Dear grad students,
I’m a visiting associate professor in the English department. Here for the year, teaching and writing on 18C theater history, I’ve been struck anew by three notions that have repeatedly cropped up since I started work on my current book:
1. that performance history is at once utterly hopeless (you can’t possibly reconstruct everything that matters about a bygone show even if it transpired yesterday, let alone centuries back) and preposterously pleasurable (you can certainly enjoy trying);
2. that the often scattershot records of performance (descriptions, for example, of Charles II’s public speaking or of Charles Dickens’s public readings; the three-minutes’-each recordings we have of Tennyson and Woolf, the twelve of Joyce, the broader audio swatches of Pound, Stein, Nabokov, Plath; transcriptions, portraits, and porcelains of Garrick; videos of Olivier and Dench; mp4s of Jon Vickers or Rufus Wainwright singing Shakespeare) amount to an underexploited scholarly resource, accessible and useful even for projects not focused on performance in itself; and
3. that questions of performance (of craft, audience, evanescence) are a pervasive, fairly obvious but maybe underexplored component of nearly everything we do in this peculiar profession we’ve chosen: teaching, writing, speaking, shaping thought, prose, and talk for purposes of exploration, explanation, and persuasion.
In spring semester, I’d like to convene an informal, open-field monthly workshop on these and related themes, in which we take up pieces of performance history and theory that have particularly intrigued us, and talk also about the place and practice of performance in our own working lives.
I’m writing now to invite you to a first session (Wednesday 13 February, 4:30, Chancellor Green 105; food plentifully provided) at which I’ll offer short samples of things we might do, ask you to suggest things we should do (what specific performance moments, topics, and ways-of-looking would be most useful to you?), and we’ll plan together some of the things we will do. If you’d like to start the conversation beforehand (suggestions, questions, trains of thought), that would be great: there’s a Blackboard site (Performance Workshop) that should by now be accessible to you all.
Hoping to hear from you; looking forward to seeing you–
Stuart Sherman
Stanley J. Kelley Visiting Professor
McCosh 60
stuarts@princeton.edu
258-7543
