Kyle’s Reviews > Ethnotheatre (Qualitative Inquiry and Social Justice) > Status Update

Saldaña wraps up his musings on what makes ethnotheatre art by asking the same question, bluntly, to his readers, and while doing so evokes an excellent idea: there needs to be a 21st century Chekhov (yes, trekkies, not to be confused with the 24th century one). It is an idea so simple to grasp, yet so amazingly complex to pull off, that this has to be part of Eury and my class presentation at the end of this month!

Establishing practicalities and realities (while exponentially squaring them) of creating an ethnodramatic play, Saldaña writes optimistically about what could be done, based on what others have already done in this sphere. It's very strange then, that he follows this sensible chapter with a chaotic script for shots: a love story that cubes reality to the point of the surreal. An excerpt would be pointless.

Reading Saldaña's ideas on turning ethnodramatic monologues into dialogues has opened up the possibility of my research project in a more classical vein: similar to Jo Carson's Voodoo that is reprinted at the end of this chapter. Why not make the research I intend to conduct on one of Shakespeare's plays more playfully Shakespearean? More fun to perform with scene partners instead of frustrated soliloquies.

Taking someone else's words and making them into a monologue is the goal described in this chapter. How the researcher goes about it is a matter of artistic choice, not so much fidelity to verbatim representation. The organic poem style Anna Deavere Smith must have pioneered in the early 1990s seems a bit dated today, with the parsed speech pointing out the uncertainty in the subjects voice rather their storytelling.

Very intrigued by the possibilities open to stage research as ethnotheatre, especially as I want to explore performative spaces known as virtual worlds for drama. Whether or not the funding and advisory committee will come together is another story, but Saldaña's engaging introduction opens the door, or more appropriately, sets the stage. Really liked his example of bad ethnotheatre with Foucault's cameo: Enchanté!