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Theatre as Cultural Exchange: Stages and Studios of Learning

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Theatre as Cultural Exchange: Stages and Studios of Learning Anita Gonzalez

Theatre Symposium, Volume 25, 2017, pp. 12-28 (Article)

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12 G O N Z A L E Z

Theatre as Cultural Exchange

Stages and Studios of Learning

Anita Gonzalez

It was a pleasure presenting for “Theatre Symposium: Cross-Cultural Dialogue on the Global Stage” in April 2016. The symposium of- fered a unique opportunity to dialogue with colleagues about how global perspectives influence our practice. Whether we work in performance, technical production, or theatre studies, our artistry and scholarship ex- pand when we take time to learn about other cultures and consider how our production seasons, classrooms, and professional work might change by introducing world perspectives. Global travel begins in our minds. We must first imagine a broad context for what we consider to be the- atre; then we can engage with new paradigms that will define the future of our artistic forms. Even though we work in diverse contexts, each of our areas of expertise can benefit from engaging with literature and prac- tices that take us away from our comfort zones. Intercultural experiences, coupled with meaningful interactions with people who differ from us, ex- pand our minds. As the head of the Global Theatre and Ethnic Studies minor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I advocate for the- atre practices that foreground diverse cultures and promote engagement with intercultural communities. “Going global” enhances our ability to absorb multiple perspectives that can broaden our understandings about theatrical practice.

Often I hear that we are all humans under the skin, but through my travels and classroom experiences I have learned that while we share com- mon emotions and physiques, ideologies and belief systems can be really different. And that is the beautiful thing about the theatre. It provides an opportunity to physically, viscerally experience another perspective of human existence. As a scholar and practitioner I find performance to be an ideal way of crossing borders. When I think about stages and studios of learning I wonder, how do we teach for a global future? Most theatre programs offer a combination of literature and studio courses coupled

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with a production season. In general, we remain committed to teaching a canon of plays that reflect the history of Euro-American, English-lan- guage theatre. Global and multicultural theatre appears as the spice to en- rich our experience of a progressive historical evolution of Western drama.

Escaping this approach to theatrical training is a challenge because, as faculty members, often this has been our training, our experience, or our area of expertise. It is intimidating to approach learning about the cul- tures of the entire world. In addition to a plethora of plays, there are lan- guage barriers. And if each cultural drama represents a distinct ideology and cultural context, then how can we immerse ourselves in all of these deep histories and experiences?

We can begin to connect to other cultural positions just by consid- ering our own background and heritage. Each of us brings experiences gleaned from a lifetime of immersion in a unique cultural context. Too often, we underestimate the impact of our learned cultural behaviors on our daily arts practice. Faculty members and students in American class- rooms tend to think of themselves as part of an assimilated, hegemonic middle class. If we consider our ancestral heritage, each of us actually car- ries distinct cultural knowledges or understandings. For example, we tend to forget that our grandparents may have come from Ireland or that we might have been raised on a farm or an island rather than within a sub- urban community. Our heritage connections travel across generations and impact our worldview.1

One of the exercises I introduce in class to help students begin to think about global identities is to have them “perform their identity” as an opening activity. When I start this exercise, at first there is confu- sion. White students tell me they do not know what to perform. African American students ask me if they can perform any identity. I encourage all students to select a song, dance, or poem that is about who they are and to perform it. Within this exercise I have seen poignant theatrical acts. One performance that stands out for me is the work of a student of Swedish descent who performed a ritual of stuffing Christmas sausages. He stood in front of the class and began to demonstrate how to grind and stuff the meat. Then he spoke about his brother joining him in filling the casings, and as he worked he recalled how this activity connected him with family and heritage. He cried while performing this memory, remembering an almost-forgotten ethnic heritage. This performance of identity is just one of many that students have presented that point to our global environ- ment. What is interesting about doing this exercise over time is the vast regional differences that emerge from the same assignment.

In New York, students tend to perform hyphenated identities—Italian

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American, Irish American, Jewish American. In Florida, people performed geographic locales—being northern redneck or being from Miami or Georgia. When I teach in Michigan today, students often perform De- troit, a city—and for the first time last semester I observed students per- forming their identities as test-tube babies. The world is changing and it is hard to keep up. There are real challenges in thinking about how to relate theatre training to all of these identities. How do we incorporate a glob- alized world into our research and theatre-training programs? I propose we think about three modes of bringing global consciousness to theatre: collaboration, exchange, and finding the global in the local.

