Tiffany Stern Lectures on 'Der Bestrafte Brudermord,' at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, January 16, 2014

Tiffany Stern (image via Hidden Room Theatre)

Join The Hidden Room in welcoming scholar/superhero Tiffany Stern to Austin! She'll be speaking as the honored Thomas Cranfill Lecturer on the mysterious Der Bestrafte Brudermord, and why it might, or might not be a puppet show. Absolutely free, and completely priceless. Don't miss this wildly influential and delightful individual.

Many thanks to the UT English Department for their kind sponsorship of this event.

Tiffany Stern is a Professor of Early Modern Drama (English Faculty), and Beaverbrook and Bouverie Fellow in English (University College) at Oxford University.

Tiffany specialises in Shakespeare, theatre history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, book history and editing. Her work arises from an interest in the contexts that shaped the ways playwrights wrote and actors performed. Her first book was Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan; her second book, Making Shakespeare, focused on Shakespeare’s London, actors, theatres, props and music. Both books are used by theatre companies interested in experimenting with ‘original’ methods of Shakespearean production. Shakespeare in Parts, a book she co-wrote with fellow Oxford faculty member Simon Palfrey, concentrates on Shakespeare as a playwright and actor performing from, and writing for, 'parts' (the texts actors received, consisting of cues and speeches, nothing else). Combining Simon’s expertise as an interpreter and Tiffany’s as a theatre historian, it is a work that takes its interpretative momentum from archival research to discover not only a newly active, choice-ridden actor, but also a new Shakespeare. It is complemented by Documents of Performance in Shakespearean England, which considers the other papers of performance not examined in 'Parts': plot-scenarios, playbills, arguments, prologues, songs, scrolls and backstage-plots.

Tiffany is also an editor, and has produced editions of the anonymous King Leir, Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals, and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer.

QUEER POLITICAL CABARET CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY MEXICO CITY, Laura G. Gutiérrez, University of Texas, November 20, 2013

University of Texas FDP Colloquium, Center for Women's and Gender Studies

Desiring the Possible: Queer Political Cabaret Culture in Contemporary Mexico City

Wed, November 20, 2013 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 p.m.
Burdine Hall (BUR) 214, South of Dean Keeton & Wichita St. (click for map)

Laura G. Gutiérrez (photo: University of Texas)

Laura G. Gutiérrez, Associate Professor

Department of Theatre and Dance / Performance as Public Practice Program

Contemporary political cabaret is a performance practice that mixes various live art strategies from the early part of the twentieth century with contemporary experimental theatre, and fuses them with musical and dance numbers and heavy doses of political satire.
The individuals or groups that define themselves as political cabaret practitioners each have an idea of what this practice is, but given that it is currently thriving and is a sort of phenomenon in a micro-level, one could venture and generalize that there is a particular Mexico City style of cabaret.
This political cabaret, which has gained currency in the last twenty years, is a particular favorite mode of self-representation for queer artists and activists. My presentation examines the ways in which cabaret is a political and artistic practice that produces a queer space. In more specific terms, political cabaret is part of the growing queer counter-public culture in the city with its left-of-center social and economic politics.
Whereas in the early 1990’s political cabaret was mostly restricted to El Hábito—managed artistically and otherwise by the same-sex couple Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe—twenty years later, political cabaret has created an alternative queer cultural map of the city.
By the latter I do not simply mean that El Hábito continues to exist under a new guise and new management as El Vicio—run by the four-member female queer collective Las Reinas Chulas—but that more urban and symbolic space has been gained in the process. For example, Las Reinas Chulas, in addition to their Festival of International Cabaret, which has been held for 9 consecutive summers now and has spread beyond the space of El Vicio, they have a television program for the national federal cultural channel (CONACULTA), one member is part of a daily radio show (El Weso), another member often takes part of LGBT marches and writes a newspaper column, and most of them have performed in the other city-sanctioned political cabaret space, the Foro A Poco No.
My presentation traces the shifts in signification and the growth of political cabaret as it has helped to map a queer public culture in Mexico City. I do the above in order to begin to conceptualize notions of desire in the context of Mexican counter-public culture, not just in relationship to same-sex desire, but also in regard to the possibility of an alternative political future for Mexico, always taking into account its limitations.


