p e r f o r u m

a newsletter of the performance studies division of the national communication association

Spring 2007 Please view our Newsletter archive

PSD Executive Board

Chair

Bruce Henderson

Ithica College

Vice-Chair

Heidi Rose

Villanova University

Vice-Chair Elect

Joanne Gilbert

Alma College

Secretary

Marcyrose Chvasta

University of South Florida

Immediate Past Chairperson

Christie Logan

CSU-Northridge

A Note from Heidi Rose, Vice-Chair

I’d like to offer a collective and heartfelt thanks to all who submitted proposals to the Performance Studies Division for NCA 2007. While the review process is still underway, it is clear that PSD will out-do itself in Chicago! Those of us with concerns that our numbers would be lower due to the new NCA policy of “one presentation-per person-per division” clearly had nothing to worry about! We received a record number of student papers, indicating the vitality and continuing growth of performance studies. In addition, we received nearly as many performance proposals as paper/panel proposals, and all promise to be innovative and provocative. NCA 2007 will be another invigorating conference for the Performance Studies Division, and I look forward to sharing it with you.

Remnants from the NCA Convention Pre-Conference

“Documenting and Evaluating Creative Work”

The following pages document several of the presentations and reported outcomes of the 2006 NCA Performance Studies Division pre-conference “Documenting and Evaluating Creative Work.” The organizers and participants of the conference believe the lessons shared and ideas cultivated during those intense and enlightening eight hours deserve wider circulation—the widest possible, in fact, among those of us who study and practice performance within the walls of Academe. If you attended the pre-conference, no doubt you will appreciate not having to rely on your memory and notes to recall the invaluable guidance offered that day.

Before providing documents and reports from the pre-conference, I must ask the Division to recognize the commitment, care, and labor provided by the organizers. Donna Marie Nudd, Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, and Mindy Fenske devoted precious time to researching, collecting, and synthesizing the myriad ways the Academy does and does not recognize the work of performance scholars. Representing various stages of the academic career, these generous folk made sure that all attendants—all performance studies scholars, from students to full professors—would benefit from discussions they helped spark. These organizers took the first steps of a long-awaited journey toward ensuring the recognition and respect that performance scholars and practitioners deserve. Let’s follow their path and continue the collaborative efforts.

Pre-conference Abstract(with modified verb tense)

Performance scholars face the continuing challenge and exciting task of communicating the scope and value of creative “work” for a variety of institutional and disciplinary audiences. The continuing separation between categories of scholarship and creativity in promotion and tenure discourse, for example, suggests the imperative of an active and assertive effort to promote an understanding of the quality and nature of performance scholarship. The purpose of the preconference was to address the issues and procedures concerning the status, review, evaluation, and documentation of creative work for the purposes of promotion, tenure, and yearly evaluations. Participants discussed these issues in breakout sessions concerning the contexts of performance festivals, outside review of local performances, journal publication of reviews, and production grants and venues. The goal of each discussion was to begin the collaboration on creating an infrastructure of support for professional development for artists and artist/scholars in the Performance Studies Division of NCA.

Opening Keynote Presentations

“Academic Politics: Working Within and Outside the Institution”

Donna Nudd

Florida State University

After my third year at Florida State University, I was fired. I filed a grievance, arguing that my department had discriminatory practices. I won. I was rehired.

By tenure time, I flew through the PTE process. Unanimous all the way.

A few years after tenure, at the bequest of my dean, I spent four years in administration—as Chair of the Department, then Interim Associate Dean. Then I sweetly requested to be a faculty member again.

Last year, after twenty years at Florida State University, I went up for Full Professor and quite definitively did NOT make it out of the chute. It was ugly.

This year, I have every reason to believe I will fly through the promotion process. Next fall, fingers crossed, I’ll be a Full Professor.

As you can see from this sixty-second summary, my academic journey continues to be a terrifying and thrilling amusement park ride. I’ve learned a lot on this academic rollercoaster, and I want to share some of it with you today.

Of course, my situation is unique in some ways, I was the second female professor, and only queer, hired into a moderately-sized Department of Communication in a Research I institution with a heavily quantitatively-oriented, white male faculty. And I co-create art in a geographically-challenged location--Tallahassee, Florida.

But while my situation is unique in some ways, in other ways, I’m afraid it’s disturbingly universal.

My first presentation today is about Academic Politics, initially covering political strategies for working withinthe institution, then political strategies working outsidethe institution.

Understandably, given the diversity of this audience in terms of the types of institutions and particular programs in which we reside, but also in terms of our varying years of servitude within academe, I know that for some my recommendations may prove mundane. Nonetheless, my modest goal is to offer to each of you, at least one new insight. If an insight doesn’t come initially, hold on, it may come later in this presentation or my subsequent one; if not then, seek me out at the reception where I’m bound to be even more candid after a few margaritas.

ACADEMIC POLITICS, PART ONE : Working Within the Institution

First, consider establishing an interdisciplinary research/creative support group.

Don’t be insular. I’ve had an interdisciplinary research/creative support group for the last fifteen years and I highly recommend it. We’re composed of feminist scholars in a range of disciplines at FSU--Theatre, Modern Language, English, as well as two independent scholar/artists from the community. We specialize in different areas—race, gender, disability, folklore, ethnicity. Since we see ourselves as bosom buddies, we’ve nicknamed ourselves the “Bosoms.”

While my support group centers on feminist concerns, yours of course need not—your interdisciplinary research group might thematically be composed of artists in your institution, or cultural studies scholars, or scholar/artists who are experimenting with on-line publishing formats.

An interdisciplinary research/creative support group can serve you in a number of ways. Most obviously, you can review and comment on each other’s scholarly manuscripts or original scripts. More therapeutically, you can collectively evaluate the value of the anonymous comments on your submitted manuscripts from anonymous reviewers. Most pragmatically, you can review each other’s institutionalwriting—grant proposals, book proposals, research statements for tenure and promotion. Last, and perhaps most important, you can serve as critical perception checkers about the policies and practices of your respective departments. For example, it is invaluable to know how other academic units at your institution handle annual evaluations and merit raises.

Second: know your institution’s record on PTE.

A testimonial.

After two women’s studies scholars, one of whom was a member of my Bosom research group, were denied tenure by our Provost (after the two women had accumulated remarkably strong favorable votes at department, college and university levels), the Bosoms had multiple strategies of counter attack both within and outside our institution. Here’s what we and others did withinour institution.

 

We started by simply publicizing an informal workshop on the Women’s Studies list serve called “Tenure Tips for Female Faculty.” In the middle of summer, a surprising number of women, fifty, showed up on a rainy Friday afternoon in my living room. At that meeting, we learned there was a long defunct organization at Florida State University called “AWFA,” The Association of Women Faculty and Administrators,” we resurrected it and renamed it “The Association forWomen Faculty and Administrators.” (My mentor’s husband said oh what an unfortunate acronym, AWFA. I told him that’s because he didn’t know what the acronym signified to the female, activist, self-appointed board members at the time. While our slightly revised letterhead was The Association for Women Faculty and Administrators, rabble-rousing officers of our organization viewed our acronym AWFA more candidly, for us it reflected our clandestine A.W.F.A. mission—“Angry Women Fighting Assholes.”)

Nonetheless, we worked strategically and proactively. We wrote our letters of protest over the Women’s Studies Scholars tenure denial to our President; AWFA officers interviewed women faculty who were leaving FSU; we organized an inspiring afternoon workshop in which fifty female Full Professors mentored sixty Associate female faculty. We posted our on-going concerns-- about maternity leave, about inordinate service expectations, about interdisciplinary and collaborative work being undervalued --on our AWFA list serve. We had the handful of radical tenured feminist professors ask the obvious question—what is going on with women faculty here at FSU?–at university PTE meetings, Provost meetings, union meetings, faculty senate meetings. One Full professor in Sociology handed the Provost A Room of One’s Own as a present at a university reception. Our organization, AWFA, became a strong enough presence that our Provost, a) joined the AWFA list serve and b) allotted $ 64,000 to fund a Task Force Study on Women Faculty.

Nonetheless, institutional change is painstakingly slow. But progress can be made.

When AWFA officers were asked for nominations of faculty to serve on the Task Force, I recommended one of my Associate Deans because he has a profound sense of fairness and is a statistical wizard. Once chosen, he asked me what he could read to prepare for his appointment on the task force. I recommended Virginia Valian’s Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women. The ideas were so new to him that he found himself, continually poking his wife in bed and saying, read this. That same semester, after he had finished a routine stint on the Faculty Annual Evaluation Committee, he made an extra trip down to the files, re-reviewing all the women faculty’s vitas and narratives, to double check to see if he had been fair in his appraisals.

After the university’s Task Force’s Study came out with all the appalling statistical results AWFA members predicted would come out (statistics pretty much in keeping with those documented by our feminist predecessors at MIT), more signs of slow institutional change began to surface. (Mind you this is also the result of not just activism withinthe university, but also outsideof it—more on that later).

One concrete example of institutional change, the same Provost who had denied my Women’s Studies friend tenure, was appalled two years later when reviewing the list of names his deans had submitted for named professorships. He immediately sent the whole list back to his deans because there was “not one female faculty member’s name listed.” Each dean immediately revisited and resubmitted his list.

I hope you understand, by now, that I am not and will not portray administrators as villains, I’m arguing, like faculty, like students, like ourselves, administrators can be educated.

In the last few years, the same Provost appointed a 21 member Faculty Advisory Council on the Status of Women and has hired two ex-AWFA officers to two prestigious positions at FSU-- Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Dean of Graduate Studies. He also personally met with me this summer, reviewed my promotion binders, and sent me, in writing, three of the best ideas yet for the revision of my dossier.

Institutional change is slow. But due to feminist activism withinthe university and outsidethe university (my friend who was denied tenured waged a successful EEOC suit), change did happen.

While the catalyst for all my work on behalf of female faculty at FSU was motivated by my feminist friend’s tenure denial, yours most likely will be different. You might focus your investigation of your institution’s PTE record on faculty in Queer Studies, or minority faculty, or faculty who are on dual appointments, or Artists in Academe.

Institutional change is slow. Start working on it.

Third, know your institution’s criteria for annual evaluation and promotion and, if needed, work to change the criteria.

Scrutinize your academic unit’s forms for evaluations. Peruse the faculty handbook, the provost’s webpage, any official P and T memos. Know exactlywhat your institution’s criteria are for annual evaluation, for third year review, for promotion to Associate or Full or Named Professor. Be familiar with the criteria at each level --your academic unit, your college, your university.

If your institution’s criteria regarding creative work are vague (and there’s a 99% chance they are), then work to change them. I know there are those who can and do argue that vague language can be beneficial, but I’m not one of them.

Organizers of this preconference are collecting samples of criteria for both annual evaluation and for promotion from a range of institutions. Supplement this by researching other academic units at yourcollege or university (from dance, visual arts, music, film, theatre, information technologies) and read their respective criteria for evaluation. Steal the best ideas. Then share all your insights about “criteria for evaluating creative work” with your colleagues and your administrators. If your institution holds an annual advisory meeting for all those seeking promotion, go and ask the tough questions regarding the evaluation of creative work.

Again, if your institution’s criteria regarding evaluating creative work are vague, then work to change them.

My last tip in regard to working within your institution is to over-prepare for annual evaluations.

