Undosical

If the musical is “a play or movie in which singing and dancing play an essential part,” then writer/theater-maker Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, University of Chicago scholar David Levin, and musician/writer/producer Erin McKeown are making an ‘undo-sical,’ where song and dance don’t play a conventional role. Through a series of workshops with Chicago-based musicians, sound-makers, and actors that started in Fall 2022 and complemented by a student seminar, The Undo-sical Project unsettles, recomposes and experiments with a musical experience of/with/against a script written by one of the collaborators.

If the musical is “a play or movie in which singing and dancing play an essential part,” then writer/theater-maker Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, University of Chicago scholar David Levin, and musician/writer/producer Erin McKeown are making an ‘undo-sical’, where song and dance hardly play a conventional role, but rather serve as an adventitious disruption. The Undo-sical Project unsettles its composite forms as a means to render the unsettling of a nuclear family and as a formal correlative of that dissolution: here, the recomposition of the family is indexed by the recomposition of dramatic form. The Undo-sical Project proposes to experiment with a musical experience of/with/against a work-in-progress script that has been written by one of the core collaborators.

“Our starting point is the script, which is about the unmaking and remaking of a family, told through the unmaking and remaking of theatrical form. The piece stages a tale of dissolution and reconsolidation while its characters – necessarily bewildered – query the very terms of dissolution and reconsolidation. The piece’s account of the queering of a heteronormative family generates a number of formal equivalences: thus, its characters seek to interrogate the means of their own production and reproduction, asking, with increasing urgency, who bears responsibility for their role, their situation, and their story. The precarity of each of these constructs – role, situation, story – is especially palpable in a breakup. But that precarity is also fundamental to the theater, where role, situation and story are posited and contingent. This precarious sense of construction and dissolution, of stolidity and fragility is figured through the stability and instability of a house at center stage, what transpires in and around the house, and how it relates to other spaces, onstage, offstage, in the auditorium, and in the lobby. And at the risk of pointing out the obvious, we are keen to explore the relationship between the house in the theater and the theater as house, the ways in which theater structurally arranges belonging and can then go about rearranging and restructuring that arrangement.

Music is one of the modes to capture the dynamism and unpredictability of the process. This is all the more exciting – but of necessity, all the more experimental – since there already exists, in the context of (North) American musical theater, a codified rhetoric for the operations of music within a play. It is a rhetoric that we are keen to ignore. That is, rather than turning to music to expand emotional states in an epiphanic moment of reflection and emotional amplification, we are keen for the music to play a playful, unpredictable, experimental, and formally inventive role. Which is not to say that the music must not express emotion, but to say that it must not be relegated to that role or must not assume it simply because that is its conventional assignment. Rather, insofar as the piece posits a dizzying and comical play of registers, such that everyone and everything gets in on the act of dissolution and reconstruction, asking after the part that they play in a dissolution and reconstruction that they have not chosen, while also playing that part – music too has an important, generative, and expressive part to play in the play of registers.

We are curious to explore what a theater piece with music but not musical music – where music’s expressive affordances play a formative and consequential role – would look and sound like, and how it would work. Not a sung-through opera. Not a play with music. A piece where music has arisen out of and reflects an expressive urgency and particularity, but where that expression is more likely to reflect a formal predicament than an emotional state. (As such, we anticipate that the music may well be contingent and comical.) We seek a process and a piece where the expressive material, including especially the musical components, remains open and flexible for as long as possible (which is decidedly not what happens in conventional musical theater creation processes, which lock in and repeat). To cite some role models: we imagine a piece that has the expressive urgency and unpredictability of Ornette Coleman (or for that matter, Erin McKeown), the comedic sensibility of John Cleese, and the formal inventiveness of Young Jean Lee.”

Course

 (re)Queering the American Musical (TAPS 22690) was co-taught in the Gray Center Lab during Spring Quarter of 2023. In this combined studio and seminar course, the fellows explored a selection of musicals (such as  Fun Home, Falsettos, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, A Strange Loop, and Indecent) considering their dramatic structure, character construction, performance norms, and musical conventions. In what sense(s) are these works “queer”? Students investigated course materials through readings, discussions, staging experiments, and a choice of either a final paper or an artistic project. Open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Previous experience in theater, music, and/or film analysis or production was preferred but not required; an interest in detailed textual analysis, rigorous discussion, and focused creative engagement was essential. Team-taught by Leslie Buxbaum (Professor of Practice in TAPS), Erin McKeown (Visiting Gray Center Fellow and composer of the musical Miss You Like Hell), and David Levin (Professor in TAPS, CMS, Germanics, and Sr Advisor to the Provost for Arts).

Fellows

LESLIE BUXBAUM

Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Division of the Humanities, the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, at the University of Chicago.

I am a director primarily of devised theater productions, working with ensembles over the course of a year or more (or less) to create original performances. My productions often bring together different performance languages (dance-theater, clown-theater, circus-theater). As both theater-maker and audience member I enjoy the unexpected ways in which narrative (of some kind) emerges from shifting performance forms and logics. I also love provoking different methods of generating material, as well as encountering varied assumptions about how rehearsals work (as each performance form comes with distinct studio practices).

