I’m very glad that a performance of my ethnographic play will be presented this March as part of the program of the 2018 Soyuz Symposium for Postsocialist Cultural Studies, this year hosted by the Department of Anthropology and the European Studies Council at Yale.
Friday March 2nd at 7:30pm, with a talk back session at 9pm Saturday, March 3rd at 1:00pm, with a talk back session at 1:30pm
At the Yale University Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) Movement Studio, 149 York Street
with additional roles and production design by Rachel Chew, Dana Smooke, Chayton Pabich, and Yuki Hayasaka.
The staged reading is presented as part of the Soyuz Symposium for Postsocialist Cultural Studies, with support from the European Studies Council, the Department of Anthropology, Theatre Studies, Slavic Studies, and WGSS at Yale University.
Event details on the Yale Events Calendar are here.
More about this project here.
I was touched this week to reread an article published online by a local news source in Petrozavodsk, Russia where I conduct my fieldwork. My dear friend and collaborator, Vladimir Rudak, a musician, filmmaker, writer, and disability activist from Petrozavodsk shared his impressions of the United States with reporter Asya Kosheleva. I was fortunate to have been able to invite Rudak to the US as part of an ethnographic theater project, a play development workshop and staging of I WAS NEVER ALONE at the Shank Theatre at UC San Diego.
In the article, in Russian, Rudak describes his impressions of the campus at UC San Diego, of accessible infrastructure in the US versus in Russia, about differences in how disability is approached as a subject for study and issue of inclusion in both countries. And, he reflects on his impressions of the play project and the experience of watching Jason Dorwart play a role based on interviews with Rudak himself.
The article, riffing on the complexity of Rudak’s experience of watching an actor play a role based on himself, titled the article with the phrase, Life is a Play, recalling the Shakespearean soliloquy that begins “all the world’s a stage” (the Russian is usually translated a bit differently, because the word the journalist used – igra – can mean either “stage play” or “game”). The title is an apt one for an ethnographic theater project, where the boundaries between research, life, art, and presentation of research blur together. As an ethnographer inviting Rudak to UC San Diego to participate in the play workshop, in many ways, I flipped the script – suddenly my interlocutor was in my cultural homeland, observing, recording, assessing, and commenting. Watching the actors and director and dramaturg interpret the stories that I had recorded in Russia – mostly with people that Rudak knows himself – and suss out how to represent a Russian sensibility on a sparsely decorated American stage – became an opportunity for us to theorize together. Now, in reading Rudak’s comments to reporters, I discover Rudak translating those experiences for a general audience back home. In this, the roles shift, and get destabilized: who is ethnographer, and who is subject? Reading Rudak’s narrative of his trip to the US, I discover some element the strangeness that he must have felt in seeing his life and lifeworld recorded and adapted for an audience. And, in this, I feel flush with awe at the kind of mutual trust needed to build such a reciprocal project. The staging in La Jolla was over a year ago, and the play script has gone unperformed since them – but still, we are all continually transformed by the theater of the project itself.
Meanwhile, Jason Dorwart has published reflections on the La Jolla process in journal TheatreForum. In his commentary, Dorwart centers the ways that the ethnographic approach centers the life experiences of people with disabilities contra many theatre scripts, which, he argues, persist in using disability as a plot device to serve an ableist narrative or erasing it altogether. He reflects on the ways that nondisabled actors had to shift their perceptions of disability and interdependency in order to play the roles convincingly.
In this way, the “two Rudaks’” separate and very different publications reflecting on the La Jolla performance might be taken as a case study for the complexity of collective theatrical meaning-making. On the one hand, each contributor’s experience was deeply shaped by interaction with the others. On the other hand, their conclusions are quite separate, perhaps reflecting their respective advocacy aims (Rudak’s toward greater inclusion and access in general in Petrozavodsk, Dorwart’s toward a shift in thinking about how disability appears on stage, particularly in the US). In turn, this aspect of the ethnographic process – the process and performance of the script – fold back in to my own work as an ethnographer. As I work through manuscripts about life in Petrozavodsk, I draw on memories and experiences from the play process.
Jason Dorwart, Laura Dorwart, Vladimir Rudak, and Larisa Kukshieva at a cast party in La Jolla, California. Jason played the role of “Rudak” – based on interviews with Rudak himself, in the La Jolla staged reading of the documentary play I WAS NEVER ALONE, October 2016.
I am looking forward to teaching several new courses at UC San Diego in the coming months.
