Process

Tara Brooke Watkins reflects on the legacy of Robbie McCauley, who challenged the status quo of theatre systems, from the classroom to the rehearsal room to productions.

Jacob Juntunen shares how the MFA playwriting program at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale adapted their new play festival for the online world and how open-access software and streaming platforms helped students at the rural school transcend geography.

Alli St. John shares a guide she developed for directors of youth theatre to prioritize consent and safe practices for staging theatrical intimacy.

Luane Davis Haggerty shares successes, learnings, and innovations from the Deaf theatre community over the past year of pandemic performance.

Fumbani Innot Phiri Jr. details the creative process of the production of The Vagina Monologues that took place during 16 Days of Activism in Malawi and offers his thoughts, as an audience member, on the show’s big impact.

Emily LeQuesne discusses space as it relates to puppetry and shares a practical, five-step dramaturgy system for puppet theatre, which she developed, called the Mosaic Scale.

Holly Derr and Calley N. Anderson sit down to talk about how Calley adopted historian Saidiya Hartman’s theory of critical fabulation when writing her new play The Story and the Teller about the effect of the Memphis yellow fever epidemic of 1878 on African Americans and immigrants.

In envisioning of the future, Jared Mezzocchi begins by questioning: “What if theatre’s identity is not lost in the digital, but instead is enhanced in it?”

Claire K. Redfield shares why it’s important for theatremakers to create trauma-responsive rehearsal spaces and offers four Rs—realizing, recognizing, responding, and resisting—as a way to approach the process.

In the last conversation of the Performing the Internet series, curator Kate Bergstrom sits down with three members of the Detroit-based artist-activist collective Complex Movements—Sage Crump, ill weaver, Wes Taylor—to talk about intentional engagement in a virtual world.

Barbara Fuchs chats with director and designer Jared Mezzocchi about his digital theatre production Russian Troll Farm, how to reverse-engineer Zoom, Isadora as the way forward, and more.

E. M. Lewis shares thirteen ways writers can think about the plays they’re writing, including the stakes, the world, and the music.

Michelle Yemayá notes that while Colombian theatre artists have found ways to face the unexpected changes this year, artists are still struggling to stay afloat. She talks about how she has adapted her practice under the circumstances and shares the stories of three other artists living and working as artists in Colombia right now. / Michelle Yemayá ha notado que, si bien los artistas del teatro colombiano han encontrado formas de enfrentar los cambios inesperados de este año, la lucha por mantenerse a flote es constante. Habla sobre cómo ha adaptado su práctica a las circunstancias y comparte las historias de otras tres personas que en este momento viven y trabajan como artistas en Colombia.

Amanda L. Andrei discusses learning Romanian—her father’s native tongue—for her play Lena Passes By and shares methodology for dealing with translations, identifies unique issues of heritage language learners who are also writers, and reflects on the pain of being separated from language.

Michael Rohd shares an edited version of a recent talk he gave at the Clarke Forum, Dickinson College, on the role of art and artists today.

Seattle-based Jasmine Mahmoud talks to New York–based Autumn Knight about Knight’s recent performance Our Water is Melted Snow, geography and audiences, and staging and presence across screens.

Charlie Peters, who has spent the early days of the pandemic thinking about and experimenting with how physical comedy can (and can’t) live online, shares what he’s learned.

Kamala Sankaram talks about the process of developing an opera on Zoom and shares advice based on what she and her team learned.

Keith Barker and Lindsay Lachance talk about the challenges and rewards of working in mixed company with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, including what it’s like to navigate work with sensitive subject matter, including Indigenous histories and colonization.

Lee Sunday Evans, the artistic director of New York City’s Waterwell, discusses the power of transcripts in performance, the topics of immigration and deportation, and the urgent attention that needs to be paid to the United States border right now.

Theatremaker Asif Majid talks about adapting his show, Snapshots, for a digital space after COVID-19 shut down theatres across the country.