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Theatre as Cultural Exchange: Stages and Studios of Learning
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Theatre as Cultural Exchange: Stages and Studios of Learning
Anita Gonzalez
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12 GONZALEZ
Theatre as Cultural Exchange
Stages and Studios of Learning
Anita Gonzalez
It was a pleasure presenting for “Theatre Symposium: Cross-Cultural
Dialogue on the Global Stage” in April 2016. The symposium offered a unique opportunity to dialogue with colleagues about how global
perspectives influence our practice. Whether we work in performance,
technical production, or theatre studies, our artistry and scholarship expand when we take time to learn about other cultures and consider how
our production seasons, classrooms, and professional work might change
by introducing world perspectives. Global travel begins in our minds.
We must first imagine a broad context for what we consider to be theatre; then we can engage with new paradigms that will define the future
of our artistic forms. Even though we work in diverse contexts, each of
our areas of expertise can benefit from engaging with literature and practices that take us away from our comfort zones. Intercultural experiences,
coupled with meaningful interactions with people who differ from us, expand our minds. As the head of the Global Theatre and Ethnic Studies
minor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I advocate for theatre practices that foreground diverse cultures and promote engagement
with intercultural communities. “Going global” enhances our ability to
absorb multiple perspectives that can broaden our understandings about
theatrical practice.
Often I hear that we are all humans under the skin, but through my
travels and classroom experiences I have learned that while we share common emotions and physiques, ideologies and belief systems can be really
different. And that is the beautiful thing about the theatre. It provides
an opportunity to physically, viscerally experience another perspective of
human existence. As a scholar and practitioner I find performance to be
an ideal way of crossing borders. When I think about stages and studios
of learning I wonder, how do we teach for a global future? Most theatre
programs offer a combination of literature and studio courses coupled
Theatre as a Cultural Exchange 13
with a production season. In general, we remain committed to teaching
a canon of plays that reflect the history of Euro-American, English-language theatre. Global and multicultural theatre appears as the spice to enrich our experience of a progressive historical evolution of Western drama.
Escaping this approach to theatrical training is a challenge because, as
faculty members, often this has been our training, our experience, or our
area of expertise. It is intimidating to approach learning about the cultures of the entire world. In addition to a plethora of plays, there are language barriers. And if each cultural drama represents a distinct ideology
and cultural context, then how can we immerse ourselves in all of these
deep histories and experiences?
We can begin to connect to other cultural positions just by considering our own background and heritage. Each of us brings experiences
gleaned from a lifetime of immersion in a unique cultural context. Too
often, we underestimate the impact of our learned cultural behaviors on
our daily arts practice. Faculty members and students in American classrooms tend to think of themselves as part of an assimilated, hegemonic
middle class. If we consider our ancestral heritage, each of us actually carries distinct cultural knowledges or understandings. For example, we tend
to forget that our grandparents may have come from Ireland or that we
might have been raised on a farm or an island rather than within a suburban community. Our heritage connections travel across generations and
impact our worldview.1
One of the exercises I introduce in class to help students begin to
think about global identities is to have them “perform their identity”
as an opening activity. When I start this exercise, at first there is confusion. White students tell me they do not know what to perform. African
American students ask me if they can perform any identity. I encourage all
students to select a song, dance, or poem that is about who they are and to
perform it. Within this exercise I have seen poignant theatrical acts. One
performance that stands out for me is the work of a student of Swedish
descent who performed a ritual of stuffing Christmas sausages. He stood
in front of the class and began to demonstrate how to grind and stuff the
meat. Then he spoke about his brother joining him in filling the casings,
and as he worked he recalled how this activity connected him with family
and heritage. He cried while performing this memory, remembering an
almost-forgotten ethnic heritage. This performance of identity is just one
of many that students have presented that point to our global environment. What is interesting about doing this exercise over time is the vast
regional differences that emerge from the same assignment.
In New York, students tend to perform hyphenated identities—Italian
14 GONZALEZ
American, Irish American, Jewish American. In Florida, people performed
geographic locales—being northern redneck or being from Miami or
Georgia. When I teach in Michigan today, students often perform Detroit, a city—and for the first time last semester I observed students performing their identities as test-tube babies. The world is changing and it is
hard to keep up. There are real challenges in thinking about how to relate
theatre training to all of these identities. How do we incorporate a globalized world into our research and theatre-training programs? I propose
we think about three modes of bringing global consciousness to theatre:
collaboration, exchange, and finding the global in the local.
