issue 1 - editorial
Staging Ourselves is an
evening of monologues written and performed by students from the
intensive 8-week Creative Writing workshop at the School of English,
Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, where I was a Fulbright
professor and guest artist in the spring semester 2009. Meeting
twice a week, the students astounded me by their wholehearted
investment in the creative process, most of them never having
written a play before; by the inspiration they gathered each in
choosing a “creative ally” from among the playwrights in Extreme
Exposure: An Anthology of Performance Texts (1999), edited by Jo
Bonney; and especially by their courage to express deeply held
convictions, embedding those convictions in creative work and
speaking them publicly in the form of dramatic performance.
My own work for the stage explores the relationship between public history and private history and the border between history telling and story telling. In the class, which I titled “Performing (My) World History,” students explored---via creative writing exercises, research, impersonation, interviews, and theatrical improvisation---their individual and family stories in light of significant events in the world around them. The resulting monologues combine elements of the students’ own experience, their personal and public histories given flesh and voice in dramatic form.
Stathis Gourgouris, in his analysis of Neohellenic history Dream Nation (1996), writes that “every history organizes vestiges into a coherent picture. It veils a fiction. And even at those times when the history is blatantly called a story---my story . . . the veil is stubbornly held up intact” (175). I asked students to construct their own stories by “organizing vestiges” in Gourgouris’s sense. We used fragments of memory, news items, dialogues with parents and family members, works of literature and music, freewriting, and improvisational exercises as raw material for the monologues in development. I helped the students work with well-established principles of dramatic structure to organize their materials.
And if every history veils a fiction, perhaps every fiction veils a history. Gourgouris speaks of the “fiction of national culture” and considers cultural memory as the preserver of national identity. From the mouths of these students fly truths in the guise of fictional states and nations, fictional feminisms, fictional soldiers’ tales, fictional hero[in]es’ journeys. These are tales told by nineteen- and twenty-year-olds looking at 1974 Cyprus, at the role of women in today’s Greece, at the global war, at concepts of beauty, at suicide and murder, at the meaning of kinship, of relationship, of citizenship.
I believe that by writing their individual histories, students are both participating in and (re)creating world history. Gourgouris says that the writer makes herself or himself “the singular subjectivity in the vortex of an entire culture” (213). He further points out that we must consider the “actual materiality of the conditions in which [authors] wrote” (216). The students and I considered how the Iphigenia of Euripides (Greece, ~ 407 BCE) and the Iphigenia of Charles Mee (USA, 2007) come to us through the particular lenses of their authors. We observed that just as William Shakespeare brought 16th- and 17th-century English power struggles to Macbeth (~1603), Anton Chekhov brought the 19th-century emancipation of the Russian serfs to The Cherry Orchard (1904), and Anna Deavere Smith brought 20th century American race relations to Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (1994), so do young Greeks (and students of other nationalities) bring to the stage public worlds remade in their private images. Embedded in the student reports of these worlds are the material conditions of their own lives: their writing desks and Facebook pages, their grandparents’ tales and silences, their parents’ mandates and examples, their own experiences in the agora, in literature, music, and media, in the classic and the popular, the ancient and the modern, the past and the future.
Of no less importance than the writing is the performative aspect of our effort. Stephani Etheridge Woodson in her article “Creating an Educational Theatre Program for the Twenty-First Century,” published in Arts Education Policy Review (March 2004), suggests that the theatre, even more than the classroom, can be the locus for current cultural assessment:
Now more than ever, young people live complicated lives. But I am not so sure that today's educational environment helps them make sense of those lives. Educational theorist, Henry Giroux reminds us that “beneath the abstract codifying of youth around the discourses of law, medicine, psychology, employment, education, and marketing statistics, there is the lived experience of being young.” Making sense out of our lives has long been the purview of the arts though and educational theatre is uniquely positioned to meet this need to explore the lived experience of being young.
In Staging Ourselves, young writer-performers move from analytical/ theoretical mode to creative/practical mode, from academic discussion to dramatic action. They appear in the flesh and speak in their own voices. Leaving the classroom and stepping into the public forum, they offer creative propositions that combine their private and public experiences transformed by imagination.
Catherine Rogers
Catherine Rogers is an American playwright and actor whose most recent work The Sudden Death of Everyone was seen in 2007 at Philadelphia’s Shubin Theatre and Dixon Place, New York. She performed Sudden Death in Thessaloniki, Athens, and Paros, Greece, in 2009 as a Fulbright professor, guest artist, and resident at the House of Literature. Rogers received her MFA in Playwriting as a James A. Michener fellow at the University of Texas and is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou of the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, prepared, mentored, and coordinated the group of (21) students who enrolled in the Creative Writing Workshop. She was the technical adviser for the performance Staging Ourselves.