Etel Adnan: At a Certain Hour of the Night

The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center presented Etel Adnan: At a Certain Hour of the Night with Klaudia Ruschkowski & Bonnie Marranca livestreamed on the global, commons-based peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Monday 9 April at 6:30 p.m. EDT (New York) / 5:30 p.m. CDT (Chicago) / 1:30 p.m. PDT (San Francisco). Follow @HowlRound on Twitter for updates, and use #howlround.

Join us to celebrate the life and work of Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist Etel Adnan. Afternoon screenings will be followed by a reading of one of her plays, At a Certain Hour of the Night, directed by Zishan Ugurlu (Turkey), Associate Professor of Theatre at Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York; and a discussion with Klaudia Ruschkowski and Bonnie Marranca. Presented as part of the exchange between the CUNY Graduate Center and the American University of Beirut.

Additional support by PAJ Publications/PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Bonnie Marranca, editor.

Photo by Antonio Maria Storch

Etel Adnan is a poet, philosopher, and painter. The author of numerous essays and of plays, she writes across languages, cultures, and continents. Born in Beirut in 1925, she describes herself as an “alchemical product.” Her father was a Muslim from Syria born in Damascus and an officer of the Ottoman Empire. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, Turkey. At home, she lived with two religions, two languages, and two civilizations: the Islamic and the Greek. Her school in Beirut was French, with no reference to the Arab world outside. “Already as a child,” she says, “I had to construct my personality, to build myself up, in order to be something.” Her parents were living in a country not their own and Adnan discovered quickly that their life, as well as hers, was somehow “in between.” Her play At a Certain Hour of the Night was recently published in PAJ 117, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (MIT Press).

Photo by Antonio Maria Storch

Klaudia Ruschkowski was born in 1959 in Dortmund and lives in Volterra, Italy. She is an author, dramaturg, curator, publisher, and translator of English and Italian literature into German. From 1984 on, she has worked for various West and East German theatres as well as the Napoli Teatro Festival, Italia and the Biennale Musica di Venezia. In 1991, she co-founded and was the co-director of The European Culture Centre of Turingia, Erfurt until 1997. From 1999 to 2010, she organized programs and workshops for the International Heiner Müller Society, Berlin. In 2000, she founded, with Wolfgang Storch, Villa Le Guadalupe Spazio Per Le Arti in Volterra. Klaudia has worked in collaboration with Etel Adnan since 1999 as a translator and publisher of various poetry books, essays, interviews, and texts.

Bonnie Marranca is founding publisher and editor of the Obie-Award winning PAJ Publications/PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, which celebrated its 40th year in 2016. A recent recipient of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award for Sustained Achievement, she has written or edited seventeen books. She is the author of three volumes of criticism, Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, and Theatrewritings, and editor several play anthologies, interview and essay collections, including Conversations with Meredith Monk,  New Europe: plays from the continent, Interculturalism and Performance, and Plays for the End of the Century. Her essays have been translated into twenty languages. A Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar, Bonnie Marranca is Professor of Theatre at The New School for Liberal Arts/Eugene Lang College.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Zishan (Zisan) Ugurlu has worked extensively both in New York and abroad as a theater artist since 1995. She is an actress and director-in-residence at La MaMa and Great Jones Repertory Company. She has performed in numerous productions with Great Jones Repertory Company, including Panorama directed by Italian company Motus as part of The Under The Radar Festival 2018. Panorama will be presented in Italy, Belgium, Spain, and South Korea. She is currently working on two directing projects: Music Room is about the prison system and will be performed by formerly incarcerated individuals and Fragments, Lists, and Lacunawritten by Alexandra Chasin, featuring Judith Butler. She is a scientist/artist fellow at Ligo Project working with Dan McCloskey Lab. She is the founding artistic director of “Actors without Borders-ITONY.” She graduated from Columbia University with a MFA degree and holds a Ph.D. She is an Associate Professor at Lang College, The New School University. She is the recipient of the prestigious Fox Foundation Fellowship granted by Theater Communications Group.

About HowlRound TV
HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based peer produced, open access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world's performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and to develop our knowledge commons collectively. Participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected], or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal/WhatsApp. View the video archive of past events.