Collaboration
Since each of us is most familiar with our own cultural contexts, it is
easiest to learn about other cultures through collaboration. Working with
someone from a different background allows both partners to experience
new ideas. In collaborations, we tend to carry a lot of unexamined assumptions with us. Studies document first-world or upper-middle-class
tendencies to approach cultural exchange with a “savior” mentality. This
means that we enter any cultural exchange believing that our own experiences, when shared, will enhance and improve the culture we are visiting. Inherent in this approach is an assumption that our partnering cultural community needs or wants to be assimilated into our behavioral
modes. Even when we try to accommodate other cultural modes, we can
lose sight of our own myopic visions.
Here is an example from graduate school. When I was working on my
PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I was charged with directing a play called El Guitarron by Lynn Alvarez in collaboration with the
university’s Latino students. For this production, the department made a
strong effort to recruit and involve Latino students. It was assumed that
theatre students would contribute knowledge of theatre practice while the
Latinos would contribute cultural knowledge to make the show a success.
Yet hidden in this plan were a lot of assumptions about how theatre
should be done. We presumed that time would work the same across cultures, with everyone showing up ten minutes before rehearsals ready to
work. That didn’t happen. We presumed that our priorities would be the
same and that the play’s needs would take precedence over other activities,
like family gatherings. That didn’t happen. Things really came to a head
when we presumed that Latino audiences would adjust to our theatrical
ticket-buying rituals—that people who wanted to see the show would
come to the box office to buy tickets. Our Latino collaborators told us
that in their community, people sell tickets by holding a block of tickets,
Theatre as a Cultural Exchange 15
selling off individual tickets to family and friends, and then returning the
unsold tickets and the money to the sponsor. The department was unable to accommodate this procedure, so we ended up with primarily university audience members.
My point here is that a successful collaboration needs dialogue and discussion. At the University of Wisconsin, and in many institutions, it is assumed that non-institutional communities will assimilate and adapt to the
institution’s norms. This creates an unbalanced circumstance in which the
non-institutional is devalued. Offering a collaborative opportunity ideally
means that both sides are willing and able to make adjustments. The Latino students’ approach to selling tickets to the production was not incorrect or in need of improvement; it was merely a different solution to
the play’s outreach and promotion needs.
Currently, I am involved in another theatre project called the Storytelling Incubator, a collaboration with the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa
Tribe.2
When I moved to Michigan to form the Global Theatre and Ethnic Studies minor, I immediately looked for local partners. I was introduced to the Upper Peninsula and the Chippewa community of Michigan
through Dana Sitzler, a colleague from our Government Relations office.
Our exchange activities with the Sault Ste. Marie community have taken
about a year to develop and we are still exploring the twists and turns.
As I began the process of working in this very rural community, I understood that notions of what theatre is might be distinct.
We began by meeting with two sectors of the community, historians
from the town and members of the Chippewa tribe’s cultural education
department. Each had a very different idea about the purpose of our project and about how the town’s history might be told. After discussions,
we decided to first immerse our students in teachings about Anishinabek Chippewa traditions, and then to develop a workshop and performance program that might unite both sectors of the community in common activities. During the first part of the project, students stayed at the
Mary Murray Culture Camp on Sugar Island, where they participated in
sunrise ceremonies and teachings about corn and fire.3
They were able to
meet and share stories with both elders and youth of the community. In
the process, they learned about themselves and came to question the way
they were educated in their school programs about Native American presence in the United States. The experience of cultural exchange allowed
students to think about who they were and what they knew from a different perspective. In the process, they gained self-awareness about their
own cultural beliefs.
The second part of the Storytelling Incubator expanded our collaboration to include the town as well as the tribal community. While our
16 GONZALEZ
goal was to unite the two communities, in practice we worked separately
with two organizations: the Soo Theatre and the Chippewa Tribe. We
found that these two cultural institutions operated within very different
aesthetic traditions. Ultimately the project was best served by organizing
distinct exchange activities. The main objective of our second phase was
to present a staged reading of a play about domestic violence, Sliver of a
Full Moon, by Oklahoma Cherokee Nation author Mary Katherine Nagle.4 We were able to utilize tribal facilities for housing students and for
rehearsals. For the performances, tribal administrators also gave us access
to The Dream Catchers Theatre, a state-of-the art facility located within
the Kewadin Casino complex. The space offers lights, catering services,
and a stage with a dance floor.
