Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Ethical Dramaturgies, Dec 2020

Examining our collaborative choreographic process and embodied investigation of accomplishment, this article argues that our ongoing performance-making practice offers new insights about a systematized, continual demand for productivity that prioritizes the individual. Focusing on our recent trio of dances, choreographed from 2015 to the present, we propose that our collaborative process and relationship intervene on neo-liberal conditioning within academia and provide a different approach to shared institutional experiences. Our insistence on co-authorship and cooperation, both onstage and on the page, creates an undercurrent of resistance to dominating structures of scholarship and hyper-valuing of individual achievement.

For scenic designers, the building of a scenic model is not merely a component of one’s practice – it is an act of creation. Handcrafted from pieces of this and that, the model’s purpose is to imagine whole worlds in miniature that, in turn, inspire fantasies and daydreams. But when this purpose is ignored, and the model is regarded as simply a tool for communication, it is seen as having outlived its usefulness and often thrown away. On the stage our work exists only briefly and then it is gone (i.e., the bittersweet, ephemeral nature of theatre) but the model need not meet the same fate. The life of the scenic model, like any life spent in the service of art, is worthy of more consideration. We must imagine a better afterlife for it. In this article, I examine an exhibit of my own discarded scenic models titled Please Touch: Revitalizing Scenic Models through Play. Displayed in their ruined state, detached from their original duties as tools for production, I invited audiences to play with the models; to touch and examine them; and to move or rearrange them, as a way to revitalize them through engagement so that they might live again.

This article will address the ethical aspects of imagination and spectating. Since Plato’s denunciation of imagination in The Republic and Aristotle’s judgement in De Anima that ‘imaginings are for the most part false’, the notion of the human imagination has been controversial. In relation to theatrical performance, key issues concern how performance acts on the imagination of the spectator – and what actions of the spectator’s imagination might perform in return. In this article, I will address the ethics of imagination: as an examination of truth and falseness, as an issue of responsibility and choice, as a social imaginary and a narrative imagination that allows one to relate to the other, and finally as an exploration of the embodied basis of imagination, which again involves a questioning of the line between the real and the imaginary. In conclusion, I will take Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Tim Crouch’s The Author as examples of two plays that explicitly address the ethics of imagining.

In the years since his death, some of the most important new areas of enquiry in Pinter studies have centred on the artistic works inspired by this major dramatist. One such endeavour is a new theatre production entitled Truth to Power Café. Truth to Power Café has been written and devised by the artist and producer Jeremy Goldstein. Goldstein’s work is a blend of poetry, performance and storytelling – an exploration of his own hidden history, and an articulation of his own ambivalent feelings. Even though Pinter contended that art and politics were irreconcilable, the argument of this paper is that Truth to Power Café represents an attempt by Goldstein to generate a synthesis between the artistic and the political: to reconcile the subjective character of art with the public nature of political activism; to mobilize the power of the theatre to enable the oppressed to break through the ritualistic ‘habits of lying’ that protect the powerful, and to discover a form of theatre where the audience can articulate themselves with ‘honesty’ and ‘precision’. Goldstein reconceptualizes the theatre as a ‘safe space’, where audience members can speak out against oppressive forces. Goldstein’s performance is a ‘call to action’. Each life testimony mediates between Goldstein’s lyrical psycho-biography, and the audience’s reception of his presentation, situating each regional performance of Truth to Power Café in its social, historical, and economic context. Goldstein achieves his objective by interweaving the personal, the private and the artistic with the public, the political and the historical.

In Australia a vibrant tradition of participatory and often politically motivated performance work developed under the term ‘community arts and cultural development’ across the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. In this body of practice, considerations of ethics are articulated through process, practices and representation rather than content. Though effective, community arts as it developed in Australia is often time, resource and emotionally intensive for artists, community participants and audiences. In recent years, retraction of funding, as well as shifts in practice towards live art, performance art and relational aesthetics have reduced the resources available for these once prominent practices. Practitioners are confronting challenges and needing to develop new ways of working in an operating environment where long-term consultation is not necessarily possible or preferred by stakeholders. In this article, we reflect on the current state of play for practitioners seeking to develop ethical dramaturgy in performance works that collaborate with communities to tell life stories or represent participants’ lived experiences in Australia. Through examples from our own practice, as practice-led researchers, we consider how work in this sector is under strain and experiencing scarcity, precarity and an increasing lack of access to institutional resources that have historically enabled ethically rigorous dramaturgical practices. We aim, through this process, to rediscover and rearticulate an ethical dramaturgy for deployment in the Australian environment as it exists today.