While it always feels like a royal pain in the ass, to write up and brag about what you have done each year, you are in fact slowly accumulating the necessary documents and arguments about the value of your work that you’ll need when you go up for promotion. Don’t miss out on this marvelous opportunity to educate your colleagues on the faculty annual evaluation committee and your chair about your work.

One of the things young faculty typically don’t understand is that your one-on-one meeting with your chair, is honestly meant to be a reciprocal experience. Yes, your chair is suppose to be evaluating you, telling you whether you are or are not on track for promotion, what you are doing right, what you need to be working on. But this meeting is alsoabout what more your academic unit can be doing for you. So you need to go in to that meeting with ideas as to what you need to be a more productive citizen—a videographer to document your theatre production in the fall? institutional support to bring in an outside reviewer for your show? or perhaps an outside expert for a faculty workshop on evaluating creative work?

So each year, when you have your annual show-and-tell experience, be thorough and exciting in your presentation and listen carefully to the feedback. And after your annual evaluation, I’d also recommend following up in writing what you understood happened at the meeting, i.e. what advice was given and how you plan to follow that advice, and what you agreed your academic unit would be doing to make your academic life the following year more rewarding. In short, keep a paper trail of the evaluation advice and promises made each year.

 

In a parallel vein, contemplate in what ways your academic unit can celebrate the year’s accomplishments. Many institutions have built into them an Awards Night where we celebrate the work of our students as well as formal awards ceremonies for faculty. But what is your academic unit doing more informally to celebrate its faculty workerbees? University of South Florida has a marvelous “Communication Day” where the work of students and faculty is showcased and celebrated. Talk today to Marcy Chvasta or Michael Levan about it.

At my institution, as a faculty member, I did something quite simple. I booked a back room at a local restaurant, invited all the members of my division, our chair, and three deans, to gather for a pay-for-your-own-meal, end-of-the-academic-year, celebratory dinner. For the event, I bought those stupid little elementary school ribbons at the dollar store—“Best Teacher,” “Good Attendance,” “Most Promising,” “Good Manners,” “Super Girl,” “Best Coach,” “Over the Hill.” During our dessert, each faculty member gave a short speech regarding the one accomplishment he or she was most proud of that year and chose a ribbon for himself/herself. A faculty member also had the option to choose a ribbon for a colleague and provide an anecdote as to why he or she was bestowing that particular ribbon on that colleague. A celebratory dinner like this does much to improve faculty morale and it allows you a public forum to perhaps explain to the Quantitative Methods professor and the Hispanic Marketer what dramaturgy is and how your insightful dramaturgical contributions were effectively incorporated into the set and sound design for a recent campus production.

ACADEMIC POLITICS, PART TWO : Working Outside the Institution

I offer three major tips for working outside your institution.

First, work hard and be loyal to your national academic home.

Be it NCA’s Performance Studies Division, ATHE’s Women and Theatre, PSI. . . Or perhaps your national academic home in your secondary research areas—Storytelling, Documentary, Race Studies, Ethnography, Popular Culture, Autobiography. . .

A solid academic home is essential because if you are professionally astute by attending and presenting at national conferences and festivals then it’s most likely your outside PTE Reviewers can comment first hand on your creative and scholarly work. Also, consider that if your administrators ask what seven people in your area are the best qualified to serve as outside reviewer for your show, a show featuring personal narratives of disabled people in a retirement home, you can immediately say—Bruce Henderson, Heidi Rose, Jim Ferris, Carrie Sandahl, Jill Taft-Kaufman, Terry Galloway, Petra Kuppers.

 

I started this presentation telling you I was fired after my third year at FSU. What I didn’t tell you, but now will, was that by the time I was fired I had been associated with the Performance Studies Division for 15 years (as I started early in NCA as the graduate student slave of Suzanne Bennett who was the primary planner for the division’s preconference in l980.) When I was in trouble during my third year at FSU, two distinguished Performance Studies scholars and ex NCA presidents, Wallace Bacon and Beverly Whitaker Long, both of whom taught at institutions I had never even attended, wrote letters to my dean in strong support of me. Now I know my mentor Paul Gray probably sweet-talked them into doing so, but nonetheless, the moral was still clear to me at the time: Performance Studies Division extended family looks out for its own.

Second tip: Know the law and hire an attorney if needed.

Yes, know the laws in reference to annual evaluations and promotion--what does the Indiana Statute say? what does The Collective Bargainingagreement say? what does the Faculty Handbook say? If necessary, file the grievance, put forth your narrative to the faculty senate grievance committee, write the appeal letter responding to the PTE vote, document the violation of Union article 4.31.

One of the many things I was startled to hear last year after I didn’t make it out of the chute in my quest for promotion, was selective faculty members serving on the PTE committee dismissing my outside letters because “they were all from Performance Studies people.” Thus it was of tremendous help to me when one of the major morals Judith Hamera stressed, when she was brought to FSU by my dean as an outside expert to conduct a faculty workshop on “Evaluating Creative Work,” is that when you are hired in a certain area, the institution is morally and legally responsible to help you to succeed in that area. If there are questions/concerns about the value of your area—those questions/concerns should be a topic of discussion with the dean when definingthe academic position and craftingthe job announcement, they are notissues to be debated when considering a faculty member’s promotion.

I’ve hired attorneys twice at FSU. The first time, after my third year, I did so as a defensive posture. I had filed a faculty senate grievance against my department, and I knew the university had a number of attorneys on their side counseling my late dean. The second time, I did so from a more offensive positioning. Although I didn’t openly acknowledge hiring an attorney, a friend privately and accurately described my litigious-sounding letter to my department PTE committee as “You’d better straighten up or I’m going to sue you butts off.”

Third tip: Plan for celebrations or counter-celebrations, for they are often one in the same.

A couple of tales with the same moral.

Anecdote One. My late friend Daun Kendig once told me that every year at NCA, the graduate students who got their doctorates from University of Illinois get together for dinner. At one year’s particular dinner gathering, they went around the table and each said “the worstthing that happened that year.” One U of I alum reported, “I didn’t get tenure.” After proceeding around the table with their accumulated woes, they went around again, this time, each articulating “the bestthing that happened that year.” When it got to the same U of I grad, he said “I didn’t get tenure.”

Anecdote Two. When I was in the middle of my third year grievance, a feminist, lesbian creative writer in the English Department said to me, “When it’s all over Donna we’re going to have a helluva party.” I immediately provided an important qualifier: “Well Sheila, if I win my grievance, then sure, I’ll throw a helluva party.” She emphatically and wisely contradicted: “No, Donna, regardless of the outcome, we’re having a party.” I knew when she said it she was right, the fightis hard, and when it’s over, it’s important to celebrate the community of people that had the tenacity to wage it, regardless of outcome.

And I end this first morning keynote about academic politics with one final telling anecdote. This summer was an incredibly busy summer for me as I was teaching a graduate course, performing Helena in A (Moveable) Midsummer Night’s Dream, while legally and politically trying to outstrategize the Evil O’s in my department. It was during this time that one of our guests here today, Frank Trezza, who has been chair of Theatre Departments for 16 years, was chained to a desk at my house for a week to finish his last rewrites for his dissertation. This summer, Frank gave me invaluable advice about how to restructure my vita to make the case for regional performance company. But as Frank witnessed me that week consulting endlessly with my partner Terry; arranging meetings with my chair; further consulting with the Bosom buddies, AWFA members, the Dean of the Faculties, the Provost, my attorney—he quipped, “It’s clear to me it takes a village for a woman to get promoted at FSU.”

I laughed, but yeah, sometimes it does take a village.

So it may take a village for an artist to get promoted at your institution.

Members of that village are sometimes withinyour institution, sometimes outsidethem.

Find them.

“The Whine” by the Whiner

aka Donna Marie Nudd

In the Performance Studies division, whenever there is a discussion about performances and productions and how they should “count” in the evaluation process in academe, I hear the same adage over and over again. The WHINE, as I’ve come to call it. The WHINEgoes something like this.

They just don’t understand the WORK that goes into creative work. They have no idea whatsoever what it takes to mount a production. And without a doubt, they have absolutely no clue how much the students learned in the process. They just don’t “get it.”

A creative work stands by itself. It should be valued in and/of itself. It’s as valuable as any academic article. But you know what bugs me, is that they say it’s not going to count cause it’s local. Of course, it’s local, we live in Tuscaloosa, Alabama for Christ’s sake. So where’s the miraculous funding that is going to appear to transport me and a dozen community members and my students to Chicago or New York or London or LA?

And what really irritates the hell out of me, is that my administrators say that well then, I should just write up my creative work, publish it. Yeah, as if there’s a real market for a chamber theatre adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s so unfair, I mean they are making me do double-duty. I just spent four months working on this show. And I tell you, it was a terrific show, great review in the campus paper. And now I’m suppose to spend another two months writing an academic article about it? I don’t think so. No, doing this show was exhausting. I’m exhausted. And I have to get back to my life. I do have a life outside academe, you know.

The WHINE.

I’m not here to mock it. For, I’ve been foremost guilty of WHINING. And let’s face it, there’re some truly valid points in THE WHINE.

I’ve been quite productive creatively these last two decades. But when I view my vita subjectively, reflecting on at each and every cabaret, video project, theatre production, radio show, street theatre activist project—I can’t help but pause and think about the amount of work that went into particular creative projects that literally count for nothing in academe.

For example, I served as co-director and co-dramaturge on a show called, Susan Gage: Term-Limited, a one-woman plus show tracing the transformation of an award-winning public radio reporter from journalist in search of “the truth” to a massage therapist.Susan’s dramatic monologue, with her spot on impersonations of politicians, also was a multi-media event as her narrative was at times was interrupted by group musical numbers, a parodic video short, and photographs/graphics on PowerPoint slides. Real-life audio sound bites from Florida Legislators were also incorporated into the show.

This production which was an unqualified hit among both the alternative arts community and the politicos who abound in our state capital. It’s had three different successful runs in Tallahassee, Florida. All sold-out shows.

Yet, it is not seen by colleagues on university evaluation committee members or administrators as really significant whatsoever on my vita.

And so I want to WHINE loud. Very loud.

But I won’t. And here’s why. Because, when I look at it more objectively, I have to agree, it shouldn’t count. The production was local. It was seen in Tallahassee, Florida by about 800 people. It was not reviewed. It did not reach a national or international audience.

And that is the standard to which academics are now held because there’s been a generational shift in Academe regarding creative work. We are being held to a standard that our creative work should have national or international visibility. And we’re meeting here today because we are finally honestly acknowledging that generational shift.

We’re admitting that the Performance Studies Division is two to ten steps behind as to the possibilities in almost every area: festival reviews, dossier, outside evaluators reviews, journal publications, production grants and venues. And we’re behind the curve in that ATHE and BEA (Broadcast Educational Association) and (Independent Film and Video Association), all have published Promotion and Tenure criteria to help guide faculty and administrators on evaluating creative work: the Performance Studies Division of NCA has none.

As someone who mocks “The Whine,” while simultaneously publicly confessing to being a frequent Whiner—I think this is the major challenge before us today: How do we as a division respond to this generational shift demanding national and international visibility for our creative work?

For those of us who work primarily in community theatre in geographically-challenging places, it’s tough. For when you are in a small community, you sometimes feel the local population views the college almost as an occupying force. I believe one has an ethical obligation to give back to the community. I believe in community theatre. I believe in radicalizing community theatre. Yet sometimes it feels that for every hour you put into community theatre you lose three hours in career advancement.

Can we collectively put our minds together to rework that equation?

