Rehearsing revolution : an auto/ethnographic mapping of feminist theatre making in the pandemic(s)
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Over the last five years, I have been exploring my embodied experience of becoming a feminist director in the academy. I began directing fully-staged theatrical works amidst the height of the COVID-19 pandemic with a digital production of Charlotte's Web in the Summer of 2020. From that experience, and from continuing to create in-person theatre with the residue of COVID-19 and the continued pandemics of violence, discrimination, and environmental crises in the U.S. and beyond, I began researching and enacting feminist care practices in rehearsals. I specifically dissect my processes of directing Charlotte's Web, The Wolves, and American Girl(s). Through this auto/ethnographic body mapping project I attempt to answer the following questions: How did I become a feminist director in the academy during COVID-19? How does the feminist director embody "care" in the current political moment? I reveal how enacting feminist care theory in academic rehearsals, specifically through the practices of casting understudies, body mapping, and modeling the artist↔citizen, creates socially aware artists who understand that all bodies are valuable, bodies carry various cultural scripts and traumas that inevitably enter the rehearsal room, and bodies creating at the theater are at all times implicated in the political world. The project concludes with a Sara Ahmed style "Feminist Killjoy Thriving Kit" for theatre makers invested in creating art that enacts a caring politic in a care-less world.
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Ph. D.