Currently I am co-creating/co-directing (with Julia Rhoads) Roominghouse, with the Chicago-based dance-theater company Lucky Plush Productions, which will premiere at Steppenwolf’s Theatre 1700 in November 2017. In summer 2017 I’ll be stage directing Third Coast Percussion’s Paddle to the Sea. And earlier this year, I wrote and directed Quest, a circus-theater production at The Actors Gymnasium, loosely based on Tolstoy’s The Three Questions.

Other productions include stage directing Wild Sound, composed by Wilco’s Glenn Kotche for Third Coast Percussion, with performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), National Forum of Music (Wroclaw), De Doelen (Rotterdam); and co-creating/co-directing (with Julia Rhoads) The Better Half and The Queue, both of which received a National Dance Project Award and a National Performance Network creation fund award (’12 and ’14). Presenting venues include Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Spoleto Festival USA (SC); CRASHarts at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; Dance Cleveland; Flynn Center for the Performing Arts (VT); ODC (CA); and Maui Arts and Cultural Center. I was a co-founder of the Chicago-based physical theater company 500 Clown, where I co-created/directed 500 Clown Macbeth, 500 Clown Frankenstein, 500 Clown Christmas and 500 Clown and the Elephant Deal. 500 Clown shows performed in Chicago at Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Lookingglass Theatre, among others, and toured throughout the US, receiving an Association of Performing Arts Presenters Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Grant, and a Presidential Fellowship in the Arts at University of Chicago from 2005-08.

Other directing credits include Damon Kiely’s The Revel with the House Theatre of Chicago; Redmoon’s The Elephant and the Whale, with Chicago Children’s Theater (with Frank Maugeri); Redmoon’s Hunchback at New Victory Theater (NYC) and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago; and Float with About Face Theater. Prior to turning to directing, I toured nationally and internationally as an actor with NYC’s Elevator Repair Service.

From 2011 – 2016, I was the curator of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, a forum for experimental collaborations between artists and scholars, and prior to that, I was a lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. I received my BA from Brown University and PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University and trained in physical theater at Écoles Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier.

ERIN MCKEOWN

Erin McKeown is a musician, writer, and producer known internationally for their prolific disregard of stylistic boundaries. Their brash and clever electric guitar playing is something to see. Their singing voice is truly unique —clear, cool, and collected. Over the last 20 years, they have performed around the world, released 11 full length albums, and written for film, television, and theater, all the while refining their distinctive and challenging mix of American musical forms.

Erin’s first musical, Miss You Like Hell, written with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, opened Off-Broadway at The Public Theater in 2018. It was nominated for 5 Drama Desk Awards, including Best Lyrics, Best Music and Best Orchestrations, and The Wall Street Journal named it Best Musical of 2018.

Leading their own band, Erin has performed at Bonnaroo, Glastonbury, and the Newport Folk Festivals. A familiar presence on NPR and the BBC, McKeown’s songs have also appeared in numerous commercials and television shows.

While a student at Brown University, Erin was a resident artist at Providence, RI’s revolutionary community arts organization AS220. A 2011-2012 fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society, they are also the recipient of a 2016 writing fellowship from The Studios of Key West and a 2018 residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. McKeown was a 2020-21 Professor of the Practice at Brown University.

Erin’s latest album KISS OFF KISS is out now.

DAVID J. LEVIN

Addie Clark Harding Professor, Department of Germanic Studies, Department of Cinema & Media Studies, the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, and the College. Since joining the faculty at Chicago, I have taught courses in German Cinema (e.g., Weimar Cinema; German Cinema 1945-1989; Fassbinder: Melodrama, Politics, and Poetics; The Cinema of Catastrophe), on theories of spectacle; performance theory; and the intersections of cinema, theater, and opera. Recently, my research and teaching have been organized around questions of performance and spectatorship, especially the institutional and ideological histories of absorption. In addition to my academic work, I have spent a number of years working as a dramaturg, mostly in Germany, (e.g., at the Frankfurt Opera, the Bremen Opera, and the Frankfurt Ballet) but also, more recently, at Lyric Opera of Chicago and for opera cabal, an avant-garde opera company based in New York and Chicago. For the past five years, I have served as the executive editor of the Opera Quarterly (published by Oxford University Press). From 2007-2010, I served as Co-Director of the M.A. Program in the Humanities at Chicago. In the Spring of 2010, Christopher Wild and I hosted “Praxes of Theory”, an international conference at Chicago that brought together artists and scholars form Berlin and Chicago to explore the intersections of performance practice and performance theory. The conference inaugurated a multi-year cooperation with the Institute for Theater Studies at the Free University Berlin. In the Summer of 2011, I was named the inaugural Director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Before joining the faculty at Chicago, I taught at Columbia University, where I served on the faculties in Germanic Languages, Theatre, and Gender Studies. In my last two years at Columbia, I served as co-chair, with Rosalind Morris, of the Columbia Seminar on Cinema & Interdisciplinary Interpretation