For those of you who work primarily with students in college productions, it’s also tough. For suddenly, you feel your campus theatre productions have moved into the realm of service or teaching. Yet you are drawn to work with students, you see how performance transforms students’ lives, their political views, their love of literature. You are a college teacher because you love to teach; it is your vocation. Yet sometimes it feels that for every hour you put into student productions, you lose three hours in career advancement.

Can we collectively put our minds together to rework that equation?

For the last decade, we’ve been having this conversation about the challenges of “Documenting and Evaluating Creative Work in Academe” in the bars at convention hotels, at performance festivals, in private emails, today is a day where we can start to tackle issues head on. The facilitators for each of your break out groups will have many questions and some answers. I offer here, just a few teasers:

Festivals

How can we make our festivals serve a double purpose, as a non-competitive, celebratory showcase for ours and our students work, as well as a respected and valuable evaluative tool for the critical assessment of a faculty member’s creative work?

Dossiers

Why is that so many universities (and/or academic units) have very specific guidelines for formatting the section in our vitas that lists our scholarly work (e.g refereed articles must be separated from non-refereed; relationships with co-authors must be explicated; all in press articles must have a letter of acceptance from press or editor attached in the appendix), but guidelines regarding how to write up creative work are vague or non-existent?

How can we share the valuable insights about vita presentation with each other that many of us have painstakingly learned by trial and error?

Grants and Venues

What strategies can we devise for geographically-challenged theatre directors?

Publications

Why as a field are we still so tied to the live theatre performance format? Online publishing has opened a huge door for us in terms of audio performance, video documentation, web design, but as a field, we still seem at the level of toddlers, barely speaking the language of media.

Outside Reviewers

What practices from other art areas (music, dance, theatre) can we steal to make the outside reviewer for our local performances carry greater weight? In other words, how do we counter the suspicion, often rightly charged, that directors are just bringing in a friend or a close colleague in Performance Studies in order to insure the director gets a great review?

To conclude:

I’m a whiner.

But I’m also a realist.

The days ofTHE WHINE are long gone.

There’s been a generational shift in academe.

The expectations—for hiring, for third year review, for tenure, for promotion, for named professorships—are higher.

And we can meet those expectations, if we seriously rethink festivals, dossiers, grants and venues, publications, outside reviews.

If our creative work is good as we think it is, it can and must meet a larger, national or international audience.

That’s the challenge before us today.

Let’s make it happen.

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Presentations and Reports from the Break Out Sessions

On Festivals

“On Festival Reviews”

Tami Spry

St. Cloud State University

My commitment to performance began when I went to the Kenlake Oral Interpretation Festival in 1980 with Annette Martin and saw, I believe it was Gerry Mathis’ production of the poem, “Flying.” I remember the performance like it was yesterday. I was sitting way back in the audience and could see the body of one of the actors being lifted by the other actors and moved about as if she were falling from an airplane with the wind tearing her cloths off as she, in a perversely calm manner, describes her situation. After that day, I knewthings about words and the body and their relationship to humanness that I didn’t know before.

Festivals are one of our richest disciplinary environments for the advocacy of embodied knowledge. So how can festivals be a space for producing, and a platform for reporting embodied knowledge in the tenure and promotion dossier? One option is in framing festivals as a permanent and public profile of scholarly activity to the administrative audiences evaluating files; but how do we do that?

A tenure and promotion file should be a “best argument” for one’s retention and advancement arguing how our work contributes to and advances knowledge in our discipline, and to the public sphere. Scholarship has always been an integral part of festival work; but the naming and claiming and organizing of that work as scholarly needs to be formalized.

Festivals as a “laboratory” for embodied knowledge

Festivals (or performance symposium) could be articulated in the dossier as performance studies laboratories where performance scholars study embodied relationships to culture, history, theory. Festivals are a place to experiment with the “production of cultural meanings on bodies willing to try a range of different significations for spectators willing to read them” (Dolan 80). Performance Festivals bring together these willing bodies from a range of university populations with a range of performance experience. The festival as performance laboratory where the body labors to discover, engage, and articulate embodied knowledges, offer students and faculty a space to directively engage performance methods and theory. I believe we are already doing this, but in a non-formalized manner which, then, does not lead to a formalized evaluation process during and after the festival.

Articulate performance as cultural pedagogy

Second, in the tenure and promotion dossier, we might articulate performance as cultural pedagogy. As performance studies practitioners, we have long engaged in the dismantling of cultural hegemony through performance of literature, and later through oral narrative and performance ethnography. The pedagogical efficacy of ethically embodying the text of another is central in our disciplinary historicity.

Though it can often be institutionally depoliticized, administration’s focus upon cultural diversity and global education is an evaluation platform that our work can decisively and ethically claim. The argument of student’s cultural pedagogical activity in a festival can be made through the submission of a framing essay or preface which accompanies the submission of a script as research activity. This frame might also include student assessment essays given and collected at a festival of what they learned about cultural difference. A discussion session at the festival with student actors and audience might be video taped as a preface to a DVD record of the performance as research.

These ideas represent only a few of the cogent and concrete guidelines suggested by Gary Balfantz, Kelly Taylor, and myself during the breakout sessions for documenting scholarly work at festivals. Please see those notes for further reference.

Students and faculty continue to be deeply transformed by festival experiences where embodied knowledge is discovered, articulated, and interrogated. Festivals provide an epistemologic laboratory unique to performance studies. Articulating and documenting scholarship produced at festivals expands our theoretical and methodological development of embodied knowledge.

Work Cited

Dolan, Jill. Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance. Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 2001.

On Dossiers

“Comments on Dossier Preparation”

Della Pollock

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The phrase “creative research” came up at a recent faculty meeting. A prize-winning media production colleague burst out with some repugnance, disavowing the language of “research” and “scholarship,” identifying instead with the language my university favors: “creative activities.” No, I burst out in turn: here are the ways your work contributes to knowledge . . . To myself I thought: “Activities” suggests a relatively unlinked set of busy projects. Busy isn’t good enough.

In the same conversation, another colleague with an extraordinary record of publication wanted to claim that his research was creative, that he did creative research! Yes, of course. But this made others nervous, fearing it seemed that if his work was “creative,” what special claim remained to “us”? What may appear to be semantic play here points, to the contrary, to a significant conjuncture across practices of performed and published work, raising the question: when and how is all of the best work in the university “creative research”?

Accordingly, my first recommendation is to disavow the language of “creative activities.” And then to note that tenure/promotion review provides an occasion to do what those “other” scholars do: Take stock. Consider where have you been; what does past accomplishment imply for future work? Convey the vibrancy of your commitments. Rather than defending, draw the reviewer into the questions or sites that drive you. Nourish him/her, knowing that the primary Qs an external reviewer must address are: How has the candidate demonstrated leadership in the field? What is the significance of this person’s contributions to scholarly knowledge? If we take seriously from the outset that performance is research, and not a set of activities, then we should have no problem answering these questions.

Accordingly, in the next few minutes, I will focus on what I take to be one of the most important documents (for both the candidate and the reviewer) in the dossier—the research statement.

This may not be required by your institution but should be included. Enumeration of productions or defense of creative research is inadequate here. For my purposes, I need to see a statement that integrates lines of inquiry and innovation, recognizing that a performance scholar may not follow a single line per se and that that line may be discontinuous, shifting, even abundant in remarkable detours, but that fully reckons with the work as research, as “inquiry, investigation, and innovation,” and hence as significant contributions to knowledge.

Axiomatic: assume the work comprises a significant body of creative research and delineate proudly, reflexively, strategically how. This is not, should not—despite pressures to the contrary—be a defense of creative research per se, but a straightforward accounting of the course of curiosities and accomplishments that comprise career momentum. Remember, whether it’s stated or not: folks want to know what you havedone in order to gain a sense of what you are goingto do. This statement is about the trajectory of work accomplished in order to establish a resounding sense of promise.

The point is to show, first of all, that you respect, if only formally or strategically, the protocols by which everyone in the university has to think about their work; we all have jobsin the same institution; we all must meet standards of excellence and rigor. However special we may think performance is, when it comes to job review, it’s not. The backside of an anti-theatrical prejudice is defensiveness and a sense of entitlement. Indulge neither.

Second, then, offer a legible picture of your work. one that doesn’t reduce or aggrandize it into something it isn’t but relies on organizational principles that constitute a kind of common language across disciplines AND that allow you to present discontinuities and discoveries cogently (just because our work may be discontinuous certainly doesn’t mean it deserves a scattershot or incoherent representation).

 

In your narrative, consider placing your work in a field of related, significant

practices

e.g. While working in the tradition of the so-called “one-man show” (see Gentile; Gingrich-Philbrook), I specifically work against the current of the postmodern, meta-textuality epitomized by, for example, one of the premier monologuists of the New York stage, Spalding Gray (cite) in favor of an open, improvisatory style exploring queer identity . . .

In turn claim the performance discovery process in specific explication

e.g. In so doing, I found 1) that monologue is critically dialogic 2) that “queer identity” designates a social relationship, embodied in performance in relationship in the audience and 3) that, then, it is open to change

Third, recognize the rhetorical form of the statement and offer something like conclusions and implications esp. as they pertain to indicating significance and leadership in the field.

While performance scholarship does not follow the social science model of hypothesis and outcome, it is possible and useful to think retrospectively from within a performance paradigm, asking yourself: what was generative about a particular production or phase of work? Towards what new conclusions, visions, forms were you drawn in the process? Insofar as performance materializestexts and discourse, what did you find matteredmost?

e.g. Accordingly, I see my work contributing to rethinking queerness in these ways . . .

The best statements I have read—across scenarios of performance-centered and published research—are those that configure history (past, present, and future) around tropes of investigation, concern, commitment. We are good at tropes. They may be good to us-- especially insofar as they allow the candidate to draw a variety of related excursions (including a performance, a performance in review, a festival, a published reflection, a related service or leadership initiative, forms of recognition) into concentrated, concentric nodes of significant work. These tropes may be formal and/or thematic.

e.g. re: a trajectory defined by a primary concern with queer performance politics, one might organize reflection and representation around 1) queer performance politics in everyday life 2) queer politics and the problem of personal narrative performance 3) interventions into “queer” identity.

Full scripts and even complete video documentation are largely unreadable to most reviewers. They are the text-artifacts of production; as such, they perversely point to absence. For the external review, provide pithy descriptions of the nature, venue, and status of productions in your vita; READ the nature and importance of your work in the research statement. Provide a well-made, selected hits DVD. And possibly a picture portfolio. These are ticklers, trailers. Committee reviewers don’t want to have to make aesthetic judgments. They shouldn’t have to. And you don’t really want them to. They are and should be relying on external reviews and measurements. In that light, presentation matters. Show your professionalism in the development and packaging of a representative selection of work that then can be viewed in conjunction withreading the vita, reviews, the research statement.

In turn, organize the package not by vita categories but vis a vis the research statement, providing a table of contents (or supplementing a required form) that 1) gives a picture of your research at a glance 2) clearly integrates your package with the research statement.

e.g. re: the same package concerned with queer performance politics, per its designated tropes--1) queer performance politics in everyday life 2) queer politics and the problem of personal narrative performance 3) interventions into “queer” identity:

I. Queer performance politics in everyday life

A. Production

1. Regional

2. National

3. International

B. Publication

1.

2.

C. Reviews and recognition

D. Photo portfolio

II. Queer politics and the problem of personal narrative performance

A.

B.

C.

D.

III. Interventions into “queer” identity

A.