Laura G. Gutiérrez (PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Associate Professor of Latin American and Latina/o Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance/Performance as Public Practice at the University of Texas-Austin. She holds an affiliate appointment in the Center for Mexican American Studies. Her research and teaching interests are Mexican and Chicana/o embodied practices and visual culture, gender and sexuality, and questions of nation, modernity and the transnational.
Gutiérrez is the author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (U Texas P, 2010), which won The Ninth Annual MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Prior to joining the UT faculty, she taught at the University of Arizona where she received the 2012 Provost's General Education Teaching Award, and, before that, at the University of Iowa. Gutiérrez is on the Board of Advisors of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas and on the Editorial Board of Feminist Formations.

Playwright Sarah Ruhl Sponsored by Michener Center forWriters, University of Texas, October 16, 2013

Upcoming: Sherry Kramer disusses Magical Objects, Hyde Park Theatre, March 8

ScriptWorks 'Dramatis Personae' Series

presents

Magical Objects

a lecture-discussion with Sherry Kramer

Tuesday, March 8th, 7-9 p.m.
Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St.

COST:$15 ScriptWorks members/ $25 General

INFO/RESERVATIONS: info@scriptworks.org; 512-454-9727

There is a great difference between a prop and an object on stage that is built or filled with the dramatic forces of a play.  Such objects become metaphors, they become fresh comprehensions of the world. In the theatre, we believe in magic.  Our gaze is focused on ordinary objects...a glass figurine, a pair of shoes, a wedding dress...and then our attention is shaped, and charged, and we watch the everyday grow in meaning and power.  Most of our greatest plays, written by our most poetic playwrights, contain a visual metaphor, an object with metaphorical weight that we can see on stage, not just in our mind’s eye.

How do we make the ordinary into the extraordinary?  How do we create something that can carry meaning across the stage, into the audience and then out of the theatre, all the way home, and into the lives of these strangers who come to sit together in the dark?  How do we generate a magical object on stage?

It will help if you have more than a passing relationship with A Streetcar Named Desire, The Piano Lesson, and Buried Child, but if you don't you'll still do okay.  We'll be talking about the magical object, and there will be a small in class writing assignment.

About Sherry Kramer

Sherry Kramer is currently a visiting professor at the James Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin.  She is a graduate of both the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and was former head of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Her plays have been produced in theaters across the country and abroad.  She is a recipient of NEA, New York Foundation for the Arts and McKnight Fellowships, the Weissberger Playwriting Award and a New York Drama League Award (WHAT A MAN WEIGHS), the LA Women in Theater New Play Award (THE WALL OF WATER), The Jane Chambers Playwriting Award (DAVID'S REDHAIRED DEATH).  She was the first national member of New Dramatists, and is on the permanent faculty at Bennington College.

About Scriptworks
ScriptWorks is a playwright driven organization that seeks to promote the craft of dramatic writing and to protect the playwright's
integrity by encouraging playwright initiative and harnessing collective potential. The Dramatis Personae series was initiated to provide area
playwrights a place to experiment with their craft and expand their careers. 

This project is funded and supported in part by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future. Visit Austin at NowPlayingAustin.com.

Upcoming: Lyn Koenning in UT's 'Research and Pizza' noontime series, April 4

April 4, noon - 1 p.m.

Fine Arts Library Room DFA 3.200, University of Texas

Lyn Koenning, vocal coach & musical director in the Department of Theatre and Dance, discusses developing storytelling through song and dance, as in popular TV shows “Glee” and “Smash.” Her students demonstrate with a live performance of some their spring musical theatre revue Curtain Up! Hats Off to Broadway.

Playwright/UT Prof Steven Dietz Speaks at St. Ed's on March 29

St. Edward’s University’s Visiting Writers Series will host UT Austin Professor of Playwriting Steven Dietz, in their Visiting Writers Series on Thursday, March 29 at 7:30 pm.

Since 1983, Dietz’s thirty-plus plays have been seen at over one hundred regional theatres in the United States, as well as Off-Broadway. International productions have been seen in England, Japan, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Austria, Russia, Italy, Slovenia, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Singapore, Thailand and South Africa. His work has been translated into ten languages.

