Brown Bag Luncheon Talk with kristen holfeuer & Joanna evans on Devised Theater and Improvisational Research

Join us on Wednesday, March 19th, from 12:00-1:00PM in the Richard Schechner Studio for a Brown Bag Talk with PS Ph.D. Candidates Kristen Holfeuer and Joanna Evans on Devised Theater and Improvisational Research.

This conversation will engage devised theater’s responsiveness to changing contexts, and our own experiences in adapting our research to this shifting form. 

Kristen will examine the labor of care invested by artists Yvette Nolan, Joel Bernbaum, and Lancelot Knight in the creation of “Reasonable Doubt”, a verbatim theatre piece centered on the murder of Cree man Colten Boushie. The play explores race relations in Saskatchewan and responds to the 2016 murder trial, but its roots extend further back to 1885, before Saskatchewan became a province. Created over six years, the play was only performed for two weeks in 2020. However, its lasting impact lies in the numerous community-driven collaborative creation workshops that supported its development. Kristen will discuss the artistic labor behind “Reasonable Doubt” as intimately linked to work begun forty years earlier, tracing its origins to “Jessica”, a landmark production made in Saskatchewan, often regarded as the beginning of Indigenous theatre in the country. 

Jo will discuss “Survival” (1976) by Workshop71. A meta-theatrical, satirical, and highly physical play about the carcerality of apartheid South Africa, “Survival” was launched amidst the upheaval of the 1976 Soweto uprising, where it was shut down by the army mid-performance. In 1977, the cast were invited to tour California, narrowly escaped arrest in South Africa, and ultimately remained in the US in exile. Jo will discuss the challenges of tracing this play’s many undocumented transformations through charged political contexts. This journey ultimately led them to befriend Seth Sibanda and Fana Kekana, the two surviving original performers, who have lived in New York since their exile. In 2024, they restaged  “Survival” together at the Africa Center in Harlem, with Seth and Fana returning to the roles they created nearly five decades ago, joined by a younger generation of performers. This generated further insight, and a chance to finally record this historical production.

We hope this sharing will open into a broader set of questions for discussion, such as: How does devised theater, as both practice and form, respond and adapt to local contexts? What kind of improvisational openings does the unwieldiness of devised theater, and performance in general, offer the researcher? And, how does ethical engagement (for both researchers and theater-makers) shift when the play is an iteration of a larger theatrical-social project?

We hope you can attend this special conversation. Pack your lunch and join us in person or on zoom! 

This event is only open to current NYU students, faculty, and staff.