Theatre History is/as/through Production Labor

“A welder’s smock, gloves, and a mask covered my sweater, jeans and boots. I shout ‘welding’ to forewarn the others in the room to avert their eyes, place the conducting wire at the intersection of two steel bars, and pull the trigger to complete my spot-weld. I raise my mask to examine my work and, to my excitement, it appears the spot will hold.”

—Hannah Florian

During the fall semester of 2014 students in my undergraduate course “Histories of Theatre and Drama I: Rituals and World Performance” constructed and performed on a minimally appointed, mobile stage as part of their exploration of late-medieval English pageantry. Although we called it a “pageant wagon,” the stage’s design had few similarities to previous reconstruction projects built to test hypotheses about medieval performance practices.¹ For us, the precedent of civic-minded actors on mobile stages performing for a citywide spectatorship became the starting point to imagine a contemporary campus performance, and the assignment prompted students to critically engage questions around the practices and politics of artistic labor. For theatre majors, the pageant-wagon project asks them to recognize their connection to a genealogy of artistic labor reaching back to the preindustrial work of medieval trade guilds, and to contemplate their own impending identities as laborers in today’s arts economy. But even for non-majors like Hannah Florian with no experience in theatrical production nor desire to work in arts-related professions, the assignment prompted insights into their identities as laborers in yet-to-be-established careers: “I felt empowered and exhilarated [having] learned and completed tasks that I never saw myself capable of doing.”² Florian (now a medical student) may never again spot-weld metal, but the insight she gained through hands-on production labor instilled the kind of confidence that early career workers need to navigate and assert their worth in the impersonal workplace economies that await their arrival.

This essay elaborates on the pedagogical dimensions of the pageant wagon project, conceived to help students perform independently on a campus with too few conventional stages, but sustained by my desire to raise consciousness around the politics of labor involved in theatrical production. As a history assignment the project assessed the students’ knowledge of late-medieval English pageantry, but this essay strategically elaborates on the ways in which the project drew students’ attention to the experiences and perspectives of artistic laborers. Building a mobile stage as part of a larger assignment in historical adaptation provided an opportunity to teach theatre history as an embodied experience of production labor—artistic labor not in the abstract, but rooted in the material realities of bodies interacting with one another under specific conditions and within specific social circumstances.

Referencing the pedagogical languages of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, this assignment intended to provide “liberatory” classroom experiences around moments of praxis, helping students to critically engage cultural and historical valuations of artistic labor through an embodiment of work skills.³ Randy Martin also argues in Performance as Political Act that the critical knowledge and perspectives gained through bodily experience—the embodiment of work skills, for example—can offer a “liberatory promise” from structures of power; as a site of resistance against dominant capitalist and consumerist ideologies the body “sustains a realm of experience not captured by the cultural commodity and never fully expressible through it” (8). Classroom exercises that connect bodily learning/ knowing to concepts of work and labor prompt students to find agency in their roles as laborers-in-training. For a population preparing for the workforce and feeling the acute pressures of a fluctuating twenty-first-century economy, an embodied study of historical theatrical labor doubles as a rehearsal of occupational abilities that potentially alleviates anxieties about their entry into a labor marketplace, and elevates critical understandings of how that marketplace constructs workers’ identities.

As a scholar currently conducting research into backstage labor, laborers, and labor unions, I am increasingly conscious of the economic structures and cultural politics shaping my students’ perceptions of work. I use the term work to reference performed, embodied activity; work, according to...