This section collects all HowlRound content that takes the form of an interview between two or more theatremakers. Interested in contributing your own interview? Here are our interview guidelines and best practices!
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.
Theater Mu managing director Anh Thu T. Pham and development director Wesley Mouri discuss the ideology behind the theater’s Pay As You Are program, how it works, and what impact it’s having on the theatre six years after its implementation.
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.
Setting the Stage for Empowerment with Theatre of the Oppressed
9 November 2023
Applied theatre scholars and practitioners Jennifer Schaupp and Dr. Felicia Owusu-Ansah discuss the empowering potential of Theatre of the Oppressed, and how Felicia has been able to utilize it in Ghana and other places around the world.
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.
More Cultivation, Less Crane Machine: Who Gets to Design in LORT Theatres
6 November 2023
Designers Porsche McGovern and Sherrice Mojgani discuss the impact of Porsche’s multi-year study looking at designers and directors in LORT theatres by pronouns, and how theatre leaders can better support and learn from the freelance artists they hire.
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.
Kinship, Solidarity, and Working Towards Everyone’s Survival
14 September 2023
As part of the Black and Indigenous Futures series, this conversation convenes Samora Pinderhughes, Storme Webber, and Mary Amanda McNeil to consider the ways that kinship and solidarity across broader collectives can coexist and mutually enrich one another through intentional practice.
The Queer-Trans Performance Family Tree is more of a Galaxy
With Guest H. May
13 September 2023
Dr. H. May joins host Nicolas Shannon Savard, who introduces the Queer-Trans Performance Family Tree Project, an interactive, open-access digital exhibit visually connecting trans artists across the United States to the collectives and communities who have sustained our work. This episode explores the role of mentorship in both the research for the project and in their own work as gender nonconforming theatremakers.
With Guests David Silvernail, Janet Werther, Victoria Lafave, Jordan Ealey, and Kelli Crump
6 September 2023
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.
Composting Queer Trauma through a Collaborative Process in SEAL
24 August 2023
As writer-performer Dante Fuoco and director Clara Wiest came together to rework Dante’s autobiographical solo show SEAL, they developed a process that centered intentional care and trauma-informed practices. In this interview with Rachel Pottern Nunn, Clara and Dante reflect upon the production, discuss the relationship between writer/performer and director, and share insights from their generative process.
Shakespeare Against the Canon in Our Verse in Time to Come
22 August 2023
Karen Ann Daniels, Malik Work, and John “Ray” Proctor sit down with Melissa Lin Sturges to discuss their work on Our Verse in Time to Come, a Folger Theatre production that used Shakespeare as a jumping off point to become a testament to “the other bards”—the ones still living and the ones still to come.
On Collaborative Evolution with Friendship at its Core
21 August 2023
After three decades of working together as playwright and director, collaborators and friends Carlyle Brown and Noel Raymond are trying something new: co-creating a theatrical work and performing in it. They sit down to discuss the project’s genesis in their friendship and the research, questions, and experiences that are shaping their generative process.
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.
For Working Actors Teaching Their Craft in College, Those Who Can Do, Teach
14 August 2023
What does it mean to teach acting at the college level? Gregory Jones and Adrianne Krstansky discuss the changing environment of university acting training, from students’ desires for purposeful and justice-oriented education to university expectations of market-driven “deliverables” from classes in the arts.
Making Space for Self-Authorship through Audio Description
With Guests H. May and Liz Thomson
26 July 2023
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.
Making Space: Consent, Collaboration, and Queer Access Intimacy
With Guests J.C. Pankratz and Emmett Podgorski
12 July 2023
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.
Playwrights Carlyle Brown, Elaine Romero, and Catherine Filloux come together to discuss their experiences as working theatre artists who also act as caregivers to their spouses.
Queer-Trans Intimacy: One Foot in the Academy and the Other in the Nightclub
With Guests Raja Benz and Joy Brooke Fairfield
5 July 2023
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.
Host Nicolas Shannon Savard and playwright Leanna Keyes discuss her play Doctor Voynich and Her Children. What does it mean to stage trans stories about queer motherhood, abortion, intimacy, choice, and power in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and the ongoing legislative attacks on reproductive rights and the trans community?
With Guests Dr. Joy Brooke Fairfield and Raja Benz
21 June 2023
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.
Tony Garcia and Claudia de Vasco share their experiences becoming immersed in the Chicano movement, which has informed both of their careers in artistic leadership.
Queer Intimacies, Trans Futures, Grief, and Radical Hope in Seahorse
With Guest J.C. Pankratz
14 June 2023
Host Nicolas Shannon Savard interviews playwright J.C. Pankratz about their play Seahorse, a poetic, stream-of-consciousness one-person show about a trans man’s attempts at artificial insemination following his husband’s unexpected death. The conversation will dive into the play’s approach to the “messiness” of imagining futures you can’t yet see and its use of magical realism to invite audiences to sit inside that mess as witnesses and confidants.