Performing Race and Citizenship (Drama 4592) is a course taught by professor Katelyn Hale Wood at the University of Virginia. I was a member of the course in the Spring semester of 2019. Students were given five creative response assignments in order to put the ideas of scholarship into action throughout the course. This website serves as a digital archive of my creative responses. What follows is a brief outline of each response and its theoretical underpinnings.
Laughing at America: Rebecca Krefting wrote an article entitled All Joking Aside in which she discusses the role of humor in America. She explains the potential for a particular type of humor, which she calls charged humor, to combat inequality by making people laugh.Charged humor is humor that both attracts and repels audiences due to its polarizing nature, typically reflects personal views of feeling marginalized within society and presents potential solutions to that marginalization. The standup set presented in my portfolio attempts to use charged humor to address my feelings towards race and citizenship in America.
Dancing with Objects: Performance studies scholar Robin Bernstein argues that material objects script behavior. In other words certain objects invite people to interact with them differently. For example, a lamp invites itself to be lit. This creative response explores the way in which an object from my family's history impacts how I think about race and citizenship.
Casting Characters: Can White characters be cast in roles written for people of color? Can a White playwright write roles for people of color? In this creative response I explore roles I would likely be cast in, and roles I wish I could play. I then present excerpts from a play I wrote exploring a story that I think is more interesting to tell than the ones we typically tell about White women in society.
Documenting Histories: On Tuesday April 16th, 2019 on the steps of UVA's rotunda the students of professor Katelyn Hale Wood's Performing Race and Citizenship Course and professor Doug Grissom's Playwriting course presented original documentary theatre pieces exploring aspects of UVA's marginalized histories. The performances were crafted in partnership with documentary theatre artist Christina Umpfenbach and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. It was a project of the Transatlantic Partnership on Memory and Democracy. Here I present our script, which discusses the history of how UVA has handled issues of gender based violence on grounds as well as some thoughts on the process.
Navigating Borderlands: Gloria Anzaldúa was a queer, sixth generation Chicana woman whose seminal book entitled Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza was originally published in 1987. At the time, the idea that one person could hold multiple, intersecting identities was revolutionary. In my portfolio, I explore this idea of two truths being held simultaneously in one person through creating a playlist based off of one of Anzaldúa's poems in the book.
The work of this course is not done, even though I have graduated. I do not think the work of this course will ever really be done. As long as I continue to create, and as long as I continue to be a White person living in America I will be thinking about the themes that this course brought to life.