A Roundtable on Sports Plays
This roundtable discussion features three authors from the forthcoming edited collection Sports Plays, a book about sports in the theatre and what it means to stage sports. Edited by Broderick Chow (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) and Eero Laine (University at Buffalo), Sports Plays considers the “problem” of the staging what is purportedly “unstaged”, that is, a “real”, non-predetermined sport, in the frame of the theatre. Sports in the theatre thus open up fundamental questions about theatre and performance at the same time as providing rich dramatic subjects for considering larger social and cultural issues and debates. The featured authors contributions range from a consideration of Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves as a theatrical intervention into discourses of neoliberal girlhood; to an exploration of American football plays that consider how the labour of both athletes and actors is bought, sold, and traded; to an exploration of “locker room dramas” that pose questions about the performance of masculinity.
In addition to marking the publication of Sports Plays, this event celebrates the online premieres of Central’s productions of Andrew Hinderaker’s Colossal, directed by Robert Styles and Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves directed by Debbie Seymour, both streaming online from the 14th-28th July (information on the links above). The roundtable will also feature contributions from cast, designers, and creatives from both productions.
About the Panellists:
Sean Metzger is Associate Dean for Faculty and Students in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. The author of Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (2014) and The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (2020), Metzger currently co-edits Theatre Journal. His other co-edited works include Embodying Asian/American Sexualities (2009); Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (2009); Race, Space, Place: The Making and Unmaking of Freedoms in the Atlantic World (2009); Islands, Images, Imaginaries (2014); Awkward Stages: Plays about Growing Up Gay (2015); Expressions of Asian Caribbeanness (2019); and Transient Performance (2020).
SAJ (they/them), PhD, is a McNair scholar, an abolitionist organizer, an educator, and a Packers fan. SAJ is a co-editor of Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and they have recent publications in Cultural Dynamics, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and edited collections. SAJ has taught at Brooklyn College, Hunter College, the College of Staten Island, Marymount Manhattan College, and New York University. Informed by critical/materialist theories of race, gender, disability, and class, their research focuses on symbolic power and racial capitalist political economies at the turn of the millennium.
Kim Solga is Professor and Director of Theatre Studies in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University (Canada). Her most recent solo book is Theory for Theatre Studies: Space (Bloomsbury 2019); her most recent edited collection is Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University: Responses to an Academy in Crisis (Routledge 2020). Find her on WordPress at The Activist Classroom and at Fit is a Feminist Issue.
Eero Laine is the Director of Graduate Studies of the Department of Theatre and Dance and Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Professional Wrestling and the Commercial Stage (2020) and co-editor of Performance and Professional Wrestling (2017) and Professional Wrestling: Politics and Pop-ulism (2020). Eero is the editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and is one of the co-editors of Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association.
Broderick D.V. Chow is Reader in Theatre, Performance and Sport and Deputy Dean (Interim) of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. His research looks at the intersections of theatre, performance, sport, physical culture, and the historical construction of masculinity. He is co-editor with Eero Laine and Claire Warden of Performance and Professional Wrestling (Routledge, 2016) and has published articles in Theatre Journal, TDR, Performance Research, and Women and Performance. His forthcoming book Dynamic Tensions explores the origins of men’s fitness practices in the popular theatre in the UK and US. Broderick is a competitive Olympic weightlifter and qualified coach.
Photo: Production photograph from Colossal by Andrew Hinderaker, directed by Robert Styles. Photograph by Nick Moran.