30pm in Lyman Hall, room 211.
Ana Elena Puga specializes in contemporary Latin American theatre. Besides literature and 
criticism, her interests include dramaturgy, translation, and performance. She has published an anthology of translations of plays by Chilean writer Juan Radrigán, Finished from the Start and Other Plays, with Northwestern University Press. Her study of five South American playwrights who tried to resist dictatorship, Allegory, Memory, and Testimony: Upstaging Dictatorship will be published by Routledge in 2008. Before earning her DFA, Puga worked as a journalist for ten years, including three years in Latin America. Together with several theatrical collaborators, Puga founded LaMicro Theater, which is dedicated to producing Latin American and US Latino plays.
October 16, 2009
'Is this a holiday?'
On the time of theatrical work in
Godard's La chinoise and Hermanis's Sound of Silence
A lecture/discussion by
Professor Nicholas Ridout, Queen Mary University of London
Nicholas Ridout is Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, and of Theatre and Ethics, co-editor, with Joe Kellleher, of Contemporary Theatres in Europe, and, also with Joe Kelleher, and members of the company, co-author of The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio.
The graduate colloquium will be held on Friday, October 16 at 4 p.m. in Lyman Hall, room 211. All are invited.
october 16 -18, 2009
Family Weekend Dance Concert
This year's Family Weekend Dance Concert features Dance Extension performing "Off Like a Prom Dress," and New Works/ World Traditions performing "ROAD HOME: Riding on the Backs of Giants (part one)."
The concert will be held on Friday October 16 & Saturday October 17 at 8:00pm and on Sunday, October 18 at 2:00pm, in the newly remodelled Ashamu Dance Studo. Tickets are available at brown.edu/tickets. Discounted floor tickets will only be available at the door the day of the show.
October 19, 2009
Panel Discussion: Art & Genocide
On October 19th, at 7:30pm, come to the Rites and Reason Theatre for a panel discussion on Art & Genocide. Co-produced by the Department of Africana Studies and the MFA Directing and Acting Programs at Trinity Repertory Company.
October 9 & 10, 2009
4X4
4 plays by 4 playwrights
4x4 is a festival of short new works, sponsored in part by the Creative Arts Council. Featuring the work of 2nd year MFA Playwrights, including Why I Don't Want To Go To Yoga Class With You by Mallery Avidon, Just a Game by Mia Chung, Four Squareby Jackie Sibblies, and Home is Another Plane by Joe Waechter.
The festival will take place in the Rites and Reason Theatre on October 9th and 10th at 8pm. Tickets are FREE. For more information, email 4x4Plays@gmail.com.
october 3, 2009
A Panel on Asian Theatre
and Cross-Cultural Performance
to celebrate the career of Professor John Emigh
Join us on Saturday, October 3rd, to celebrate the contributions Professor John Emigh has made to the fields of Asian Theatre and Cross-Cultural Performance with a conference featuring the speakers Bill Beeman, Claire Conceison, I Made Bandem, John Rouse, Carol Sorgenfrei, Donna Wulff, Rylan Brenner, Kate Bornstein, and Daniel Alexander Jones.
The panel will be in Leeds Theatre in Lyman Hall from 2:00 - 5:00pm. For more information, contact Professor Patricia Ybarra at patricia_ybarra@brown.edu.
For a complete list of speakers and schedule of events, see the program here (as a pdf).
To view photos from the this panel, click here. Thanks to Julie Strandberg for taking and posting these pictures!
September 18, 2009
José Enrique Macián to Present
Still Gestus: Gestural Remains, Tableaus,
and the Haunted Theatres of Heiner Müller and Dimiter Gotscheff
This Friday, September 18th, recent Brown grad José Enrique Macián will present the Artist/Scholar's talk "Still Gestus: Gestural Remains, Tableaux, and the Haunted Theatres of Heiner Müller and Dimiter Gotscheff" in Lyman Hall, the Cave, at 2:00pm.
