Participation in this workshop is limited. Please follow this link to register in advance:
Advance Sign-Up Here
Participants in the workshop: please bring a text (short, it can be a word, a sentence, or a paragraph, no more than one page), images, or objects pertaining to your research or area to the workshop."
I’ve long thought that teaching and learning anthropology should be more fun than they often are. Perhaps we should not merely read and comment on ethnographies, but actually perform them. […] How, then, may this be done?" --Victor Turner, Ritual to Theater, p. 89
Taking up Turner’s invitation, this workshop is an exploration of and a cross pollination between research and narrative practices in theater and anthropology. By creating a dialogue between these disciplines in a laboratory format, we hope to pose questions and engage techniques in ways that will enrich our engagement with anthropological questions and performative productions. We will explore how anthropologists can learn from theater a more playful posture towards research, and a more performative understanding of narrative that can translate into either new forms of writing (essays, plays, short stories, installations, etc.), or into a revitalized existing practice of academic writing. On the other hand, theater makers can learn from anthropology a more nuanced understanding of political and cultural contexts, and how to approach the different discourse formations around events and social issues.
We will engage in exercises that use the body as a tool to explore our ethnographic material, and in the practice of Moment Work to render aspects of the same material performativelly. This theatrical devising technique is a practice for working with non-theatrical source material (interviews, archival documents, medical and legal reports, various media sources, etc.) to construct narratives for the stage.
Greg Pierotti who, as a member of Tectonic Theater Project, is one of the originators of Moment Work, has used this technique in the creation of such plays as “The Laramie Project” and “The People’s Temple." Ugo Edu will lead the embodied exercises at the beginning of the workshop. Cristiana Giordano will lead the part on Moment Work. We hope to reach an audience of social scientists, artists, and experimenters. Ugo Edu is a medical anthropologist, currently developing a full-length theatrical piece based on her dissertation research. This builds on her experience developing theatrical material and performing in a UCB Black Theater Workshop production. She has assisted in data collection and as a capoeira consultant and performer for a theatrical piece about the Freddy Gray murder in Baltimore by Greg Pierotti (Tectonic Theater Project). She has been a collaborator with Brazilian choreographer Isaura Oliveira as dance and capoeira performer since 2014.
