MLA 2021 Special Session – Putting Writing and Performance in Conversation
MLA 2021
Toronto, Jan 7 – 10
Special Session on “Putting Writing and Performance in Conversation”,
Abstracts due by March 11 2020 to kel.irene.aliano@gmail.com
Kelly I. Aliano, PhD
Dept. of Theatre, Dance, and Arts Management
Long Island University–Post Campus
Dept. of Theatre, Dance, and Arts Management
Long Island University–Post Campus
This panel welcomes abstracts (max. 300 words) that explore the intersection between writing instruction and performance/theatre practice, via sample class activities, assignments, etc. What is gained by crossing the disciplinary boundaries?
Through our research and teaching practice, we have discovered that Writing Across the Curriculum practices emphasize writing as a process. Thus, WAC pedagogy can be seen as a kind of dialogue between the instructor and the students, both in the classroom and via regular feedback on students’ work.
With this dialogic approach in mind, we have come to the discovery that theatrical concepts and terms can be particularly useful to enhancing the instruction of writing. The connection has been made by, for example, Mary Broussard, Jackie Tuck, Shelley Manis, Margaret Werry and Stephanie Walseth, Alisa Roost, and others. For example, in following Broussard, we can see low-stakes writing activities as rehearsals of thoughts and ideas; we aspire to create the classroom as a hospitable “rehearsal” space as Tuck would propose. We can conceptualize the final paper or project as a “performance” of each student’s ideas; even instructor feedback is, in a way, a kind of audience interaction with the student “performance” of writing (and a “performance” of professorial writing as well). We believe there are likely other fruitful intersections of writing and performance in courses beyond our field of Theatre Studies.
We are interested in discussing and exploring how, in your own courses, you put writing and performance in conversation:
- What sorts of writing activities and assignments do you require?
- Are there any theatrical concepts and terms that are applicable to any of these writing activities and assignments?
- What do you find useful, in terms of learning outcomes, about conceiving and implementing your writing activities and assignments through this lens?