As a writer, Heiner Müller developed a visual dramaturgy to unbalance the written word. Layering quotations and allusions in a process of digging up the past, he understood the power of art as producing a desire for a future different from the present. Müller sustained this bombardment of references in his work as a director, developing a use of Brechtian gestus and creating a stage picture based on images from art history and visual culture to confront the performance text. Müller’s work in the theatre has continued into the 21st Century through the work of a newer generation of directors. The Bulgarian-born Dimiter Gotscheff, popularly seen as Müller’s artistic heir, draws upon this image-driven theatre with performances rooted in the bodies of his actors. Just as Müller’s stage was haunted by history, Gotscheff’s stage is haunted by Müller. The developing “Müllerian” dramaturgy centers performance in a process of re-presenting, returning, and digging up. It begins to question the notion of “liveness” as integral to an understanding of performance, where the present is haunted by ghosts from the past and the future.
Since graduating from Brown in 2008 with degrees in Theatre Arts and Literary Arts, José Enrique Macián has been living and working in Berlin, Germany. As a Fulbright Scholar, José is researching Müller’s influence on contemporary directors at the Volksbühne and is currently completing several articles on this topic. At the Deutsches Theater he has worked with Dimiter Gotscheff on Dejan Dukovski’s The Powder Keg. At the Berliner Ensemble, José worked as an assistant to Robert Wilson during the rehearsals of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Most recently, in collaboration with the International Heiner Müller Society and the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia, he worked with director Matthias Langhoff on a workshop performance based on Müller’s The Wage Shark. This year, José will continue his work with Gotscheff for a production of Müller’s adaptation of Macbeth. He has also been invited to work as the dramaturg for a production of Müller’s Horatian in Istanbul, as well as direct in Berlin during the coming season.
September 16, 2009
John Emigh to Speak for Year of India Lecture Series
Brown has declared this the year of India and Professor John Emigh is am kicking off a lecture series this Wednesday. The talk, Uses of Adversity: The Prahlada Nataka of Orissa, will concern a form of ritual theatre in Orissa, India.
At last count, over fifty troupes in the Ganjam Province of Orissa, India perform the Prahlada Nataka – The Play of Prahlada. Their enactments span the night, can last over 20 hours, are usually performed simultaneously by two competing troupes, and frequently end with the actor-priest playing Vishnu’s Man-Lion avatar, Narasimha, going into a violent trance. This is the story of how this genre moved from Court to Town to Village during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, critiquing British rule, crisscrossing caste lines, and gaining new relevance to Orissan village life.
There will be extensive use of video and still images. The talk will take place on September 16th, at 12:00pm in the Anthropology Dept (Giddings House – 128 Hope St.), Brown University Room 212.
July 8 - August 1, 2009
Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep Theatre
Summer theatre begins on July 8th with the opening of Dogs of the Blue Gods, by Ian Fraser. Life Science, by Anna Ziegler opens on July 15, and Chicken Grease Is Nasty Business! by Michael Miller opens on July 29th.
For tickets and more information of all three shows, visit the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep website at brown.edu/btprep.
May 24, 2009
2009 Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Commencement
Congratulations to the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies graduates of 2009. Full Commencement schedule here.
May 23, 2009
Commencement Dance
Don't miss the 2009 Commencement Dance at StuartTheatre on Saturday, May 23, at 7:00pm in Stuart Theatre.
Tickets are available online at brown.edu/tickets or one hour before the show.
May 22-23, 2009
SoloFest 2009
Each year, ten seniors are selected to take Solo Performance, a class in which each student writes and performs their own solo show. Their shows are then produced in late April/early May as part of the Solo Festival. The Festival has an encore run during the Commencement weekend. All shows are open to the general public, and run just under 1 hour.
All shows are in the Strasberg Studio off the Leeds Courtyard.
Tickets are FREE and are available at the door 30 minutes before each performance.
For the full schedule lineup and more information about each scene, visit solofest2009.blogspot.com.
May 4&5, 2009
Audition for Tartuffe
Audition for Sock & Buskin's first slot show for the fall, Tartuffe, by Molière, directed by Beth Milles.
Tartuffe is Molière's hilariously controversial satire of religious hypocrisy. When a cultish impostor named Tartuffe wins the following of the wealthy Orgon, Tartuffe quickly gains control of Orgon's wife, family, and bank account. As things spiral out of control, the family attempts to expose Tartuffe's fraud and convince Orgon of the deceit. Come audition for this classic example of French farce!
