performance art Archives | Research & Innovation

Passings: Theatre scholar Lisa Wolford Wylam was a specialist in contemporary performance

fmaquito — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ is mourning the loss of Professor Lisa Wolford Wylam, who died suddenly on Sunday, Oct. 9 while visiting family in Knoxville, Tennessee. The University flag will fly at half-mast in her honour from 9am today until 1pm on tomorrow.

Left: Lisa Wolford Wylam

Prof. Wylam came to 91��ɫ from Bowling Green State University in 2006, joining the faculty in 91��ɫ’s Department of Theatre as associate professor. At the time of her death, she was graduate director of the MA/PhD Program in Theatre Studies.

A passionate and widely respected scholar, Prof. Wylam was a specialist in performance art, theories of acting and directing, and performance ethnography, with a particular interest in the work of groundbreaking theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. She was best known for her involvement with the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy and her ethnographic work with US-based performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his company, La Pocha Nostra. A founding vice president of Performance Studies international (PSi), she served as program chair for the 2010 PSi conference, Performing Publics, held in Toronto.

“Lisa had a brilliant mind and contributed so much to the development of contemporary performance research,” said her friend and department colleague, theatre Professor Laura Levin, who directed the conference jointly with Prof. Wylam. “There has been a tremendous outpouring of grief within the theatre and performance studies community following her passing, as scholars from around the world recognize the importance of her contributions to the field.”

Prof. Wylam’s publications include Grotowski’s Objective Drama Research (University Press of Mississippi 1996) and The Grotowski Sourcebook (Routledge 1997), co-edited with Richard Schechner. In 2008, she co-edited (with Mario Biagini and Antonio Attisani) Doorways: Performing as a Vehicle at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards (Seagull Press) and co-edited with Kris Salata a special issue of The Drama Review that examines Grotowski’s lingering influence on artists and scholars around the world.

Prof. Wylam’s scholarship was informed by her extensive experience in devised theatre and as a dramaturg, including her work with La Pocha Nostra, the Workcenter, and Cleveland’s Theatre Labyrinth. In 2010 she brought Pocha Nostra’s co-artistic directors, Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, to 91��ɫ as artists-in-residence for the Summer Institute in Theatre Studies (see YFile, June 29, 2010). This past summer, she was instrumental in bringing Mario Biagini from the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards to 91��ɫ for an intensive Summer Institute (see YFile, July 25).��

Alongside her professional accomplishments, Prof. Wylam’s faculty colleagues note above all her deep commitment to her students, her collegiality towards her peers, and her personal integrity and compassionate spirit. She was a beloved teacher and a tireless advocate for students and junior faculty. She brought to her classes tremendous critical insight, warmth and humour, and instilled in her students a passion for merging theory with practice. Working closely with her graduate students in theatre studies, she helped to create a rich, challenging and forward-thinking environment for advanced study.

"Lisa was incredibly generous and supportive, always willing to step in to help students and colleagues when the need arose,” said theatre Professor Marlis Schweitzer. “Her passion, conviction and dedication to our students were evident in everything she did – from classes and committees to one-on-one meetings. We will deeply miss her."

Prof. Wolford Wylam is survived by her husband, John Wylam. An on-campus memorial event celebrating her life is being planned; details will be forthcoming soon. Meanwhile, condolence cards and messages for the family may be directed to Professor Elizabeth Asselstine, chair, Department of Theatre.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Video: Faculty of Fine Arts' Summer Institute for grad students focuses on Performance Art

fmaquito — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

The two co-founding artistic directors of the hugely influential performance collective La Pocha Nostra were artists-in-residence at 91��ɫ’s fourth annual Summer Institute in Theatre Studies, which ran June 15 to 27.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, described as “among the most significant of late-20th-century performance artists" by New 91��ɫ City’s Village Voice, and Roberto Sifuentes, professor of performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and former artistic director of New 91��ɫ’s Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, led the intensive workshop.

