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Putting the Theater on Trial: The Politics
of Reception
RU Faculty Lecture Series 2006
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IIn my current project, making use
of previously completed research on revolutionary Russian stage design
in the 1920s, I want to suggest that the role of criticism changed from
aesthetic evaluation to a form of unstated censorship, with a goal of ensuring
that the theater - always a popular form of art - communicated acceptable
ideology. Not only was this a new and unconventional role for criticism;
it was the metaphorical equivalent of putting the theater and play on trial.
We might even say that criticism was mirroring the theater: that as theater
increasingly became the site of mock agitation trials in the 1920s and
a rehearsal for the real trials of the 30s, criticism itself became another
venue for agitation trials with the theater as its “defendant.” My
earlier work focused on a description and analysis of the stage sets and
their role in the formulation of constructivism, a new artistic movement
which wanted to eliminate the boundaries between life and art. Here
I direct my attention more specifically to an analysis of the reception
of these performances.
As this suggests, Russian constructivism
does remain my primary area of research interest, although not my only
one. In a class I taught before coming to Radford, on representations
of women in the history of American art, I became equally fascinated by
the images I could not find as I was by the ones I could. In many
cases, literature shows women in roles which the visual arts avoided.
My question here is what makes certain images acceptable, why is it possible
to express uncomfortable or painful ideas more readily in literature than
in painting, and what do we actually learn from these images, whether verbal
or pictorial, about the lives of women. I hope a book will emerge from
this as well, but at present, I want to make it my second book and not
my first.
A Narrative about Me
The narrative of my life has always
been a bit perplexing, even to me, since it includes two bifurcations.
After graduating from college in 1972 and deciding to become an occupational
therapist (a career I chose as something which seemed more daring than
becoming a teacher, but more suited to my interests than law or medicine),
it took me 15 years to admit that passion and commitment, which I did not
feel for occupational therapy, were more important to me than the success
I had already achieved in that career, along with a doctorate in education.
Not being one who is easily daunted, I decided to return to school in my
mid-30s. In the 1980s, there were few role models of single, self-supporting
women who decided to make a radical career change, especially one which
meant leaving a position as an assistant professor to become a student
again. I did it anyway, initially planning to become an architect
but discovering that my passions lay more in asking questions, doing research,
and writing, and that I was probably more suited to the role of historian
than that of an architect. I began working on a doctoral degree in
art and architectural history, along the way deciding to learn Russian
and to focus my research on the Russian avant-garde, planning to write
my dissertation in the year following my return from Russia and begin teaching
in a tenure-track position before turning 45. But the second bifurcation
intervened. Shortly after returning from a year of research in Russia,
I was hit by a car while riding my bicycle. The resulting head injury
did not result in a career change although it did change my schedule and
the circumstances in which I worked toward my goals. Having to begin
a career while recovering from a traumatic brain injury eventually meant
having to live with the repercussions of some unwise decisions and the
loss of strong collegial support from people who did not understand the
combined impact of a brain injury and traumatic stress on someone’s life.
It took me almost ten years (in which I did write my dissertation and begin
teaching) to reach the point where I was able to believe that if my passion
had been temporarily interrupted, my commitment never failed me and ultimately,
neither my passion nor my commitment were derailed.
Although I’m not the kind of person
who believes that good things come out of bad experiences or that there’s
a reason for everything, I do find it pleasantly ironic that there may
be an advantage to the fact that I’m only now beginning to rewrite my dissertation.
In 1992, when Russia first began to open its archives to western scholars,
I was part of a small group of people who were interested in studying the
Russian artistic avant-garde. We all completed our dissertations
at approximately the same time, and in the past two or three years, the
products of this research have been published. Because one-year jobs
do not provide the resources which enhance scholarly productivity, I find
myself in the somewhat unusual situation of not only having been part of
this original period of research but also being able to respond to the
insights of people whose research focused on the same period as mine but
raised different questions and took different directions. I’ve also
learned that the simplest resource of all may be the most valuable: the
time to do nothing but write. Last summer (2005), I obtained my first
tenure-track position. Because tenure-track positions are decided
earlier than non-tenure track, and because this position calls on me to
teach in areas I’ve taught before, I had the experience of being able to
devote almost the entire summer to intensive reading and a reconceptualization
of my writing. Had I not done this, I would not be envisioning the
book I now plan to write.
As an occupational therapist, I
learned that despite playing a leadership role in my profession and publishing
numerous studies on the role of occupational therapy in the treatment of
psychological disabilities, I could not be the kind of professor or therapist
I wanted to be without feeling a passion for what I was doing.
As an art historian I have learned that in addition to scholarly excellence,
the fact that I do feel this passion and that I have worked very hard not
to let anyone deprive me of it makes me a different kind of role model
for my students. It also makes me an educator who does not believe
I know all the answers and who is not unwilling to let students be my models
in the ways that they can be.