Please prepare any monologue from Molière. Some monologues will be provided at the auditions and in the Becker Library (third floor of Lyman Hall). For any questions, e-mail flynn@brown.edu.
Auditions will be held Monday, May 4th from 1:00-3:00pm and 6:00-8:00pm, and Tuesday, 6:00-9:00pm in Stuart Theatre. Callbacks will be on Wednesday afternoon, time to be announced.
May 9 & 10, 2009
Brownbrokers Presents:
Adding Up & Leavittsburg, OH
Come see live readings of two student-written musicals this weekend.
On Saturday, May 9th, see Adding Up, with book and lyrics by Sarah Kay '10 and music by Drew Nobile '07. On Sunday, May 10th, see Leaveittsburg, OH, book, lyrics, and music by Nate Sloane '09.
Both readings will be at 2:00pm in Leeds Theatre. Tickets available at 1:00pm in the Leeds breezeway. These readings will only be presented ONCE!
Email brownbrokers@gmail.com with any questions.
May 1, 2009
"Playing Change:
Embodied Learning in the Sciences and the Arts"
a Thesis Presentation by Daniel Sobol
Come and see this excellent work by one of our first graduates in Performance Studies. This presentation will be on Friday, May 1st, from 3:00-4:00pm in Lyman Hall, room 219.
April 25, 2009
Balinese Theatre, Dance & Music
See a day of performances of Balinese Theatre, Dance & Music, featuring Gamelan Gita Sari of Holy Cross College, under the direction of I Made Bandem.
Red Riding Shawl, a Topeng Pajegan (one-person masked theatre and dance performance) with John Emigh, will show at 3:00pm, accompanied by an all-star musical ensamble under the direction of I Made Bandem.
Stay for the Concert of Balinese Performing Arts beginning at 8:00pm, with music and dance by Holy Cross students, Brown students, and guest artists including I Made Sidia, Dewa Alit, I Nyaman Saptanyana, Ida Ayu Ari Candrawati, Putu Bagus Krisna Saptanyana, Kadek Bayu Saptanyana, Cynthia Laksawana, John Emigh, and Lynn Kremer.
Both events will take place on Saturday, April 25 in Leeds Theatre in Lyman Hall.
This event is sponsored by the Brown University Creative Arts Council, The Brown South Asia Faculty Group, and the Departments of Theatre and Music of Holy Cross College.
April 15-18, 2009
New Plays Festival
The Brown University Literary Arts Program and the Brown/Trinity Repertory Consortium are pleased to announce the second installment of the 27th annual NEW PLAYS FESTIVAL. A celebration of the diversity and strength of new theatrical voices, the NEW PLAYS FESTIVAL has been instrumental in bringing the work of America’s finest emerging playwrights to life for nearly three decades. 
This second installment of the festival features world-premiere plays by MFA-candidate playwrights Mallery Avidon and Joe Waechter, directed by MFA-candidate directors Mia Rovegno and Jesse Geiger, respectively. The plays run in repertory at the McCormack Family Theater (70 Brown Street, Providence, RI 02912) from Wednesday to Sunday. This year’s festival also features an assortment of special events, including a a panel discussion of Avidon and Waechter’s work with Brown faculty and special guests, a reading of in-progress work by fellow MFA-candidate writers Mia Chung and Jackie Sibblies (whose work was featured in the first installment of the festival in February), and the late night “Smoke and Mirrors Cabaret” of new music, fiction, poetry, photography, and playwriting. All additional events, with the exception of the late night Cabaret, will also take place in the McCormack Family Theatre.
Tickets are FREE and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Reserve your tickets here.
April 15, 2009
Four-Second Decay to perform “Audible Montage, or, Eurydice’s Footfall”
Performance group Four-Second Decay will perform “Audible Montage, or, Eurydice’s Footfall," a performance for stills, voice and motion.
