Behind the Curtain

Chapter 3 assembles data and renders visible gender hierarchies among choreographers in concert dance in the United States today. Recent statistics in the field are explored to establish a baseline for understanding gender in dance on a broader scale. An analysis of gender representation among choreographers is presented through an examination of the 2012, 2013, and 2014 performance seasons at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the American Dance Festival, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The stratified programming of each venue provides a multi-case study for understanding how female choreographers fare within the various levels of public recognition in the dance field, creating a foundation for further discussion of gender in dance. The author’s primary questions ask whether men and women are represented in numbers that reflect their respective populations in the field of dance, and how the production of dance illuminates or undermines gender disparity among dance creators.

Talk about A Piece of Work: A Group Self-Interview

As an investigation into the dramaturgy of algorithms themselves, “algorithmic theatre” conveys a different relationship to digital technologies than typical multimedia performance: the ways algorithms order the world, the particular kinds of meanings they make, the types of narrative structures they imply. The primary collaborators on Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (2013) participated in a group self-interview on the day of the final performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“A War of Ideas”: The Rise of Conservative Teachers in Wartime New York City, 1938–1946

On the evening of May 17, 1946, more than 1,200 festive supporters streamed into the Brooklyn Academy of Music to honor a New York City teacher who had survived, by the skin of her teeth, charges of “un-American” teaching. Since 1935, New York City's public school teachers faced the threat of investigation and dismissal for potentially subversive radical political beliefs or affiliations. Tonight, however, the audience breathed a collective sigh of relief that the Board of Education hearing had turned out well and that the teacher in question would retain her position.

RESURRECTING SIZWE BANZI IS DEAD (1972–2008): JOHN KANI, WINSTON NTSHONA, ATHOL FUGARD, AND POSTAPARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

On 30 June 2006 at the annual National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, two giants of South African protest theatre, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, performed as the original cast of the landmark struggle drama Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972). The revival marked the first production of the play in over twenty-five years. After its brief stint at the National Arts Festival (30 June–5 July 2006), the play transferred to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town (11 July–5 August) and then entertained a monthlong run at the State Theatre in Pretoria (17 August–17 September). After its turn at the State, the production stopped shortly at the Hilton College Theatre in KwaZulu Natal (19–23 September) before settling into an extended engagement at Johannesburg's Market Theatre (28 September to 22 October). In March 2007, the original cast revival of Sizwe traveled to the British National Theatre before finally ending its tour at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April 2008.

Reply to Stanislavsky

While it has its origins in a talk given at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February 1969, this key essay has never previously appeared in English. Publications in Italian, Polish, and Spanish, however, have ensured the circulation of this historically crucial text in European and South American theatre culture, resulting in a far more accurate historicization of Grotowski's work and its indebtedness to Stanislavsky.

Klinghoffer in Brooklyn Heights

Is The Death of Klinghoffer anti-Semitic? Performances of the opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in September 1991 were at the epicentre of a controversy that continues to this day; the New York audience was – and remains – uniquely hostile to the work. A careful reception analysis shows that New York audiences reacted vehemently not so much to an ideological position on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but to specific nuances in the satirical portrayal of American Jewish characters in one controversial scene later cut from the opera, a scene that must be read closely and in relation to specifically American-Jewish questions of ethnic humour, assimilation, identity and multiculturalism in the mass media. I understand the opera's negative reception in the larger context of the increasingly severe crises that beset American Jewish self-identity during the Reagan-Bush era. Ultimately the historical ability of Jews to assimilate through comedy, to ‘enter the American culture on the stage laughing’, in Leslie Fiedler's famous formulation, will have to be reconsidered. A close reading of contested moments from the opera shows librettist Alice Goodman and composer John Adams avoiding the romance of historical self-consciousness as they attempt to construct a powerful yet subtle defence of the ordinary and unassuming.