My approach to teaching is one that understands performance as both an object of study and a method of learning. Because performance entails visual, auditory, and kinesthetic ways of knowing, I have found that it can serve as a helpful tool not only for those who wish to pursue careers in the arts and humanities, but also for those who wish to strengthen their critical thinking skills and develop a deeper understanding of human behavior and political circumstances. My pedagogical practice stems from my experience as a theater and performance artist, as well as from my graduate work in performance studies and undergraduate training in philosophy and English literature.
In both the studio and the seminar room, I work to achieve a balance between an emphasis on interdisciplinary forms while also maintaining a rigorous commitment to the methodologies, literatures, and practices of the disciplines I engage. Through a combination of workshops, lectures, invited guests, in-class and online discussions, and individual and collaborative assignments (both creative and/as scholarly), I guide my students not only to digest, but also to critique inherited frameworks. I help them to situate dramatic texts, theatrical productions, performance situations, and theoretical interventions in their larger socio-historical contexts. I challenge them to examine how our varied roles are inflected by intersecting categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. I am emphatic with my students about the primary importance of close-reading skills: be it marking the beats of a dramatic scene, deciphering important directorial choices in a live performance, or pinpointing the logical moves and rhetorical shifts of an argument. And I am also adamant about the fundamental importance of learning how to write critically, effectively, comfortably, and adventurously. I help students to see that writing well – like playwriting, directing, and devising – greatly benefits from a deep familiarity and fluency with a particular set of guidelines, and I encourage them to develop the necessary knowledge and expertise so that they feel permitted ultimately to break those rules.
When teaching directing, adaptation, and devised performance, I emphasize a detailed historical focus on a wide spectrum of theatrical sites, while also provoking students to explore a range of intermedial practices that engage the shifting role of the text, music, site-specificity, street performance, spectacle, as well as a repertoire of postdramatic paradigms: collage, surreal experience, vaudeville, dream image, and simultaneity. I encourage students to explore modes of performance that de-hierarchize “the story” as the only mode of story-telling. Instead, we work to understand performance as a productive meeting point of multiple intelligences and media. Performance (through a park, within a protest, at a rehearsal, on a stage) provides an explosive site of parataxis: text and body and environment and music. Of: pop-culture and obsolescence, real and play, aesthetics and ethics. We are always asking: what is essential about live performance – that television or cinema or TikTok just can’t tackle in the same way? And: how can we make performance that strives to challenge our inherited assumptions: about agency, spectatorship, identity, and community. My courses investigate and attempt to instigate a theater of big ideas: curious, probing, intransigent (when necessary). I believe in the power of performance to promote and provoke controversy, critique, even discomfort and antagonism, just as much as it promotes and provokes exuberance, laughter, amusement, and joy. All of my courses – be they introductory or more advanced – aim to help students cultivate an ability to engage critically, ethically, and actively with their peers, their community, and their art. From the first day of the semester, I place a great amount of emphasis on generosity and the importance of ensemble. I believe – and I communicate this over and over again – that good art making depends on the individual’s ability to react to others and to the world at large with openness and presence. I help students to discover that the optimal conditions for reaction – poise, spontaneity, and specificity – are themselves predicated on trust and respect.
Whether I am teaching directing, theater history, or performance theory, I work to establish the classroom as a safe space and as a dialogic space. Rather than relying on a model of teaching in which the professor deposits knowledge in students’ minds, I aim to create an environment of critical inquiry where students actively participate in the processes of knowledge creation. My goal is to help students make their own discoveries and to equip them with the resources, contexts, and confidences to do so. In their evaluations of my teaching, students consistently note that my classes are filled with passion and enthusiasm, and that they find me to be open, patient, and accessible.
I’ve been very lucky in my position as Director of Dramatic Literature at NYU to have the opportunity to reimagine much of our curriculum and to bring coursework into more active alignment with contemporary conversations in the field. In each new course, I propose we examine global sites of drama, theater, and performance in their historical contexts in order to critically question canon formation and to understand the many and varied challenges of doing theater history and of comparing performance forms across cultures. By explicitly calling attention to questions of historiography – how history itself is made – I work with students to consider both the productivity and the limits of temporal categories and to interrogate traditional reliance on written forms or archival remains over embodied practices. Whose histories and stories, for instance, have not been told or have received much less attention? Who benefited from the prevailing ideologies of the age and who did not? And why have previous historians asked some questions and not others?