What does thinking out loud sound like? Or more pointedly, how does the juxtaposition of images, visual and aural, create a thinking sound through motion, create a motion that makes for thinking with the still image in relation one to another? Taking a leaf from Philippe-Alain Michaud’s book Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Zone 2007) with the Introduction by Georges Didi-Huberman, the performance explores the aural/visual world of the ‘montage-collisions’ and spectatorship (Warburg has an intriguing unpublished piece on the spectator and motion that Michaud examines). While photographer Matthew Fink creates out of stills his version of a ‘Mnemosyne,’ that form of juxtaposition of images Warburg invented, P. A. Skantze composes a live montage-collision in sound about sound and thinking out loud, juxtaposing medium and method, eliding and augmenting the notional fissures between the two.
Four-Second Decay, founded by Matthew Fink and P. A. Skantze, is a performance group made of two that can expand to four, six, eight and on depending on the project and the collaborators. They have performed in Copenhagen, Glasgow and London.
Matthew Fink is a photographer, writer and artist. His graphic novel After the Smash: the Humpty Notebooks is in development for a chamber opera project with Four-Second Decay. Works include: "The Author's Diffident Son: an Elegyto an Age of Sustained Economic Growth" and "An New Illustrated History of Received Ideas" a contemporaryhomage to Flaubert. "N.Orleans," a video project with photographs and text by Fink and video by Julio Velasco, was an official selection for the Cologne Off IV festival.
P. A. Skantze, Reader in the Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Department at Roehampton University, directs, writes for and teaches theatre and performance in London and in Rome. Her book Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre was published by Routledge in 2003. She has written plays and performance texts as well as essays on dance, Shakespeare, sound, gift exchange and contemporary performance in Europe.
The performance will take place in the Hillel Center at 80 Brown Street on April 15th, 2009, and will be followed by a discussion about the work and the process of working.
April 10, 2009
Ronni Stewart to Lead Movement Workshop
On Friday, April 10th, Ronni Stewart will teach a master class in
Sensory Actualization. Sensory Actualization trains the actor to be embodied and transformational by actualizing reality through profound sensory awareness.
Ronni Stewartis the Co-Chair of the Acting department at TheConservatory of Theatre Arts and at SUNY Purchase College. She has taught her distinctive approach to acting nationally and throughout Europe. Her training and experience as a dancer includes training in classical ballet with the New York City Ballet; Modern dance with Martha Grahamn; Acting with Sanford Miesner, and Occupational Therapy at New York University.
Ronni Stewart's Sensory Actualization workshop will be held on April 10th at 3:00pm in Leeds Theatre. Workshops are free and open to the public.
This workshop is available through the generous support of the Creative Arts Council.
April 10, 2009
Professor Alice Rayner to speak at Graduate Colloquium
Alice Rayner teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in dramatic literature and theory. Her research interests include the phenomenology of theater as well as comedy, genre theory, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, and hermeneutics in the analysis of texts and performance. Published books include Comic Persuasion (University of California Press), To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action (University of Michigan Press) and Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomenon of Theatre (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Her essays on technology and culture have been included in Discourse as well as in Michal Kobialka’s book, Of Borders and Thresholds and Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs’ Landscape and Theatre. She has written on Harold Pinter for Theatre Journal as well as the collection Harold Pinter at 60 (ed. Katherine Burkman, Indiana).Three essays on Suzan-Lori Parks, co-authored with Harry Elam, have appeared in Theatre Journal as well as in Performing America (ed. Jeffrey Mason and J. Ellen Gainor) and Staging Resistence (ed. Jeanne Colleran and Jenny Spencer). Also published in Theatre Journal is “Rude Mechanicals and The Specters of Marx,” a theory of practical labor in theater. Other essays include a study of metaphor and performance in Études Théâtrales/Essays in Theatre; on Stanislavksy and A.C. Bradley in Theatre Quarterly, “The Audience...and the Ethics of Listening,” an examination of the responsibilities of an audience; “Grammatic Action and the Art of Tautology,” a theory of action derived from Hamlet (both in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism); and “All Her Children: Caryl Churchill’s Furious Ghosts,” a study of the unborn in Churchill’s plays (in Sheila Rabillard’s Essays on Churchill). Her article on stage objects in relation to Heidegger’s essay, "The Thing," appears in the collection, Staging Philosophy, (ed. David Krasner and David Saltz, Michigan, 2006). She is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Theatre Journal. From 1996-99 she was Director of Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Chair of Drama from 2002-2005.
