Jan 20 – Guest Lecture “Performing the Archive in Contemporary Testimonial Plays” 🗓

Documentary practices currently proliferate in contemporary drama and theater in the US and are attracting increasing attention from literary and theater scholars. The recent shift in the genre from using official documentation (such as court recordings) towards account-based narratives (such as first-person testimonials) reflects a distinct orientation towards the archive and historical memory in contemporary testimonial plays that address social and global debates in the public sphere. Focusing on the work of two Black female playwrights, Lynn Nottage’s One More River to Cross: A Verbatim Fugue (2015) and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present… (2012), this talk seeks to situate and theorize the emerging forms of testimonial dramaturgies concerned with remembrance and commemoration. Both plays use live performance to articulate the affective and political affordances of personal stories in public sphere discourses and complicate an understanding of archival stories as stores of objective record. Whilst they engage the theatrical dimension of the archive and raise questions about artistic agency, their individual approaches result in a fundamentally different theater aesthetic with varying levels of (meta)theatricality and audience participation.

Julia Rössler, M.A. is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Amerika-Institut at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her current research focuses on contemporary American Drama after postmodernism and the history and forms of documentary and verbatim theatre. She has successfully defended her dissertation under the title “Drama After Postmodernism: New Aesthetics of Mimesis on the Contemporary Stage” and she has recently co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English.

You can download the poster for the event here.