Cultural differences in this collaboration emerged once again around
production mechanisms. Because the play directly addresses sensitive issues of violence against women, our partners suggested we consult with
Figure 1. Students participating in the Storytelling Incubator project remove kernels from hard Indian corn as they learn how to prepare corn soup. The Sault
Ste. Marie Chippewa Tribe education department invited elders to teach the university students cultural traditions as part of the theatre exchange project. Photograph by Anita Gonzalez.
Theatre as a Cultural Exchange 17
three local organizations: the Chippewa Advocacy Resource Center,
the Diane Peppler Center, and Uniting Three Fires against Violence, a
statewide advocacy organization. In this collaboration, we did not want
to make decisions without considering tribal perspectives about how a
public event should be handled. We incorporated honoring and healing songs into the presentation because the Native American community wanted to honor the women for their bravery in telling their stories.
The healing songs provided support and helped to ease any emotional
trauma the women might have felt as they relived their traumatic experiences. Throughout the process we adapted our theatrical practice to accommodate an alternative approach to storytelling through performance
that would heal the community by making public the stories of women
who had been harmed by violence.
Outside of the reservation, we conducted workshops with community
members. Students and faculty members interacted with the Soo Theatre,
the town’s European cultural community theatre, by offering workshops
Figure 2. University of Michigan student Mia Massimino listens as a docent explains settler history of the Sault Ste. Marie region during a tour of one of the
historic houses. An engaged learning exchange project educated students about
history and culture of European settlers and Native Americans in this Canadian
border town. Photograph by John R. Diehl Jr.
18 GONZALEZ
in theatre games as well as musical theatre and opera practice. Collen Arbic, president of the Soo Theatre, supported our residency by introducing us to her theatre’s membership. We held informational meetings with
local, nontribal theatre practitioners, but they did not participate in production activities for staging the Native American play.
Each community, even within the same town, approached the business
of theatre-making differently. Ultimately I do not know that we were
able to bridge cultural differences across the two Sault Ste. Marie communities. Even though some of the tribal facilities were directly across
the street from the local Soo Theatre, it was hard to bring the two constituencies, the white European descendant community and the Native
American community, into the same space. One group was invested in
the Eurocentric arts of opera and ballet, while the other valued Native
American cultural events such as powwows and bingo. Our performance
brought a few members of the non-native community into the Kewadin
casino performance space, but most of our audience members were also
tribal members. Nevertheless, by collaborating on a project that crossed
cultural lines, students were able to experience how different processes of
performance can be. They could see the limits of collaboration, and we
all learned that sometimes bridges cannot be realized.
International Exchange
International exchange, like any collaboration, brings artists together to
swap ideas. Most international exchange programs emphasize summeror semester-long study at a foreign university. Some schools offer faculty-led programs. For American theatre folk, the most common destination is London. While I have led programs in Mexico and Costa Rica,
I am going to focus on four different UK projects because each project
engaged with British culture differently. Some involved observation and
tourist experiences, while others immersed students in one-on-one dialogic exchange with local partners.
It seems natural to travel to England to study theatre because the language is the same as in the United States and we have heard so much
about Shakespeare. We want to immerse our students in the history and
culture of the Bard. Still, I would like to point out that there are many
other global sites for English-language theatre—Nigeria, the Caribbean,
South Africa, Toronto—but here I will focus on England, describing four
international exchange programs that I have led. My first UK project was
simply attending plays. The State University of New York at New Paltz
has an annual program where students spend two weeks seeing about ten
plays in London. The program introduces students to styles of British
Theatre as a Cultural Exchange 19
professional theatre and allows them to experience such historical London
sites as the reconstructed Globe Theatre. With this program, I most appreciated the way that the students’ eyes lit up as they discovered life in
a country where theatre has been supported and nurtured for centuries.
Because my students at that time were New Yorkers, they were less impressed with the vibrancy of the city and more impressed with the multiple
aesthetics and culturally diverse plays they were able to see in London.
After two years of leading this type of excursion, I proposed a more
immersive experience in which students would be able to devise new
work and learn with British practitioners. For this second, three-week
experience, the students were housed at Kingston University. In addition to classes in British culture, they also participated in six workshops
with British artists—producers, scholars, choreographers, directors—to
learn how they might develop new work within the British landscape.