Collaboration

Since each of us is most familiar with our own cultural contexts, it is easiest to learn about other cultures through collaboration. Working with someone from a different background allows both partners to experience new ideas. In collaborations, we tend to carry a lot of unexamined as- sumptions with us. Studies document first-world or upper-middle-class tendencies to approach cultural exchange with a “savior” mentality. This means that we enter any cultural exchange believing that our own expe- riences, when shared, will enhance and improve the culture we are visit- ing. Inherent in this approach is an assumption that our partnering cul- tural community needs or wants to be assimilated into our behavioral modes. Even when we try to accommodate other cultural modes, we can lose sight of our own myopic visions.

Here is an example from graduate school. When I was working on my PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I was charged with direct- ing a play called El Guitarron by Lynn Alvarez in collaboration with the university’s Latino students. For this production, the department made a strong effort to recruit and involve Latino students. It was assumed that theatre students would contribute knowledge of theatre practice while the Latinos would contribute cultural knowledge to make the show a success.

Yet hidden in this plan were a lot of assumptions about how theatre should be done. We presumed that time would work the same across cul- tures, with everyone showing up ten minutes before rehearsals ready to work. That didn’t happen. We presumed that our priorities would be the same and that the play’s needs would take precedence over other activities, like family gatherings. That didn’t happen. Things really came to a head when we presumed that Latino audiences would adjust to our theatrical ticket-buying rituals—that people who wanted to see the show would come to the box office to buy tickets. Our Latino collaborators told us that in their community, people sell tickets by holding a block of tickets,

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Theatre as a Cultural Exchange 15

selling off individual tickets to family and friends, and then returning the unsold tickets and the money to the sponsor. The department was un- able to accommodate this procedure, so we ended up with primarily uni- versity audience members.

My point here is that a successful collaboration needs dialogue and dis- cussion. At the University of Wisconsin, and in many institutions, it is as- sumed that non-institutional communities will assimilate and adapt to the institution’s norms. This creates an unbalanced circumstance in which the non-institutional is devalued. Offering a collaborative opportunity ideally means that both sides are willing and able to make adjustments. The La- tino students’ approach to selling tickets to the production was not in- correct or in need of improvement; it was merely a different solution to the play’s outreach and promotion needs.

Currently, I am involved in another theatre project called the Story- telling Incubator, a collaboration with the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Tribe.2 When I moved to Michigan to form the Global Theatre and Eth- nic Studies minor, I immediately looked for local partners. I was intro- duced to the Upper Peninsula and the Chippewa community of Michigan through Dana Sitzler, a colleague from our Government Relations office. Our exchange activities with the Sault Ste. Marie community have taken about a year to develop and we are still exploring the twists and turns. As I began the process of working in this very rural community, I under- stood that notions of what theatre is might be distinct.

We began by meeting with two sectors of the community, historians from the town and members of the Chippewa tribe’s cultural education department. Each had a very different idea about the purpose of our proj- ect and about how the town’s history might be told. After discussions, we decided to first immerse our students in teachings about Anishina- bek Chippewa traditions, and then to develop a workshop and perfor- mance program that might unite both sectors of the community in com- mon activities. During the first part of the project, students stayed at the Mary Murray Culture Camp on Sugar Island, where they participated in sunrise ceremonies and teachings about corn and fire.3 They were able to meet and share stories with both elders and youth of the community. In the process, they learned about themselves and came to question the way they were educated in their school programs about Native American pres- ence in the United States. The experience of cultural exchange allowed students to think about who they were and what they knew from a dif- ferent perspective. In the process, they gained self-awareness about their own cultural beliefs.

The second part of the Storytelling Incubator expanded our collabo- ration to include the town as well as the tribal community. While our

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goal was to unite the two communities, in practice we worked separately with two organizations: the Soo Theatre and the Chippewa Tribe. We found that these two cultural institutions operated within very different aesthetic traditions. Ultimately the project was best served by organizing distinct exchange activities. The main objective of our second phase was to present a staged reading of a play about domestic violence, Sliver of a Full Moon, by Oklahoma Cherokee Nation author Mary Katherine Na- gle.4 We were able to utilize tribal facilities for housing students and for rehearsals. For the performances, tribal administrators also gave us access to The Dream Catchers Theatre, a state-of-the art facility located within the Kewadin Casino complex. The space offers lights, catering services, and a stage with a dance floor.

