PERFORMANCES

Alumni Lecture Series: Wallace Bacon Lecture with Professor Derek Goldman
Performance Studies as Life-Practice: Cultivating "The Both/And"
This lecture explores and celebrates performance studies as life-practice, a way of being the world, building on the notion of the "both/and" espoused so indelibly by performance studies pioneers such as Wallace Bacon and Dwight Conquergood. As practitioners toiling in the "interdiscipline" of performance studies, we are called upon to position ourselves, often simultaneously, as artist/scholar, citizen/activist, teacher/learner, creator/adapter, parent/ descendant, advocate/critic, administrator/innovator, as practitioners of an art form and members of a community that is at once intimately embodied and intensely local, and yet also profoundly cross-cultural and global.  The lecture will offer personal reflections on how we in performance studies may be uniquely equipped to navigate and embrace these myriad and often paradoxical roles and investments, and to claim "the Both/And" as an empowering foundation that unites us in our diversity. 

Derek Goldman is Artistic Director of the Davis Performing Arts Center and Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Georgetown University.  He is an award-winning stage director, playwright, adapter, developer of new work, teacher, and published scholar, whose artistic work has been seen around the country, Off-Broadway and at numerous major regional theaters, as well as internationally.  
Wednesday, October 24, 12:00 p.m.
Alvina Krause Studio, Annie May Swift

Alumni Lecture Series: Professor Tony Perucci
The Complex and the Rupture: Paul Robeson and the Politics of Cold War Performance
Actor and singer Paul Robeson's performances in Othello, Show Boat, and The Emperor Jones made him famous, but his midcentury appearances in support of causes ranging from labor and civil rights to antilynching and American warmongering made him notorious. When Robeson announced at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference that it was "unthinkable" for blacks to go to war against the Soviet Union, the mainstream American press declared him insane.  
  
Notions of Communism, blackness, and insanity were interchangeably deployed during the Cold War to discount activism such as Robeson's, just a part of an array of social and cultural practices that author Tony Perucci calls the Cold War performance complex. Focusing on two key Robeson performances—the concerts in Peekskill, New York, in 1949 and his appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956—Perucci demonstrates how these performances and the government's response to them are central to understanding the history of Cold War culture in the United States.

Tony Perucci is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He is the author of "Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex" (University of Michigan Press, 2012).  His writings on the politics and aesthetics of performance have appeared in the journals Text and Performance Quarterly, TDR: The Drama Review, and Liminalities, as well as the books Iraq War Cultures, Violence Performed, and Performing Adaptations.
Wednesday, October 31st, 12:00 p.m.
Alvina Krause Studio, Annie May Swift

Performance Hour, “Murder. Women. Hope.” and “How To: Mend a Heart,”
7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 18, and 7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 19
Alvina Krause Studio, Annie May Swift Hall, 1920 Campus Drive
Northwestern University’s Evanston campus
Combining strategies of rhetoric and staging derived from early 20th-century German Expressionism with postmodern collage, this solo performance reconstitutes Oskar Kokoschka’s 1907 play “Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen.” Hosted by the School of Communication’s department of performance studies, “Murder. Women. Hope.” will be directed by undergraduate Charles Schultz. “How To: Mend a Heart” explores how people recover from a break-up following the Kübler-Ross model of grief. Undergraduate Rachel Geistfeld’s performance piece includes recent and older poems, poems from close to home and poems from around the world, which show different ways that people grieve over lost love, as well as The Bee Gees’ song “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” 

Alumni Lecture Series: Professor Renee Alexander Craft
The Portobelo Digital Oral History Project: Critical Ethnography, New Media, and the Unfinished Business of Co-performative Witnessing
Wednesday, February 20, Noon
Alvina Krause Studio, Annie May Swift
The Portobelo Digital Oral History Project represents the second phase of Alexander Craft’s eleven-year ethnographic research focused on an Afro-Latin community located on the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama.  It responds to a call from the community for greater cultural preservation and a desire fromresearchers on the topic to have a better platform to share and expand uponexisting research. Using the framework of Dwight Conquergood’s co-performative witnessing, this lecture will examine the process of co-creating and co-curating a digital repository as a radically collaborative space to co-produce, maintain, and share knowledge.
Renee Alexander Craft (PhD 2006) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on black identity, cultural performance, and nationalism(s) in the Americas. Based on six years of critical ethnographic and historical research with the Congo community of Portobelo, Panama, including a sustained one-year experience supported by a Fulbright Full Grant, she is completing a manuscript entitled When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and Politics of Black Identity in Panama.