The workshops increased student immersion in cross-cultural dialogue.
Figure 3. University students from Michigan sit on a mountaintop outside of Oaxaca, Mexico. One among many study abroad offerings led by Anita Gonzalez, the
international exchange program took students out of their comfort zones and exposed them to new ways of thinking about art and culture. Photograph by Omar
Alonso.
20 GONZALEZ
After completing the workshops, the class participated in a devising project, which involved reimagining scenes from The Tempest while thinking about gender-specific and postcolonial responses to the play. While
the students could have studied the play at home in their classrooms and
learned about Caliban as a postcolonial subject, or about how the opening shipwreck scene connects with the history of Jamestown, the project allowed the students to connect with local artists. They learned more
about British perspectives on the play and made professional connections
with British directors and scholars.
My third UK exchange was supported by the Global Intercultural
Experience for Undergraduates (GIEU) program at the University of
Michigan. This exchange program offered an opportunity to travel with
students to Liverpool and engage with the black communities of this
northern port town.5
We spent one month interacting with local partners
and arts organizations. After learning about Liverpool, students worked in
small teams to volunteer with local not-for-profit agencies, including Africa Oye, The Brouhaha Carnival, The Green House Project, The Somali
Women’s Project, and the Black E performance space. Our coordinating
community partner and sponsoring agency was the Merseyside Dance Initiative (MDI).6
In addition to helping us to connect with the agencies,
MDI arranged housing and located a theatre for us to perform in. Because
the students collaborated closely with local artists, they were able to really
see differences and similarities between British and American cultures.
The students learned about black identity and how it works differently
on the other side of the water. For example, African American female students noticed that white British men found them attractive and complimented them, something that seldom happened in their hometown of
Detroit. They also recognized that US historical events, such as the civil
rights movement and the life and death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had
limited impact on the British community. Most of all, the student travelers learned about themselves. When British people asked the American
students where they were from, most could offer no response other than
the name of their hometowns. Recognizing this lack of heritage, the students began to reconsider their identities and how to describe their point
of origin. At the end of the project we developed and performed a devised show for our community partners.7
The play incorporated student
perspectives about their experiences and allowed them to verbalize their
feelings about their identities and those of their British collaborators. In
one section of the play, they performed what surprised them about British customs: tea, small cars, politeness, and language differences. Later
in the play, they talked about their newly gained understandings of class,
their concerns about social justice, and the challenges that America offers
Theatre as a Cultural Exchange 21
for social mobility. This project was particularly satisfying because it was
both educational and community-based, allowing students to use theatre
to learn about another culture through engaged and interactive activities.
The current UK project I am working on has allowed students to collaborate as performers in a professional international theatrical production. Building upon my own academic research about African American
transatlantic voyaging, I am collaboratively writing a new musical called
Liverpool Trading with the black British composer Errollyn Wallen.8
The
project has been developed in both New York City and Liverpool, and
each stage of the process has tested me as an artist and administrator.
The story follows an Afro-Caribbean woman named Ayanna, who goes
to Liverpool in search of her father. After she lands, an Irish pub owner
named Monroe leads her on a time-traveling journey. As Ayanna searches
for her ancestors, she discovers musical worlds of Ceilli, trip hop, tea gardens, and the Mersey beat.9
Eventually, she finds her father and learns to
accept love. Once again, the challenge of this project has been in crosscultural notions about how theatre is ideally produced. Should work be
developed in resident theatres? On university campuses? The UK has a
strong system of “research and development,” but how does that complement our US context of private funding? In the United States, musical theatre composers usually write lyrics; that is not the norm in the
UK. And artistically, how do you tell two sides of a transnational story in
a way that works for both sets of audiences? These are some of the challenges, and I do not yet have answers, but the learning curve has been a
wonderful journey.
During December 2015 and January 2016 my two collaborators, novelist Richard Aellen and composer Errollyn Wallen, came to the University
of Michigan to work with students on developing and recording songs
for the show. Two weeks later we traveled to New York City to work with
professional actors on a staged reading of the script. Performers in both
locations became more culturally aware as they discovered how African
cultures, in diaspora, contributed to both American and British histories.
