Stop staring, start seeing: Housed spectatorship of homeless performers

Theatre Research International

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 163-173

  Snyder Young, Dani ^a  

^a ILLINOIS WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79959428520     PISSN: 03078833     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S030788331100023X     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup), Corey Walton and the zAmya Theater Project, unpublished script. All references refer to Draft 3, Edit 4.
2. zAmya Theater Project is part of St Stephen's Human Services, a not-for-profit organization offering a variety of services and resources for homeless individuals including a shelter, programmes transitioning people into affordable housing, counselling and emergency services.
3. Amya's 2009 programming was funded, in part, by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council through an appropriation by the Minnesota Legislature and COMPAS Community Art Program through a grant from the McKnight Foundation, and received additional support from Securian Financial and the United Way.
4. Three-quarters of the performers in the production are homeless or formerly homeless. Performers are paid weekly throughout the rehearsal and performance run, and performances are presented each November as a week-long tour of hospitals, churches, schools and public sites. For an extended analysis of zAmya's creative process and institutional organization, see Rachel Chaves, 'zAmya Theater Project: Toward an Intimacy of Social Change', Community Arts Network, February 2008
5. idem, 'zAmya Theater Project: Toward an Intimacy of Social Change', University of Minnesota dissertation, 2010.
6. Sonja Kuftinec, 'Staging the City with the Good People of New Haven', Theatre Journal, 53, 2 (May 2001), pp. 197-222.
7. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press), p. 2.
8. Henri Schoenmakers and John Tulloch, 'From Audience Research to the Study of Theatrical Events: A Shift in Focus', in Vicki Ann Cremona, Peter Eversmann, Hans van Maanen, Willmar Sauter and John Tulloch, eds., Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 15-25, here p. 15.
9. Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985).
10. Willmar Sauter, 'Introducing the Theatrical Event', in Cremona et al., Theatrical Events, pp. 1-14, here p. 8-9.
11. Of the two hundred audience surveys returned at zAmya's 2009 performances, 94 per cent of respondents reported themselves to be housed.
12. Peter Eversmann, 'Introduction to Part Two', in Cremona et al., Theatrical Events, pp. 133-8, here p. 133. See also Sauter on performers and audience 'playing together', in 'Introducing the Theatrical Event', p. 11.
13. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, Theatre in Co-communities: Articulating Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 5.
14. Kuftinec, 'Staging the City', p. 214.
15. Cesare Segre, 'A Contribution to the Semiotics of Theater', Poetics Today, 1, 3 (1980), pp. 39-48, here p. 44.
16. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), p. 20.
17. Stanley Fish, 'Interpreting the "Variorum"', Critical Inquiry, 2, 3 (1976), pp. 465-85, here p. 484.
18. See, for example, Kim Christian Schrøder, 'Audience Semiotics, Interpretive Communities and the "Ethnographic Turn" in Media Research', Media, Culture, & Society, 16 (1994), 337-47.
19. Interview with Melisa, November 2009.
20. About half the cast identifies that this is, indeed, their first play.
21. Gwendolyn A. Dordick, Something to Lose: Personal Relations and Survival among New York's Homeless (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), pp. 10-11.
22. Rob Rosenthal, Homeless in Paradise: A Map of the Terrain (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
23. Anthony Jackson and Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, 'Rethinking Audience Participation: Audiences in Alternative and Educational Theatre', in Cremona et al., Theatrical Events, pp. 207-36, here p. 217.
24. Dolan, Utopia in Performance, pp. 170-1.