Performance Studies

Joanna Evans

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Joanna Ruth Evans
Joanna Ruth Evans
Joanna Ruth Evans
Joanna Ruth Evans

Joanna is a South African theatre artist, playwright and performance scholar based in Brooklyn. Their research is moved by improvised and ensemble performance practices, decolonial exigency, material animacy, queer intimacy, communal knowledge, and the permeability of Their working methodology is to listen close, breathe deep, and stick around for things to get weird. Joanna’s plays have toured throughout South Africa, as well as to international festivals in Italy, Germany, Iran, Hungary, Réunion and the United States. These include Four Small Gods, King Kong What What, Patchwork, and The Year of the Bicycle. Joanna is a co-founder of Pillow Fort Theatre, one of South Africa’s first Theatre for Early Years companies, which conducts experimental research into performance for pre-verbal audiences. Their article Unsettled Matters, Falling Flight was winner of the 2017 TDR: The Drama Review Student Essay Contest, and was published in the journal’s Fall 2018 issue.

 

Why PS @ NYU?

What drew me to Performance Studies, both as a department and as a field, is its generosity. It’s home to this diverse lineage of thinkers that are really committed to a rigorous critical practice that seeks openings, movement, potentiality… that’s the way I have to work. And then there is also this really open generosity as to archive, genealogy and “objects” of study – the field is totally promiscuous, and bold, and under constant revision in this regard. And this generosity of the field infuses the daily interactions in the classroom…we share a genuine excitement about each other’s work that I think is quite rare in academia. The people here are really incredible – professors, students and staff – I feel so lucky to know them; and to have made the friendships I have here. I suspect that PS is home to a number of scholars who, if we had not found this space, may not have found our way to academia at all... Not just because we are misfits (although we are!), but because we are invested in multiple other artistic, political, intellectual, spiritual, and transnational worlds. The department welcomes this multiplicity. It encourages us to bring all of our histories and our commitments into the classroom, and into our work. This space is a sanctuary for unique critical engagement that does not settle or territorialize, and for working in commons and from the heart.

 

Areas of Study and Concentration

de/post/anti-colonialisms; matter and materialisms; race; queerness; devised, improvisatory and ensemble performance practices; geographical focus on South Africa and Brazil.

 

Current Projects/Employment

I’m currently working with my friends and collaborators Shariffa Ali and Avi Amon on a new musical commissioned by the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. While I’ve worked a lot with sound, this is my first time writing a “Musical” proper, so… it’s an adventure!

 

Recent Publications/Projects

Recent Publication:

Evans, Joanna. Unsettled Matters, Falling Flight: De-colonial Protest and the Becoming-Material of an Imperial Statue. TDR/The Drama Review. Fall 2018.https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/dram_a_00775

Recent Performance Presentation: Evans, Joanna & Girino, Lua. Choreographies of Disencounter: Friendship & Exile. Trans-in-Corporados. Museu de Arte do Rio. August 2018. https://girino.net/flowers

 

I suspect that PS is home to a number of scholars who, if we had not found this space, may not have found our way to academia at all... Not just because we are misfits (although we are!), but because we are invested in multiple other artistic, political, intellectual, spiritual, and transnational worlds.