Cultural differences in this collaboration emerged once again around production mechanisms. Because the play directly addresses sensitive is- sues of violence against women, our partners suggested we consult with

Figure 1. Students participating in the Storytelling Incubator project remove ker- nels from hard Indian corn as they learn how to prepare corn soup. The Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Tribe education department invited elders to teach the uni- versity students cultural traditions as part of the theatre exchange project. Pho- tograph by Anita Gonzalez.

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three local organizations: the Chippewa Advocacy Resource Center, the Diane Peppler Center, and Uniting Three Fires against Violence, a statewide advocacy organization. In this collaboration, we did not want to make decisions without considering tribal perspectives about how a public event should be handled. We incorporated honoring and heal- ing songs into the presentation because the Native American commu- nity wanted to honor the women for their bravery in telling their stories. The healing songs provided support and helped to ease any emotional trauma the women might have felt as they relived their traumatic experi- ences. Throughout the process we adapted our theatrical practice to ac- commodate an alternative approach to storytelling through performance that would heal the community by making public the stories of women who had been harmed by violence.

Outside of the reservation, we conducted workshops with community members. Students and faculty members interacted with the Soo Theatre, the town’s European cultural community theatre, by offering workshops

Figure 2. University of Michigan student Mia Massimino listens as a docent ex- plains settler history of the Sault Ste. Marie region during a tour of one of the historic houses. An engaged learning exchange project educated students about history and culture of European settlers and Native Americans in this Canadian border town. Photograph by John R. Diehl Jr.

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in theatre games as well as musical theatre and opera practice. Collen Ar- bic, president of the Soo Theatre, supported our residency by introduc- ing us to her theatre’s membership. We held informational meetings with local, nontribal theatre practitioners, but they did not participate in pro- duction activities for staging the Native American play.

Each community, even within the same town, approached the business of theatre-making differently. Ultimately I do not know that we were able to bridge cultural differences across the two Sault Ste. Marie com- munities. Even though some of the tribal facilities were directly across the street from the local Soo Theatre, it was hard to bring the two con- stituencies, the white European descendant community and the Native American community, into the same space. One group was invested in the Eurocentric arts of opera and ballet, while the other valued Native American cultural events such as powwows and bingo. Our performance brought a few members of the non-native community into the Kewadin casino performance space, but most of our audience members were also tribal members. Nevertheless, by collaborating on a project that crossed cultural lines, students were able to experience how different processes of performance can be. They could see the limits of collaboration, and we all learned that sometimes bridges cannot be realized.

International Exchange

International exchange, like any collaboration, brings artists together to swap ideas. Most international exchange programs emphasize summer- or semester-long study at a foreign university. Some schools offer fac- ulty-led programs. For American theatre folk, the most common desti- nation is London. While I have led programs in Mexico and Costa Rica, I am going to focus on four different UK projects because each project engaged with British culture differently. Some involved observation and tourist experiences, while others immersed students in one-on-one dia- logic exchange with local partners.

It seems natural to travel to England to study theatre because the lan- guage is the same as in the United States and we have heard so much about Shakespeare. We want to immerse our students in the history and culture of the Bard. Still, I would like to point out that there are many other global sites for English-language theatre—Nigeria, the Caribbean, South Africa, Toronto—but here I will focus on England, describing four international exchange programs that I have led. My first UK project was simply attending plays. The State University of New York at New Paltz has an annual program where students spend two weeks seeing about ten plays in London. The program introduces students to styles of British

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professional theatre and allows them to experience such historical London sites as the reconstructed Globe Theatre. With this program, I most ap- preciated the way that the students’ eyes lit up as they discovered life in a country where theatre has been supported and nurtured for centuries. Because my students at that time were New Yorkers, they were less im- pressed with the vibrancy of the city and more impressed with the multiple aesthetics and culturally diverse plays they were able to see in London.

After two years of leading this type of excursion, I proposed a more immersive experience in which students would be able to devise new work and learn with British practitioners. For this second, three-week experience, the students were housed at Kingston University. In addi- tion to classes in British culture, they also participated in six workshops with British artists—producers, scholars, choreographers, directors—to learn how they might develop new work within the British landscape. The workshops increased student immersion in cross-cultural dialogue.

