A Note from the Theory, Theater, and Performance Working Group at Indiana University Bloomington

Helen Gunn and Cynthia Shin

As campuses across the nation struggle against attacks on higher education, it is easy to forget the power of community as a site of resistance. In this blog post, we want to introduce you to the Theory, Theater, and Performance Working Group (TTP) at Indiana University Bloomington, a space on campus where academics come together beyond institutional boundaries to share work and learn from one another in solidarity.

TTP started with a simple idea: let’s get people interested in theater and performance studies in one room. The idea for the group started when Helen faced challenges identifying an advisor for her dissertation. As one of the sole modern dramatists in the IU English department, she had been asking different faculty if they could support her dissertation but was gently declined. However, a common piece of advice from these faculty members was to speak to Kovacs, a professor from the Germanic studies department. Thankfully, Kovacs said yes to Helen’s request to chair her committee. Then, Kovacs realized the need to bring theater scholars together to support similar projects in the future. Turns out, a lot of us interested in theater were working in different pockets of campus and did not feel like we belonged in our respective departments. This group thus served a number of purposes by being a catalyst for a community of practice based on our scholarship.

Now we regularly gather to write together, plan events on campus, and put together performances. Next semester, we will have a PhD minor approved that the group initiated. We also planned a graduate workshop titled, “Afterlives and Otherlives: Performance, Passivity, and Possibility in the Time of Catastrophe.” The two guest speakers for it include Caroline Lillian Schopp (Johns Hopkins University) and Christopher Wild (University of Chicago). We are even adding a reading group to our programming that is dedicated to exploring fundamental texts in performance studies.

Theater seems to be a particularly appropriate subject for a group like this, since collaboration is at the core of performance. Last semester’s performance of Two Suns and a Setting is a perfect example of the intimate link between performance practice and our cross-campus collaboration. The play explores nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands vis-à-vis artificial intelligence. The cast included Kovacs’s undergraduate students, who were guided by Kevin Rittberger (the playwright invited from Germany to participate in the initiative) in addition to TTP members Helen, who helped with the translation and served as the dramaturg, Ahmed Tahsin Shams, who provided the recording as well as video clips, Cynthia, who moderated the round table, and Nicole Rizzo, who served on the round table. Appropriate for a play featuring AI, there were works of art created with AI playing in the background by the artist Caleb Weintraub, a professor in IU’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design. Soundscapes were composed by Jordan Munson, a professor of music technology at Indiana University, Indianapolis.

Our experience watching the group grow has been inspiring. We found new friends through this work. We stepped into roles that we could not have imagined stepping into a few years ago. Crucially, we find new energy to pursue our respective dissertation projects through encouragement from our colleagues.

We believe that this structure could be replicated in different settings to serve different community needs. If you are interested in initiating such an intellectual space on your campus or in your community, we hope our work can serve as inspiration and encouragement for you to pursue this work. Sure, it takes great time and dedication to start the group because it requires a lot of support. For instance, TTP would not have happened without Kovacs, who has been so generous with her time and energy. But it does not have to immediately become a giant, cross-campus endeavor.

To show you what we mean, take a look at some of these practical action items, which could serve as guide for how to undertake an initiative such as ours.

1. If you are advising students, put them in the same room. Let them talk about their research interests. Invite other scholars on and off campus who would speak to their interests to the room.

2. Put together a weekly writing support group. This can be a space to work together, but also share ongoing projects and writing struggles or successes.

3. Secure a space for the group. If you have the power to book a room on campus or a connection off campus, offer it to scholars so that they can come together.

4. Participate! Find other initiatives that are ongoing on your campus and connect to those where possible. It does not matter how many people are organizing an initiative if nobody shows up for it. When you hang around enough, you might even end up finding something to do to support the project.

5. Do not wait (but always ask) for permission to lift each other up in such group settings.

Tending to this group has been meaningful to us. This has especially been the case in our current context, when higher education is under attack from both inside and outside Bloomington. Recently, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education announced the plan to cut 19% of degrees and programs at our institution. At times, it feels like there is no future for the humanities. But in our group, we remind one another that there will still be intellectual conversations and curiosity, no matter the context. The future of the humanities then lies with us; we can ensure its survival in the communities we cultivate.