B.

C.

D.

In general, show you’re in charge, making it clear that you don’t deserve “special” treatment (which will certainly backfire) and certainly that, as a performance-centered scholar, you don’t think you should be judged differently (which will translate as: by lesser standards); to the contrary, show off a little. Indicate by professional presentation and pith that, while offering the external and university reviewer a little extra reading help, you’d put your dossier toe-to-toe with anyone else’s. Give ‘em a kick.

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“Some Thoughts on Negotiating Promotion and Tenure”

Ronald J. Pelias

Southern Illinois University

Learn your departmental and university culture.

1. Examine departmental operating papers and recognize that there may be a discrepancy between what the guidelines say and what are the practices of the department and university.

Example: In my case, department and university operating papers said that

creative activity would count toward promotion and tenure as long as there was an outside reviewer. However, there was no money to bring in an outside reviewer.

1. Read what the department values and what the university values.

Departments are notorious for asking faculty members to do tasks that will not carry much weight for promotion and tenure. This seems to be particularly the case with service and co-curricular activities. Finding the balance that demonstrates your good citizenship and protecting your time for efforts that will likely be the criteria for promotion and tenure is essential.

1. Speak about your shows in the predominant language of your department, e.g., what might your show say about intercultural communication, about historical dramas or directing practices, about identity and communication.

1. Be smart about when you invite administrators to witness your work. Always make sure it is quality work. Help them understand what you are doing—they will often come using a traditional theatre framework for making sense of what they are seeing.

Integrate your production work with departmental, university, and community interests.

1. Department: Do a show that links to the research interests of other faculty members.

Example: I co-directed with Phil Glenn, a scholar working out of the conversation analytic tradition, a show on interpersonal conflict. We used transcripts of naturally occurring conversations as our texts.

Example: Linda Welker directed Bud Goodall’s Casing a Promised Land, a study of organization culture and invited Goodall to campus as a respondent, much to the delight of the faculty in organizational communication.

2. University: Do a show that links to the research interests of faculty in other departments.

Examples: Feature the work of resident poet.

Stage a text that is university required reading or is a standard reading in an English class.

Spin from an article another faculty member has written, e.g., I did a T.S. Eliot show where English professor argued that “The Waste Land” can be productively viewed as a minstrel show.

Cast faculty members or integrate faculty into your production concept—ask them to serve as respondents, to give a framing lecture, to meet with the cast, to serve as dramaturg.

 

3. Community: Do a show that links to community concerns and consider taking your show to community locations.

Examples: Nathan Stucky’s did a show, “Burning Old Main,” that focused on the riots during the sixties at Southern Illinois University.

Lee Jenkins and Laila Farrah & Mariangila McGuire did shows that focused on the Women’s Center in their respective communities.

If you have read your culture carefully and integrated your work into the ongoing concerns of those with whom you live, you’ve gone a long way to getting your dossier ready. You have generated a number of individuals who will speak on your behalf, who have become your allies, assuming, of course, that your work is quality work. These allies, however, will want further evidence in your dossier.

Some suggestions for preparing your dossier:

1. Discover if external venues are valued by your department and university.

 

If so, consider taking your productions to other universities, performance festival, fringe festivals, or conventions.

 

2. We often play multiple roles whenever we do a show, e.g. director, adaptor, designer, dramaturg, publicist, and so on. Avoid listing the same show under each of the categories—it will look like padding, but do note the various roles you played with each production.

3. Get a quality video/CD of your production that can be sent to reviewers of your dossier. Hire someone with expertise. Make that part of your production cost.

4. Always have you shows reviewed, even if it means getting someone from campus to do the labor. Having a reviewer is the only way anyone will accept the argument that a production is equal to a published article.

5. If you are permitted to write a framing narrative of your research/creative activity, talk about how your production work reflects programmatic research or, if that is an unhappy phrase for you, how your shows were informed by certain theoretical or research interests.

Also, if you are situated in a communication department, note how performance functions as a method for studying communication phenomena.

Narrate the significance of any alternative venues where your work was staged.

Link your work to the departmental and university mission.

Link your work to the job description for which you were hired.

6. If the norms of your university permit it, consider including a production notebook from your shows that includes script, dramaturgical notes, production notes, prompt book, etc.

7. Consider listing on your vitae under research/creative activity all your published work as well as your production work.

8. Work with your chair, particularly if he/she isn’t in the performance studies area, to articulate why performance has a place in a communication department or why performance studies adds to a theatre department.

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“Personnel Actions in Your Future?

Some Reflections to Engage”

Tim Gura

Brooklyn College

• Devise an external evaluation process that is validated by people

in power inside the discipline andoutside the discipline before

you start the project.

• Chemists know as much about performance as we do about chemistry.

• You won’t take a sociologist’s word for the quality of what she does;

why should they take your word for the quality of what you do?

• Nothing is as persuasive as the memory of successful efforts at

shared and common tasks, essential to the University.

• It is always easier to tenure or promote a familiar face.

Reflections on P&T Dilemmas

I am convinced that each institution has idiosyncratic procedures and crotchets which have arisen over time—the ‘meaningless cultural markers’ we ignore at our peril. But I am also certain, from conversations with many of you, and with deans and provosts over the years, that things run reasonably similarly across the country.

First of all, we have to recognize the dilemma confronting committee members outside the field. The overwhelming number of candidates present, as evidence of scholarship and research, refereed print that appeared in journals or in publications after scrutiny by review panels or editorial boards. Their decisions or editorial advice are labeled “objective” when we all know full well that there is no such animal. Performance scholars—like other colleagues who present in non-traditional research venues—need to determine in advance of their projects what analog can be devised to serve the function of so-called “objective review.” We have happily used a protocol wherein the candidate makes clear after hiring what form or forms scholarship is likely to take and, in the event it follows non-traditional patterns, proposes the mechanism for selecting external evaluators. This proposal is reviewed by the chair and the departmental executive committee and, when their imprimatur is secured as appropriate for the discipline, ratified by the dean or the provost. This provides the ground rules which enable candidates to devote time to the project, rather than diffusing their efforts over several different tasks. Moreover, when scholars both inside and outside the discipline ratify the protocol, we have reassured committee members that this work will be analyzed rigorously—or, at least as rigorously as it would be in a journal. And, baring the occasional outright ghoul (and I have met some real pieces of work), most committee members are grateful for this form of guidance. People who do not understand what we do (and that cohort is enormous, compared to those who do understand) simply need to put our work in a framework consistent with the perspective they put others’ work that they don’t understand. Moreover, the candidate (and the chair or the promotion and tenure committees) know in advanced what is expected BEFORE the project begins. And, when the procedure gets used with reasonable frequency, problems seem to be minimal. So, Tim’s first principle:

Devise an external evaluation process that is validated by people

in power inside the discipline and outside the discipline before

you start the project.

Let’s suppose that you have devised some mechanism that will permit external evaluation by a (hired or volunteer) reviewer consider your work. Collaborate with colleagues in theater, music performance, studio art, media production, library who also present non-traditional evidence of scholarly achievement, but remember that more information is not necessarily the same as useful information. So, before you submit all minutiae of the research you invested in staging a set of personal narratives for a conference, ask yourself how often the chemists present their records about how many experiments failed before one worked that led to the publication which won the Cliveden prize.

Once a classicist whom I enormously respect (and who is, by the way, a splendid stride piano player), said to me in evident desperation, “I am convinced that what you do is essential to the university, but I just don’t understand how you do it and how what you do compares to what others do.” This leads to the second and third of Tim’s principles, and they resonate with each other.

Chemists know as much about performance as we do about chemistry.

And, it’s cognate pair:

You won’t take a sociologist’s word for the quality of what she does;

why should they take your word for the quality of what you do?

If you have devised a transparent evaluation process, you have, ipso facto, established the reasonable grounds on which an advocate (chair or representative) can argue in your favor. Moreover, the discourse about your achievements will not be based on ephemera or attitudes or feelings or innuendoes, but on the facts as required in the protocol you devised. You promised seven performances of a staged production of 90 minutes duration, using students and faculty, as part of a symposium the University offered that met a level of quality recognized as, at the minimum, acceptable by external evaluators. If the physicists think the costumes were terrible, or the health scientists didn’t like the texts performed, it is not germane. You delivered what you promised. Fact is the finest foundation on which to appeal or grieve.

Finally, in order to understand the world from the other’s perspective, let’s recognize the humanity of the personnel involved. Most of our colleagues have no more interest in thwarting the careers of historians and nutritionists than they have in sabotaging us. But they are human, and that leads to the fourth and fifth of Tim’s principles:

Nothing is as persuasive as the memory of successful efforts at

shared and common tasks, essential to the University.

And the corollary to that claim:

It is always easier to tenure or promote a familiar face.

Now, I will try to be brief. Speech communication and performance studies will always be missionary endeavors in our lifetime. We will always have to prove our bona fides to English professors and mathematicians. You can resent it or you can resist it, but you ignore it at our peril. My department faculty is tired of listening to me preach about visibility on campus outside departmental activities. Yes, that means serving responsibly on curriculum committees, or those ghastly outcomes assessment task forces, or student appeals review boards. There you meet people from so many departments, some of whom will one day also serve on P&T committees. Often these tasks are colossal bores, eat valuable time, and produce voluminous recommendations commonly ignored. They are the mode of being for administrative functionaries, and if you expect to have administrations reward you for playing well with others, you have to—in fact—prove that you can play well with others. When the dean calls a meeting about another, interminable report, and offhandedly mentions at the conclusion that line requests are about to be announced, you have earned your keep. If you have served responsibly with colleagues on difficult, tiresome committees, and they remember you went at the job responsibly, and with a smile, they will give you the benefit of the doubt when your performance record is scrutinized. And the opposite is even truer.

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On Publications

“The Opportunities and Obstacles of Publishing Performance Studies Work”

An Overview by Marcyrose Chvasta

University of South Florida

From textual analyses to performance scripts and reviews to multimedia performance, performance studies scholars have much to offer the publication scene. However, beyond academic presses and the relative handful of nationally and internationally recognized performance and theater print journals, we often find ourselves looking far and wide to find venues for our scholarship—venues that our larger academic communities would find “legitimate.” Our breakout group was charged with the task of considering the possibilities and challenges of publishing the work of performance studies scholars.

As performance studies scholars, we may believe that a production should be considered the equivalent of a publication in terms of labor and recognition. In fact, as Donna Nudd notes, we may even whine that this should be so. But beliefs and whines are not sufficient responses to the demands of the Academy. Our breakout group sought ways to answer the demands of the Academy without sacrificing the performance of our studies. In what follows, I’ll outline the various issues, questions, concerns, and strategies we discussed.

At the top of the session, co-facilitator Bruce Henderson asked, “How do we establish that performance is as rigorously vetted as an essay that is blind-reviewed for publication?” This question, of course, is at the heart of the pre-conference itself. Throughout these pages—and, in particular, in Craig Gingrich-Philbrook’s report—one answer to this question is to employ at least one reviewer for your production. First, however, one must have tenure and promotion criteria that allow “creative work” to “count.” The pre-conference set in motion strategies to educate departments on the purpose and legitimacy of production work. What remains to be answered, however, is how to deal with production work that would be the equivalent of a “revise-and-resubmit” or “reject” manuscript. One way to avoid this possibility is to bring in reviewers during the process of creation. Unfortunately, this is a costly solution, if one is also bringing in a reviewer for the show.

