Theater 393R - S-Performance Workshop
Spring
2014
01
3.00
Gilbert Mccauley
TU TH 9:30AM 11:30AM
UMass Amherst
50918
Description not available at this time
Using the Research-to-Performance Method (developed at Brown University?s Rites & Reason Theatre) and W.E.B. DuBois? seminal ideas about theater for social change as a foundation for exploration of what we are calling ?engaged community storytelling,? this course will introduce participants to Research-to-Performance Method?; allow them to practice storytelling and creative engagement techniques; and explore the work of a particular scholar or artist in order to develop and perform a piece based on their research.
This semester in Performance Workshop the focus of our exploration will be Court Dorsey?s PROJECT UNSPEAKABLE, which is a energetic verbatim theater piece about the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy that includes excerpts from the speeches and writings of the four slain leaders, documentary images, witness testimony which has been covered up or explained away, ignored evidence, testimonials from trusted sources, and the political and spiritual elements that helped shape these leaders? actions.
Inspired by James Douglass? remarkable book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, and coinciding with the 50th anniversary year of the 1963 death of John F. Kennedy, PROJECT UNSPEAKABLE envisions simultaneous dramatic readings or full performances of this theatrical work about the role of Thomas Merton?s ?Unspeakable? in the tragic murders of these four visionaries. Merton (1915?1968), an internationally respected spiritual writer and Trappist monk, wrote in 1965: ?One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that [the world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable?[that] too few are willing to see.?
This semester in Performance Workshop the focus of our exploration will be Court Dorsey?s PROJECT UNSPEAKABLE, which is a energetic verbatim theater piece about the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy that includes excerpts from the speeches and writings of the four slain leaders, documentary images, witness testimony which has been covered up or explained away, ignored evidence, testimonials from trusted sources, and the political and spiritual elements that helped shape these leaders? actions.
Inspired by James Douglass? remarkable book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, and coinciding with the 50th anniversary year of the 1963 death of John F. Kennedy, PROJECT UNSPEAKABLE envisions simultaneous dramatic readings or full performances of this theatrical work about the role of Thomas Merton?s ?Unspeakable? in the tragic murders of these four visionaries. Merton (1915?1968), an internationally respected spiritual writer and Trappist monk, wrote in 1965: ?One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that [the world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable?[that] too few are willing to see.?