Pannill Camp

Why On TAP? Podcasting for a Scholarly Field

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On TAP is a new podcast dedicated to theatre and performance studies. Practically, it’s a downloadable audio chat show hosted by three professors, Sarah Bay-Cheng, Pannill Camp, and Harvey Young. Each episode looks at a variety of topics of field-wide interest, new ideas in research, trends in the profession, pedagogy, artist/scholar dynamics and recent events. In some ways this enterprise is very conventional in 2015. There are tens of thousands of podcasts, and after the success of programs like Serial, about half of Americans know what a podcast is.

In other ways, though, On TAP feels like a fun experiment. How will this non-traditional medium fit with the established modes of communication that permeate our field? Can we translate the pleasure of the conference hotel bar chat into a form that someone would want to listen to? Simply, if we build it, will they come?

Part of the initial impulse for creating this podcast was, unsurprisingly, the pleasure of podcasts themselves, which are steadily reaching more people. Pannill has been an avid podcast listener since 2007, when a handful of downloadable audio programs helped him pass a lonely year of dissertation research in Paris (very sad, we know!). About two years ago he began to imagine the possibility of adapting the Slate.com format (three co-hosts discuss three topics in a casual, hour-long chat) for the field of theatre and performance studies. Last summer he made his pitch to Sarah and Harvey, and was thrilled that they were willing to dedicate their time and energy to the project.

But more than just for fun, the podcast seems well-suited to our field; a dynamic, collaborative, social medium is a good match for theatre geeks of all types. It’s a little bit rebellious, too. Like those of many academic disciplines, most of our interactions are orchestrated within established institutions: universities and colleges, publishers of books and journals, and associations that organize conferences. These organizations create and disseminate high quality research, facilitate communication among people with overlapping interests, and advocate for the professional well-being of scholars, teachers, and artists. They work well, and Theatre and Performance Studies is a growing, dynamic field that is holding up relatively well against the economic and cultural forces that are decimating other disciplines in the humanities.

However! There are two patterns that can slow down and even stifle field-wide communication. First, it can be challenging for scholars to keep up with ideas that are circulating outside of our particular areas of interest. A great wealth of research is published year-round, but the pressures of specialization, and the mounting administrative, mentoring, and teaching duties typical of work in today’s academy make it hard to keep up with what is being written.

Second, the rhythms of field-wide communication are slow. We inherit our cycles of contact from the creeping pace of peer-reviewed journal and book publishing, from the quarter, semester, and year periodization of teaching, and from the yearly cycle of conference planning. Compared to the accelerated rhythm of mass communication in the digital age, this pace of work is positively glacial.

We thus offer On TAP as complement and corrective to the traditional ways we theater/performance academics interact and share ideas. Working on a comparatively short cycle (roughly monthly releases during the academic year; one or two days from recording to release) and with a broad field-wide perspective, we hope to offer a new mode of communication that is both immediate and more inclusive. We also aim to incorporate the best parts of theatre and performance into our work: dialogue instead of lecture; improvisation instead of carefully planned remarks; and the pleasure of a good joke or bad pun. We hope listeners will come to think of On TAP as a unique and sometimes irreverent way to gain both a bird’s-eye view of the field, and a sense of what is on people’s (or at least our) minds at the moment. We hope you’ll join us soon.

The next round’s on us!

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Reperformance Once and Again

Aron Taylor, Adrienne Mischler, Robert Pierson, and Elizabeth Doss in Rude Mechs' recreation of Mabou Mines' B Beaver Animation. Photo by Bret Brookshire. Used with Permission

The Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis recently hosted a symposium on the topic of performance re-creation. My colleague Christine Knoblauch O’Neal, a dance scholar and artist, quickly settled on reperformance in part because of her ongoing research into the work of dance trusts—institutions like the Antony Tudor Ballet Trust that are dedicated to preserving choreography. But we saw too that the activities of these institutions are closely linked to broader questions.

Other arts institutions are now facing the complex tasks of curating performance. Marina Abramovic’s plans to open an institute of performance art in an abandoned theatre in Hudson, New York, point to a wider institutional investment in “live art” (and incipient mutations in theatre space). Theater companies including the Wooster Group and the Rude Mechanicals have garnered attention for re-creating plays such as Grotowski’s Acropolis (1964) and the Performance Group’s Dionysus in ’69.

I am pleased to share here some ideas that emerged at this event:

1) Curators, dance repetiteurs, and re-creators of theatre face cognate theoretical and practical challenges. But we approach the concepts from widely different angles. Amelia Jones reminds us that for the critical tradition around performance art, the live body is very nearly a scandal in itself, in part because it resists the sort of aesthetic containment that enfolds painting and sculpture. From the point of view of dance and theatre the body is potent element, but hardly a disruptive fact in itself. Thus dance trusts cultivate just the sort of containment and commodification that performance-based visual art deploys the live body to resist.

2) What seems at first to be an impasse for interdisciplinary research into reperformance in fact points to a caveat that it must acknowledge in order to proceed. Branislav Jakovljevic pointed out in St. Louis that reperformance functions according to principles imposed by the specific economy that produces it. Dance reperformance is subject to the criterion of authenticity and is inseparable from the cult of genius—both of which notions the avant-garde holds under suspicion. Revivals of plays and attention to “original” theater practices are likewise inflected by institutional commitments to literary interpretation, and, like battle re-enactments, exude the same melancholic affect retailed by “living history.”

3) What remains an open question, to my mind, is whether the fact that these distinct economies have now converged to exploit a common set of reperformance techniques is related in a meaningful way to this historical moment. What characteristics of temporal experience or media-driven consciousness might have led us here? A historiography of performance across disciplines is required even to frame the question.

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