by Cristiana Giordano and Greg Pierotti
Our 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 recognize the value of the work of Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, and Erving Goffman in their exploration between anthropology and performance studies. This is not, however, a workshop on the anthropology of theater nor an experiment in performing ethnographies, but rather a lab where we use theatrical techniques to engage empirical questions and material. Rather than enacting our research, we put the elements of the stage (lights, sets, objects, sound, bodies etc.) into conversation with our research material. This generates surprising and often more affective analyses.
We explore how anthropologists can take from theater a more visceral posture towards research, and a more performative understanding of narrative that can translate into either a new kind of texts (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, how to approach the different discourse formations around events and social issues, and to pay attention to the complexities of worlds and their grammars.
We use the practice of Affect Theater, a devising technique influenced by the Moment Work technique originated by Greg Pierotti’s former theater company, Tectonic Theater Project, and Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints. 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. The practice of theatrical devising departs from traditional theater in that a finished script is not the starting point for the staging and direction of a play. Devising emerged as a means to revitalize how theatrical texts are created. It is a collaborative process involving the members of a company devising and writing together. Our workshop aims at extending this way of writing to other disciplines and their forms of textual production (books, articles, essays, installation, exhibits, etc.).
In our weekend workshops, we encourage participants to include their own empirical data as a part of the source material we utilize in our devising practices. This creates the opportunity for students and faculty to shift their relationship to their research through a collaborative engagement with our theatrical exploration.
* To request a workshop at your institution, contact Greg or Cristiana
You treasure elements of theater while not succumbing to the authority of the text (which usually demands absolute authority) or the body (which usually substitutes itself to the domination of text in a simple reversal). I believe this approach opens up a form of democratic dramaturgy! Beautiful!
[Biella, Pistoletto Foundation July 2019]
The academic world can be very cold. It felt good to have a space where we could simply experiment and feel without trying to make sense of things.
[McGill, Fall 2018]
The workshop was structured nicely, well executed, and at no point intimidating.
[Goldsmith College, March 2019]
So useful for us in developing our own practice and delving even deeper into what theatre can achieve when working with academic research.
[Goldsmith College, March 2019]
I was struggling taking years' worth of ethnographic material and organizing it into the format of a scholarly manuscript. I was uncomfortable with the process of squeezing people's complex, unruly life stories out to extract the theoretical "juice" they contained within--this process seemed an injustice to the many people who shared their stories with me. The Affect Theater workshops felt like a breath of fresh air - they provided a model for working with ethnographic material in a way that is collaborative, nonhierarchical, and nonlinear, allowing us to engage with knowledge-production as spatial and embodied as opposed to abstract and immaterial.
[University of California, Davis, 2017-18]
[From Audience members of Unstories, Spring 2017]
Using a fusion of anthropological ethnography and dramatic interpretation, the urgency of the stories is heightened as the interplay of scenes and stories unfolds.
From the standpoint of a student of anthropology, the scene that focused on empathy brought sharply into focus the distance between the observer anthropologist and the lived lives. It was a reminder that observation has its bias and distance. However, the performance as a whole was a stronger lesson that we can have a measure of understanding of difficult human situations. Anthropology has a valuable role in recording and reporting and exposing. Theater and Anthropology joined in expanding the lessons beyond the page.
I liked the gentleman who went up into the rafter beams. I have been on a fishing boat that has been stopped by the US Coast Guard, this was exactly the perspective I remember – authority on high with voices booming down on us. My favorite element was on empathy. It was a visual reminder that there is always distance between two humans, watcher and watched.
The Ritual of Performance: in “Rituals of the Contemporary”, Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella (Italy), July 15th , 2019.
“Getting Caught:” Dialoghi e sperimentazioni tra teatro e antropologia II (sul palco e non), Milan (Italy), May 9th, 2019.
Affect Theater: Ethnography and Theatrical Composition, Goldsmith College, London (UK), March 7th , 2019.
“Getting Caught:” Dialoghi e sperimentazioni tra teatro e antropologia (sul palco e non), Universita’ Milano-Bicocca (Italy), February 21st, 2019.
Affect Theater: A Workshop, Anthropology Department, McGill University, Montreal (Canada), October 17th , 2018.
“Teatro Experimental. Momentos de la vida Colombéana,” Centro de Desarrollo Integral, Quito (Ecuador), June 11-15, 2017.
Getting Caught: a collaboration on and off stage between theater and anthropology (performative lecture)(co-presented with Greg Pierotti). The Center for Experimental Ethnograpny, Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania, December 6, 2021.
Getting Caught: between Theater and Anthropology (co-presented with Greg Pierotti). 15th National Symposium of Theater and Performance Arts in Academe, Washington and Lee University, April 1-2, 2021.
Getting Caught: a collaboration on and off stage between theater and anthropology, Goldsmith College, London, March 5th, 2019.
Getting Caught: a collaboration on and off stage between theater and anthropology, Canadian Anthropology Society, Santiago de Cuba, May 2018.
Un-Stories Disrupting the Narrative Urge, produced by Lisa Stevenson, edited by A. S. Krauss, Society for Cultural Anthropology virtual Conference, April 19-21, 2018.
Theater and the Devising of Research, Department of Anthropology, Università Milano-Bicocca, December 13th, 2017.
Un-Stories: Disrupting the Narrative Urge, American Anthropological Association Meetings, Washington D.C., December 2017.
Getting Caught: a collaboration on and off stage between theater and anthropology, Visual Culture in and out of Crisis Symposium, Rutgers University, October 19th-20th, 2017.
On being caught, Panel: Experimental Methods in Ethnographic Research, 5th Annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, March 18th, 2017.
Dramaturgy, CoLED Conference, ETHNOGRAPHY & DESIGN: MUTUAL PROVOCATIONS, University of California, San Diego, October 29, 2017.
Getting Caught: A Collaboration On and Off Stage Between Theater and Anthropology. Society for Cultural Anthropology Meetings, Cornell University, May 14, 2017.
Organizers, Un-stories II (roaming) workshops, University of California, Davis, 2017-2018.
Organizers, University of California, Davis Humanities Institute Cluster on “Theater Research, Narrative, and Performance: Explorations in between the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities,” 2017-2017.
Co-Organizers (with Lisa Stevenson and Eduardo Kohn) “Teatro Experimental. Momentos de la vida Colombéana”, Centro de Desarrollo Integral, Quito, Ecuador, June 11-15, 2017.