This winter, I am teaching a course originally designed by Dr. Tom Humphries. The Problem of Voice takes the trope of “voice” as an important mode of understanding representation, recognition, and multivocality in contemporary cultural perspectives. The course, in the Department of Communication, asks upper level undergraduates to read and discuss social theory, autobiography, and fiction in order to interrogate the question of who gets to speak on behalf of an identity group, how to reconcile internal diversity, and how speakers establish authority, authenticity, and what counts as “truth”.
In spring 2017, I will teach another course in Communication, Performance and Cultural Studies, and a course in the Department of Anthropology, Ethnography in Practice.
Ethnography in Practice is a practicum for upper level undergraduates, in which each student picks a field site and over the course of the quarter researches, analyzes, presents to peers, and writes an original ethnography. The course is appropriate for undergraduate anthropology majors, but also for communication majors and writing majors interested in taking observation of real life events into compelling, rigorously thought-out writing. Ethnography as a practice first and foremost seeks to represent the insider’s point of view to describe or translate a cultural scene to others. We will read examples of written ethnography to explore the practice of ethnography as a genre and practice of writing, learn how to write, organize and analyze ethnographic field notes, and follow a contemporary adaptation of the Spradley method of conducting and analyzing ethnographic interviews.
Performance and Cultural Studies is in the Communication Department and cross-listed with the Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies (REEES) major and minor. The course begins from the question of what performance is, and what it does, as a form of dialogic communication. We will discuss a variety of genres of performance in cultural contexts, engage core texts of performance studies, and draw on examples of how performances can be mobilized as political resistance. Students will participate in workshops to develop a performative term project. REEES majors and minors must chose examples and subject matter related to the major for their term project (in addition to relevant material throughout the course).
Finally, during UC San Diego’s Summer Session I 2017, I will offer an upper level undergraduate course on Queer & Crip Theory for the Program in Critical Gender Studies. This course takes a critical, contemporary approach to understanding disability and sexuality.
Over the past year, in my role as postdoctoral fellow for the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design (CoLED), it’s been my great privilege to work with an outstanding array of scholars interested in the intersections and conundrums presented by thinking about ethnography and design.
A little over a year ago, in September 2016, we launched the CoLED website, which, with guidance from co-PIs Elana Zilberg and Joe Hankins, and groundwork laid by Yelena Gluzman, I was glad to develop.
Now, based on a year of work, and thanks to a workshop grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and input from the CoLED faculty, postdocs, and graduate students across six UC institutions, we are so very excited to be presenting the fist CoLED conference, ETHNOGRAPHY & DESIGN: MUTUAL PROVOCATIONS. We are thrilled to present a conference that answers concerns brought by the scholars in our network: how can we make a conference that is about design and ethnography without reproducing a paradigm in which ethnography is constantly coopted for capital accumulation, as design enlists ethnographic techniques to work to produce value? How can we address the variety of stakes, concerns, approaches, disciplinary lenses, and arguments surrounding the ways that the words “ethnography” and “design” are circulating in our time? What would a conference program look like if the “standard” research presentation were demoted, and other “designs for ethnography” including artworks, performance, pedagogy, interactive digital interfaces, and experimental labs were offered equal footing? Who would even come to such a conference.
It has been a fascinating challenge and enthralling visioning process to work with the CoLED conference committee to bring this conference into existence. I’m personal very excited for the event, and I know that the rest of the team is as well. Please join us at UC San Diego next week, Oct 27-29th, for the event, or stay tuned for a multimedia conference publication to come.
One of the interesting challenges of conducting performance ethnography is learning anew how to document non-text-based happenings that become part of the ethnographic record. The recent staged workshop of I WAS NEVER ALONE, my ethnographic play script, produced an overwhelming barrage of moments of meaning-making and storytelling as actors, directors, lighting and set designs, and our access researcher, came together to create two performances and move the work toward a full staging (the workshop engaged professional actors and MFA theatre student designers in a very short a two week process with light tech and props, but no set. In director Joseph Megel’s hands, this stripped away aesthetic was just enough to draw the audience into the stories in the play, presented with stirring energy by the talented cast.
Regan Linton as Vera, and Vladimir Rudak as Musician, during the October 2016 staged workshop of I WAS NEVER ALONE at UC San Diego’s Shank Theatre. Photo copyright Jim Carmody, please visit his website for a full gallery and contact him for usage requests.