For example, in the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the social unrest and anxiety accompanying the November 2020 U.S. election, I worked to reconceive our Program’s “Major Playwrights” seminar on Bertolt Brecht for our own political moment. In the new iteration of the seminar, we set out both to examine key moments of Brecht’s multi-faceted artistic development and to juxtapose his major theatrical and theoretical experiments with more contemporary Black and Latin American artists working to engage and to challenge the “Brechtian” legacy of political theater. Channeling Brecht’s commitment to experimentation and institutional critique, we studied a series of radical interventions including those by Nina Simone, Boots Riley, Ed Bullins, Aleshea Harris, Tania Brughera, and Guillermo Calderón in order to interrogate the ways that Brecht continues to serve (or not serve) as a reference point for political theater and performance today.
In the classroom, as in my research and theater practice, I am committed to exploring the interrelations of theory and practice, scholarship and public engagement. I encourage my students to make connections between the university and the surrounding community. Before all theaters were abruptly closed in response to COVID-19, I offered a newly imagined iteration of our popular Drama in Performance course each term. With this seminar, my aim was to help students from across the campus (and visiting from across New York University’s global network) think in more expansive ways about the relations between performance and the city, between theater and civic life. Each term, I curated a new “season” of 15 or so performances from across the city’s boroughs that we attended each Thursday (Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, Dance, Inter-Art-Performance, we even headed to New Jersey on occasion). I then matched each performance with a theoretical or critical text, brought in a lineup of guest artists, and facilitated students in devising an artistic response to the course’s themes. The goals of the course were threefold: to expand students’ understanding of the vast array of different forms of drama, theater, and performance happening in New York City; to give them new theoretical and methodological tools to read, watch, and write critically about those performances; and to understand how performance practice itself can be a method of research.
Teaching in and between the arts and humanities, I find it especially useful to help students think about and work through the practical (and often less glamorous) side of artistic and academic labor and the ways these practicalities inform and affect that labor. For instance, in spring 2018 and again in spring 2020, I co-taught a course on “Curating Radical Performance” with Jay Wegman, the director of NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. This is the only undergraduate course on performance curation at NYU – and, from what we can tell, the only course to be offered nationwide that brings interdisciplinary questions from the critical humanities together with the nitty-gritty realities of curatorial practice. It was a very exciting seminar to develop as there are so few models for what should be included. We invited a series of high-profile New York curators to talk to the students about curating in today’s performance economy. And for their final assignment, students embarked upon a multi-week group project to curate a “new” festival of their own dreaming and to write a (fake) grant application to fund the festival. On the final day of the seminar, we met as a mock review panel to adjudicate which festival should receive funding based on criteria we had established beforehand. This examination of the paradoxes and hidden assumptions behind those (ever-dreadful) grant applications helped students develop a deeper understanding of the infrastructural and administrative dimensions of making and presenting theater today. Students said that this strategic interweaving of theoretical debates, aesthetic approaches, and hands-on practical administrative and artistic work opened their eyes to a range of new perspectives that they don’t usually encounter in their other theater studies courses.
The curation course felt like an important step toward more sustained investigation of the intersections between the important work happening on global stages and in various arts and humanities departments across NYU. When COVID hit, I approached Jay Wegman and Humanities Dean Una Chaudhuri about collaboratively developing a course for fall 2020 in which we would set out to develop a new online seminar to study emerging forms of theatrical experimentation around the world. We were interested in a class that could provide students from different courses of study with a unique opportunity to learn first-hand from artistic change-makers and to gain practical knowledge of the methods they use to create their work. In addition to the subject matter, it was also essential for us to use the perceived setbacks of the COVID crisis and the move to Zoom as an opportunity to explore the experimental forms of pedagogy that online teaching enables – and not merely to wallow in what it prohibits. We commissioned six renowned performance makers – Annie Dorsen (US), Tim Etchells (UK), Florentina Holzinger (Austria), Faustin Linyekula (Congo), Thomas Ostermeier (Germany), and Kyle Abraham (US) – to each teach one intensive Zoom masterclass developed exclusively for our course. In addition to the six masterclasses, we invited performance scholars from across NYU to lead us in the study of texts, ideas, and artistic practices that shape their ongoing research in contemporary performance. This class was inspiring on many levels. Not only did we manage to create a course that would be impossible to teach without the expanded sensorium and communication technologies Zoom affords. But amid so much loss, the course inspired the students (and us) to think about and practically explore how contemporary performance provides new and essential tools for collaborative world-building. As we contend with the effects of ongoing planetary crises, and though I hope we are finally finished with Zoom pedagogy, this course strengthened my convictions about the central roles theater and performance can play in the years to come helping us to re-envision the arts and humanities as vital public institutions.