Interviews

MENA cultures are deeply familial with a strong connection to home, defined geographically and through close family bonds. With fraught political and religious opinions about queerness throughout the region, making queer art can threaten those deep connections. How do queer MENA artists consider those complications when making theatre? How do individuals change culture in the face of possible exile? Multi-hyphenate artists Zeyn Joukhadar and Raphaël Aimé Khouri interrogate these questions.

Film reaches a larger public than theatre due to the way it is produced and disseminated. In this way, it has a large and lasting cultural impact. In this episode with Mike Mossalem and Amin El Gamal, we discuss the ways the film and theatre fields influence each other as they both contribute to culture change and performance methodologies.

Activism and storytelling often go hand in hand. What does it mean for queer art and activism to take center stage? How can we look to the future while honoring the places and people from where we all came? In this episode, Sivan Battat talks about their ancestral storytelling workshops within queer and Middle Eastern communities and how they see the relationship between art and activism.

Is art inherently political? Must artists consider sociopolitics in the development of their work? Hamed Sinno’s art has been constantly and publicly politicized. In this episode, we hear about Sinno’s own artistic process and how they approach their art in light of this politicization and their perspective on the role of art in politics in the MENA region and beyond.

Queer SWANA theatremakers are constantly breaking out of boxes. Even within queer and/or SWANA spheres, some artists are pushing boundaries and redefining broad identity categories. Join two such artists, Bazeed and Pooya Mohseni, in a discussion on the present and future of SWANA theatremaking.

In this episode, playwright and dramaturg Adam Ashraf Elsayigh joins co-hosts Nabra Nelson and Marina Johnson to unpack what it means to put queer SWANA characters on stage and discuss the future of representation in the United States.

What role does white supremacy play in the creation of the queer theatre canon? What power and what responsibility do we—as queer theatremakers, historians, and educators—have to challenge canons and archives that define “queer” almost exclusively as white and cisgender? Artist-scholars Janet Werther, Victoria LaFave, Jordan Ealey, David Silvernail, and Kelli Crump join host Nicolas Shannon Savard to tackle these questions and to queer the archive.

Austin’s pop princess, p1nkstar, shares the story of her evolution from performance artist creating a pop star persona for Instagram to real life pop star to community leader creating spaces for fellow trans artists to showcase their work in Texas. This episode also features guest co-host Melissa Lin Sturges, coordinator of the annual Doric Wilson Panel for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) LGBTQ+ Focus Group.

Host Nicolas Shannon Savard, Dr. H. May, and Dr. Liz Thomson discuss the creative and collaborative possibilities that emerge when audio description (AD) is made an integral part of the artistic process, as opposed to solely an accommodation for individual audience members. They critique traditional models of AD that demand objectivity and propose alternative approaches that embrace self-determination, specificity of lived experience, and universal design.

J.C. Pankratz returns to the podcast to reflect on the first full production of their play Seahorse, directed by Nicolas Shannon Savard, starring Emmett Podgorski. Nicolas, J.C., and Emmett discuss how the collaborative process, from auditions through closing night, was informed by queer community building, access intimacy, and consent-based practice. They offer behind-the-scenes perspectives and concrete examples of how tools and ideas discussed in previous episodes played out in practice.

Nicolas Shannon asks Joy Brooke Fairfield and Raja Benz how their intimacy work is informed by queer theory and critical theory. Their conversation bounces between queer of color theory, decolonial theory, disability theory, and the dim glow of the night club; between past, present, and future; between the ideas they’re sure of and the ones they’re working out in real time. Bonus! It comes with dozens of recommended readings.

In the first part of a two-part conversation on queer-trans intimacy direction and choreography, Nicolas talks with Theatrical Intimacy Education faculty members Dr. Joy Brooke Fairfield and Raja Benz about their courses Working with Trans & Non-Binary Artists and Staging Intimacy Beyond the Binary. They discuss crafting courses that are less Trans-101 and more cracking gender open, resisting patriarchal and colonialist scripts, and bringing queer culture into the rehearsal room.