Q. What is artistic resonance, and how does the concept create pathways between artistic forms and/or academic fields?
A. In my search for the most basic task of the theater experience, I came to understand that it is resonance that matters most. Our job as theater artists is to create the conditions in which resonance—literally, vibration—can happen between actors and the audiences’ bodies, minds, and senses. As I studied the phenomena of resonance, I realized that, in fact, all the arts are only as successful as the resonance that they generate with those on the receiving end.
Q. What are you most looking forward to seeing during New York’s fall cultural season? Will you attend live theater?
A. I am trepidatious about being in packed rooms, but I shall tread carefully back to live performance. I am finished with Zoom performances. I am looking forward to Bill T. Jones’ production of Deep Blue Sea at the Park Avenue Armory. Also, Pass Over and Dana H. and Is This a Room on Broadway.
Q. What is the last great book you read, and why?
A. I am currently enjoying Louis Menand’s The Free World. Also, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul was a complete revelation this summer and a delightful book of highly readable neuroscience.
Q. What’s on your night table to read next?
A. I am reading a great deal about the poets in Russia who were highly influential prior to the Russian Revolution. These include Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Alexander Blok, Osip Mandelstam, Sergei Yesenin, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. This delicious reading is research for a project that I am directing entitled Beautiful Lady, a musical by Elizabeth Swados and Paul Schmitt.
Q. What are you teaching this semester?
A. I am teaching four classes: Directing 1 is essentially a composition class in which first-year directing students produce one short play per week. For the second-year directing students, I am co-teaching Collaboration 2 with David Henry Hwang and Christian Parker. I am also teaching a Visiting Artists course in which illustrious theater professionals come to our class each week. And along with Brian Kulick, I am co-teaching a class with New York University design professors in which our directing students work with NYU set, lighting, and costume designer students.
Q. You’re hosting a dinner party. Which three scholars or academics, dead or alive, would you invite, and why?
A. bell hooks, Steven Pinker, and Oliver Sacks. What would happen then?
Check out Books to learn more about publications by Columbia professors.
