Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative

Description

Casting a Movement brings together US-based actors, directors, educators, playwrights, and scholars to explore the cultural politics of casting. Drawing on the notion of a "welcome table"―a space where artists of all backgrounds can come together as equals to create theatre―the book’s contributors discuss casting practices as they relate to varying communities and contexts, including Middle Eastern American theatre, Disability culture, multilingual performance, Native American theatre, color- and culturally-conscious casting, and casting as a means to dismantle stereotypes. Syler and Banks suggest that casting is a way to invite more people to the table so that the full breadth of US identities can be reflected onstage, and that casting is inherently a political act; because an actor’s embodied presence both communicates a dramatic narrative and evokes cultural assumptions associated with appearance, skin color, gender, sexuality, and ability, casting choices are never neutral. By bringing together a variety of artistic perspectives to discuss common goals and particular concerns related to casting, this volume features the insights and experiences of a broad range of practitioners and experts across the field. As a resource-driven text suitable for both practitioners and academics, Casting a Movement seeks to frame and mobilize a social movement focused on casting, access, and representation. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of illustrations Acknowledgments List of contributors Foreword: From “I Love Your Freckles” to “Representation Matters” Introduction The welcome table: Casting for an integrated society PART I: Culturally conscious casting 1. The chasm between 2. Playing with “race” in the new millennium 3. Nevertheless, whiteness persisted PART II: Approaches to casting Middle Eastern American theater 4. Casting pearls before authenticity 5. ReOrienting: A Middle Eastern American casting case study 6. Casting Middle Eastern American theater: Cultural, academic, and professional challenges PART III: Casting and disability culture 7. Casting disabled actors: Taking our rightful place onstage? 8. The difference disability makes: Unique considerations in casting performers with disabilities 9. A great and complicated thing: Reimagining disability PART IV: Casting and multilingual performance 10. The sea will listen 11. Setting a global table with multilingual theater 12. Creating emergent spaces: Casting, community-building, and extended dramaturgy PART V: Casting contemporary Native American theater 13. Journey 14. Native Voices at the Autry: Casting the room 15. Decolonial practices for contemporary Native Theater PART VI: Subverting stereotypes 16. Whose story is this to tell? 17. Casting, cross-racial performance, and the work of creativity 18. Artists of color/cross-racial casting PART VII: Casting across identities 19. Reaparecer 20. Collidescope 2.0: Performing the “alien gaze” 21. The spatio-temporal logics of Collidescope’s welcome table Afterword Index