Figure 3. University students from Michigan sit on a mountaintop outside of Oax- aca, Mexico. One among many study abroad offerings led by Anita Gonzalez, the international exchange program took students out of their comfort zones and ex- posed them to new ways of thinking about art and culture. Photograph by Omar Alonso.

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After completing the workshops, the class participated in a devising proj- ect, which involved reimagining scenes from The Tempest while think- ing about gender-specific and postcolonial responses to the play. While the students could have studied the play at home in their classrooms and learned about Caliban as a postcolonial subject, or about how the open- ing shipwreck scene connects with the history of Jamestown, the proj- ect allowed the students to connect with local artists. They learned more about British perspectives on the play and made professional connections with British directors and scholars.

My third UK exchange was supported by the Global Intercultural Experience for Undergraduates (GIEU) program at the University of Michigan. This exchange program offered an opportunity to travel with students to Liverpool and engage with the black communities of this northern port town.5 We spent one month interacting with local partners and arts organizations. After learning about Liverpool, students worked in small teams to volunteer with local not-for-profit agencies, including Af- rica Oye, The Brouhaha Carnival, The Green House Project, The Somali Women’s Project, and the Black E performance space. Our coordinating community partner and sponsoring agency was the Merseyside Dance Ini- tiative (MDI).6 In addition to helping us to connect with the agencies, MDI arranged housing and located a theatre for us to perform in. Because the students collaborated closely with local artists, they were able to really see differences and similarities between British and American cultures.

The students learned about black identity and how it works differently on the other side of the water. For example, African American female stu- dents noticed that white British men found them attractive and compli- mented them, something that seldom happened in their hometown of Detroit. They also recognized that US historical events, such as the civil rights movement and the life and death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had limited impact on the British community. Most of all, the student trav- elers learned about themselves. When British people asked the American students where they were from, most could offer no response other than the name of their hometowns. Recognizing this lack of heritage, the stu- dents began to reconsider their identities and how to describe their point of origin. At the end of the project we developed and performed a de- vised show for our community partners.7 The play incorporated student perspectives about their experiences and allowed them to verbalize their feelings about their identities and those of their British collaborators. In one section of the play, they performed what surprised them about Brit- ish customs: tea, small cars, politeness, and language differences. Later in the play, they talked about their newly gained understandings of class, their concerns about social justice, and the challenges that America offers

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for social mobility. This project was particularly satisfying because it was both educational and community-based, allowing students to use theatre to learn about another culture through engaged and interactive activities.

The current UK project I am working on has allowed students to col- laborate as performers in a professional international theatrical produc- tion. Building upon my own academic research about African American transatlantic voyaging, I am collaboratively writing a new musical called Liverpool Trading with the black British composer Errollyn Wallen.8 The project has been developed in both New York City and Liverpool, and each stage of the process has tested me as an artist and administrator. The story follows an Afro-Caribbean woman named Ayanna, who goes to Liverpool in search of her father. After she lands, an Irish pub owner named Monroe leads her on a time-traveling journey. As Ayanna searches for her ancestors, she discovers musical worlds of Ceilli, trip hop, tea gar- dens, and the Mersey beat.9 Eventually, she finds her father and learns to accept love. Once again, the challenge of this project has been in cross- cultural notions about how theatre is ideally produced. Should work be developed in resident theatres? On university campuses? The UK has a strong system of “research and development,” but how does that com- plement our US context of private funding? In the United States, mu- sical theatre composers usually write lyrics; that is not the norm in the UK. And artistically, how do you tell two sides of a transnational story in a way that works for both sets of audiences? These are some of the chal- lenges, and I do not yet have answers, but the learning curve has been a wonderful journey.

During December 2015 and January 2016 my two collaborators, novel- ist Richard Aellen and composer Errollyn Wallen, came to the University of Michigan to work with students on developing and recording songs for the show. Two weeks later we traveled to New York City to work with professional actors on a staged reading of the script. Performers in both locations became more culturally aware as they discovered how African cultures, in diaspora, contributed to both American and British histories. The play is written in multiple dialects: Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Jamaican, Liverpudlian, London British, and New York (Brooklyn). As the actors struggled to understand the context for the dialects, they participated in dramaturgical discussions about transatlantic travel, the Windrush gen- eration,10 and British anti-slavery activism. The creative team talked about black and Irish relationships focusing on how neighboring, multilingual communities supported cultural encounters and racial mixing. Our artis- tic process of having discussions about the script revealed the diverse cul- tural heritages of each of the artists in the room. Often, we talked about the actor’s migration stories and discussed relatives who could have been

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affected by these cross-cultural exchanges. Learning about black and Irish experiences in London, New York, Liverpool, and Jamaica reminded all of us about how minimal our degrees of separation across continents are.