Mr. Dietz joins authors Oscar Casares and Debra Monroe, and poets Marie Howe and Naomi Shihab Nye on the list of celebrated writers that the Visiting Writers Series will be bringing to the St. Edward’s University campus for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Location: Maloney Room, 3rd Floor of the Main Building (at the center of the campus)
St. Edward’s University, 3001 South Congress Ave. (click for campus map)

[photo: Steven Dietz, via University of Texas]

Upcoming: Reading/Lecture by Playwright Sherry Kramer, Michener Center for Writers, University of Texas, March 22

The Michener Center for Writers of the University of Texas

presents

Sherry Kramer

reading from a work in progress

7:30 pm • Thursday • March 22, 2012
Avaya Auditorium, ACE 2.302
southeast corner of 24th & Speedway on campus
MICHENER CENTER FOR WRITERS • THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
www.utexas.edu/academic/mcw • 512-471-1601

Sherry Kramer's readings are always wildly entertaining, like her work—a fearless melding of humor, pathos, and intellect. Kramer’s plays have been produced in theaters across the country and abroad. She is a recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the NY Foundation for the Arts and McKnight Foundation. Her other honors include the Weissberger Playwriting Award and a NY Drama League Award (WHAT A MAN WEIGHS), the LA Women in Theater New Play Award (THE WALL OF WATER), and the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award (DAVID'S REDHAIRED DEATH). She was the first national member of New Dramatists, former head of the Iowa Playwrights’ Workshop, and is on the permanent faculty at Bennington College.

Scriptworks Dramatis Personae Lecture: Micah Magee on Found Storytelling, State Theatre, March 7

ScriptWorks Dramatis Personae Series presents Found Storytelling Workshop - telling global stories on a shoestring budget with Micah Magee
Wednesday, March 7th, 7-10pm at The State Theatre,719 Congress Ave. (click for map)

COST: $20 ScriptWorks members/ $30 general public
INFO/RESERVATIONS: info@scriptworks.org; 512-454-9727

What are our values as independent filmmakers or playwrights? How can we best use our limited resources to tell global stories?In this three-hour workshop, participants explore the narrative material of self and environment through place, memory and improvisation - using both fiction and documentary as storytelling material to create subjective universes Hollywood would never dream of building.

Writer/director Micah Magee will present ways of structuring found stories through archetype, fairy tale and a story-specific macro-dramaturgical analysis of time, character and place developed by screenwriter Armando Lao. Seeds of initial writing exercises will be further developed through partner writing, acting exercises and improvisation in the group.

Micah Magee is an award-winning writer and filmmaker based in Berlin, Germany and Troy, New York. In the past, Micah has worked as co-director of Cinematexas Film Festival, pirate radio programmer and (currently) full-time mom. She holds two undergraduate degrees from UT Austin (B.A. Plan II Liberal Arts/B.S. Film Production) and attended graduate school at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. She has taught at the DFFB in Berlin, Istanbul Film Academy and WizArt Art Academy in the Ukraine. Micah's films have taken her to festivals all over the world. She is overjoyed that they are finally taking her back to Texas with SXSW 2012! Micah has received a Fulbright Award in Journalism, a screenwriting fellowship from NYFA and an individual artist grant from NYSCA.

ScriptWorks is a playwright driven organization that seeks to promote the craft of dramatic writing and to protect the playwright's
integrity by encouraging playwright initiative and harnessing collective potential. The Dramatis Personae series was initiated to provide area
playwrights a place to experiment with their craft and expand their careers.

This project is funded and supported in part by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future. Visit Austin at NowPlayingAustin.com.

Upcoming: Playwright Will Kern Lectures at Trinity University, San Antonio, January 30

Via

Trinity University Dept of Human Communication and Theatre

presents

a lecture by playwright Will Kern

Monday, January 30 at 7:30 p.m. in the Cafe Theatre located in the Ruth Taylor Theatre Building (#3 and #31 -- click for map)

Trinity University Campus, One Trinity Place, San Antonio, Texas, 78212

Admission free -- no reserved places

Internationally known and produced playwright Will Kern will present a lecture at Trinity University on The Art of Playwriting. Mr. Kern's most famous work is the play Hellcab (1992). First produced as a late-night show by Famous Door Theatre in Chicago, the play, which was originally scheduled for twelve performances, ran for over nine years and is one of the longest running shows in Chicago theatre history. Hellcab has been performed all over the U.S. and abroad, including Scotland, Israel, Singapore, and Ireland. The play was adapted for the screen by Mr. Kern in 1998 and the film starred Gillian Anderson, John Cusak, Jullianne Morre, Laurie Metcalf, Harry Lennix and John C. Reilly.

Trinity University Dept of Human Communication and Theatre
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 7:30pm in the Cafe Theatre located in the Ruth Taylor Theatre Building.

