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Conjuring Abolition Phonography in A Record Album Interpretation
- TDR: The Drama Review
- The MIT Press
- Volume 64, Number 3, Fall 2020 (T247)
- pp. 132-149
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
The Wooster Group's 2017 The B-Side: "Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons," A Record Album Interpretation has three actors reanimate a 1965 vinyl LP of prison work songs. This formally simple production embeds a series of almost imperceptible shifts between past and present, thus "interinanimating" the men on the record and the men onstage, conjuring an "abolition phonography": a mode of sensory (dis)formation that shortcircuits the racial ideologies of the senses and points towards a collective future.