Professor Dorinne Kondo: The Drama of Worldmaking
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Grounded in critical ethnographic work, Dorinne Kondo’s Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity theorizes racialized labour, aesthetics, affect, genre, and structural inequality in contemporary theater. The text upends genre, interleaving analysis with vignettes and her full-length play Seamless, a comic drama about the afterlife of the historical trauma of Japanese American incarceration. The book theorizes and performs the ways the arts can remake worlds, from theater worlds to inner, psychic worlds to worldmaking visions for social transformation.
Kondo will discuss the theoretical/political stakes of the book and its discursive chapters, followed by reading, with Royal Central School of Speech and Drama faculty and students, of several scenes from Seamless.
“Dorinne Kondo’s work recalls us to the indispensable power of creative art and action during times when prospects for persistence are closing for so many. Brave, passionate, and always incisive, Kondo’s work paves the way for those who seek to know the link between art and politics for our time.” — Judith Butler
Scholar, playwright and dramaturg Dorinne Kondo is Professor of American Studies and Anthropology and former Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Southern California.
A cultural anthropologist who began her career as a Japan specialist and theorist of subjects/selves, Kondo holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard. Kondo’s books include Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (J.I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research, for a book that has influenced the field of Anthropology), and About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (Cultural and Literary Studies Prize, Association for Asian American Studies). Her new book Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity, based on twenty years of participation in theater as dramaturg, scholar, and playwright, pulls the auratic back to earth by analyzing backstage creative labour as theory and as race-making practice. Worldmaking bends genre, remixing first-person entr’actes, theoretical/analytical essays of the creative process of artists of colour Anna Deavere Smith and David Henry Hwang, and Kondo’s full-length comic drama Seamless. Kondo served as dramaturg for the world premieres of three plays by pioneering documentary theatre artist Anna Deavere Smith, including Twilight: Los Angeles, about the 1992 uprisings.
PLEASE NOTE:
This talk is open to all, but anyone wishing to attend must register in advance. Registrants will be sent a link to the event, which will take place on Zoom. It will be hosted by Tom Cornford and will take the form of a presentation by Professor Kondo, followed by a discussion to which attendees are invited to contribute by asking questions using the chat function in Zoom.
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