The play is written in multiple dialects: Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Jamaican,
Liverpudlian, London British, and New York (Brooklyn). As the actors
struggled to understand the context for the dialects, they participated in
dramaturgical discussions about transatlantic travel, the Windrush generation,10 and British anti-slavery activism. The creative team talked about
black and Irish relationships focusing on how neighboring, multilingual
communities supported cultural encounters and racial mixing. Our artistic process of having discussions about the script revealed the diverse cultural heritages of each of the artists in the room. Often, we talked about
the actor’s migration stories and discussed relatives who could have been
22 GONZALEZ
affected by these cross-cultural exchanges. Learning about black and Irish
experiences in London, New York, Liverpool, and Jamaica reminded all
of us about how minimal our degrees of separation across continents are.
Classroom Learning
Working at global sites is challenging and transformative, but we cannot
always travel. We spend most of our time working with students in classrooms. How do we bring the global to our daily university lives? The
minor I coordinate in Global Theatre and Ethnic Studies depends on
finding the global in the local. We travel the world by reading, discussing, and staging plays from the canons of diverse cultural drama. Earlier
I discussed the “perform your identity” exercise. This exercise encourages me to value the tremendous amount of diversity that exists among
students in my local environment. America is already diverse, but most of
us walk in set patterns of encounter that prevent us from interacting with
the cultural experiences of the people that surround us. Studio courses in
the Global Theatre minor incorporate local visitors as core partners for
classroom activities that come to share their expertise. These partners include campus constituencies, community organizations, and student organizations. Campus constituencies are departments and administrative
units outside of the theatre department. I lean upon colleagues housed
in Latino studies or Asian languages, in religious studies or social work.
Campus constituencies can aid in bringing global projects to the mainstage. And this includes possibilities for working across class as well as cultural boundaries. A partnership with campus constituencies might include
staging a production with university maintenance workers or having students devise a work about area bus drivers. All of these possibilities will
broaden the cultural perspectives of students, faculty members, staff, and
administrators. It is about broadening the perspectives of all involved, reconsidering production and performance processes, and expanding the
borders of theatrical practices.
Community organizations are often knowledgeable about event planning, and universities can collaborate with them to make plays by figuring
out how to exchange expertise. For example, maybe the local church
would like to include a song or dance performance in a fundraising event.
Even better, perhaps a locally organized music event includes spoken
word artists or krumpers11 who could introduce a new performance style
to students. In January 2015, I directed a Puerto Rican play where all of
the characters needed to perform parkour. This athletic performance style
involves acrobatic leaps, slides, and jumps over physical obstacles. When I
began rehearsals I had no idea where I would find someone to teach the
Theatre as a Cultural Exchange 23
art form. To my surprise, the university had a parkour club that I never
knew existed. Each time I look for an ethnic art form—in Wisconsin, Tallahassee, upstate New York, or Michigan—I find practitioners hidden in
plain sight. Not hidden—merely outside of my own set patterns of encounter. Student organizations hold a wealth of expertise in multicultural
performance forms. Although we are the teachers and they are the students, collaborative exchange means respecting their knowledge of folkand street-based performance and valuing that as theatrical practice. We
all know our students are faster with technology than we are. They may
also be more culturally astute than we are.
Finding the Global in the Local means expanding our ideas about what
theatre is. For some cultures, the storytelling of theatre is captured in outdoor pageants, street competitions, or daylong parades. These genres do
not fit neatly inside of the proscenium box, yet they prevail throughout
the world. Perhaps it is possible for theatre departments to embrace multiple theatrical styles and use these unfamiliar forms to train students in
global theatre. There are exciting developments in training that indicate a
shift in pedagogy. Devising is now a part of many department programs.
This approach to performance de-privileges the written text, substituting movement, images, and intertextual symbols. With the success of
Hamilton, more departments are embracing styles like hip-hop and spoken word; Asian movement forms have become a part of some training
programs. And there is so much more to explore, such as masking, puppetry, and song as text.
Of course, at the bottom of it all is story. Stories grounded in multicultural performance aesthetics give students a chance to experiment with
style and master rigorous techniques for interpreting drama. Stories and
the characters they feature matter if we are to really promote diversity of
culture and cross-cultural dialogue. For example, the 50/50 by 2020 initiative of the League of Professional Theatre Women aims to achieve parity for professional women theatre artists by the year 2020. The organization recognizes that authorship may impact story and consequently hopes
to have regional theatres develop seasons in which at least half of the
plays are written by women.12 The same applies to multicultural theatre.
My own theatre department primarily offers minority theatre students
opportunities to perform in Eurocentric plays. How do we change that?
