The Performance Studies Research Group at UW presents its first event of the 2015–2016 academic year:
Dr. Charlotte Canning
University of Texas at Austin
"On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism”
Please join us for this exciting conversation. A reception will follow in the Simpson Center.
Abstract: On the Performance Front argues that US theatre in the twentieth century embraced the theories and practices of internationalism as a way to realize a better world and as part of the strategic reform of the theatre into a national expression. Live performance, theatre internationalists argued, could represent and reflect the nation like no other endeavor. Dr. Canning focuses on US theatre's international efforts without losing sight of either the ways these efforts mirrored those in other countries or the complex, often conflicting, relationship between internationalism and nationalism.
Bio: Charlotte Canning is the Frank C Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor in Drama at the University of Texas in the Department of Theatre and Dance where she is head of the Performance as Public Practice MA/MFA/PhD programs and as Director of the Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History, Criticism, and Literature. She is the author of Feminist Theaters In The USA: Staging Women's Experience and The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance, and Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, co-edited with Thomas Postlewait. Her most recent book is On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism. She serves as the Senior Editor for Theatre Research International and on the Executive Committee of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics.
This event is sponsored by the Performance Studies Research Group, a crossdisciplinary cluster of the Simpson Center for the Humanities.