What’s the relation between theatre and justice today? Histories of ancient theatre draw a direct line between Greek tragedies and contemporary Western justice systems. Protest movements and activists have used forms of spectacle and street theatre to directly intervene in social and political systems. The distance between the stage and the street is dynamic, and artists continually move to inhabit, question and deploy this connection in their works.
This season, several shows in the Skirball lineup engage with the relation of theatre and justice – from Daniel Fish’s “Kramer/Fauci,” to Milo Rau’s paired presentations, “The Interrogation” and “The Pelicot Trial” which explicitly draws on courtroom accounts from Gisèle Pelicot’s landmark case.
Join us to explore the nuances of justice in relation to contemporary theatre, taking these pieces as a starting point but speaking more broadly to contemporary trends – with NYU Tisch faculty Mauricio Selgado and Lauren Whitehead, and NYU’s Performing Arts Librarian Rye Gentleman.
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Rye Gentleman is the Librarian for Performing Arts and has taught in the Drama and Performance Studies departments at NYU. His writing has been published in TDR/The Drama Review, Theater, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Performing Arts Resources, and the anthology Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre (Routledge). Current projects include a dissertation-based book project exploring real and imagined links between transgender and transhumanism, and co-curating the Archives Onstage series, a collaboration between NYU Libraries and the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.
Mauricio Tafur Salgado is currently an Associate Arts Professor, the Director of Applied Theatre, and the Interim Chair of Tisch Drama at NYU. He is a co-founder of Arts Ignite and the Remember 2019 Collective, a Core Faculty member with artEquity, a Program Director with the Collective Fund of the Distracted Globe Foundation, and a Faculty Fellow with The Arts and Health Lab@NYU, where he recently co-authored a commission for the World Health Organization titled, Creative Care: A Resource Guide for Artists Working in Humanitarian Conflicts.
Lauren Whitehead is a writer, performer and dramaturg. She writes in several forms including poetry, adaptations and drama. Her poems have been published in POETRY magazine and Apogee Journal as well as in selected anthologies such as Break Beat Poets, Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic and What Things Cost, the first anthology of labor writing in nearly a century. Whitehead adapted the text of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ award winning memoir, Between the World and Me for staging at the Apollo Theater, the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and for the TV adaptation on HBO. In 2022, Whitehead was a finalist for The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the oldest and largest playwriting prize honoring women + writing in English. Her ten minute play, Cliff & Clara & Her Baby was published by Concord Theatricals and is currently in development to be made into a short film. In her most recent performance, she originated the lead role of “Un/Sung” in the opera “We Shall Not Be Moved,” which she performed at the Wilma Theater, The Apollo Theater and the Stadsschouwburg Theater in Amsterdam. Currently, she is a Professor of Drama at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.