How do we promote theatre productions by and about people of color
as a valuable pursuit for all theatre students—not just students of color?
I advocate bringing multicultural drama to the main stage—not to
the studio, not to the outdoor forum, not to the neighboring community. Why? It validates multicultural drama as a core value and an inherently robust site of theatrical tradition. We must work harder to locate
24 GONZALEZ
under-produced plays. Ethnic communities and their canons cover a
broad range of historical styles. It is possible to study melodrama by teaching and staging the 1847 play The Black Doctor by Ira Aldridge or to investigate commedia by teaching the actos of Luis Valdez. This is not a radical
idea. Theatre audiences and their tastes shift with social movements.
While realism may have been radical in 1910, it is now all too familiar.
Once again, we can adjust core beliefs about how theatre is made. One
way is to offer students opportunities to improvise, devise, and write new
theatrical works, perhaps in collaboration with diverse cultural communities. In November 2015, I attended an event about theatre training at the
National Theater Institute located at the O’Neill Center in New London,
Connecticut. Thirty educators met to discuss how theatre training can
prepare students for millennial performance. We shared processes, saw
new work, and exchanged ideas. I was most impressed with the industry
casting agent who told us that we are not effectively training our students
for the types of theatre that new playwrights are writing—playwrights
like Hansol Jung, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Sharon Bridgforth, SuzanLori Parks, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Ping Chong.
Works by these playwrights require fluidity of expression, physical awareness, an ability to move through theatrical styles like performance art, and
an understanding of how to perform a variety of different cultural forms.
We can read these new plays in the classroom and stage them with
our students, working beyond our preconceived ideas about how to cast
along racial or ethnic lines. All students, by embodying characters outside of their experiences, expand their repertory of available roles. They
learn about world cultures through the process of physically enacting the
beliefs and behaviors of another person. Ideally, universities are a place
where students and faculty members collectively explore new ideas and
paradigms for theatrical work as we train students for the theatre’s future. Minority theatre did not suddenly appear on the stage as a result of
the cultural revolutions of the 1990s. Latino, African American, and Asian
artists have been writing, producing, and staging theatrical work for centuries. These canons of literature enrich our understanding of world theatre in a global context.
Finally, how does writing and scholarship fit into the picture? The field
is changing. Increasingly I see scholarship that bridges disciplinary boundaries. Many of the authors in this volume have written essays that bring
together cultural studies and theatre studies. Scholars are finding linkages between classics, religious studies, and other fields as they consider
dramaturgies of diverse world communities. My own scholarship is also
informed by collaboration and exchange. This happens in several ways:
I engage in dialogic performance when I work with artists, I collaborate
Theatre as a Cultural Exchange 25
Figure 4. The home page of the interactive website 19thcenturyacts.com. The suite
of digital humanities tools allows users to visualize context for nineteenth-century
performance and to learn more about underrepresented performers. Home page
designed by Clara McClenon.
26 GONZALEZ
with archivists at international archives, and I collaborate with teams of librarians and computer scientists on digital tools. By dialogic performance
I mean the kinds of exchanges that happen when people encounter one
another and share practice to comment about identity. For example, my
book Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality,
13 examines how indigenous and mestizo populations in Mexico perform African identities,
how they dialogue with contemporary Afro-Mexican communities. While
researching the book, I traveled to Mexican communities to dance with
people. Through the dancing we were able to talk about how the body
communicates and what a foot stamp with a head throw might mean for
each of us. This embodied research—physical dialogue and exchange—
helps me to craft the writing.
My current research is about maritime performance. For this project
I have visited maritime archives in New York, London, Bristol, and Liverpool. Even as I mine the archive for information about how sailors
performed, I engage with contemporary maritime communities, singing sea shanties at Mystic Seaport and working as a destination lecturer
on Caribbean cruise ships.14 These experiences allow me to write scholarship that considers how different those worlds might be from my daily
life while uncovering new information about port and maritime communities. My most complex research project is actually a digital tool,
www.19thcenturyacts.com, that I have been developing for about four
years now. This tool visually depicts nineteenth-century performance in
multiple ways. The mapping tool allows users to see how artists working
in the nineteenth century toured in order to make a living. Here, the user
can access information about Ira Aldridge, Jenny Lind, or Edwin Booth.