Classroom Learning

Working at global sites is challenging and transformative, but we cannot always travel. We spend most of our time working with students in class- rooms. How do we bring the global to our daily university lives? The minor I coordinate in Global Theatre and Ethnic Studies depends on finding the global in the local. We travel the world by reading, discus- sing, and staging plays from the canons of diverse cultural drama. Earlier I discussed the “perform your identity” exercise. This exercise encour- ages me to value the tremendous amount of diversity that exists among students in my local environment. America is already diverse, but most of us walk in set patterns of encounter that prevent us from interacting with the cultural experiences of the people that surround us. Studio courses in the Global Theatre minor incorporate local visitors as core partners for classroom activities that come to share their expertise. These partners in- clude campus constituencies, community organizations, and student or- ganizations. Campus constituencies are departments and administrative units outside of the theatre department. I lean upon colleagues housed in Latino studies or Asian languages, in religious studies or social work. Campus constituencies can aid in bringing global projects to the main- stage. And this includes possibilities for working across class as well as cul- tural boundaries. A partnership with campus constituencies might include staging a production with university maintenance workers or having stu- dents devise a work about area bus drivers. All of these possibilities will broaden the cultural perspectives of students, faculty members, staff, and administrators. It is about broadening the perspectives of all involved, re- considering production and performance processes, and expanding the borders of theatrical practices.

Community organizations are often knowledgeable about event plan- ning, and universities can collaborate with them to make plays by figuring out how to exchange expertise. For example, maybe the local church would like to include a song or dance performance in a fundraising event. Even better, perhaps a locally organized music event includes spoken word artists or krumpers11 who could introduce a new performance style to students. In January 2015, I directed a Puerto Rican play where all of the characters needed to perform parkour. This athletic performance style involves acrobatic leaps, slides, and jumps over physical obstacles. When I began rehearsals I had no idea where I would find someone to teach the

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art form. To my surprise, the university had a parkour club that I never knew existed. Each time I look for an ethnic art form—in Wisconsin, Tal- lahassee, upstate New York, or Michigan—I find practitioners hidden in plain sight. Not hidden—merely outside of my own set patterns of en- counter. Student organizations hold a wealth of expertise in multicultural performance forms. Although we are the teachers and they are the stu- dents, collaborative exchange means respecting their knowledge of folk- and street-based performance and valuing that as theatrical practice. We all know our students are faster with technology than we are. They may also be more culturally astute than we are.

Finding the Global in the Local means expanding our ideas about what theatre is. For some cultures, the storytelling of theatre is captured in out- door pageants, street competitions, or daylong parades. These genres do not fit neatly inside of the proscenium box, yet they prevail throughout the world. Perhaps it is possible for theatre departments to embrace mul- tiple theatrical styles and use these unfamiliar forms to train students in global theatre. There are exciting developments in training that indicate a shift in pedagogy. Devising is now a part of many department programs. This approach to performance de-privileges the written text, substitut- ing movement, images, and intertextual symbols. With the success of Hamilton, more departments are embracing styles like hip-hop and spo- ken word; Asian movement forms have become a part of some training programs. And there is so much more to explore, such as masking, pup- petry, and song as text.

Of course, at the bottom of it all is story. Stories grounded in multi- cultural performance aesthetics give students a chance to experiment with style and master rigorous techniques for interpreting drama. Stories and the characters they feature matter if we are to really promote diversity of culture and cross-cultural dialogue. For example, the 50/50 by 2020 ini- tiative of the League of Professional Theatre Women aims to achieve par- ity for professional women theatre artists by the year 2020. The organiza- tion recognizes that authorship may impact story and consequently hopes to have regional theatres develop seasons in which at least half of the plays are written by women.12 The same applies to multicultural theatre. My own theatre department primarily offers minority theatre students opportunities to perform in Eurocentric plays. How do we change that? How do we promote theatre productions by and about people of color as a valuable pursuit for all theatre students—not just students of color?

