Dramaturging Personal Narratives

Judith Rudakoff

Description

How do people identify, locate, or express home? Displaced, exiled, colonized and disenfranchised people the world over grapple with this question. Dramaturging Personal Narratives explores the relationship between personal and cultural identity by investigating how people perceive and creatively express self, home and homeland through showcasing a variety of innovative artistic processes and resulting projects. Written in clear and accessible language, this book will appeal to professional and community based artists who work in a wide variety of genres, scholars from creative fields and both students and teachers at all levels of education who are interested in learning more about generating, developing and disseminating artistic work inspired by personal narratives.

Introduction

Dramaturging Personal Narratives: Who am I and Where is Here? 

Section One: The Ashley Plays

The Ashley Plays: The Basics

Chapter 1: Ashley Lives in Cape Town, South Africa I (2002)

Chapter 2: Ashley Lives in Cape Town, South Africa II (2006)

Chapter 3: Ashley Lives in Cape Town, South Africa III (2006)

Chapter 4: Ashley Lives in Iqaluit, Canada (2006)

Chapter 5: Ashley Lives in Namma Bhoomi, India (2008)

Chapter 6: Ashley Lives in Whitehorse, Canada (2008)

Section Two: The Virtual Ashley Plays

The Virtual Ashley Plays: The Basics

Chapter 1: Ashley Lives in Canada, Iran, South Africa, and United Kingdom (2007)

Chapter 2: Ashley Lives in Cuba, Canada, and USA (2007)

Chapter 3: Ashley lives in Cameroon, Jamaica, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, and South Africa (2008) 

Chapter 4: Common Ground Forum: “Talking ABOUT Ashley” and “Talking AS Ashley” (2007) 

Section Three: Photobiography

Photobiography: The Basics 

Chapter 1: Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada and Khayelitsha Township, South Africa (2007) 

Chapter 2: Whitehorse, Canada (2010) 

Section Four: Roots/Routes Journeys to Home

Roots/Routes Journeys to Home: The Basics 

Chapter 1: Journey I: Geoffrey Hyland, South Africa (2008) 

Chapter 2: Journey II: Mfundo Tshazibane, South Africa (2007) 

Chapter 3: Journey III: Mercedes Bravo, Cuba (2008) 

Chapter 4: Journey IV: Jolene Arreak, Canada (2007) 