Professor Rayner will be speaking at the Graduate Colloquium on April 10, 4:00 - 6:00pm. Title is TBA.
March 16, 2009
Cusi Cram to Give Reading
Cusi Cram will be coming tocampus on March 16 to give a reading, followed by a Q&A.
Cusi Cram's plays include Landlocked, The End of It All, Lucy and the Conquest, Twenty Shadows, and Fuente, in addition to numerous short plays and adaptations. Her work has been performed at South Coast Rep, The O'Neill Playwrights Conference, MCC, the Cherry Lane Alternative, the Williamstown Theater Festival, The New Group, Naked Angels, Joe's Pub, The Women's Project, HERE, New Georges, the Lark Theater, PS 122, and The Dag Hammarskjold Theater at the United Nations. She is a recipient of a fellowship from the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard; the Le Comte du Nouy Prize; a fellowship from The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; the 2004 Herrick New Play Prize; and two Daytime Emmy Nominationsfor herwork on the children's animated program Arthur. She has been commissioned by South Coast Repertory, New Georges, and Theatreworks USA. Her work is published by Applause, Smith & Kraus, Broadway Play Publishing, and Playscripts, Inc.
The reading will be on Monday, March 16 at 5:30pm in Lyman Hall, room 219.
March 13 - 15, 2009
Guest Artist Mohammad Ghaffari:
Screening and Workshop
Mohammad Ghaffari was born in Neishaboor Iran. He received his theater training at the School for Dramatic Arts In Tehran and was active as a professional actor on the Iranian National Stage. In 1971 he joined Peter Brook and his international research center as an actor to perform the first play of the center at Festival of Arts in Shiraz. From 1974-1978 he was associated with the Festival of Arts in Shiraz, Iran, where he conducted research on, and produced for public performance, a wide range of traditional theater forms;these included the epic drama of Ta'ziyeh and the comic improvisatory Ru-hozi. He continued his education in the United States at Michigan State University following the Iranian Revolution. In 1980-1982 he was Guest Director and Lecturer of Theatre and Anthropology Department at Brown University. He latermoved to New York where he continued to work as a professional actor at Ellen Stewart's La Mama ETC where he also directed plays and performed at Festivals in Europe. He was assistant to Jerzy Grotowski at Columbia University in 1983 where he taught acting from 1982-1992. In 1987-1988 he taught acting at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut where he directed "Moses and the Wandering Darvish" based on Ta'ziyeh. He directed the first international performance of traditional Ta'ziyeh at the Festival d'Avignone in 1992 and later at the Festival d'Automne in 2000. In 2002 he directed three Ta'ziyeh plays for the Lincoln Center Festival. As a performer, he appeared in the films "Little Odessa", "The Devil's Advocate" and "Somewhere in the City" and most recently, in collaborative productions with artist-director Shirin Neshat and as actor in the feature film, K, by filmmaker Shoja Azari.
On Friday, March 13th, there will be a screening of Rabeah Ghaffari's The Troupe, a documentary about Ta'ziyeh performances in New York. The screening will be in Lyman Hall, room 219, at 6pm.
Mohammad Ghaffari will be leading two Ta’ziyeh workshops on Saturday, March 14, 10am to 4pm, and Sunday, March 15, 10am to 2pm. Space is limited to 12 participants at each workshop. Students will work on Shakespeare scenes using Ta’ziyeh techniques. Scene material will be distributed before the workshop. Please contact Professor Patricia Ybarra if you would like to attend. All are welcome.
There will be a public viewing of the Ta’ziyeh workshop from 11am to 2pm on Sunday, March 15, in Leeds Theatre.
March 13 -14, 2009
Theatricality Conference
This interdisciplinary symposium brings together Brown faculty 
from several departments with five invited scholars from the Free University of Berlin to examine “theatricality” and its relationship to goals and methods of performance studies and the humanities.
In everyday parlance the term “theatricality” often implies a suspicious lack of authenticity or truth—an excess of expressive means that must be controlled or monitored. How and with what consequences did theatricality acquire this pejorative meaning in the western world? How does theatricality inhabit cultural practices beyond the theater proper, and how can we explain its pervasive influence in communicative contexts of all kinds?
