P.A. Skantze
P. A. Skantze is a theatre director, writer and composer based in Italy and working internationally. She has staged work by the poets Anne Carson and Matthew Fink as well as performances created with her company Four Second Decay including Audible Montage; or Eurydice's Footfall in Providence, Eating Our Pictures Pompidou Centre Paris. A Methodology of Locks performance with Ella Finer and Emily Orley based on the works of Luce Irigaray; Moving Home Hayward Gallery London; Get Thee to a Gallery durational performance of The Winter's Tale London.
She has been teaching across the disciplines of theatre history, theatre practice, writing and performance since her postgraduate study at Columbia University. Her method has always been one of engaged translation between practice, practitioners and theorists, theorists in the most joyous sense of that word encompassing imagined conversations between Blake [Eubie and William] and Billie Holiday, between someone you meet on a corner and the author of the book you are reading.
As an artist researcher, Skantze has directed practice research PhDs in the 'stage life of props,' voice and gender in early modern theatre, dreams and dreaming on stage from Calderon to Strindberg, female masochism in film and performance art, queer methods for playwriting, the afterlife of still life in live art, the 'vocal female body in performance space and time,' 'image and the Italian post avant-garde,' dance, Deleuze and the unschooled body,' acoustic ecologies, performance as political intervention in movements for racial justice, the Queer Archive, and the radical practice of generative neurodiversity.
In the spirt of study as communal intervention, Skantze has run workshops/intensives on Rehearsal Practices: modes of study in aesthetic action; Polysonic: black feminism and the intellectual life of black feminist sound; Fired Up: composing in the/for the Kiln on writing as creative practice in and out of the academy and Speaksinging/singspeaking workshops in the art of lyric as disruptive power.
Author of Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (Routledge 2003) and Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle (Punctum 2013), Skantze’s recent ‘spoken theory’ works include ‘Shake That Thing: Shakespeare and the Dark Lady of the Sonic,’ Shakespeare and the ‘philosophy of sway, and ‘Time Beside the B Side.’
Her articles include examinations of national identity, the choreography of Bill T. Jones, surtitles and contemporary theatrical performance, gift exchange and creative generosity, Ivo van Hove, spectating and ‘watching as praxis’ about tragedy and race and gender, on sound and black feminism, lyric as method, dance and re-enactment, and the epistemology of practice as research.
She is working on a New York production of her musical STACKS; an opera libretto based on Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books, and a performance of her 27 Lockdown Sonnets. Following her staged textual interventions for the opera Falstaff at the National Theatre of Croatia in 2018, she is creating a performance that moves between spoken play and sung opera, Scoring Macbeth, at the National Theatre of Croatia.