I advocate bringing multicultural drama to the main stage—not to the studio, not to the outdoor forum, not to the neighboring commu- nity. Why? It validates multicultural drama as a core value and an inher- ently robust site of theatrical tradition. We must work harder to locate

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under-produced plays. Ethnic communities and their canons cover a broad range of historical styles. It is possible to study melodrama by teach- ing and staging the 1847 play The Black Doctor by Ira Aldridge or to inves- tigate commedia by teaching the actos of Luis Valdez. This is not a radical idea. Theatre audiences and their tastes shift with social movements. While realism may have been radical in 1910, it is now all too familiar.

Once again, we can adjust core beliefs about how theatre is made. One way is to offer students opportunities to improvise, devise, and write new theatrical works, perhaps in collaboration with diverse cultural communi- ties. In November 2015, I attended an event about theatre training at the National Theater Institute located at the O’Neill Center in New London, Connecticut. Thirty educators met to discuss how theatre training can prepare students for millennial performance. We shared processes, saw new work, and exchanged ideas. I was most impressed with the industry casting agent who told us that we are not effectively training our students for the types of theatre that new playwrights are writing—playwrights like Hansol Jung, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Sharon Bridgforth, Suzan- Lori Parks, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Ping Chong. Works by these playwrights require fluidity of expression, physical aware- ness, an ability to move through theatrical styles like performance art, and an understanding of how to perform a variety of different cultural forms.

We can read these new plays in the classroom and stage them with our students, working beyond our preconceived ideas about how to cast along racial or ethnic lines. All students, by embodying characters out- side of their experiences, expand their repertory of available roles. They learn about world cultures through the process of physically enacting the beliefs and behaviors of another person. Ideally, universities are a place where students and faculty members collectively explore new ideas and paradigms for theatrical work as we train students for the theatre’s fu- ture. Minority theatre did not suddenly appear on the stage as a result of the cultural revolutions of the 1990s. Latino, African American, and Asian artists have been writing, producing, and staging theatrical work for cen- turies. These canons of literature enrich our understanding of world the- atre in a global context.

Finally, how does writing and scholarship fit into the picture? The field is changing. Increasingly I see scholarship that bridges disciplinary bound- aries. Many of the authors in this volume have written essays that bring together cultural studies and theatre studies. Scholars are finding link- ages between classics, religious studies, and other fields as they consider dramaturgies of diverse world communities. My own scholarship is also informed by collaboration and exchange. This happens in several ways: I engage in dialogic performance when I work with artists, I collaborate

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Figure 4. The home page of the interactive website 19thcenturyacts.com. The suite of digital humanities tools allows users to visualize context for nineteenth-century performance and to learn more about underrepresented performers. Home page designed by Clara McClenon.

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One line long One line long

with archivists at international archives, and I collaborate with teams of li- brarians and computer scientists on digital tools. By dialogic performance I mean the kinds of exchanges that happen when people encounter one another and share practice to comment about identity. For example, my book Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality,13 examines how in- digenous and mestizo populations in Mexico perform African identities, how they dialogue with contemporary Afro-Mexican communities. While researching the book, I traveled to Mexican communities to dance with people. Through the dancing we were able to talk about how the body communicates and what a foot stamp with a head throw might mean for each of us. This embodied research—physical dialogue and exchange— helps me to craft the writing.

My current research is about maritime performance. For this project I have visited maritime archives in New York, London, Bristol, and Liv- erpool. Even as I mine the archive for information about how sailors performed, I engage with contemporary maritime communities, sing- ing sea shanties at Mystic Seaport and working as a destination lecturer on Caribbean cruise ships.14 These experiences allow me to write schol- arship that considers how different those worlds might be from my daily life while uncovering new information about port and maritime com- munities. My most complex research project is actually a digital tool, www.19thcenturyacts.com, that I have been developing for about four years now. This tool visually depicts nineteenth-century performance in multiple ways. The mapping tool allows users to see how artists working in the nineteenth century toured in order to make a living. Here, the user can access information about Ira Aldridge, Jenny Lind, or Edwin Booth. The context tool provides images of places and artifacts and gestures to provide a sense of what performances looked and sounded like. I am par- ticularly excited about this section of the tool because it replicates the sense of browsing in the archive in a digital way. The tool demonstrates how even during the nineteenth century, the scope of the English-lan- guage performance world was international.