Alumni Lecture Series: Professor Amber Day
Shifting the Conversation: Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC and the Problem of Satirical Efficacy
Wednesday, February 27, Noon
Alvina Krause Studio, Annie May Swift
This lecture examines Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC experiment, a project that one-ups his program’s usual boundary muddling, further crossing lines between entertainment television and political reportage, comedy and activism, by literally performing the debate about campaign finance regulation.  Day argues that, though the commercials developed by Colbert’s Super PAC may not have managed to significantly impact uninitiated viewers, it has nevertheless substantially effected the public discussion of campaign finance, challenging many assumptions about how the effects of political entertainment should be measured. 
Amber Day is Assistant Professor in the Literary and Cultural Studies department at Bryant University.  Her book, Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate, was published by Indiana University Press in 2011.  She also has articles in Social Research, Popular Communication, The International Journal of Communication, The Electronic Journal of Communication, Communicazione Politica, and the anthology Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post Network Era.   Her research centers on irony and satire, political performance and activism, and public debate.

Performance Hour, "The Canary: A Devised Play about Identity," 8 p.m. Thursday, February 28th, 8 p.m. Friday, March 1, and 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 2
Alvina Krause Studio, Annie May Swift Hall, 1920 Campus Drive
Northwestern University's Evanston Campus
The Canary is a play in which six characters explore the barriers to discovering and enacting the dimensions of their identities.  Following each performance, audience members are invited to interact, engage in dialogue, and discoverways to bridge barriers in relationships and communities. 

Alumni lecture Series: Professor David Donkor, Texas A&M University
Dance of a Savior King: Statecraft, Stagecraft and the Grand Durbar of Ghanaian Independence.
Wednesday, March 6th, Noon
Alvina Krause Studio

Alumni Lecture Series: Professor Tamara Roberts
Inextricably Bound: Performing Sonic Identity Politics and Radical Multiculturalism
As a political project, multiculturalism has been heavily criticized for its failures. In this presentation, I tease out the sonic dimensions of critiques of multiculturalism, most notably debates regarding identity politics. "Sonic identity politics" operates as a discourse in which singular sounds come to stand in for entire groups of people and are assigned a predetermined political function. This discourse operates with the neoliberal assumption that representation of Otherness is the equivalent to political engagement or enfranchisement, and works to disconnect rather than keep intact links between music, culture, history, and political efficacy. To understand the effects of sonic identity politics, I examine the work of Chinese American musician, composer, and activist Fred Ho. Ho’s music and theater works combine Black Arts Movement free jazz, West African and East Asian traditions, western opera, martial arts, and manga aesthetics in order to promote Third World—or Afro Asian—unity. Despite its anti- racist foundation, Ho's work is often promoted and received through standard multicultural discourse highlighting its "exotic" sources. Yet it also enacts a "radical multiculturalism" by historicizing, re-politicizing, and putting into dialogue non-western practices. Posing a theory of musico-racialization—the process by which sounds are racially marked—I argue that due to longstanding sonic stereotypes, the work of artists like Ho remains bound between sonic identity politics and radical multiculturalism, requiring a new way of conceiving musical politics.

Tamara Roberts is a scholar and artist devoted to exploring the aesthetic, political, and spiritual potential of performance. Her current research investigates connections between sound and race, centering on forgotten interracial and intercultural histories of vernacular music in the Americas.
This work has appeared in publications including the Journal of Popular Music Studies and the anthology Yellow Power, Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho, which she co-edited. She is also developing new research on gender and sexuality in Afro-Puerto Rican bomba, women- centered drumming communities in the U.S., and the "spiritual technologies" of plantation slavery era music in the U.S. and Caribbean. Tamara received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and is on the faculty of the UC Berkeley Music Department.
Tamara is an active musician and has worked nationally and internationally as a composer and sound designer in theater, dance, and film.
Wednesday, May 15, 12:00
Alvina Krause Studio, Annie May Swift