Seattle Repertory Theatre put on Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me as a part of their 2022 season. The play is an illuminating 100 minute almost solo-show of Heidi Schreck recounting her personal story of what the US Constitution, promises and gaps, means to her and the women of her family. This retrieval is prompted by the questions she received at US Constitution debates she attended all over the country, but specifically at the American Legion Hall in Wenatchee, Washington. Struck by Schreck's implementation of "Greek tragedy wailing", I argue that she signals the existence of intergenerational trauma in white American women. More so, that there is little interpersonal communication amongst white American women about their shared cultural traumatic experiences. How does she do this? I draw on theory and evidence around intergenerational trauma put forth by historical and contemporary accounts of the weaponization of white femininity, feminist interpretations of Euripides' Medea, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, literary trauma theory, and trauma theory, all of which may show us how to descend into the next step of dissecting these seemingly patterned behaviors. I formulate this argument from my phenomenological experience with the play, but support it through a semiotic analysis focusing on Heidi's "Greek tragedy wailing", her sock monkey, and the use of yellow for her blazer and promotional material. I wonder: did the play resonate with the white women in the audience? Obviously, not with the woman I passed on my way out, as she said she "didn't understand the point of the sock monkey." Is this an exact example of what Schreck is trying to point to, highlighting the oversight or lack of conversation about this topic? I am interested in theatre as a site of healing and discussion of unresolved trauma. This paper is to help us better understand Schreck and uproot white supremacy, the patriarchy, and the violence this trauma inflicts on white American women and black people in America. 

Larissa FastHorse originally wrote The Thanksgiving Play in response to theatre-makers' complaints that they could not produce her other works due to a lack of indigenous actors. The Thanksgiving Play, therefore, does not include any indigenous roles and instead centers itself around the very issue of pursuing representation without the people you are trying to represent. Upon first watching the show, audiences may leave the performance having come to the same conclusion as the characters: true representation is impossible to do well, and it’s better to say nothing than to try “too hard.” But is that really what FastHorse is asking of her audience? Is The Thanksgiving Play a snarky way of telling white people to keep their noses and “activism” out of places where they don’t belong and stay as passive spectators? A closer reading of the play reveals the characters to be continually contradicting themselves; they seem to care deeply about social issues, but are completely oblivious of their own ignorance and intolerance; they are attempting to create dialogue, but can’t communicate with one another. I have taken a deconstructive and phenomenological approach to understand how the binary of passivity/activity represented in Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play works against the perceived message around political activism, yet somehow still succeeds in calling audiences to find a space of truly meaningful engagement. The results of my analysis will provide a glimpse into one way that the controversial topic of modern casting practices is being discussed in contemporary theatrical productions. Along with an analysis of the text itself, I will bring in information on historical activist theatre to understand the ways in which The Thanksgiving Play both follows and contradicts the conventions of its genre in order to further its message, especially in relation to Brechtian Epic Theatre. I will also include information from three different receptions of one LA production of the show in order to understand what audiences seemed to get out of it, and how their interpretations interact with each other and the ideas of Cultural Activism.

One of the most revolutionary points of Annie Baker’s The Flick is the way it insists that everyday actions, occurrences, and feelings matter. In fact, they do not just matter in a passing, superfluous way - they are deeply significant and meaningful. Art often takes on the role of importance-giving in our society, showing us which aspects of our lives and the world around us are important enough to be recreated and talked about. Annie Baker answers the all important question of what here deserves to be illuminated in a relatively uncommon way. She chooses an atypical topic, three employees of a small town, small time movie theater and chooses to spend the next three hours with them. The Flick, by virtue of its very existence, says that these people, and their experiences matter. This is a radical statement in a world that denies the importance of billions of people’s common, everyday experiences, and audiences have noted that resonance. In this essay I will explore exactly how Baker achieves this effect, and explore various audience reactions to the lifting up of “ordinary” activities through a phenomenological analysis of reception. To do this, I will consider a wide range of reviews of The Flick, with an eye turned towards reactions to the unassuming content and how audiences may have recontextualized their own lives and experiences within the new hierarchy of importance offered by this play. It is my belief that this is a monumental question to consider because art and other forms of representation have an undeniable impact on how people understand themselves and their relation to the world, often in terms of importance. If making powerful, insightful plays about ordinary people can impact our own relationships to ourselves, that has the potential to offer a guiding light for theater in the 21st century.