The long-standing strategy of legitimizing our production work has been to write about it for publication. Not only has Text and Performance Quarterly provided a home for such reports and analyses, it now has a re-envisioned “Performance in Review” section—conceived, edited, and newly titled by co-facilitator Scott Dillard—called “Performance Space.” This space will host traditional performance reviews, critical forums, autoethnography, reviews of trends in performance and performance studies, as well as other genres of engagement with performance. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and blind-reviewed when possible. (The Performance Studies Division of NCA is a small world. It is often quite difficult to find reviewers completely unfamiliar with the work of our members. It may be important to make this case for the purposes of annual, tenure, and promotion reviews.)

A few years ago, co-facilitator Michael LeVan and I devised a different approach to respond to the writing-centric demands of the Academy. Like many of our colleagues, we were frustrated with the limits of writing about performance, as well as the limits of published stand-alone scripts, as well as the limits of “merely” being-there for performance events. We established Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies as a way to “publish” performance work along side of—or, as part of—writing about performance. We sought to find a way to publish some form of the interactivity and process that constitutes a performance event. We also hoped to publish performances—performances that were conceived for the computer screen. Thus far, we have published combinations of scripts, audio and video documentation, framing essays by writers/performers, reviews, responses to reviews, audio performances, analytic essays, poems, an interview, and photographs. We encourage interdisciplinarity and are thrilled to find that our online journal has become a bit of a force in the far-reaching world of performance studies. Judging from the submissions, the sitemeter, and the comments of our international colleagues present at the breakout session, we learned that Liminalities, a resident of World Wide Web, is accessible to several countries where TPQ is not. (Currently, we have an average of 104 visitors a day, coming from over 80 different countries. Last year, Liminalities received a total of 115,000 hits. This month alone, we’ve received 91,000.)

In terms of publication, the capabilities of an online format are endless. We are now confronted with a charge: How can we best present our work in a multimedia format? To answer this question, we might do well to remind ourselves of an oft-repeated comment to our own introductory performance students: “Show us, don’t tell us.” Consider the computer screen your stage for a new production. As you develop your live performance, think about how you might combine text, image, video, and audio in a resultant publication. How might you use portions of your live performance to create a multimedia collage? If your desire is to submit a video recording of your entire show, procure the services of the best videographer you can find. If you can’t find an experienced videographer, learn how best to record your performance. Start filming during dress rehearsals. Film from multiple angles. Rely on your popular culture literacy. Stop thinking of “recording” as something that occurs after creation and during performance. Start thinking of recording, creating, and performing as co-constitutive. The group agreed that courses on documenting live performance may become an important part of performance studies curricula.

After discussing some of the possibilities of online publishing, our group discussed other ideas, strategies, and issues concerning performance publication. One member suggested we consider the formidable presence and utility of weblogs. Among other things, blogs provide spaces for reviews, discussions, experimentation, performative writing, and promotion of our own work and the work of others. Non-pseudonymous blogs provide us with the opportunity to connect with others who practice and study performance. Some academic institutions may be willing to consider the contribution of such writing as “legitimate” academic contributions. It seems, however, that it may take some time and convincing to change the larger academic community’s opinion of blogging as time wasted—especially for the untenured. For an excellent example of a colleague’s blogging, see Jill Dolan’s Feminist Spectator http://feministspectator.blogspot.com.

In line with the Division’s endorsement of Liminalities “as a valuable peer-reviewed online journal,” another breakout group member suggested the Division endorse various types of writing (e.g., performative and ethnographic) as acceptable forms of scholarship. The NCA relies upon its divisions to determine conditions of acceptability. The PSD must take an active role in educating the NCA, and thus our own institutions, on what “counts” as scholarship in performance studies. Otherwise, we will continue to be subject to the more traditional legitimating terms of the Academy, such as the “impact factor” of individual essays and authors. (For more on the politics of impact factors and suggestions for “our creative reappropriation” of such measurements, see Judith Hamera’s “Future Directions” near the end of this document.) In short, we simply must take better control of how others perceive us.

 

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On Production Grants and Venue Proposals

“Notes and Advice”

Elizabeth Whitney

Emerson College

Touring

Some of us want to do this work, some of us have students who want to do this work.

Students are mostly pretty net savvy, and that’s where the connections are happening.

Consider YouTube for example. User-generated sites are the future of collaborative performance (ex. free hugs happenings videos).

How to get connected

The Internet

Calls for submissions

Introduce yourself to other artists online

Get on their lists—people circulate information about work & submissions

Finding spaces to perform

Make your own opportunities

(important performance happens everywhere you just have to look for it

The myth of legitimate venues: performance is inherently illegitimate

This isn’t about trying to prove your summer stock credits

Holly Hughes said: difference between perf art & theatre is headshots

Though I’m not sure that’s really a difference

Do not underestimate the value of presentation

Frame your work as legitimate and it will be received in this way)

Get together with other artists and make a venue happen

Find the lesser-known venues

(ex: Milwaukee: Darling Hall, The Barrio

ex: Baltimore: Dirt Palace

ex: Philly: Pro-Choice Haunted House & Anti-Santorum Cabaret)

Consider the internet as a viable venue

Make a site that features performance

Make a site that features your students’ performances

(ex. Learning Portal works as portfolio)

Become an online curator

(ex. Underscore Collective http://www.underscore-collective.net)

Local venues

open mics, collectives/collaborations, self-production

Out of town venues

Festivals: find your festival niche

(Columbus, Fresh Fruit, Chicago Single File Solo, Mae West Fest)

Galleries

Galleries like interdisciplinary shows

(ex. Athica Gallery lesbian show I found at http://www.artdeadline.com; ex. UWM Gallery Barbie show)

Schools

Solicitation is a tricky negotiation--esp. when there are so many independent solo artists who really rely on colleges & universities for their income

Theatre companies

Many companies will program solo shows—less to produce;

Even larger companies are doing so-called “alternative” series

(Ex: Cincinatti Playhouse “Alteractive” http://www.cincyplay.com/shows/alteractive/schedule.php and Kitchen Theatre Company’s “Kitchen Counter Culture” http://www.kitchentheatre.org)

Or, find another artist and share a bill

Or, create a group piece and propose it to a local theatre co.

Or, create your own theatre co. name—Mickey Faust Club)

Finding funding

Extremely important, b/c we are not supposed to talk about money—somehow artists just magically do their work and shouldn’t expect to be paid for it

Be prepared to fund yourself sometimes, if you can manage, worth it to gain exp.

Ask for the money you think you deserve, you can always negotiate

Some of the best advice from another solo artist: If they think you are a $500 artist, they will treat you like one. If they think you are a $3000 artist, . . . .

Work with local organizations (state arts boards, city orgs, non-profits)

Framing our accomplishments

Holly Hughes said: difference between perf art & theatre is headshots

Though I’m not sure that’s really a difference

Do not underestimate the value of presentation

Frame your work as legitimate and it will be received in this way)

Create a website, doesn’t have to be fancy

Should include a list of performances (past & upcoming), images, artist statement

a links page, video or audio, testimonials from people who know your work

Don’t apologize or justify your venues

The myth of broadway & legitimate venues:

performance is inherently illegitimate

everything on bway now is Disney anyway

This isn’t about trying to prove your summer stock credits

Create a press kit for yourself to act as your dossier

It should include:

Artist vitae, dvd/video sample of work, script or writing sample (could be both script and writing about performance, reviews or testimonials

(if you don’t have press reviews, ask people for testimonials about your work and create a document that can stand in place of a more formal press review.)

Documentation = Legitimacy

Programming Guest Artists:

*Places to look for funding on campus

Dept can’t sponsor for just 1 class—must involve other interested faculty & depts

Faculty can build it into their syllabus if you plan a semester ahead

Find related courses in other departments

Student activities groups

LGBT student group, Hillel organization

Co-sponsored efforts

In keeping with the suggestion to focus on directions for us as a field:

 

First, consider the Motivating Factors: in other words, this is a lot of work, why do it?

Develop and strengthen useful relationships with student & campus orgs

Network with other artists

Create interdisciplinary environments on campus

Support each other’s work

Second, encourage the growth of scholarly venues that allow for intertextual representation of work, such as Liminalities.

A lot of this is happening online

Use technology to our advantage

Why not have a performance studies YouTube? The website might be used for blogging and posting work

“On-the-side artist; performer; actor and activist at large, consultant, small business owner: None of this is meant to be prescriptive; some is outdated; some is more relevant to one kind of performance than another.”

Linda Park-Fuller

Arizona State University

1. If you have an area that does small business consulting at your university, visit it; learn the basics of setting up a business plan, deciding what kind of business you wish to create (sole owner, partnership, corporation, etc.), how you wish to handle finances, etc.);

1. You may want to visit an agency and learn the differences between representing yourself and being represented by someone else.

1. If you wish to do consultancies or workshops along with your performances, consider clarifying your areas of expertise;

1. Give yourself and your business titles for your business card and website;

1. Develop a website or have one constructed for you. Continue to develop it through time with photos, video, reviews, essays, letters, commentary on your work.

1. Get business cards, a designated phone line, and office materials;

1. Have your photo taken professionally, head-shots, etc.;

1. Have an invited performance; rent a space or see if you can do a performance through your university; Be sure to have it taped by a professional—or at least get excerpts taped professionally;

1. Gather quotes from audience members of your invited performance or performances; if the person who engaged you is pleased; ask if they would consider writing a letter of commendation/recommendation;

1. Prepare a brochure, try to appeal to more than one market, e.g., education, art, health communities; sexualities or ethnic communities;

1. If you mean to be a consultant and speaker as well as a performer, keep up with the research in the areas you represent;

1. Research potential audiences and mailing lists, listservs, e.g., teaching, medical schools;

1. Consider renting a post office box; find out how much bulk mailing you need to do to get discounts; to get free rent on your p.o. box.

1. Have a demo DVD made and make copies to take with you wherever you go. Give them to people you think will make good contacts;

1. Attend, or at least find out as much as you can about conferences or meetings where you can apply to perform; remember that conference planners in areas outside academics may have very different expectations; be as precise as you can in clarifying how you can meet the needs of the organization;

1. If you have published books or other publications addressing issues that your performance addresses, feature those in your publicity;

1. Investigate grants and corporate representation, e.g., the Gold Foundation for humanitarian medicine;

1. If you don’t get a grant, it’s possible to get connected with other grants, your performance may be brought in on monies from a grant;

1. Join organizations or listservs to keep your name in front of people who are apt to be good network partners;

1. Keep publishing but include mass market articles for newspapers, magazines, weblogs, podcasts, ezines, as well as journal articles and scholarly books. Remind tenure reviewers of communication scholars’ calls for accessible and relevant distribution of communication knowledge (Goodall, Trethewey).

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Closing Keynote Presentations

“On the Limits (and Promise) of Adaptation”

Craig Gingrich-Philbrook

Southern Illinois University

During my years as Acting Associate Dean of the School of Communication at Hofstra University, I had the pleasure of working with an inspirational Acting Dean, Sylvia Giallombardo. Sylvia repeatedly stressed that any additional layer of evaluation or reporting we asked faculty to do should also present them with a genuine opportunity, not merely an artificial one. From that perspective, and having often seen administrations develop layers of reporting, surveillance, and judgment that did little to develop faculty, I offer my remarks today. The concerns I raise here I raise as someone whom I hope you see as obviously committed to the work we begin today.

