Hello and Welcome

This is a blog run by a group of MFA acting students at the University of Louisville, KY, as part of a class called Tools for a World Theatre.

As a general introduction to what the class is about, I'm pasting in the description of the course from the syllabus:

As a vital cultural practice, theatre and performance expresses and comments on the beliefs and practices of particular people, places and times. But also, especially in the modern international and contemporary global environments, cultural conflicts and changes within nations have affected how theatre artists approach their work. In this class, we will look at theatre from three non-European nations and discuss how it reflects historical issues of national identity, colonization and international exchange, and the gradual transition to global culture. In this context, we will examine the roles of tradition and innovation within and between different cultures, especially in relation to the increased cross-cultural influence that has accompanied technological and philosophical developments around the world: how do traditional theatrical practices develop and shift as they travel across time and between locations?

The ultimate goal of the course is to learn ways of approaching and understanding theatre from other countries and regions and the populations who have moved from those regions into different areas around the world. As actors, understanding the cultural context of different performance practices across the globe can help us to understand the implications of our own work and how we fit into a larger historical and cultural picture. But it can also broaden our horizons and allow us to imagine new perspectives and possibilities for creating theatre and performance. To that end, over the course of the semester we will

• examine how different historical and cultural backgrounds influence performance practices and the dramaturgy of plays;

• reach for an understanding of how theatre and performance in these cultures is different from what we are familiar with, but also to find similarities between them and our own interests, experiences and goals as performers;

• practice community-based interviewing techniques as a means of understanding culture from an experiential perspective and

• practice ways of having public conversations about the issues raised in global cultural exchange.

In general, we've started out by asking ourselves what, exactly, "global" theatre might be, in terms of respecting and understanding difference vs. assimilation and unity. And over the course of the semester we will probably continue to examine the question of why we are interested in studying theatre from a variety of cultures, and how our own work fits into the current global environment artistically, culturally and socially.

The purpose of the blog is an attempt to open our class discussions up for comment by a larger community. I hope people will read our thoughts and help us to think through these issues by commenting on what we have to say.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the discussions on here can become another tool for examining not only world theatre, but the idea of culture in a global community more generally.