This symposium explores the appearance of theatricality in diverse cultural performances including opera, political spectacle, popular music, video games, dance and avant-garde theater. We will question how it reproduces or subverts power relations, what role it plays in individual and collective identity formation, how it is reinscribed in newer forms of media, and how it can be manipulated for social and political effects.
This event is free and open to the public. For more information, please see the Symposium website.
On Friday, March 13th, 10:00 - 11:00am, Brown Theatre, Speech, & Dance Professor Patricia Ybarra and Chair Rebecca Schneider will be speaking on a panel for "Theatricality and the Public Sphere." For more information on this event and the complete lineup, click here.
March 13, 2009
Ronni Stewart to Lead Movement Workshop
On March 13th, Ronni Stewart will teach a master class in Sensory Actualization. Sensory Actualization trains the actor to be embodied and transformational by actualizing reality through profound sensory awareness.
Ronni Stewartis the Co-Chair of the Acting department at TheConservatory of Theatre Arts andat SUNY Purchase College. She has taught her distinctive approach to acting nationally and throughout Europe. Her training and experience as a dancer includes training in classical ballet with the New York City Ballet; Modern dance with Martha Grahamn; Acting with Sanford Miesner, and Occupational Therapy at New York University.
Ronni Stewart's Sensory Actualization workshop will be held on March 13 at 3:00pm in Leeds Theatre. Workshops are free and open to the public.
This workshop is available through the generous support of the Creative Arts Council.
March 6, 2009
Shanti Pillai to Lead Bhratanatyam Workshop
On March 6th, Shanti Pillai will teach a master class in the basic principles of Bhratanatyam, a traditional form of south Asian dance theatre, and will disucss how these preciples can be applied to other styles of performance.
Shanti Pillai received her training in Bharatanatyam from Nandini Ramani and Priyamvada Sankar, senior disciples of the late great T. Balasaraswati. She continues to perform as a classical dancer, but also as a performance artist, creating multimedia installations and theatrical works which combine a variety of movement and acting styles. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and is currently a Guest Professor in Global Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. For the last three years she has served as the Resident Director of the Sarah Lawrence College Semester in Cuba Program.
Shanti Pillai's Bhratanatyam workshop will be held March 6th at 3:00pm in Leeds Theatre.
This workshop is available through the generous support of the Creative Arts Council.
February 28 & March 1, 2009
Dance Theatre Workshop with Alexandra Beller
What is Dance Theater? The boundary between these two genres is 
confusing and ambiguous, and yet, full of potential and meaning. In this 2-day workshop, we will explore some of the elements that separate Dance Theaterfrom the singular genres of Dance and Theater. How can we use movement to create meaning and how can we use text to create ambiguity? How do objects become symbols that matter? How does character transform the body? Through compositions made in class, we will engage in the possibilities of both forms and investigate the space between them.
Alexandra Beller, who danced with Bill T. Jones from 1995-2001 will be giving a two-day long dance theatre workshop February 28, 3:00 - 7:00pm and March 1, 11:00am - 3:00pm in the Ashamu Dance Studio. Please note that she intends to build over the course of the weekend so it is important that if you plan to attend you that you go to both days.
This is the second in a series of workshops presented by Body & Sole with the support of the Creative Arts Council.
February 19 - March 1, 2009
Rites and Reason Show
Rites and Reason is pleased to present Gever/Shabab: Shadows of Israel-Palestine, written by Noam Dorr and directed by Elmo Terry-Morgan, Thursday February 19th, 2009 through Sunday, March 1st, 2009, at the Rites and Reason Theatre. There is a suggested donation of $10 collected at the door. Reservations may be made by emailing geverandshabab@ brown.edu. All are invited.
Noam Dorr ‘09, author of Gever/Shabab, paints an intimate portrait of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by telling a story of captivity and freedom, as well as choices and inevitabilities, through the voices of a young Israeli and a young Palestinian. Developed through Rites and Reason Theatre’s Research To Performance Method (RPM), a process by which student writers create new work informed by ongoing scholarly research, Gever/Shabab looks at what happens when you can’t help but become close to your enemy despite the overwhelming forces that keep you apart.