Right: Guillermo Gómez-Peña

During their residency, they worked with graduate students to develop an original performance which was showcased on Saturday in the Accolade East Building at 91��ɫ’s Keele campus. Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes performed as part of the open public exhibit.

Founded in 1993, is an ever-morphing trans-disciplinary arts organization based in San Francisco, with branches in many other cities and countries. Positioning themselves as collaborators with “rebel artists” around the world, members of La Pocha Nostra seek to erase the “dangerous” borders between art and politics, practice and theory, and art and spectator.

A Spanglish neologism, “pocha nostra” is loosely translated to mean “our impurities” or the “cartel of cultural bastards”. The group describes its installation performances as living museums. The performers decorate themselves as “ethno-cyborgs” that are one-quarter stereotype, one-quarter audience projection, one-quarter esthetic artifact and one-quarter unpredictable personal or social monster. La Pocha Nostra audiences are invited to observe, interact and participate in a wide and wild variety of activities, from dressing and posing the performers like dolls to leashing them like animals or pointing weapons at them.

Left: Robert Sifuentes

“The Summer Institute brings prominent international theatre artists and scholars to campus each year to work with graduate students to give them an intensive experience of applied research and praxis,” said Professor Lisa Wolford Wylam, the director of 91��ɫ's master's and doctoral programs in theatre studies. “Given that our theatre studies MA/PhD areas of specialization include post-colonial theatre and performance studies, bringing Pocha Nostra artists made perfect sense. And having had the opportunity to see Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes work with graduate students at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth some years ago, I knew it would be a fabulous experience for our students.”

Wolford Wylam has a long history with the company, including working as a dramaturge and assistant director on La Pocha Nostra shows in the late 1990s and editing the manuscript for Gómez-Peña's book Dangerous Border Crossers, to which she contributed an interview and an afterword. Wolford Wylam’s Theatre Department colleague Professor Laura Levin is the editor of Conversations Across the Border, a collection of interviews with Gómez-Peña slated for publication by Seagull Press.

Among the many remarkable La Pocha Nostra shows Wolford Wylam has participated in and witnessed as an audience member, The Mexterminator, a piece presented in San Francisco to commemorate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, stands out in her mind.

“It was a large-scale production, for which they'd transformed an enormous warehouse into a post-apocalyptic environment inhabited by hybrid border creatures. The atmosphere was electric, like a rave, and audience members were completely uninhibited in the ways they interacted with the artists,” she said. “There was even an ‘ethnic makeover booth’ where gallery visitors could transform themselves into a ‘romantic Indian princess’ or a ‘militant Black Panther’ complete with bad afro wig and blackface makeup. And people went for it. I couldn't believe it, but they went for it without shame or hesitation.”

Left: Lisa Wolford Wylam

Such extreme, experimental and interactive performances have brought the company an international following and made La Pocha Nostra a legendary name in the worlds of performance studies and conceptual art.

The graduate students participating in the Summer Institute come from both the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. Wolford Wylam gave seminars on Pocha Nostra's work to prepare them for the artists' arrival.

While at 91��ɫ, Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes road-tested the final manuscript for their new book Radical Performance Pedagogy: Exercises for Rebel Artists and Border Crossers (forthcoming from Routledge Press in 2011). They led improvisations and exercises with the students that encouraged them to explore their expressivity and develop their own iconic performance personae through physical games and tableaux.

“The students had an amazing time,” said Wolford Wylam. “They hung out with the artists in the evenings and spent the mornings scouring thrift stores for props and costume elements to enhance their adventures in pop culture archeology.”

Previous topics and guests of 91��ɫ’s Summer Institute in Theatre Studies include The Greek Theatre, directed by Regina Kapetankis of the National Theatre of Greece, and Brecht: Theory in Practice with Johanna Schall, a leading German director and granddaughter of Bertolt Brecht, and Politics in Black African Theatre, directed by Nigerian playwright and educator Femi Osofisan.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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