As an ethnographer, of course, I wanted to capture every moment of the process. What notes did the director give the actors? How did disability theatre specialist Jason Dorwart, the assistant director for the workshop, who also played the role of Rudak, differ in his interpretation of the script from our nondisabled director? What kinds of problems – embodying a role, pronouncing Russian words, working out what a Russian speaker might mean when referring to a particular political issue – arose during the rehearsal process? Most of these elements were captured by my digital audio recordings. And, with the help of Communication Department graduate student Olga Lazitski, who has a background in television news production, we were able to capture research quality video for several rehearsals and the two performances.
Finally, Jim Carmody, of the Department of Theatre & Dance at UC San Diego, brought his theatre & dance photography artistry to our final rehearsal, producing a series of stunning photos. View his gallery here: http://jimcarmody.zenfolio.com/iwasneveralone.
As performance ethnography scholar Dwight Conquergood underlined in his discussion of textocentrism, the process of knowledge production, and the kind of knowledge that is ultimately produced is curtailed if we cave to the hegemony of text-based forms of recording and knowing. Visual media like video and photography can only capture a limited glimpse of the social phenomena that live performance produces; a photo of a still moment in a performance can hardly produce the kind of communitas or social shift in emotive and interactional awareness that live performance creates. But these forms of documentation help us to understand the ways in which those performances continue to reverberate in the lives of people that the work has touched. How these images are taken up and used in the future is a question that interests me as a methodological problem: are they data, or are they objects in and of themselves? Are the publicity, interventions, illustrations, or texts? How will they be edited, read, shared, compiled, critiqued, or ignored? In an increasingly mediated world, these are questions that no longer pertain only to digital, media, or visual anthropology, or performance ethnography, but to many ethnographers whose fieldwork archives become increasingly media rich. In this way, I suspect that looking again to theatre, and understanding how our colleagues in those institutional locations have understood production photos, can be a useful pathway (as was Victor Turner’s alliance with Richard Schechter). Just some thoughts as I sort through the various media piling up in the wake of the play workshop.
I’m pleased to announce that I WAS NEVER ALONE, my new documentary play based on ethnographic research with adults with disabilities in Russia, will be on stage for the first time this October at UC San Diego!
A two week workshop process with director Joseph Megel (StreetSigns, UNC Chapel Hill) and international collaborator Vladimir Rudak (Musician, filmmaker, disability advocate) will feature professional regional actors in each of the roles, and UC San Diego Department of Theatre & Dance graduate students in design and tech roles. The workshop will culminate in two performances in the Shank Theatre a black box theater at the UC San Diego Jacobs Theatre District (shared with La Jolla Playhouse).
Mark your calendars for Friday, October 7 & Saturday, October 8, 2016 at 7pm.
The show runs for 90 minutes and will be followed by a talk-back session one each night. The Friday talk back will feature discussion with the director, assistant director, cast and crew about the work of performing documentary theater and disability theater. The Saturday talk back will feature local scholars discussing performance ethnography, and representations of Russia and disability on the stage. Further talk back details TBA.
I WAS NEVER ALONE is a documentary play script and performance ethnography project that I am developing in collaboration with Joseph Megel (UNC Performance Studies artist-in-residence and director of FREIGHT) and collaborators in Russia. The script focuses on the personal narratives of seven adults with disabilities living in contemporary Russia, presented in a 90 minute play as a series of monologue-type portraits. The narratives are drawn nearly verbatim from translations of interviews with Russians with a range of disabilities in Russia who have participated in the development of this project since 2012.
Winter 2016 brings two exciting moments in the development of the work. There will be a table reading of the draft script at UCSD as part of the Studio for Ethnographic Design’s new Performance Ethnography Lab series on January 7th. In late January and early February, the play will be workshopped and performed in two public staged readings featuring local actors in the Performance Studies program at UNC-Chapel Hill. The staged readings will take place on Friday, February 5th at 7pm, followed by a talk back session with the audience, and on Saturday, February 6th in the afternoon, followed by a roundtable event featuring local scholars of Russia, disability studies, and performance studies. I will also be talking about the methodology for the project withthe Moral Economies of Medicine working group of the Medical Anthropology Program on Friday February 5th at lunchtime.
This week takes me back to North Carolina to work on logistics leading up to a planned workshop and staged reading that will take place at UNC-Chapel Hill Performance Studies during the first week of February 2016.
The workshop will be the second process presentation for I WAS NEVER ALONE, a documentary play script and performance ethnography project that I am developing in collaboration with Joseph Megel (UNC Performance Studies artist-in-residence and director of FREIGHT) and collaborators in Russia. The script focuses on the personal narratives of seven adults with disabilities living in contemporary Russia, presented in a 90 minute play as a series of monologue-type portraits. The narratives are drawn nearly verbatim from translations of interviews with Russians with a range of disabilities in Russia who have participated in the development of this project since 2012.
