Last year when Professor Denny Partridge, Barnard's Alice B. Pels Professor of Theatre, was awarded a Mellon New Directions Fellowship to create new theater coursework and touring opportunities, she found a way to combine her 30-year background in professional theater with social activism by developing "Theatre in the Community." Now, Partridge is spending the spring semester helping 10 students discover how to confront painful and difficult subjects in society through the power of dramatic expression.
Partridge's innovative new course gives students the opportunity to create an original play based on research from oral histories, newspaper accounts, and archival material, then rehearse and perform it in schools, theaters, and other places across the city.
Long a proponent of the idea that theater should address relevant social issues, Partridge and her students have chosen the topic of sexual coercion and rape as the focus of this play.
"This is an artistic endeavor with a social purpose," says Partridge. "We're trying to do something on a subject that is taboo and hard to talk about. Forty percent of most rapes are never reported. For us, the question is: How does the story get told? This is always the question of theater."
The new play, titled WHAT YOU NEED , will be performed on Thursday and Friday evenings on April 15-16 at the Minor Latham Playhouse on Barnard's campus, coinciding with the annual nationwide rally against sexual violence, Take Back the Night . WHAT YOU NEED will then tour from April 17-28 in the New York area and elsewhere in the Northeast.
In addition to giving students an opportunity to develop and perform a script based on their own research, workshop improvisations, and interviews, the course also will let them see the effects of different venues on the life of a production.
"A play changes depending on the place and audience," Partridge says. "I'm interested in helping students learn that a play is not a fixed thing on a page; it's an event, it's alive, and it can make a difference to a movement or political issue."
Partridge learned the power of this kind of theater first-hand at an early age. When she was a small child in San Diego, her father served in the Korean War. To make life a little easier during his absence, Partridge recruited her siblings and neighbors and staged "community theater" in the family garage, performing Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and other tales for children. As a child in a military family, she lived all over the world, and her love for theater grew as her parents took her to see plays in Europe and Asia.
From these experiences, Partridge says she always knew she wanted to be involved in "theatre that was purposeful." She studied directing at Boston University and at Carnegie-Mellon University as a National Endowment of the Arts Fellow, earning bachelor's and master's degrees of fine arts, respectively.
When her brother served as an officer during the Vietnam War, she recalls her consciousness was "cracked open." The turbulent 1960's profoundly influenced her sense of purpose and vocation. Working with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, she directed an early feminist play, The Independent Female , or A Man Has His Pride , which ran for three years in San Francisco. She later directed shows around the world, including Mexico, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Sweden, and New York. She has since earned numerous academic and professional awards for her work, including an Obie Award and two Fulbright Fellowships.
When her academic career brought her to Barnard in 1994, Partridge continued to incorporate her vision for community involvement in theater courses. In 1997, she and Kat Kavanagh, Director of the Minor Latham Playhouse, together created Still Life With AIDS , a play about women infected with HIV or AIDS. A cast of Barnard and Columbia students toured New York City and represented the United States at the 1999 Thespis Festival in Jerusalem. Since 1999, Partridge has also taught theater in several prisons in the New York area.
Why the sustained passion to take theater into the community?
"I've become more and more aware of the extreme privilege that higher education brings in this country, a privilege that, when extended to those outside it, has great results," Partridge says. "I learn so much from offering the same level of instruction at the prison as I do at Barnard. I've looked at how I could become a better theater teacher and that's raised questions of venue, of where we do theater and for whom."
Partridge expects to continue travelling around the world to examine the relationship between theater and the community. In the meantime, she and her students in "Theatre and the Community" are preparing to produce a play about an issue audiences rarely confront.
"This is not a social science class but a theater class where we're looking at story, character and action," Partridge says. "The difference is we're also using it as a tool to reach out."
- Jo Kadlecek
- From Featured Faculty, Barnard College. |