As Donna, Mindy, and I emailed one another about the parameters of this preconference, I often found myself playing the role of a particular kind of worrier. Again and again I articulated my distrust of institutions, a desire to move more slowly, to contemplate the dangers of adaptation to the administration’s escalating demands. While much of my concern stemmed from my few year’s service as an acting associate dean in the school of communication at Hofstra University, I must also mark my naïve privilege as the middle child among the three of us. Relatively recently tenured, I was both post-traumatically amnesiac about the material danger of the pretenured position and not quite yet in earshot of the falls for promotion to full. I do not mean to indicate that I had forgotten to empathize with either of my colleagues, nor that I’d taken my ear off of my career, as it were, in the blissful illusion that everything was fine now. Only that my place on the developmental timeline that has so occupied all of us today gave a crack of breathing room, demanding the post-tenure question: what have I gotten myself into, having never, really, gotten myself out of it since September, 1966, when I entered kindergarten?

And so I do ask, what is this monster, bespeaking what new world order, that consumes our kin, that offers and withdraws its approval, it’s presumption to condone or condemn our work, often without pausing even to meet it, and changing with the wind every few years? My Lacanian leanings asked me to consider that monster an obsessional neurotic, pathologically concerned with counting things that do and do not count in order to assuage the fundamentally uncertain basis and guilt of its own often arbitrary exercise of authority. Additionally, my performance criticism class had been reading Mike Sell’s extraordinary book Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism. In it, Sell describes the co-opting force that institutionalized one wing of the Avant-Garde, soliciting its submission to a series of parliamentary procedures imposing increasing venues for bureaucratic evaluation between work and audience until the actual lived encounter between them became nearly epiphenomenal in what remains of the artistic process. Sell’s argument insinuated itself intertextually among the positions of another book I’ve been working through, Philippe Van Haute’s Against Adaptation. Van Haute describes Jacques Lacan’s distrust of efforts to view the cure, which is to say the seeking of change, particularly in psychoanalysis, as a process of adaptation to the environment in search of another’s recognition. Such efforts participate in the “fading of the subject” as she or he increasingly identifies with the incoherent but powerful discourse of an Other. To me, this offers a caution against searching for the “cure” for the discontents of our own position in the academy only in the form of means to assuage our desire to adapt uncritically to administrative and cultural demands. I began asking what resources we have as a discipline that might seem more persuasive to colleagues unfamiliar with or skeptical of the particular Lacanian formation I’d stubbed my toe on. I found three: our critique of autonomy, that is, of the emphasis upon the individual; our concern about commodification and its alienation of cultural labor; and, finally, our critique of easy appeals to realism as a transparent necessity, rather than an always already ideological formation that itself obscures and naturalizes specific constellations and inequities of power.

As a discipline in this historical moment, we’ve absorbed—or at least behave as if we have absorbed—a variety of concepts that challenge the autonomy of the individual. The deaths of the author and subject, the intentional fallacy, Althusserian interpellation, the “subject position,” the Lacanian symbolic, false consciousness, the intercultural critique of autotellic vs. sociotellic cultures, dialogism, even the phenomenological situation of interpersonal being articulated by Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and other contributors to the idea of “proximity” as a construct to condition the more familiar abstraction of the “Other,” all limit the intelligibility of the individual as a concept with much explanatory power. Nonetheless, the individual remains uninterrogated as the proper recipient of tenure or promotion.

By a similar token, we routinely critique the commodification of artistic production; champion outsider art, folk art, and DIY (do-it-yourself) culture over the gallery system; circulate histories of conceptual and performance art as resisting the production of archivable/salable objects (at least at the beginning). We resist the objectification, exoticization, fetishization, and cooptation of women, ethnic and racial difference, cultures of sexual dissidence, etc., by regimes of ethnographic observation, pornography, advertising, and other popular entertainments. We recite the distinctions between exchange and use value; talk about the alienation of labor; decry the proliferation of meaningless difference that secures the illusion of our having “so much choice” between everything from Post cereals to Post-isms. Nonetheless, we base much of our own legitimacy precisely in our ability to pursue and secure such commodifications and alienations of our own labor, providing articles and performance scripts free of charge to our association in its pact with Routledge and its stockholders. The contracts we sign with delight allow Routledge to reproduce our work in anthologizing projects without our consent, let alone notification or remuneration, even as that corporation advises us to attend to copyright permissions, notifications, and fees when reproducing our work for our classrooms or distributing it to peers.

Finally, we have subjected “realism” as an artistic construct to considerable scrutiny, revealing it as always selective, myopic, patriarchal, ideological, and invested in shoring up the illusory legitimacy of the alibi, “Oh well, that’s just the way things are.” Yet to offer any of these observations about the limits of the call to adapt, so intent upon sweeping us further into the matrix as isolated commodities invites the charge of “whining,” of failing to take a sufficiently “realistic” perspective on our situation vis-à-vis the institution.

Those who fail to take stock of these critiques of autonomy, commodity, and realism in their written scholarship and performance work earn the sometimes gentle reminders and sometimes violent dismissals of anonymous reviewers and on-site respondents. But it seems contradictory at best, if not hypocritical, at worst, both to demand that we resist untheorized views of these concepts in our scholarship and then to uncritically rush to retrench them in our relationship with the institution. This hypocrisy doesn’t vanish with an appeal to scale, either. We cannot say, well, the candidate for tenure is simply a different creature than the author or performer. Such a disjunct between the theoretical content demanded of scholarship, creative or traditional, and the apparatus for evaluating its contributions to the university amounts less to a shift in scale than a shift in the terms of adjudication, the sort of double-bind situation that tends to generate schizophrenia.

But of course, the institution, as Mary Strine reminded us some time ago, is not separate from us. On the contrary, our institutional reality, like “Our social reality [,] is the result of continuous and variable symbolic processes and interactions which in turn give shape and meaning to our lives” (71). So I came to this preconference with a question: what will we have said today that exercises our power to shape institutions dialogically, rather than merely respond to them reactively?

Relative to autonomy, we heard about Donna Nudd’s “Bosom Buddies” group of women faculty helping one another negotiate the tenure and promotion process. She also reminded us of the ways we intervene in one another’s fate with letters of support. In the summary of the breakout session devoted to peer reviews of local performance work, Nathan Stucky detailed a proposal that group generated for a national board of reviewers vetted by the division as a way for the division to participate responsibly in the promotion, tenure, and retention of its members.

Relative to commodification, Linda Park-Fuller reminded us that we needed to help administrators think critically about the standards they apply to our work. Perhaps the idea of marketing a performance influenced by Boal’s work with theatre of the oppressed is a bit contradictory. We also heard about the electronic journal, Liminalities’ use of the Creative Commons Copyright as an alternative to the corporate publishing and permissions model. This alternative copyright undermines the pressure to commodify our work by opening access and secondary use technically prohibited by Text and Performance Quarterly’s relationship with Routledge via its contract with NCA.

Relative to realism . . .well, the appeal to realism is hard to shake, whether as a literary inheritance or a sociological viewpoint. But we have contested uncritical appeals to realism that presume only one possible solution inasmuch as we have demonstrated, today, that we do not believe our fates are sealed. I believe it is in such work not so much to turn the tables as to have a place at them, to interrogate the institutions we help shape, that our future resides. When we hold the institution accountable, we hold ourselves accountable. I do not think it unreasonable to ask that we bring the terms of these accounts into better alignment, turning adaptation from a reactive force into a generative and critical participation in the future the untenured will face. Unless we do so, we mortgage their future in undue complicity with the bureaucratic pretensions, the parliamentary procedures, that otherwise exacerbate autonomy, commodification, and imposition of so-called realism that offer security for only a few.

Works Cited

Sell, Mike. Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the

Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005

Strine, Mary S. “Between Meaning and Representation: Dialogic Aspects of

Interpretation Scholarship.” Renewal and Revision: The Future of Interpretation. Ed. Ted Colson. Denton; Omega, 1986. 181-204.

Van Haute, Philippe. Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject. Trans.

Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk. New York: Other, 2002.

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“Future Directions”

Judith Hamera, Professor and Head

Department of Performance Studies, Texas A&M University

I’d like to begin with deep thanks to Pre-Conference organizers Mindy Fenske, Donna Nudd, and Craig Gingrich Philbrook for their hard work in bringing all of us together for these fruitful conversations. Advance thanks to the Performance Studies Division Executive Committee because, ultimately, where we go from here will depend on their energy, vision, and good sense.

When Dwight Conquergood posited performance as a means of scholarly representation commensurate with the written monograph, he reinforced an important turn in performance studies as radical research. This turn calls us to think again about documenting and evaluating our creative work, and about documentation and evaluation as epistemological enterprises. As Dwight very well knew, it also calls us to examine the political economy of knowledge production in the academy generally, as well as our home institutions. It insists that we attend to the minutiae of policy development and implementation, and to solidarity with colleagues who have negotiated these issues in other fields. I’d like to take this opportunity to explore each of these dimensions in both conceptual and very pragmatic terms, and to link these explorations explicitly to a list of recommendations for future actions.

First, some brief self-situating. I have been an administrator at the department and college levels for over a decade. In this capacity, I have both evaluated, and developed evaluation policies for, colleagues who are musicians, composers, software designers, hardware designers, costume designers, filmmakers, effects editors, screenwriters, TV commercial directors, technical directors, dramaturgs, animators, dancers, playwrights, performers, ethnomusicologists, critics, historians, ethnographers, translators, the occasional quantoid social scientist, and many others in all facets of academic production. In that sense, my comments today are ethnographic: one participant-observer’s summary of our work together today, including what seems to me a remarkably shared sense of where we can go from here.

I very strongly suggest thinking about the challenges of documenting and evaluating creative work in terms of opportunity, and thinking of these opportunities in the following way: hidden labor is undervalued labor. A master may make it look easy, but that might not get her promoted. Documentation and evaluation of creative work is an opportunity to uncover and describe the archival, ethnographic, and conceptual work central to performance. It is a way of detailing precise mechanics of collaboration, a way to educate larger audiences about the inquiry-based nature of what we do.

Think about this: if a professor in management was presenting her consulting work as part of her review dossier, she might include a narrative in which she describes facilitating a team as it moves from an abstract to a concrete resolution to a problem. She might outline the process of settling on strategies to share the resolution with a large outside constituency through on-time and on-budget delivery. She would probably include the hours spent with the client, any written tools developed to negotiate the process, any interviews with “stakeholders.” Finally, she would present some assessment of the final product: number of users, users’ responses, and the team’s feedback on the utility of their process. The actual documentation of this process includes multiple potentials for evaluation, and might take on the very useful and generative framework Della Pollock has suggested: “investigation, imagination, innovation, and implication.”

Now I don’t know why MBA programs haven’t been replaced wholesale with MFA programs given both Enron and the fact that the culture industry in the U.S., such as it is, is still a leading exporter, but I do know that we might benefit from adapting and emulating this model. I would certainly summarize the intellectual and selected logistical work required to mount a given performance in a succinct, well-crafted narrative, including the larger disciplinary context of the work, and primary and secondary sources that funded it. I would include this as part of any visual record of the work, and I would make the visual record of that work as professionally produced as possible. This may mean defamiliarizing your own intellectual routines, and I would suggest collaboration with non-performers in that effort. This kind of partnership can have profound effects on all involved. If you are a department administrator, the clinical psychologist, sociologist, or large animal veterinarian on the college Promotion and Tenure Committee might be invited to a junior colleague’s rehearsal or your own, years BEFORE that colleague goes up for review. Consider it an investment in shared intellectual capital that will pay off for all involved. Said veterinarian may, in fact, not know that putting on a show is more than what Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland did, but might enjoy finding out. I was reminded of this when touring our TAMU theatre spaces with a construction science engineer who, on seeing our shops, commented that he was very impressed and “never know you could get hurt doing theatre---there’s a lot to this.”