Strictly applied Aristotelian models of rhetoric limit possibilities of communication to the binary roles of speaker and hearer, and as such reinforce binary notions of power across lines of gender and race. A brief case study of a cancelled conversation about the white-centred storytelling and harmful stereotypes in the musical Miss Saigon at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, Wisconsin, reveals the harm that can be inflicted by the rigidity of ancient rhetorical models. Feminist rhetorical models offer an alternative, and unless institutions recognize that there is ethos in our audiences and value the labour that produces ‘organic dramaturgy’ in our communities, the contemporary call for new collective forms of storytelling will be left unanswered.

This reflection questions the materialism that drives professional and educational theaters in the United States. Dramaturgs could contribute an ethics of climate change to provide necessary interventions to contemporary theatrical practices.

Professional theatre practice in the United States rests on a foundation of patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist white supremacy. Of the many factors reifying theatre’s ties to racial and gender inequity, the theatre curriculum deployed by most American colleges and universities is perhaps one of the most consequential as it both upholds and replicates the profession’s oppressive structures by privileging training in craft over a more humanistic engagement with the discipline. If theatre curriculum actively challenged the profession’s oppressive foundations, and thereby produced artists who are prepared and committed to working for justice, then future generations might be able to change the profession from within the profession. I propose integrating ethics training into theatre curriculum as one way to initiate this process. This manifesto advocates for an ethics-driven theatre education and suggests that training in ethics will prompt students to consider the material consequences of their artistic choices and justify their decision-making using ethical theory. Ethical reasoning requires practice and the classroom is an ideal place for students to rehearse their use of ethics. Working through an ethical dilemma with classmates gives students the opportunity not only to see ethics as a social project, but also to devise anti-racist, feminist and queer-affirming approaches to artmaking. Training the next generation of theatre artists in ethics could lead to profound changes in the way we create and consume theatrical art in the future.

What are the challenges and opportunities of working with undergraduates from the perspective of institutional dramaturgy in relation to equity, diversity and inclusion? How can ideas of change be foregrounded as methods, subjects and objects of study?

This article reflects on the experiences of a white male faculty teaching Black theatre history at a predominantly white institution. It views the Black theatre history classroom as a potential haven for theatre students of colour, and highlights the critical role of a white faculty member in honouring and protecting that space. It argues for the importance of self-reflection and humility on the part of white faculty as we engage with topics surrounding Black history. This piece references the traditional power dynamics between students and faculty, and reimagines those power dynamics when white faculty members teach Black theatre history to Black students. In our current moment of racial upheaval and reckoning within the rehearsal rooms and on our stages, this reflection contends that we must also examine the ways in which our pedagogy in Black theatre history can be actively antiracist. Ultimately, this piece advocates that white faculty work to de-centre their own whiteness in their theatre history classrooms and commit to humility and a willingness to learn from their students of colour.

This article proposes that dramaturgical forays into the archive often necessitate important reckonings with ethical concerns and quandaries. Reflecting briefly on my experiences doing research for Ifa Bayeza’s extraordinary trilogy of plays about the life, death and legacy of Emmett Till – The Ballad of Emmett Till, That Summer in Sumner and Benevolence – I sharpen particular focus on what an ethical engagement with the archive has looked like for me and contemplate what it means to hone a practice of ethical dramaturgy.

This reflection considers what it means to ethically engage with material, specifically that which contains harm perpetuated against Black bodies by the police. In the height of this particular critical moment, I address the continued harm that is caused by white folks purposefully avoiding videos of Black trauma. Deploying a pedagogy of care, I attempt to bring attention to those that have divorced themselves from larger political narratives by turning away from those events that are a fundamental part of the unfinished emancipation of Black people in United States.