The context tool provides images of places and artifacts and gestures to
provide a sense of what performances looked and sounded like. I am particularly excited about this section of the tool because it replicates the
sense of browsing in the archive in a digital way. The tool demonstrates
how even during the nineteenth century, the scope of the English-language performance world was international.
So where have we traveled in this discussion? I talked about collaboration. I talked about research and dialogic partnerships. I talked about
communication and embodiment. Most of all, I talked about changing
our set patterns of encounter and moving out of our comfort zones, letting go of preconceived notions about what the journey of theatre looks
like. We are not all the same. We walk with different religions, class backgrounds, racial experiences, and gender expectations. But we can find
common ground within theatrical expressions. To accomplish this, we
will need to sit with the unfamiliar, ask disturbing questions, and invest
in learning new stories to define our practice. At its core, theatre brings
Theatre as a Cultural Exchange 27
individuals together to explore how life experiences merge into human
stories. The journey is most illuminating when we bring a wide spectrum
of voices into the “empty space” and recognize that cultural spaces we
might imagine as a void are full of a diversity of lived human experiences.15
Notes
This paper is adapted from a keynote presentation offered at the SETC Theatre Symposium at Agnes Scott College on April 22, 2016.
1. Gust A. Yep, “Encounters With the ‘Other,’” The Global Intercultural Communication Reader (New York: Routledge, 2014), 339–56. The entire volume is
useful for those embarking on an exchange experience. Also see Lila Abu-Lughod,
“Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September
2002): 783–90.
2. A video about the meaning and impact of this project is available at: http://
ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/videos/23367-u-m-course-challenges-studentsto-learn-about-native-american-culture-through-immersion.
3. Sugar Island is a small island located just east of Sault Ste. Marie on the St.
Mary’s River. The island is named for the many sugar maple trees that grow there.
The Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Tribe maintains their culture camp and powwow
grounds on the island.
4. http://sliverofafullmoon.org/ provides information about the origin of
this dramatic work and documents productions at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Stanford Law School, New York University, and
other locations.
5. In the United Kingdom, citizens of African and Indian ancestry refer to
themselves as black communities because the nomenclature around blackness conflates multiple nationalities, ethnicities, and experiences into a single label. The
designation of “black” includes British-born blacks, South Asians from India and
Pakistan, Africans coming from countries such as Somalia, Nigeria, Ghana, and
Sudan, as well as Jamaicans and Afro-Caribbean descendants.
6. Information about these vibrant cultural organizations can be found at
the following websites: http://www.africaoye.com, http://www.brouhaha.
uk.com, https://www.facebook.com/The-Greenhouse-Multi-Cultural-Playand-Arts-Project-194745240596801, http://www.granbysomaliwomensgroup.
org, http://www.theblack-e.co.uk, and http://www.mdi.org.uk/
7. The performance video of the show, called “Framing Liverpool
through Michigan Eyes,” can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=qOxHbbkXUac.
8. http://www.liverpooltrading.com
9. Ceilli is a form of Irish folk music. Trip hop is a music style that originated
in Bristol that blends electronic music with soul, funk, jazz, and Jamaican ska.
The African Grove theatre, known as the first African American theatre company,
28 GONZALEZ
was founded in 1821 in a tea garden in New York City. Finally, Mersey Beat is the
musical sound associated with the Beatles that began during the late 1950s when
service workers on transatlantic passenger ships brought African American music
records to dance clubs in Liverpool.
10. The Empire Windrush was a ship that brought Jamaican settlers to England between 1948 and 1954 to rebuild the country’s infrastructure after World
War II. Jamaican immigrants who arrived during this historical time are known
as the “Windrush” generation.
11. Krumping is an urban dance style with percussive upper body moves performed with improvisation.
12. http://theatrewomen.org/programs/5050-in-2020-parity-for-womentheatre-artists.
13. Anita Gonzalez, Afro-Mexico: Dancing Between Myth and Reality (Austin,
University of Texas Press, 2010).
14. Mystic Seaport is a maritime museum located in Mystic, Connecticut, where
visitors and scholars work and study with actual vessels. My work as a destination cruise lecturer involves traveling to Caribbean ports and educating passengers about the history and cultures of the ports.
15. Here I reference Peter Brook’s foundational book The Empty Space (New
York: Touchstone Press, 1992). His book proposes that the theatre is an empty
space to be filled by the actor and director’s imagination. Here, I suggest that
Peter Brook’s “empty space” could be opened to include cultures and communities outside of his imagined Eurocentric experiences.