So where have we traveled in this discussion? I talked about collabo- ration. I talked about research and dialogic partnerships. I talked about communication and embodiment. Most of all, I talked about changing our set patterns of encounter and moving out of our comfort zones, let- ting go of preconceived notions about what the journey of theatre looks like. We are not all the same. We walk with different religions, class back- grounds, racial experiences, and gender expectations. But we can find common ground within theatrical expressions. To accomplish this, we will need to sit with the unfamiliar, ask disturbing questions, and invest in learning new stories to define our practice. At its core, theatre brings

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One line long One line long

individuals together to explore how life experiences merge into human stories. The journey is most illuminating when we bring a wide spectrum of voices into the “empty space” and recognize that cultural spaces we might imagine as a void are full of a diversity of lived human experiences.15

Notes

This paper is adapted from a keynote presentation offered at the SETC The- atre Symposium at Agnes Scott College on April 22, 2016.

1. Gust A. Yep, “Encounters With the ‘Other,’” The Global Intercultural Com- munication Reader (New York: Routledge, 2014), 339–56. The entire volume is useful for those embarking on an exchange experience. Also see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cul- tural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 2002): 783–90.

2. A video about the meaning and impact of this project is available at: http:// ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/videos/23367-u-m-course-challenges-students- to-learn-about-native-american-culture-through-immersion.

3. Sugar Island is a small island located just east of Sault Ste. Marie on the St. Mary’s River. The island is named for the many sugar maple trees that grow there. The Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Tribe maintains their culture camp and powwow grounds on the island.

4. http://sliverofafullmoon.org/ provides information about the origin of this dramatic work and documents productions at the Smithsonian National Mu- seum of the American Indian, Stanford Law School, New York University, and other locations.

5. In the United Kingdom, citizens of African and Indian ancestry refer to themselves as black communities because the nomenclature around blackness con- flates multiple nationalities, ethnicities, and experiences into a single label. The designation of “black” includes British-born blacks, South Asians from India and Pakistan, Africans coming from countries such as Somalia, Nigeria, Ghana, and Sudan, as well as Jamaicans and Afro-Caribbean descendants.

6. Information about these vibrant cultural organizations can be found at the following websites: http://www.africaoye.com, http://www.brouhaha. uk.com, https://www.facebook.com/The-Greenhouse-Multi-Cultural-Play- and-Arts-Project-194745240596801, http://www.granbysomaliwomensgroup. org, http://www.theblack-e.co.uk, and http://www.mdi.org.uk/

7. The performance video of the show, called “Framing Liverpool through Michigan Eyes,” can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qOxHbbkXUac.

8. http://www.liverpooltrading.com 9. Ceilli is a form of Irish folk music. Trip hop is a music style that originated

in Bristol that blends electronic music with soul, funk, jazz, and Jamaican ska. The African Grove theatre, known as the first African American theatre company,

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28 G O N Z A L E Z

was founded in 1821 in a tea garden in New York City. Finally, Mersey Beat is the musical sound associated with the Beatles that began during the late 1950s when service workers on transatlantic passenger ships brought African American music records to dance clubs in Liverpool.

10. The Empire Windrush was a ship that brought Jamaican settlers to En- gland between 1948 and 1954 to rebuild the country’s infrastructure after World War II. Jamaican immigrants who arrived during this historical time are known as the “Windrush” generation.

11. Krumping is an urban dance style with percussive upper body moves per- formed with improvisation.

12. http://theatrewomen.org/programs/5050-in-2020-parity-for-women- theatre-artists.

13. Anita Gonzalez, Afro-Mexico: Dancing Between Myth and Reality (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2010).

14. Mystic Seaport is a maritime museum located in Mystic, Connecticut, where visitors and scholars work and study with actual vessels. My work as a destina- tion cruise lecturer involves traveling to Caribbean ports and educating passen- gers about the history and cultures of the ports.

15. Here I reference Peter Brook’s foundational book The Empty Space (New York: Touchstone Press, 1992). His book proposes that the theatre is an empty space to be filled by the actor and director’s imagination. Here, I suggest that Peter Brook’s “empty space” could be opened to include cultures and communi- ties outside of his imagined Eurocentric experiences.

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