Marisol, set in 1993 New York City, depicts the end of the world from the perspective of a twenty-something Puerto Rican white collar woman who loses her guardian angel. In approaching the costume design for this play I encountered a deeply concerning question: how can I design costumes for homeless characters without appropriating the physical appearance of people who experience homelessness in real life? Homeless characters are represented in many iconic plays in English language theatre, from Angels in America to Oliver!, and costume designers are frequently asked to address the ethics of representation with their design choices. In this short article I share my process in sourcing primary reference images for homeless characters without appropriating the exclusionary violence of the people who are considered ‘out of place’ in today’s New York City. I considered the ethics of different approaches to sourcing primary research that I have used in the past but ultimately chose to give up ‘authenticity’ for ethics. For the design I used reference images sourced from Japanese label N. Hoolywood’s Fall 2017 Menswear Collection, a fashion design that directly appropriates people who experience homelessness. My choice to frame homelessness through the lens of fashion served our production of Marisol only because of its design concept but leaves open the question of how to ethically design costumes for homeless characters in other plays.

This reflective article asserts that the monologue form helps audiences and readers ask ethical questions concerning the relationship(s) between subjectivity and communal identity formation. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, researched, written and originally performed by Anna Deavere Smith, serves as this article’s primary textual example of a monologic play. The play’s monologic form embodies ethical possibility through its attentiveness to multiple perspectives and intersubjective dialogue developed from Smith’s interviews following the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict. Because the violence against Rodney King (like the more recent murder of George Floyd) was recorded on video, the play’s monologic ethics also engage with, and sometimes against, technological evidence of institutional racism. Monologues, and especially soliloquies, function within larger dialogic plays as a mirror – a reflection of consciousness. These minor generic variations in dialogic plays here become Twilight’s primary organizing principle, thus transgressing traditional genre laws. Earlier twentieth-century monologic texts, by Beckett and others, resignified and problematized the soliloquy’s relationship to identity-formation. The paradigm of an isolated single subjectivity, such as Hamlet or even King Lear’s Edmund, is sedimented into classical form. Smith’s play, Twilight, like Shange’s monologic text, For Colored Girls, without one central protagonist, restructures and reframes the dramatic monologue to allow a closer look at the ethics of how we live with our own fragmented selves.

In the scholarly world where disembodied language and intellectualism reign, Kaustavi Sarkar, a dancing archive, performs embodied epistemologies. Even in her native Odissi dance discipline, Sarkar works from the margin as a questioner and an experimenter in a codified practice that values obedience and tradition. It is from this periphery that Sarkar develops a unique ethos of traditional dance that turns the conservatism of classical forms to open-layered intracultural and intercultural dance dialogues through dance.

Review of: Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy, Emer O’Toole, Andrea Pelegrí Kristić and Stuart Young (eds) (2017)

Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 230 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-00434-637-6, e-book, €100.00

ISBN 978-9-00434-633-8, h/bk, €100.00

Review of: Risk, Participation, and Performance Practice: Critical Vulnerabilities in a Precarious World, Alice O’Grady (ed.) (2017)

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 264 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-31963-242-1, e-book, €93.59

ISBN 978-3-31963-241-4, h/bk, €93.59

ISBN 978-3-31987-506-4, p/bk, €74.89

Review of: Prison Cultures: Performance, Resistance, Desire, Aylwyn Walsh (2019)

Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, 274 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-106-1, e-PUB, £85.00

ISBN 978-1-78938-107-8, e-PDF, £68.00

ISBN 978-1-78938-105-4, h/bk, £68.00

Review of: Writing in Collaborative Theatre-Making, Sarah Sigal (2016)

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 240 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-13733-170-0, e-book, €23.99

ISBN 978-1-13733-169-4, h/bk, €79.11

ISBN 978-1-13733-168-7, p/bk, €28.47

Review of: Moment Work: Tectonic Theater Project’s Method of Creating Drama, Moisés Kaufman and Barbara Pitts McAdams (2018)

New York: Vintage Books and Random House, 224 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-10197-178-9, e-book, $12.99

ISBN 978-1-10197-177-2, p/bk, $18.95