I would extend this peer-consultation process to include colleagues in music, modern languages, journalism, visual arts, film production, television production, dance, design, and architecture. How are they evaluated on your campus? What counts as nationally prominent work? What do their dossiers look like? Do they get school or department support for documenting their work? What are their start-up packages? Are production and post-production expenses included as part of that start-up?

Solidarity with peers begins at home. While building in individual peer reviews of individual performances is certainly very worthy, the evaluation of creative work is a disciplinary responsibility that requires deep and sustained thinking about a variety of publication models. I personally believe very strongly in performance in review sections in our journals, and in strongly encouraging contributions to these sections by all sectors of our community: undergrads to full professors. Further, review essays can focus on performances, and performances can, and should, be cited in critical and theoretical discussions as part of the citational context in which such performances arise. The new NCA journal Review of Communication is ripe for precisely these kinds of contributions.

As a member of the NCA Publications Board, and as an evaluator of social scientists, I have learned a great deal about ISI, the latest corporate attempt to quantify the “impact” of scholarly work and sell it back to us. The NCA journals don’t have high “impact factors.” Like many others, I was surprised to learn that one reason is communication scholars as a whole don’t seem to cite each other, and don’t cite our own journals. While we can discuss the mechanics of ISI another day, the notion of “impact factor” is a.) not going away and b.) ripe for our creative reappropriation. We all know our work has impact, but it incumbent upon us to clearly and explicitly articulate how and where and, moreover, to lead a productive conversation about how to do this. As part of your documentation and evaluation of creative work, discuss impact: how many came to see the show? How diverse a group was it? And how many wrote about the show in academic as well as popular reviews and analyses? Of course this also means collecting this specific data. It means talking about venue---who else performed there? Is there a selection committee? Did this performance happen with grant support? What was that peer-reviewed process? I learned a great deal about the quality of a colleague’s musical achievements when I saw who else was recorded by her record label, and about another’s compositions by examining other composers whose works were played in the same venue. In Music departments, festivals are prestigious because they are explicitly juried, and invitations come with clear statements of specific qualifications met by the invitees.

Invite performers to your campus and to your classes. Campus conferences and symposia are opportunities to situate performances firmly in a wide range of disciplines beyond our own. Consider this the conference tithe that compensates you for your membership on planning committees, similar to the “tithe” for public art extracted from developers in some progressive areas. Is there a conference on environmental justice? Why not invite Jonny Gray to perform? Development and privatization? Ask Soyini Madison to present excerpts from “Water Rites.” If, when suggesting these events, your colleagues in the social sciences think you’re volunteering for the “entertainment committee,” so much the better for your investment in the stealth radicalization of their disciplines as you advance our own.

We can also vary the mode and medium of the works’ circulation. Dwight never meant to oppose performance to publication. We have ample models of scholars who have published their adaptations and original scripts: Derek Goldman and Mary Zimmerman to name only two. We also have multiple outlets; while we have loyalty to TPQ, TDR also publishes performance pieces: Omi Osun, Shannon Jackson, and E. Patrick Johnson are outstanding examples of scholars who have maximized the impact of their solo work through publication. What about Liminalities? What about Samuel French? What about university presses like Wisconsin, which has published Tim Miller’s work? Is publishing the script “enough”? Of course not, any more than any written ethnography is ever “enough” to encompass and represent the multisensory complexities of the field. But let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good, and let’s remember Bakhtin: we are not seeking to publish the “final” and fixed performance, only a turn in an unfinalizable conversation. Publication of our work gives us more access, and will inspire more citations—and greater impact.

I want to press this further with something even more challenging: why not package selected creative work in cd or dvd form for commercial distribution? Anna Deavere Smith was certainly successful at this and she was a drama professor, after all. If administrators intimate that they expect you to be Anna Deveare Smith, see them and raise them with a heart to heart talk about precisely what it takes in terms of budget, infrastructure, and technical support to pull that off. It will be a teachable moment for them. Jill Godmillow’s DVD set Lear ’87 is another example of a very successful, principled approach to documentation and distribution. Godmillow’s work, and particularly her documentary of Ron Vawter’s Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, was featured at an NCA preconference on documentation and/as performance over a decade ago, and I think it’s time we learned from her very successful example. Is a mutually beneficial collaboration with local public television, or the video artist in the art department, a possibility? Is it worth a pitch? Certainly these possibilities suggest the merits of reconceiving documentation as an epistemological operation, then reflecting this in the curriculum with courses on documentation, on the study of the mediated life of performance including the pragmatics of that life, and in the analysis of performance as intellectual property. However you feel about Peggy Phelan’s argument regarding performance and disappearance, it’s important to realize that the traces of creative work must be clear enough for others to follow, not just for your own advancement, but for that of the field. Models for creatively engaging the residues of performance are all around us and, indeed, have been right here among us.

The political economy of knowledge is exposed with special clarity in meetings of the faculty senate, in a university’s intellectual property guidelines, in discussions about revising departmental and college p&t guidelines, and in discussions of individual tenure cases. I assure you that the traditional constituencies of these committees do not see these as “service.” They see it as “power” and it’s time we aggressively do the same. As we think about radical research on the page and on the stage, we also need to think about our roles as participant observers in conference rooms, on committees, in conversations with the provost. And here we in Performance Studies are especially blessed by a truly impressive number of role models -- scholar administrators whose commitment to their departments, and to this organization, benefited all of us. This extraordinary group of people, and I’m sure there isn’t anyone here who couldn’t name at least five without even trying, showed us that a zero sum game pitting teaching against research against administration was for losers. These people sat in conference rooms and created Literature in Performance and then TPQ. They led the disciplinary and institutional conversations that birthed interpretation and performance studies. They lobbied for, and had bare-knuckle brawls to secure, performance space, main stage season shows, assistantships for grad students, and tenure track lines. It is deeply important that we, first, realize we all stand on the shoulders of these giants and, second, that we aggressively seize all opportunities to lead the conversation about evaluating all work in our field, for it is all creative work, and that means assuming administrative responsibilities in large and small matters.

Inviting the Dean to rehearsals and performances, serving on key committees at the department, college, and university levels, insuring that performance is explicitly on the agenda in discussions of copyright and intellectual property issues, actively participating in the governance of our national organizations, forging alliances with colleagues across the university-----this is the kind of commitment to building social and intellectual infrastructure that will ultimately change the conversation about the importance of performance in the academy. Above all else remember: this is not just about YOUR performance, YOUR promotion, YOUR dossier. This is about the most basic commitment of our field, and that field, like performance itself, was made, not given.

Documenting and Evaluating Creative Work:

NCA Pre-conference Survey Results

Craig Gingrich-Philbrook

Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

As most likely readers of this document know, the Performance Studies Division’s preconference on Documenting and Evaluating Creative Work took up the subject of what the division might do to aid members in the retention, tenure, and promotion (RTP) process. The preconference included morning keynote presentations, a breakout session (with separate sessions devoted to festivals, outside review of on-campus productions, identifying venues and production grants for off-campus production, journal publication of creative work, and dossier preparation), afternoon reports from the chairs of the breakout sessions, and final keynotes.

At the conclusion of the preconference, attendees received a feedback questionnaire. After an extended deadline, I had twenty-one responses. In this document, I digest those responses. This is not a traditional thematic analysis per se, nor do I present it as “scientific.” I offer it as the result of my effort to read across a diversity of responses for patterns, similarities, differences of opinion, and, ultimately, a holistic sense of the division membership’s desire for a concrete, coherent, and integrated set of strategies for improving and evaluating creative work in order to enhance the tenure and promotion prospects of division members—particularly, but not exclusively, those who identify in whole or in part as creative artists.

This report of results has three sections. The first section identifies patterns of response related to members’ perceptions about how the division should proceed in the creation of these strategies. On the feedback form, we asked for both immediate and long-term actions members recommended in light of the preconference discussions. We also asked for specific recommendations for the preparation, ratification, and dissemination of any RTP guidelines we might ultimately produce. I call this section “Goals for Action.” We also asked for feedback about the preconference itself, what members found useful and what they would like to see improved. I call this section “Evaluating the Preconference Itself.” I conclude this report with a few general observations.

Part One: Goals for Action

In answer to the question, “What steps would you like to see the division take, immediately, to address issues raised in the preconference?”members typically called for measures discussed in the breakout summaries. The most specific and widely made (8 responses) recommendation was to develop a national review board, even at a pilot level if necessary. The division has created an ad hoc committee to develop a proposal to bring before the membership prior to NCA 2007, in time to vote on it at the business meeting. The committee is also developing a set of RTP guidelines to help establish the context for the review board, as well as to address other issues of concern to the membership.

Members also made a variety of other recommendations, including: developing support for the electronic journal Liminalities(which was done later in the conference, at the business meeting), using the division as a mechanism for more short courses and other programs related to professional development, enhancing the division website, developing a list of journals the division recognizes as important for the work of its members, working to coordinate festivals in order to avoid overlapping dates, and providing a place for members to advertise shows. The most common call beyond the review board and guidelines was for some way to provide access to dossiers used by members who have made successful applications for tenure and/ or promotion. In essence, these recommendations take note of specific elements the larger RTP Guidelines will address in more detail.

My own sense of the feedback to this question is that the membership would like (1) a clear and coherent set of RTP Guidelines (2) backed up by specific action by the division, particularly (a) the development of the review board that could identify reviewers for on-campus (and potentially festival) productions, but also (b) more strategic use of the convention and website, tied to specific aspects of the guidelines.

Given the opportunity to identify steps to take “over the next few years,” members made similar recommendations. While many of the recommendations came from “a similar place,” they were much more varied than the clear preference for the review board and guidelines in answers to the “immediate action” question. Where there were more than two people making a similar recommendation, they echoed the concerns others voiced in the immediate action section. That is, they called for the review board and guidelines, placing their recommendation here (rather than in the “immediate action” section), perhaps, because they felt those initiatives might take more time.

Other recommendations included: using the internet and website more strategically, perhaps establishing a web site “guru” within the division; gathering and providing access to RTP standards developed by departments with performance studies faculty; offering a short course on documenting performance for dossiers and scholarly purposes; establish more of a presence with other, international organizations devoted to performance scholarship; developing additional awards; developing the diversity of the organization; and using the convention and other resources to provide “services that connect with professional realities.”

My holistic sense of answers to this question essentially mirrors my sense of the answer to the first: a clear desire for a comprehensive set of RTP guidelines, review board, and programs/services tied to the elements of the guidelines. Additional themes, perhaps indicating what members hoped the guidelines and associated measures might accomplish, also emerged (e.g., creating and circulating work that might increase international visibility). The desire to continue to develop the diversity of the organization also raises an important note that the RTP Guidelines should reflect.

The feedback form also asked, “If the division were to produce a document about evaluating creative work for purposes of retention, tenure, and promotion, how would you like that document to be created? Tell us what sort of process for composing, ratifying, and disseminating that document would be most usefulto you?” Members responded to this specific request in helpful ways.

They offered helpful advice for the process of preparing the Guidelines. The most widely made recommendation, here, was to “look at ATHE’s guidelines” (4 respondents). The committee has taken this advice. One respondent also suggested gathering the guidelines pertinent departments have created. We will do this as well.