Binary gender stereotypes infiltrate every space in which people interact in this society; they are instilled in all social behaviors and relationships. The form and intensity of the stereotyping in a particular academic field may influence whether a student enters that field; is affected permanently by the learning environment of that field; and/or, ultimately, is successful in the field . This study looks at the effect the gender binary and sexist stereotypes have on communities of dance education. Historically, dance has been a female-dominated space, yet this is not reflected in equity of opportunity and success across genders in the field. This research identifies societal and cultural behaviors that impact dance communities. To collect information regarding dance culture in academia, surveys were sent to students in collegiate Western Theatrical Dance classes aimed to collect information regarding dance culture in academia. Participants responded to questions about experiences in past dance education settings in comparison to the collegiate community in which they are currently engaged in order to understand what predetermined behaviors and understandings influence their current practices. An extensive literature review of gender effects on individuals in STEM and dance contextualizes the survey responses and shapes the findings of this study. There is a vast gap in the way females and males are taught to behave in order to be respected and successful. The findings of this study suggest communities need to explore ways to decentralize instilled social behaviors in order to provide equal opportunities for growth and success in dance across genders and other identities.

Over the past year, I have conducted movement and personal-narrative-based epistemological research interrogating the gender semantics of manhood versus “male-hood" within our Western society. Borne of the progressively queer politics of gender that define all transgender men as men, as well as the freedom of identity and expression among all individuals that queer theory permits, this research has intended to discover the identity of “man” disconnected from the previous phallic definition. I have observed, physicalized, and self-referentially disrupted forms of masculinity in our society through embodied movement explorations and semantic restructurings, with specific ties to masculinity within my own life and upbringing. More recently this research has primarily focused on the pressures that make manhood an assumed consequence of maleness and what it means to interfere within that predestined process, as well as the associated consequences of doing such. From these investigations, I developed three iterations of physical performance works, the third of which will be presented at this symposium. Each work has come with different conclusions and has revealed areas lacking understanding and/or definition. So, though I am presenting a finalized work, this research remains quite unfinished and never intends to be considered so. Due to the personal nature of this research, this work is only directly applicable within my lived experience and I hesitate to generalize my research to claim any relevance to lives other than my own. My motivation behind this research has always been one of personal discovery, but by sharing it, I hope to expand this research and bring it into a larger conversation than myself. 

People embody the joy and pain of nature through their own experiences, and have been sharing and cherishing this interconnectedness from time immemorial through paintings, stories, songs, dance, and more. I am a migrant living in a foreign country. i was eating sushi that day…. is a solo dance and an ethnographic research project, exploring ways in which I connect to, resonate with, and embody nature and personal experiences through performance. The awe-inspiring habit of salmon migration sparks my curiosity about the complex and multifaceted nature of human migration. As anadromous fish, salmon spend their juvenile life in rivers, and migrate to the ocean where they spend their adult life. They return to the upstream rivers to reproduce when they reach sexual maturity. Salmon are able to precisely return to their natal river, and even to the very spawning ground of their birth. This creative research explores my questions around identity and the idea of belonging through examining migrating salmon, and my own migrating experiences. What is the definition of home? Is it where you were born, reproduce, and die? Or where you mature? Salmon migrate to optimize their chance of reproduction as it defines their success. What about humans? What are we migrating for? Are we ultimately going to return to where we were from? My creative process starts with producing a soundscore combining text, breathing, and waves. The choreography is inspired by and generated through filmed improvisations as I experiment with different ways to interact with the soundscore and the props, always keeping my research questions in mind. The piece is a product of my desire to understand and reify the fear, confusion, exhaustion, excitement, and hope in the process of migration.