Spect-actorship

During April I was hired to be one of a small ensemble of actor/devisers developing a scene enacting a hiring committee meeting to review applications for the position of  assistant professor in chemical engineering. The project is part of a million-dollar grant awarded by the National Science Foundation to the University of Louisville to advance women of color in STEM fields. Using Augusto Boal's theatre of the oppressed as a model and adapting it to Zoom, we performed the scene twice to a pilot group of faculty and deans who had written the grant, facilitated by our director, Sidney Monroe, who was charged with the challenging work of conceptualizing the piece, figuring out what this particular hiring process would entail, shepherding our script through a process of increasing complexity and relevance, and delivering it by Zoom at a time of year when faculty were eagerly leaving campus after a profoundly difficult year. We were charged with fashioning a believable group of academic chemical engineers, about which we went in knowing exactly nothing. 

During the second run-through of each performance we  stopped whenever a spect-actor (Boal's term that called in the audience as active participants) interrupted the action to share thoughts about how implicit bias was evident in the workings of the committee meeting, identifying everything from how prioritizing publications over service favors some applicants to the frequency or ease with which some committee members cut off others or ignored their suggestions. For me this was an instructive adventure in applied theatre with the potential to increase transparency and change real-world systems, and it was a joy to work with artists from Kentucky, Virginia, and New York.

Also this month I took bystander training with Hollaback, which I highly recommend. Bystander intervention training gives us the tools to step in during episodes of harassment rather than just freezing—it's a bit analogous to Boal's spect-actor/active problem solver rather than a passive audience member. Historically this is a time of taking ownership and stepping into stories as they unroll, for the common good. The relationship between acting-as-performance and moving out of bystander mode in order to intervene in situations of harm is one way in which actors have the opportunity to make our profession a study of becoming a more effective human. I'm thinking a lot these days about what we mean when we say "make strong choices." 

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