Find more information about the casting needs please contact me (cassandra.hartblay@gmail-dot-com) or Joseph Megel (megel@unc-dot-edu). Casting will continue through November 2015.
The June 2015 conference of the Society for Disability Studies brought some great moments for disability ethnography. For the first time in recent memory, interdisciplinary ethnographers in attendance met to discuss common goals, new research, and possible collaborations. There were several ethnographic and/collaborative qualitative research presentations. There was an exciting discussion following Karen Nakamura’s paper presentation, “Why I am Not a Medical Anthropologist.” A meeting on disability and digital research methodologies produced some interesting points.
As a Summer Research Fellow at the Kennan Institute for Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC, I was glad to participate in a roundtable event on Global Disability Rights. Held in tandem with the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the panel highlighted different perspectives on the role of the US in disability rights advocacy in Russia and Ukraine. The panelists included me, Eric Mathews of Disability Rights International, and Andrea Mazzarino of Brown University and formerly Human Rights Watch. The event offered a rare moment to bring together policy, human rights advocacy, and critical academic perspectives. A transcript and audio recording of the event are available via the Kennan Institute.
And, most recently, I’ve moved to San Diego to begin a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the interdisciplinary Studio for Ethnographic Design at UCSD and the multicampus University of California Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design (CoLED).
I was also an enthusiastic spectator-at-a-distance for the production of the new play FREIGHT at HERE Arts Center in New York. Joseph Megel, who developed and directed that show, has been a great mentor to me as I develop a documentary theater project based on my research. Congrats to all involved in that production!
Finally -in the travel tips/canine adventures department, the dog beach at Ocean Beach in San Diego is fantastic!
I find out what a nerd I really am when I realize how excited I am for the Society for Disability Studies conference. The conference will take place this week, June 11-14th, in Minneapolis. This will only be my third time attending, but I truly love this community. I look forward all year to finding out what people have been working on, congregating in hotel lobbies (bundled up to bear my Reynaud’s in the too-cold air-conditioning), and building new relationships. It’s also an extra-fun year for me to attend SDS, because I went to college at Macalester College, just across the river in Saint Paul. So, the Twin Cities are where I first got to delve into disability studies as a field – taking classes with Cindy Wu, doing campus activism (Disability Awareness Month) with SDS board member Joan Ostrove, and interning, then working at Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts. Now in the culminating years of my graduate studies, it all comes full circle.
The poster for Disability Awareness Month 2005. Artwork adapted for this poster is RUSTY CAT MEOW, tempera on matboard, 8.5×11″, by Ron Christopherson, 2005. RUSTY CAT MEOW was one of the works featured in an exhibition on the 2nd floor of the Ruth Stricker Dayton Campus Center at Macalester College in October 2005. The exhibition included narratives and photos that Ron and I gathered together, as well as his multimedia artworks.
This year my presentations will be as follows:
“Dual regimes of productivity?: tracing ableisms and resistances in Soviet and postsoviet welfare states” a paper presentation extending the questions raised in my recent DSQ article, on a panel titled Performing resistance outside of capitalism: Interrogating Soviet, postsoviet, and global leftist ableismswith Anastasia Kayiatos (Presenter in absentia), Stevie Peace Larson (Presenter), David T. Mitchell (Discussant/update: Dr. Mitchell is unable to attend at the last minute) and Louise Hickman (Moderator). Panel 9d/Friday 5:00-6:30 pm.
“Do You Like This Installation?” a paper presentation about my Ethnographic Installation investigating the built environment of public space and cyberspace in Russia, on a panel titled Cripping Cyberspace: Exploring Online Disability Aesthetics. With Amanda Cachia (Panel Organizer, Presenter, this year’s Zola award winner!!), Sara Hendren (Presenter in absentia), and Margaret Price (Chair/Moderator).Panel 5c/Friday 8:00-9:30 am.
I’m really lucky to be engaging with all these amazing folks, and I can’t wait to see what unfolds.
Fellow graduate students, if you’re not already a member, check out the Facebook group for the SDS Grad Student caucus (you need to request membership, but one of us administrators will add you promptly). Join us for a happy hour at Brit’s Pub on Thursday evening, and for the Caucus Meeting Saturday 6:45-7:45 pm (holla, caucus coordinator Adam Newman) and the special panel on professionalization (how do you get a DS job, y’all?) that Jess Waggoner put together (Thursday 12:15-1:15pm).
