Date + Time
Date + Time
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Tuesday Nov 11, 20257:00 PM
About
About
What’s the difference between horror and tragedy? How do these genre classifications speak to the needs and desires of contemporary audiences? Traditionally, tragedy has been the purview of the stage, running all the way back to the Greeks – who tended to keep the violence unseen, told rather than shown by messengers, prophets and hubris-ruined heroes. Contemporary performing artists – from theatre companies like Teatro La Re-Sentida’s “Oasis de la Impunidad,” Theatre in Quarantine’s “Phantom of the Opera” and “Nosferatu,” and Susie Wang’s “Burnt Toast,” to choreographer and body horror auteur Florentina Holzinger’s “Tanz” – are getting explicit, bringing the jump scares and gore to the stage. These artists are using both theatrical magic and “real” bodily risk to bring audiences to the edge, and accounts of audience members fainting mid-show are markers of the kind of intensity at play.
This season, several shows in the Skirball lineup engage with horror as a theatrical genre – join us to explore the nuances of horror onstage, with NYU professors Kristin Horton (Gallatin) and Sonia Werner (Experimental Humanities).
Speaker
Speaker
Sonia Werner
Sonia Werner is a Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU’s Program in Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement. Her research and teaching areas include the relations between aesthetics and politics, literature and performance, and the question of realism across disparate genres and media. She is currently working on a book entitled “Fringe Realisms: Belated Nations and World Literature,” which tracks experimental writing practices in the global nineteenth century. You can also find her writing published and forthcoming in journals like Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Diacritics, and Poetics Today.
Company
Company
Kristin Horton
Kristin Horton is an Associate Professor of Practice in Theater & Directing at NYU’s Gallatin School. A director and educator, she develops new plays, reimagines classics, and creates community-centered works that interrogate race, gender, and class through theatrical experimentation. Her directing credits include the world premiere of Chisa Hutchinson’s horror-comedy Whitelisted at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in 2022, where gentrification takes a ghostly turn. Horton also collaborates internationally on an art-science research project exploring performance and volcanic risk along Italy’s Campi Flegrei coastline.