Affect Theater
Experiments with Ethnography and Theatrical Composition
with Greg Pierotti
Our workshop is an exploration of a cross pollination between research and narrative practices in theater and anthropology. By creating a dialogue between these disciplines in a laboratory format, we hope to pose questions and engage techniques in ways that will enrich our engagement with anthropological questions and performative productions. We recognize the value of the work of Vitor Turner, Richard Schechner, and Erving Goffman in their exploration between anthropology and performance studies.
This is not, however, a workshop on the anthropology of theater nor an experiment in performing ethnographies, but rather a lab where we use theatrical techniques to engage empirical questions and material.
Rather than enacting our research, we put the elements of the stage (lights, sets, objects, sound, bodies, etc.) into conversation with our research material. This generates surprising and often more affective analyses.
We explore how anthropologists can take from theater a more visceral posture towards research, and a more performative understanding of narrative that can translate into either new kinds of texts (essays, pays, short stories, installations, etc.) or into a revitalized existing practice of academic writing. On the other hand, theater makers can learn from anthropology a more nuanced understanding of political and cultural contexts, how to approach the different discourse formations around events and social issues, and to pay attention to the complexities of worlds and their grammars.
We use the practice of Affect Theater, a devising technique influenced by the Moment Work technique originated by Greg Pierotti’s former theater company, Tectonic Theater Project, and Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints. This theatrical devising technique is a practice for working with non-theatrical source material (interviews, archival documents, medical and legal reports, media sources, etc.) to construct narratives for the stage. The practice departs from traditional theater in that a finished script is not the starting point for the staging and direction of a play.