February 25
Performance by David Greenspan
David Greenspan will be performing two works: The Arguement and Plays at the McCormack Family Theatre on Wednesday, February 25th at 6pm, followed by a Q&A session.
The Argument is based on the essays of Gerald F. Else regarding the attack on poetry made by Plato in the Republic, reasons for Plato's disapproval of tragedy and the coherent rebuttal offered by Aristotle in the Poetics. The play incorporates this material into a portion of the Poetics. It is a 40-minute monologue in the form of a lecture delivered by Aristotle.
Plays is Gertrude Stein's highly original lecture on the theatre. It is a coherent account of her development as a playwright and her exploration of theatre "from the standpoint of sight and sound and it's relation to emotion and time rather than in relation to story and action." The lecture is an exceptional melding of whimsy and irreverence with precise, insightful and deeply felt analysis. It features discussion of her plays, reminiscences of the theatre-going she did as a child in Oakland and San Francisco, and the impact of American melodrama and French theatre on her playwriting.
This performance is presented by the Brown Literary Arts Program and is co-sponsored by the Creative Arts Council; Theatre, Speech and Dance; and the Brown/Trinity Consortium.
February 11 - 15, 2009
New Plays Festival
Tickets are free and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Click here to reserve yours now.
For the complete lineup and more information, see the New Plays Festival blog.
February 6, 2009
Professor Michal Kobialka:
"Representational Practices and Real Abstractions in Eighteenth-Century London: A Prolegomenon to Historiography of the Enlightenment"
Rather than focusing on the long or wide eighteenth century to explore the operations of the Industrial Revolution and of the Enlightenment, this research project draws attention tofragments—the events and the representational practices—which register the process of their detachment from the operations of the emergent mercantile culture and their becoming subordinated to an act of public/academic thought. This act of abstracting, when given a concrete shape, has remained visible as an architectural style, a playtext, or a pamphlet which was archived in a place designed for it.
To be more precise, this project points to the process of abstracting cultural and societal norms delimited by the representational 
practices and operations of the emergent capitalism of the Industrial Revolution, and subject to its constraints of what can be enunciated about the self’s contingent existence in print, in public, or on stage and, inevitably, in the archive. While focusing on problem of “abstraction” and, for this matter, of “trade” as well as the national embodiment of these notions on England, this project re-opens a philosophical discussion on the Enlightenment.
Professor Kobialka will be speaking as a part of the Theatre, Speech, and Dance Graduate Colloquium Series in Lyman Hall, room 219, on Friday, February 6th at 4:00pm.
January 27-28, 2008
Barbara Campbell:
"Making Marks, Marking Time: Working Across Media"
Sydney-based Performance Artist and Writer Barbara Campbell will be coming to Brown January 27-28, 2009.
Campbell will offer a workshop for visual artists and writers (together) on Tuesday, January 27th from 4-7 in the List Art Center, room 325 (there will be food). Space is limited -- participants will need to register. Contact Jessica Lilien with inquiries.
Campbell will also present an Artist's Talk at 5pm on Wednesday the 28th, "Making Marks, Marking Time: Working Across Media" in List, room 325.
Barbara Campbell has been making performances since 1982. In developing and presenting her works, Barbara plies the specific physical and contextual properties of a given site, be it art gallery, museum, atrium, tower, radio airwaves or the world wide web.
Barbara graduated with a Master of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts in 1998 and she has taught courses there in experimental drawing and video performance. She has been artist-in-residence at many institutions in Australia including ABC Radio as well as studios in New York, LA and Paris.
The Department of Performance Studies at Sydney University produced a survey exhibition of her performances with an accompanying catalogue, Flesh Winnow (Power Publications: 2002) and she is now an Associate Artist with the Department. She was awarded the NSW Women and Arts Fellowship in 1994 and in 2004 she received an Australia Council Fellowship to develop and produce her online durational performance work, 1001 nights cast, that began in Paris on June 21, 2005 and finished in Sydney on March 17, 2008.
See also http://www.videoartchive.org.au/bcampbell/
This visit is sponsored by the Creative Art Council, the Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance, the Visual Art Department, and the Literary Arts Department.