The Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale (DGSD) is pleased to invite you to an upcoming Hot Topics lecture at Humanities Quadrangle, 320 York St, Room 276 on Thursday, March 7th at 3:30 pm. There will be a reception following the lecture at 5:00 pm.

Hot Topics Lecture Series features internationally recognized scholars and artists in the fields of theater and performance studies whose work speaks to the current moment. The series is open to the DGSD community as well as to students, faculty, and staff outside of the School of Drama. Please join us for:

AFTER TRAGEDY, BEGIN AGAIN:

The Contingency of Liveness in Time Slips and 24H Medea

A lecture by Jack Isaac Pryor, Ph.D., a writer, theater artist, and performance studies scholar specializing in experimental forms; queer, trans, and feminist theories; and the politics of time.

Abstract

In Euripides’s Medea (431 BCE), the titular character—marked as a religious, ethnic, and gender outsider—infamously slays her two children at the play’s end. There are innumerable ways to understand this: as revenge, as an act of radical resistance to patriarchal and xenophobic violence, as an intervention in the oppressive reproduction of power. But is another outcome to this story possible? In “After Tragedy, Begin Again,” I propose that live performance can be used as a model for intervening in seemingly intractable cycles of violence. I will begin by sharing research from my first monograph, Time Slips (2017), and move into a discussion of my current work-in-progress, 24H Medea. 24H Medea is a live performance in which Medea is repeated 24 times over the course of an entire day. With each round, performers switch roles and begin again: each time a real experiment to see what happens—and what might shift—through duration, repetition, and the contingency of the live event. Contrary to Aristotle, this talk proposes, tragedy need and indeed must not be regarded as overdetermined from the start—especially crucial for those of us working at the intersection of art, activism, and human rights for whom a belief in justice and liberation animates our work and life. Tragedy, I argue, is only tragic when alternative futures fail to be collectively imagined and labored into being.

Thursday, March 7, 2024, at 3:30 pm

Location: Humanities Quadrangle, 320 York St, Room 276

Alternatively, join the lecture via Zoom: https://yale.zoom.us/s/95692606264