A smaller number of respondents (3) indicated that the document would need support from deans, dept. chairs, and NCA itself. Certainly the committee will seek this support. Additionally, several members of the committee have experience as chair or in the Dean’s office. We will also seek NCA support after the division itself has supported the document.

They offered helpful advice about the content of the eventual Guidelines. The primary

concern was the need to balance rigor and flexibility in the Guidelines (generally) and the review

process more specifically. On the one hand, respondents felt that the guidelines had to seriously

accept the burden to identify when performance work did and did not “measure up.” On the other

hand, the document would also have to be flexible enough to recognize variations in department

resources (production budgets, technical capacities, access to support staff, release time) and

mission.

Respondents were also concerned about the membership and mechanism of the review board. Responses here were single, but no less useful. For example, one respondent believed that members of review board would need to be part of (or at least represented on, depending upon their number) the executive committee and ratified by the membership like any other officer. Another respondent reminded us that we would need to decide upon criteria and means for nominating members of the review board. One member offered the observation that reviewers should have production experience themselves. Another indicated that the guidelines for preparing appropriate reviews and the mission of the review board should be very clear. A final observation underscored the importance of clarifying funding for the board, including arrangements for travel, lodging, and (potentially) honoraria.

Respondents also made suggestions for linking the Guidelines to the promotion process in concrete ways. In addition to the Guidelines themselves (or perhaps as a section of them), one respondent recommended creating a self-mentoring document to help candidates prepare their dossiers for review. Another suggested that the Guidelines also contain standards for members acting as outside reviewers of the tenure and promotion dossiers of division members. Such guidelines should offer strategies for writing up evaluative letters for those dossiers.

Only one respondent offered direct advice about the process of ratifying the guidelines. This member recommended againstsubmitting the document to the membership for ratification because doing so presumed “certain powers and absolutes.” This enigmatic phrase certainly suggests that the guidelines need to be ratified only after discussion of the division’s authority, departmental and institutional autonomy, and the relationship between the executive committee of the division and the division at large.

Finally, many members had strong feelings about the importance of disseminating the document widely.Some of these feelings were primarily qualitative and abstract, noting, for example, that the guidelines would need to be “accessible” and have “lots of exposure.” Others offered strategies for operationalizing this access by sharing it and responses to it online (via .pdf files), and/or in a special section of TPQ. When making suggestions of this sort, some members also echoed others’ concerns for simplifying the process of posting and revising it on the division’s website.

Holistically, then, members offered a variety of viewpoints about developing the contents of the guidelines and undertaking its ratification and dissemination. Principle themes of access, coherence, and integration of the guidelines and website seemed universal. Members approached those concerns in different ways, highlighting different aspects of the RTP process, but collectively they were rarely, if ever, contradictory or suggestive of controversy.

Part Two: Evaluating the Preconference Itself

Answers to these questions have two sorts of value. First, many members used this opportunity to reflect on the subject of the preconference, so responses of this sort underscore responses above. Second, comments on the structure of the preconference can help those planning future preconferences, hence the utility of sharing them widely rather than only among the planners.

We asked members, “which aspect of the preconference was most useful to you? How did it help? What could be improved?” One of the survey’s largest common themes emerged in answers to this question. Seven members identified networking opportunities and range of voices as strengths of the preconference (a gratifying response, but one that needs to be at least partially mediated by the earlier observation of the homogeneity of the division).

Members also used this question as an opportunity to underscore the importance of the review board, citing the report on it by Nathan Stucky as helpful in articulating future direction(s) for the division.

Structurally, members appreciated the breakout sessions and the specific information that came out in them, the keynotes, and the breakout session on dossier preparation in particular. Qualitatively and abstractly, many members highlighted the concentration on specific strategies and practical steps for building community on local campuses and navigating the RTP process in general

We also asked members, “What was least useful? What would make the experience more pertinent for you?”

Style-wise, one member called for less “whining” and two felt there was too much self-congratulation. Three members felt handouts from each presenter would have been useful, and one of these members suggested that the keynotes be made available in print. The committee has already taken this advice, and the texts will appear in the next Perforum.

There were also suggestions for the breakout structure in particular, including stricter standards in terms of time and style for breakout panelists. The most common answer in this section (with three members sounding this theme) was the desire to have had the opportunity to participate in more breakout sessions, perhaps “doubling them up” and having two time slots for breakouts, with a smaller number of breakout sessions in each slot.

Other answers included seeking more administrator perspective. In our only set of responses that seemed to be diametrically opposed, one member said there was no need to discuss festivals and another said we needed more discussion of festivals and other events and how to coordinate them more effectively between institutions to allow broader participation.

 

Part Three: Concluding Observations

Throughout the process of preparing for, attending, and evaluating the preconference, members have indicated a relatively consistent desire for a set of RTP guidelines accompanied by programs (e.g., the review board and targeted use of short courses) to help members carry out and meet the expectations articulated in those guidelines.

In response to the preconference, the division’s executive committee has approved an ad hoc committee to develop such guidelines and programs. The membership of that committee includes Donna Nudd, Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, Mindy Fenske. Christie Logan, Nathan Stucky, Della Pollock, Judith Hamera, Elizabeth Whitney, Elizabeth Bell, Patrick Johnson, Ruth Laurion Bowman, and Ron Shields. This committee will use this feedback to help them create a proposal to bring to the membership in time for a vote at NCA in Chicago, November of this year.

Additionally, as part of the coherent set of programs and other means of support coming out of the guidelines, it seems increasingly likely that the division will undertake the creation of a larger, edited volume of essays and other resources devoted to conceptualizing, negotiating, and participating in the RTP process, both of ones own and as an external reviewer of dossiers. If there are subjects you feel should be covered in such a collection, please feel free to contact me (craiggp@siu.edu).

Finally, in addition to thanking my co planners, Donna Nudd and Mindy Fenske, I’d like to thank the preconference presenters and attendees for their valuable feedback, as well as my assistant, Jessie Stewart, for her help in the early stages of this document.

Announcements

Change in Submission Policy: Please submit all publication announcements to the Performance Studies Division website’s contact page

http://www.cas.usf.edu/communication/perfdiv/contact.htm

and to Publications Chair Heather Carverat CarverH@missouri.edu.

Call for Papers: Latina/o Performativities

A Special Issue of Text and Performance Quarterly

Guest Editors: Bernadette Marie Calafell, University of Denver and Shane Moreman, California State University, Fresno

Part of the appeal and possibility of Performance Studies work is that it can be articulated from many different theoretical and methodological perspectives. The study of performance takes these different conceptions and blends them into deeper understandings of the ordinary and the extraordinary of life. Similar to Performance Studies, the work of Latina/o Studies draws from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives to center and articulate the experiences of Latina/os, the United States’ largest "minority" group. While the work of Performance Studies and Latina/o Studies have both been integral in creating a space for the study of identities and communities that challenge traditional academic canons, there still remains much work to be done within the nexusof Performance and Latina/o Studies.

To inspire and encourage new perspectives out of this nexus, we offer this special issue of TPQ specifically devoted to multiple sites of Latina/o performance (i.e., everyday life, performance ethnography, popular culture, performance art, theater, personal narrative). We seek to showcase Performance Studies work that takes up the identities, communities and cultural issues of Latina/os and this group's relationship to and impact upon reality both within and without the academy. This special issue will further our understandings of the ways in which performers negotiate discursive plurality(s) in multiple sites. In addition to furthering the existing theories of performances of identity, hybridity, mestizaje, and biculturalism, this special issue will both complement and confront the criteria of performance and performance theory.

Submissions that cover a range of approaches to and analyses of performance will be favored. When speaking of Latina/o performativity or latinidad,¹one often necessarily must address language, citizenship, im/migration, biculturalism, assimilation, etc. As performance is becoming an important way to understand and critique exploration and embodiment of latinidad, this special issue will, in turn, demonstrate how latinidadis shaping the way performance can be understood and utilized. As a result, this special issue will enlarge and enhance the scope of performance as it is now researched and re-presented. Especially welcomed are essays that attend to these issues particularly around themes of memory performance/performance and memory, diaspora and migration, feminisms, popular culture, the (im)possibilities of performances of latinidad or pan-Latina/o affiliations, queerness, and the politics of immigration, and citizenship. Manuscripts from a wide range of interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspectives, including performance ethnography, rhetorical theory and criticism, performative writing, and personal narrative.

Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6^thed. (2003). To facilitate the blind, peer review process, no material identifying the author(s) of submitted manuscripts should appear anywhere other than the title page, which should include: (a) the title of the paper, (b) the author’s name, position, institutional affiliation, address, telephone and fax numbers, and email address; (c) any acknowledgements, including the history of the manuscript and if any part of it has been presented at a conference or is derived from a thesis or dissertation; (d) a close word count. The first page of the manuscript itself should include the title of the paper, an abstract of 100 words, and a list of five suggested key words. Manuscripts must be double-spaced throughout and should be no longer than 9000 words, inclusive of notes and reference matter.

Please submit an electronic copy in RTF or Word format to bcalafel@du.edu. Also, send four hard copies of the manuscript by October 1, 2007 to:

Bernadette Marie Calafell

Department of Human Communication

University of Denver

2000 East Asbury Ave.

Sturm Hall, Suite 200

Denver, CO 80208

Penninnah Schram, Associate Professor of Speech and Drama at Stern College of Yeshiva University, NYC, is taking a sabbatical this spring semester in order to do research on Jewish Moroccan folktales. She just returned from two weeks in Morocco and is spending an additional four weeks in Israel interviewing and collecting Jewish Moroccan folktales.

Congratulations

Jim Ferris has received a literary arts fellowship in nonfiction from the Wisconsin Arts Board for 2007, and he will be a Rowland Foundation fellow at the Vermont Studio Center in June and July.

Joanne Gilbertwas promoted to the rank of Professor at Alma College. She will be on Sabbatical during the 2007-2008 academic year, working on a performance ethnography project about the Crazy Horse Memorial in Crazy Horse, SD. Joanne's script, "Up From The Ashes: Michigan Holocaust Survivors Share Their Stories" is in press with Smith and Kraus. 

On Tuesday April 24th, 2007, Peninnah Schram, also a professional storyteller, will be featured in a program, Sephardic Folktales, with singer/guitarist Gerard Edery and other musicians at the 92nd Street Y, NYC, to launch a book on Sephardic Folktales recently published by the Jewish Publication Society, edited by Dan Ben-Amos. This is the first in a series of 5 volumes culled from the Israel Folktale Archives housed at Haifa University.

John T. Warren was named the Performance and Pedagogy Editor for Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.

The 2007-08 officers for SSCA are

Chair Tracy Stephenson Shaffer

Vice-Chair Rebecca Kennerly

Vice-Chair Elect Justin Trudeau

perforum is the official newsletter of the Performance Studies Division of the National Communication Association, published semi-annually in the spring and fall. The

newsletter welcomes your articles, announcements, letters and any other features appropriate for its readership. Materials may be edited for length. Please forward all correspondence to the editor:

Marcyrose Chvasta

Department of Communication

University of South Florida

mchvasta@cas.usf.edu

Please freely pass on this newsletter to interested individuals who may not

be on the Perform-L listserv. If you know of someone who is on the Perform-L listserv and is not receiving perforum, please ask that person to check the filters on his/her email program. The program may be filing this email as junk or spam.