A Fresh Slant: Rethinking Emily Dickinson with Guest Artist Stuart Sherman

A FRESH SLANT: Rethinking Emily Dickinson with Guest Artist Stuart Sherman Ellen Donkin The whole piece is an attempt to get inside Emily Dickinson. I'm not her but I'm very open about it. I show myself doing it. I catch myself in the act of doing it and I let people see that. I don't try to hide it. When I wear her dress it's another way of saying,"here is this monstrous presumption we all make about EmilyDickinson." I'm writing on that presumption, filling in that white dress. We don't know who she was. -----Stuart Sherman Preparation Stuart Sherman's SLANT (concerning Emily Dickinson) provided a formative experience for our theatre program, both in the way it taught us how to integrate a visiting artist into our curriculum and in the way his work changed our thinking about performance itself. In 1986, we were offered a guest artist residency in order to create a performance piece commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Emily Dickinson's death. The project was perfect for us. It combined our proximity to the Dickinson homestead and gravesites (Hampshire College is just six miles down the road) with our program's stated commitment to explore non-traditional theatre. Furthermore, our state arts council had a serious interest in funding such a residency.1 We were intrigued by the prospect; certainly teaching avant-garde theatre through textbooks paled next to the possibility of having our students watch a piece develop firsthand . We plunged ahead with the funding request. We selected Stuart Sherman, a New York-based performance artist, because of his special interest in creating personal reconsiderations of classical literary figures; he had just completed a trilogy about Chekhov, Strindberg, and Brecht.2 After recovering from the initial rapture of receiving funding for Stuart's residency, however, we began asking ourselves the hard questions. How precisely would the students benefit from this experience? How could we integrate the needs of the resident artist with the needs of the program? We realized Stuart's personal response to Emily Dickinson had to emerge not only as a production but also as a teaching device for students—and faculty— attempting to think about theatre in new ways. 145 146 Ellen Donkin At all costs, we wanted to avoid the kind of apprenticeship which sets up students as mute observers on the sidelines while the resident artist and the faculty have all the fun. Nevertheless, Stuart had such a precise and fully conceived vision for the piece that we didn't foresee a great deal of room for creative improvising around the production itself. Also, although the piece would use four student performers in addition to Stuart, it would not require traditional acting. In other words, we had to be careful about creating unrealistic expectations. And even assuming that we successfully integrated students into the technical mounting of the show, their exposure could not stop there. Because we run a liberal arts program rather than a conservatory program, we were determined to find ways of incorporating the intellectual and historical content of the project as an integral part of the production work. Dramaturgy, which has always been a component of our program, now became central. Given our curricular structure, Stuart's production had to situate itself in the context of a course we call Theatre Three.3 This course creates a point of entry for incoming theatre students and transmits to them an ethos for the program by setting up a tripartite emphasis on skills combining performance, production, and dramaturgy. We urge students not to specialize. If Theatre Three does its job properly, students become "multi-lingual" in theatre, taking dramaturgical research and crew work as seriously as stage management, directing, or acting. Theatre Three treats dramaturgy as a fundamental strategy for creating a show with a point of view. The more we considered how to situate Stuart's project into the context of Theatre Three, the more important dramaturgy became. The enrollment of our class consisted of twenty-four new students (with unknown skills and exposure to theatre), ten senior theatre students functioning as teaching assistants , two faculty members, one staff technical director, and...