Appendix: 35 Sample Lomogram images 

Sujets

• Performing Arts
• Theatre
• Performance art
• General officer
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783204212
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2015 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2015 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos
Cover image: Judith Rudakoff
Author photo: Christopher Gentile
Copy-editing: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Claire Organ
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-419-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-420-5
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-421-2
Printed and bound by Page Bros, Norwich
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Dramaturging Personal Narratives: Who am I and Where is Here?
Section One: The Ashley Plays
The Ashley Plays : The Basics
Chapter 1: Ashley Lives in Cape Town, South Africa I (2002)
Chapter 2: Ashley Lives in Cape Town, South Africa II (2006)
Chapter 3: Ashley Lives in Cape Town, South Africa III (2006)
Chapter 4: Ashley Lives in Iqaluit, Canada (2006)
Chapter 5: Ashley Lives in Namma Bhoomi, India (2008)
Chapter 6: Ashley Lives in Whitehorse, Canada (2008)
Section Two: The Virtual Ashley Plays
The Virtual Ashley Plays : The Basics
Chapter 1: Ashley Lives in Canada, Iran, South Africa, and United Kingdom (2007)
Chapter 2: Ashley Lives in Cuba, Canada, and USA (2007)
Chapter 3: Ashley lives in Cameroon, Jamaica, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, and South Africa (2008)
Chapter 4: Common Ground Forum : “Talking ABOUT Ashley” and “Talking AS Ashley” (2007)
Section Three: Photobiography
Photobiography : The Basics
Chapter 1: Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada and Khayelitsha Township, South Africa (2007)
Chapter 2: Whitehorse, Canada (2010)
Section Four: Roots/Routes Journeys to Home
Roots/Routes Journeys to Home : The Basics
Chapter 1: Journey I: Geoffrey Hyland, South Africa (2008)
Chapter 2: Journey II: Mfundo Tshazibane, South Africa (2007)
Chapter 3: Journey III: Mercedes Bravo, Cuba (2008)
Chapter 4: Journey IV: Jolene Arreak, Canada (2007)
Appendix: 35 Sample Lomogram images
Acknowledgements
This book reflects the contribution and support of many participants, collaborators, and volunteers.
I would like to thank Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for a generous grant under the auspices of their Research-Creation Program which funded Common Plants: Cross Pollinations in Hybrid Reality from 2006 to 2009, and York University’s Graduate Program in Theatre and Performance Studies for funding the services of my graduate student assistants, Diana Reis and Sara d’Agostino. I am very grateful to Tim Hampton, Chris Alfonso, and Kevin Haghighat of the Faculty of Fine Arts, York University, for their work updating the video links on the Common Plants website, which are referred to many times in this book.
I would also like to thank the following York University theatre students who offered thoughtful comments, attentive proof-reading, and general encouragement throughout the writing and revising of this book: Shawna Blain, Tyler Graham, and Spencer Schunk. Further, I am grateful to Amy Bowman, Serena Dessen, and J. Paul Halferty who read early drafts of the Introduction, and to Brian Fawcett, whose input made my writing more readable.
In addition to their participation in some of the projects I discuss in the book, I want to acknowledge the importance of the detailed documentary reports contributed by Nisha Ahuja, Mark Fleishman, Andrew Houston, Mandla Mbothwe, Myles Warren, and Belarie Zatzman. I also appreciate the important photographic and video documentation by Nisha Ahuja, Andrew Cheng, Jayeshekar Madapadi, Fabienne Tessier, Myles Warren, and Belarie Zatzman.
The staff at Intellect Books are a pleasure to work with, and I appreciate their ongoing support and enthusiasm for my projects. In particular, I would like to thank May Yao and Claire Organ, and, as well, to mention the extraordinary dedication to innovation and quality in publishing of the late Masoud Yazdani.
Finally, I must specifically acknowledge the participation of all the contributors to the projects chronicled in this book: their commitment, courage, and creativity are at the heart of the work.
Introduction
Dramaturging Personal Narratives: Who am I and Where is Here?
I am hyphenated: I work as an academic-artist, documentarian-practitioner in theatre-dance within this culture-that culture. I live in one of the most diverse cities in the world, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 1 I teach playwriting and developmental dramaturgy at York University, where the student population of over 55,000 reflects the city’s wide range of cultures. The pedagogy and the resulting projects in my courses are a result of and reaction to my theoretical, academic study of theatre as well as my practical experience. My academic training has provided me with the skills to incorporate my field work into an educational setting, both as practical work and in a theoretical context. Over the past two decades, I have undertaken developmental dramaturgy on three continents. My projects are often site-specific, culturally diverse, and multidisciplinary. Much of my dramaturgy practice has focussed on eliciting personal narratives and providing people with the opportunity and tools to tell their own stories.
International literary criticism icon Northrop Frye wrote, “It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by some such riddle as ‘Where is here?’” 2 This challenge—how and where to root the self and/or to identify home—is one grappled with by displaced, exiled, colonized, othered, or disenfranchised people the world over. Dramaturging personal narratives has helped me to understand more about this fraught relationship between personal and cultural identity.
The developmental dramaturgy I practice often begins with an investigation into how people perceive self, home, and homeland and how they inter-relate these concepts. My dramaturgical methods involve prompting personal narratives, sometimes provoking those narratives through a variety of pretexts and constructed projects. I try to ensure that all participants find ways and means of expressing their histories and experiences that are unique to their lives, yet are accessible and understandable to as far-reaching and diverse an audience or readership as possible. No matter what their socio-economic or political status, for many participants the voicing or enacting of personal narratives (and the realization that these individual stories can be universally affective) is empowering. As well, recognizing similarity within difference has been illuminating for both contributors and viewers.
For the record, I am neither an anthropologist nor an ethnographer: I am a dramaturg who facilitates the creation and development of artistic projects. If important outcomes such as social engagement or individual healing are by-products of the work generated, so much the better.
Further, while most of my practice has and continues to be situated in performative forms of artistic creation, some of my engagements with the development of new work have encompassed non-performative projects which either stood on their own or fueled later theatrical work. In this book, I focus on how the dramaturgical process was applied in a variety of forms, styles, and genres emanating from personal narratives. Sometimes I use the term dramaturgy to describe what I do in non-theatrical projects. This is a conscious and considered choice: dramatic narrative can be found in a series of photographs or a poem as well as in a play.
The relationship between source and artistic creation shapes my dramaturgical practice. I use unconventional methodologies to encourage responses from artists, community members, and students from a multitude of cultures (I use culture to refer —but not exclusively—to geographical origin, ethnicity, socio-economic situation).
People often ask me about dealing with difference and how I approach working creatively in geographically distant places with people whose lives are culturally distinct from each other’s, from mine, and/or with individuals whose life experiences are radically different from mine. This is my answer:

Whenever I enter a room, I enter as myself. That sounds simplistic, but represents a complex principle. I carry personal history. I see through a particular set of filters. I am an educated, white, Jewish woman who was born in Canada, a country with great resources, natural and otherwise. I was the first in my immediate family to graduate from high school and go on to higher education, but I come from a world of privilege, despite challenges, where choice exists, as do the possibilities of change and betterment.
Whenever I enter a room, I admit what I don’t know in that context. I also claim what I do know.
In workshops involving difference, in the initial stages, I don’t offer, but wait to be asked; I don’t take, I wait to be given. I have learned to engage and be part of the group, but I never pretend that difference doesn’t exist. In so doing, I have, mostly, escaped the trap of creating otherness.
I also have learned, gradually, to accept the discomfort of difference. This experience should never get easier, but the uneasiness should become familiar and educative.
One of the ways I cope with being different (not just feeling, but being different) is to find or acknowledge something that gives the sensat