Internationally known and produced playwright Will Kern will present a lecture at Trinity University on The Art of Playwriting. Mr. Kern's most famous work is the playHellcab (1992). First produced as a late-night show by Famous Door Theatre in Chicago, the play, which was originally scheduled for twelve performances, ran for over nine years and is one of the longest running shows in Chicago theatre history. Hellcabhas been performed all over the US and worldwide, including Scotland, Israel, Singapore, and Ireland. The play was adapted for the screen by Mr. Kern in 1998 staring Gillian Anderson, John Cusak, Jullianne Morre, Laurie Metcalf, Harry Lennix and John C. Rilly.

Location:Trinity University Campus, One Trinity Place, San Antonio, Texas, 78212
Tickets:FREE
For Reservations: Limited seating and NO Reservations are being taken. Seating is on first come basis.

Upcoming: Lecture at UT Theatrical Design Showcase: Kevin Adam's Big Apple, May 3

Received directly:

The University of Texas at Austin Department of Theatre and Dance

hosts the public lecture

Kevin Adams' Big Apple - Lighting Rock and Pop for the Broadway Stage

by alumnus and Tony-award-winning designer Kevin Adams

May 3, 5:30 - 7 p.m.

W.R. Woolrich Laboratories, Room 102 (WRW) (click for map)

Admission is free and open to the public.

The lecture is in conjunction the department’s annual Theatrical Design and Technology Showcase, a retrospective exhibition of student work in costume, lighting, sound, scenic design, costume technology, and theatrical design, on exhibition at the F. Loren Winship Drama Building (WIN) (click for map)

Theatrical Design and Technology Showcase Opening Reception: May 2, 6 – 8 p.m.

Theatrical Design and Technology Showcase: May 3 – 5 and May 7, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Kevin Adams is on the leading edge of the post-incandescent age on Broadway. His work for “Spring Awakening” -- brilliant white light for the 19th-century play's scenes and saturated color from what he calls "electric objects" for the songs -- won him a Tony in 2007. He picked up a second Tony in 2008 for “The 39 Steps” and a third in 2010 for his lighting of the Green Day musical “American Idiot”. Adams holds a B.F.A. in Theatrical Design from The University of Texas at Austin. (Fast Company Magazine)

Adams is a guest artist respondent for the student work exhibited in the Theatrical Design and Technology Showcase. Additional respondents include: Thomas Walsh (president of the Art Directors Guild and Chairman of the Art Directors Film Society), Robert Faires (actor, director, arts editor), Susan Branch Towne (costume designer), Kevin Rigdon (associate director for Houston’s Alley Theatre), Caylah Eddleblute (production designer, art director, property master for Troublemaker Studios), Steve Joyner (production designer, art director, property master for Troublemaker Studios), Nina Proctor (costume designer and costume supervisor for Troublemaker Studios), and Michael B. Raiford (scenic and costume designer).

The Theatrical Design and Technology Showcase celebrates the work of 38 emerging artists, including a 20 foot Rube Goldberg machine, three-dimensional modeling techniques and millinery. The opening reception on May 2 will offer guests an opportunity to view the work and meet with the student artists and guest respondents.

Upcoming: John Lahr Lectures on Tennessee Williams and the Out-crying Heart, Harry Ransom Center, UT, March 3

Found on-line:

Tennessee Williams and the Out-Crying Heart

a lecture by New Yorker drama critic John Lahr

March 3, 7 p.m.

Homer Rainey Hall music building, University of Texas

21st St., east of Guadalupe and east of Ransom Center (click for map)

no charge for admission

The University Co-op presents the Harry Ransom Lectures event "Tennessee Williams and the Out-Crying Heart” with John Lahr, Senior Drama Critic of The New Yorker. The event takes place Thursday, March 3, at 7 p.m. in Jessen Auditorium in Homer Rainey Hall.

Lahr will discuss the origins of Tennessee Williams's dramatic voice and how it changed over the decades.

Members of the Harry Ransom Center receive complimentary parking and priority entry at this program. Doors open at 6:20 p.m. for members and at 6:30 p.m. for the general public. Members must present their membership cards for priority entrance; one seat per membership card. Members arriving after 6:30 p.m. will join the general queue. Complimentary parking for members is available at the University Co-op garage at 23rd and San Antonio streets.

The Harry Ransom Lectures honor former University of Texas Chancellor Harry Huntt Ransom and highlight the Ransom Center’s vital role in the University’s intellectual and cultural life. The program brings internationally renowned writers, artists, and scholars to Austin for public events and conversations with University students. The lectures are made possible by the generous support of the University Co-op.

Additional support was provided by the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin.