On November 2, 2022, Dr. Giovanna Parmigiani discussed affect theater with her guests Prof. Cristiana Giordano (UC Davis) and Prof. Greg Pierotti (University of Arizona), and how it can transform academic research. This discussion touched on the role of affects, emotions, and collaborative practices in academic and non-academic processes of meaning-making.
Full transcript:
NARRATOR: Gnoseologies. Affect Theater and Collaborative Meaning-making, a conversation with Christiana Giordano and Greg Pierotti. November 2, 2022.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Good afternoon, and welcome to our second gnoseologies event for the 2022-2023 academic year. I'm happy to be here again with you. I'm Giovanna Parmigiani. And I am the host of this series, organized within the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative at the CSWR are here at Harvard Divinity School.
This series focuses on ways of knowing that are often labeled as non-rational, traditionally referred to as gnosis in Western philosophical and religious traditions. And often understood in contraposition to science. These ways of knowing are becoming more and more influential in contemporary societies, popular culture, and academic research.
What is the place of spirit possession, divination, and experience is perceived as out of the ordinary in our lives? How can we study and approach this type of phenomena? What is the place of multiple subjectivities and collaborative meaning-making practices?
Going beyond dichotomies such as body and mind, ordinary and extraordinary, reason and affects, and matter and spirits. The series hosts scholars of different disciplines and practitioners interested in exploring and expanding the boundary of what counts as knowledge today.
So it is with immense pleasure that I introduce today's guest today, Christiana Giordano and Greg Pierotti. Christiana is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She received a PhD from UC Berkeley and her book, Migrants in Translations, Caring and the Logic of Difference in Contemporary Italy, won the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing and the Boyer Prize in psychoanalytic anthropology.
Her current research investigates new ways of rendering ethnographic material into artistic forms. And as a result of this interest, she met with our second guest today, Greg Pierotti. Greg is Assistant Professor in experimental dramaturgy at the University of Arizona.
He co-authored The Laramie Project, Laramie 10 Years later and the People's Temple, which have garnered Humanitas Bay Area Theater Critics awards and an Emmy nomination. He has co-authored the Moment Work book with members of Tectonic Theater Project. And his research investigates dramaturgical practices that deal with problems of narrative and truth claims in theater of the real.
Together, Giordano and Pierotti have been collaborating on a new methodology, Affect Theater, and the intersection of the social sciences and performance, which will be the topic of our conversation today. So thanks, Christina and Greg, for being here.
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: Thank you, Giovanna.
GREG PIEROTTI: Thank you so much for having us.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: So last year, I taught a course here at HDS, Religion Materiality on the Senses. That was basically our sensory ethnography course. And in this course, my students and I encountered your work, and thought it was particularly thought-provoking.
And so there we are. Let's start from here. Do you want to tell us a little bit how encountered your topic of research and practice, Affect Theater, or maybe how it's encountered you?
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: So we have a little origin story that we usually tell to explain how we met and why we met. So when I was writing my first book, Migrants-- what my dissertation that became a book, I was-- as everybody who was writing big projects, I was struggling with how to organize this immense quantity of ethnographic material.
And I went to see a play at the Berkeley Rep, which is a local theater in Berkeley. And I saw one of the plays that Greg wrote, the People's Temple, which is the story of the People's Temple, which was a movement in the '70s in the Bay Area that followed Jim Jones, who was a spiritual charismatic figure.
And this movement had a very complex history, social, racial, political history. And it ended up in Nam in a form of mass suicide. So the company, Greg and his collaborators, had researched this movement and had done interviews with survivors, with family, members of the people who were part of the group, archival documents.
And they devised this amazing play that portrayed the story and the social life of the movement that I went to see. And when I left, I felt like, OK, now, I can write a book.
Because what the play did was it looked at one event from so many different angles. And it kind of conjured so many different voices that at the end, you leave and you really don't know what's right and what is wrong, what is ethical, what is not ethical. Like all your questions are completely reformulated.
And it's kind of what I wanted to do with my ethnographic method. So after writing the book, I started taking classes in theater writing. And I was kind of searching for a different form of writing. And the universe conjured because Greg Pierotti, who I really didn't-- I mean, because I knew the theater company, but not the individual members of the Tectonic Theater Project.
But Greg appeared at UC Davis as a student, as an MFA student. And colleagues kept telling me, you've got to meet him. You have to meet him. And so I wrote him an email and I said, well, you know I'm interested in theater and I'm working on questions of migration and borders. I work with ethnographic material. You want to meet. And maybe we can collaborate on something. And now, Greg, it's your part of the story.
GREG PIEROTTI: And so I just ignored the email because that's how I respond to things when they first appear to me. I'm really slow at committing. But Christiana persisted. And so on the second email, I agreed to have coffee with her. And from that initial coffee meeting, it was just so apparent that we had so much to share with each other and to learn from each other.
I think this speaks directly to kind of the project that we share, Affect Theater. I think one of the things that was resonant for Christiana and for a lot of audience members about the People's Temple is that there is a shared cultural narrative about what happened down there.
A lot of younger students that I encounter don't know about this event. But when I was growing up, this was a huge event. And it was basically a mass murder suicide by a bunch of crazy cultists in the jungles of Guyana. And that was the story. That was the beginning and the end of the story.
And so our project was to sort of encounter this giant archive of empirical material and try to refract all the different sides of this story from all the different places of all the different stakeholders to see that there really isn't like a definitive true version of the story that we can share.
And so this is a lot of where we depart from when we start to engage with our own and other students empirical material using Affect Theater. We're interested, I think, as much in the collisions of like truth claims as we are and kind of coming up with a definitive version of what our research might mean.
So I often say the work is a lot about not knowing what our research is rather than knowing what our research is. And I think that we're both very engaged by this question. So that was a jumping off point for us.
And then I was working on a body of material about Freddie Gray, who was a Black Baltimore resident, who was killed in an illegal arrest by the Baltimore City Police. And so we organized a workshop around that material.
And we spent a long time with students developing that. And it became one act of what will hopefully be a two-act play at some point. And then the following two years, we worked with Christiana's material that she gathered in the Mediterranean around bodies and motion and migration. And we developed two projects based on that material called Untories and Unstories 2.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thanks a lot. And thank you for this origin story. It's always nice to hear what's in the background. But can you tell us a little bit more what is Affect Theater, and how it works? Yeah. Some more about the practice actually.
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: Yeah. So we started by really kind of trying to create-- you can call it a cross-pollination or a collaboration or a weaving together of our individual practices. So my ethnographic work and anthropological questioning with a theater, a very specific theater devising practice that Greg taught me and the first iteration of our working together with the seminar undergrad in the anthropology department and in performance studies.
GREG PIEROTTI: And I'll just throw in that for those of you who don't the theater disciplines, that theater devising, it's a way of making theater that doesn't depart from an existing script that was written separately. So typically, in the theater, a playwright write to play, and then they hand it over to the director, who gets designers and actors to kind of use the play is a blueprint to create a show.
And what we do is we kind of start with the body of research and these particular practices and build from the ground up the performance, the text, the design, and everything, simultaneously.
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: What was compelling for me was the fact that I could bring all or select my ethnographic material, interview transcripts, field notes, images, the sound recording, objects, and share them with a group of collaborators, those who participated to the seminar and then later to the series of workshops that we organized.
And so the compelling part was that we would start from this raw ethnographic material. And together, we would work it and create a performance. And when I say work it, I mean that we would start actually devising, working with this technique of devising ethnographic material into a performance.
And here is where the vocabulary of elements of the stage, which is what Greg introduced us becomes extremely important. Because when we do workshops, we work with empirical material. But what is fundamental is to bring into the room all the elements of the stage, which are sound, lights, objects, that space, other bodies.
And Greg can say something more specific about it. But the idea is that even if we work with ethnographic material, which is mostly textual, which is made of words--
GREG PIEROTTI: And there's also an element of the stage, right?
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: Exactly. That is just another element of the stage. So one of the interests in engaging with this practice is that text actually gets decentered at the beginning of the process because we bring in text towards the end. And it's only one element of the stage.
And it's not necessarily the most important because we can still engage our ethnographic material only through sound or only through light if we want to evoke a certain atmosphere or a certain event. But Greg can say more about the specificity of--
GREG PIEROTTI: Yeah. But before I do, it's so funny because Christiana is sharing about some of the stuff that sort of I brought to the table. But what Christiana brought for me, a lot of things about the research process, but particularly, she introduced me to the work of [INAUDIBLE], who is a French anthropologist, who was working in the [INAUDIBLE] in France, studying witchcraft and having a difficult time sort of finding her way into the field.
Everyone was kind of there is no witchcraft here. And it wasn't until she actually got caught into the situation as a participant because she got bewitched. Basically, her property got-- she was told that she was being enchanted.
And then suddenly, she found her way in because she couldn't separate herself any longer. So she wrote this incredible essay called About Participation, which challenges the whole concept of participant observation.
One of her favorite lines that we love so much is she says, to participate while observing or to observe while participate is about as paradoxical as savoring a burning hot ice cream. So she poses that in order to do proper field research, you have to be caught in the kind of grammars and the world of the field itself.
And then she posits that when you leave the field, you have to find a way of getting caught again in those same sort of energies and affective realities. You can't write from a kind of theoretical position of understanding your material. You have to be caught again.
And so that was sort of our project, was how do we use these compositional practices to find a way to create an opportunity for people coming back from the field, to get caught again and not know what they're doing. And then what we do is we make little EP what we call episodes.
And it might be an episode exploring a piece of empirical material or it might be an episode exploring the way of beam of light falls on the ground. But we basically just make these tiny little episodes. And they start with either I or we begin. And they end with we end.
And so if I'm making an episode about this bottle, I might just say, I begin-- I end. So the purpose of doing this is simply to say, oh, this was in my field site. Like I encountered one of these.
And this is sort of the phenomenological qualities that it has that can speak from the stage. And then we build on those. And we add text and we add light and we add other things. And the meanings, they've moved from being more phenomenological-oriented to being more semiotic. Like they start to mean certain things to different people.
The way a text is used when I blow into the bottle and make that sound has certain resonances for certain people. So we make the moments more and more complex as we build. But we start from this very basic premise of initially just exploring how the different elements that we might have encountered in the field and then brought back into the studio speak back to us as audiences.
And our interaction between that kind of conversation and ourselves allows like new kind of relations to our empirical material to emerge. Christiana, do you want to help me?
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: So we spend a lot of time really exploring all the elements of the stage that we have in the room. So sometimes, if we are doing a weekend long workshop, we might spend the first day just not touching text and exploring the objects, costumes, light, sounds that we bring to the workshop, but also the space where the workshop is happening.
So we explore the architecture of the space. Everything that doesn't move or things that might be hanging. And it's almost like for me, I've always seen it as a practice of awakening our attention and awakening our affective responses to what is around us. So that when we do engage texts, that text resonates with something around us. It resonates, in fact, with the affective quality of the space where we are in.
So the idea is in the here and now of having finished fieldwork, how do we-- I want to say represent the text, but it's really re-encounter it and find ways to get caught again, or get caught anew, which is we work with the question that [INAUDIBLE] raises.
What does it mean to write? What does it mean to write ethnography? It's not a distancing process, but it's a process of recreating or creating relationships anew with the material, with the sites, with the encounters, and kind of bring it back in.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thanks a lot. I really appreciate if I can jump in the reference of [INAUDIBLE], not only because I'm a scholar of Magic, but I think because it explains why if I can do some code switching here, since we are the Divinity School house, such a method could be particularly useful in the study of religion.
And I think about lit religion and the object and the affects. And also, the encounters with other than human and more than human, let's say, interlocutors persons and relationships. So yeah, I just wanted to point out that this might be very presented, of course.
You're an anthropologist not working particular in religion, and you work in theater, Greg. And so from a scholar of religion, it makes really very much sense. And I think it's a great opportunity to explore aspects of the study of religion that are not easily explorable.
Do you have something to share with us some, sort of an episode or a couple of episodes so we can see Affect Theater in action?
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: Yeah. We actually have-- it wasn't like planned, but we have a short episode on Magic that we did while we were in residence at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania last year.
Last fall, we did a seminar, a graduate seminar, on Affect Theater. And the students who participated brought fragments of their ethnographic material. And at the end, we did a public event, which was organized by our colleague, Deborah Thomas. And so we wanted to share just a couple of minutes from--
GREG PIEROTTI: Before we share that, I wanted to just talk a little bit. So we've described sort of these early essays in making episodes and kind of getting into the qualities of the object. I love the non-human interlocutors. I love that.
But this is a much more complex moment that sort of was developed at the end of a long workshop. So there is a lot of text. There's a lot of different kinds of-- there's many, many things going on in it. And so I just want to frame it by saying that this-- when we had spoken earlier, we had spoken about the distinction between individual meaning-making and kind of collective meaning making.
And I think when we make these more complex moments, that's a lot of what we're pressing into is what are the distinctions and the varieties, and what one might qualify as confusions around what something means. And the disagreements and the lack of clarity is actually a lot of where the new knowledge actually comes from.
So we are more interested in of developing these open sort of episodes rather than something that has a clear and distinct meaning that can be shared by everyone. If it's a little bit unclear, that's sort of where the juice is so. I have that lined up to share with you.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thanks a lot for the clarification.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- We begin. In classical anthropological contexts, this is from field notes. In classical anthropological contexts, magic has been contrasted with work rather than treated itself as a form of labor with a number of certain and measurable costs.
That is to say magic is not a technically productive trade. At best, magic is a symbolic super stratum that helps practitioners imagine technical processes for pragmatic ends. But it is not, itself, a form of technical labor.
Art, however, is a form of technical labor for Gil. In Haitian Creole, the term travaille means work. The mundane, the sacred, the secular, the magical, that beings used to [FRENCH], or make a life for themselves.
That's an interesting point. Work is meant to do things. Work often fails to achieve its end. Even when it fails, it makes life. But even when it fails, it is a collaborative act that pulls together people, substances, wisdoms, durations, and styles of practice. In Haitian Vodou, work means magic.
- This is from Jeanne Favret-Saada. Nobody ever talks about witchcraft to gain knowledge, but to gain power. Witchcraft is spoken words, but these words are not knowledge or information. The act in witchcraft is the word.
There is no neutral position with spoken words. In witchcraft, words wage war. There is no room for uninvolved observers.
- We end.
[END PLAYBACK]
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: What was the last word, Greg?
GREG PIEROTTI: Uninvolved observers. Sorry. I'm trying to turn my video off now. There we go.
NARRATOR: Thanks a lot. Do you want to comment on this?
GREG PIEROTTI: Well, I mean, I'm happy to comment on where we would go from there rather than talking again about what it necessarily means. So we would then follow this-- so first of all, a lot of episodes are made that people are like whatever. And then we just move on to the next one.
But if there's a resonance for people in a particular episode, then we'll do what's called a structural analysis. And the structural analysis is simply what exactly we saw and heard without attaching any kind of significance or narrative or meaning to it.
So we might say a man and a woman were standing on opposite sides of the stage. There was a box of bottles in the middle of the stage. Somebody said this is from field notes and started talking. Then the man put the bottles out in a particular order and seemed to be paying attention.
But even that, that's meaning-making . It seem to be paying attention. So it's hard. I've been doing this for years and I still have trouble. But he laid them out in a row. He moved them back and forth. He stopped. He looked at them. So we really try to articulate just what actually was seen and heard on the stage.
And then we start to do what's called an interpretive analysis, where we start to tie different associations and meanings that might have emerged for us based on the combination of what happened.
So we really try to tie it to our structural interpretation. So there was a moment just now when I was watching it, where I talked about gaining power. And I noticed that a list of the women was kind of crawling-- it had a kind of crawling quality on the floor and was grabbing the bottles in a way that I made up to mean that she was like snatching power , somehow.
Why? Just because of my particular set of associations. And I've never had that thought before. I've seen this a number of times. So but for some reason today, that emerged for me. And then people start to kind of defend-- people have stakes in their interpretations.
And they start to-- and the meaning maker, the moment makers themselves or episode makers themselves aren't allowed to comment on what they meant. So we don't clarify what we meant because we're working directly with the meanings that emerged for the individuals.
We send the message out. And then whatever you get, that's what we accomplish. So we don't clarify with our hosts episode descriptions. And then out of this kind of conversation about what meant what and what resonated for whom, and where the value lies, or where the energy lies in the moment, you start to see all of these different kinds of layers of stakes and values that exist inside the individuals.
And then from there, you can go on to do any number of things. You could say, well, I really like how there's an argument about what the shaking of the bottles means. And so you might add elements to create more dissonance between interpretations.
Or might say, no, I want the group to come away with the thing that I initially intended. And based on this feedback, I need to clarify my elements and order them in a different way so that I do create a shared meaning.
So what the episode maker does with it from there is up to them? But for me, this process of analysis is where a lot of the kind of like knowledge making happens. We find out what signs and language mean in new ways.
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: So for example, I want to underline something that is very important to us and to the practice, is that what we are trying to cultivate is a way of thinking and being with the material that is more associative rather than argumentative. And so a lot of the practice is to just make associations that may seem random, but we they are not.
There's always like an unconscious element that then gets on Earth as we work. So for example, this is like a kind of a complete episode. But it really started by [? Alisa ?] bringing just one paragraph or her field notes to the workshop.
Then we said, bring objects that you find compelling for whatever reason they don't necessarily have to be linked to your research, but just like them and she brought a bunch of bottles. And then we were working with the work of Favret-Saada.
And so it really just started with her making a moments and an episode with the bottles, period. And we all like this kind of the sound of the bottles, of like putting them on the floor, and then back in the packet.
And then when she layered text to this presence of the bottles and the bottles being organized in space, and then brought them back on the bucket, and then shaken, we kind of started to feel that there was-- obviously, what we were doing with the bottles was not literally what was happening in her text.
But we realized that the association between the text about magic and power and the bottles, somehow, could speak to one another and evoke in one another different things. So for me, for example, the bottles also came to symbolize some form of power that she's trying to grasp. But the moment she thinks she's grasping it, it's also out of control. It starts shaking.
And so we kind of-- then we kept making other associations. And then we went to Favret-Saada and we felt like oh, maybe all this, a theoretical text, Alisa's field notes, and these elements that we have here, I think, even the bottles, maybe she didn't even bring the bottle to the workshop. They were already in the studio and we just kind of look them in the process.
So this both kind of free associating between elements of the stage. And then see what happens when we create part-- Marilyn Strathern would say partial connections. What kind of analytical work emerges that is more associative and intuitive than something that we would explain in a linear way?
GREG PIEROTTI: Can I just add one little detail because what Christinia is saying is so important. The process of developing that moment really points to the ways in which the elements of the stage that aren't text can teach us what about our text is important to us. Because I'm remembering now as Christiane is describing this, when Alisa first made the moment on the episode, there was a lot of text, a lot of texts.
And it was all super compelling, but it was a lot. And you kind of would check out after a certain point. And when we analyze the moment, initially, we realized that the point of energy for everyone, for different reasons, was the shaking of the bottles.
And so in order to highlight the shaking of the bottles, she had to pare down the text, so that it didn't get diluted. And so she went back to the text with that idea of featuring the bottle shaking, rather than some important idea in her empirical research to make her edits.
And she made the edits so that she could feature this bottle shaking. And I don't miss the other text at all is the point. It was all really, really interesting. But it was the elements of the stage that sort of oriented her back to her research, which I find really exciting.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's fascinating. And this is one of the aspects my students and I found very fascinating about your work. So directing open, horizontal approach to knowledge, but also the magic, so to speak, if I might use the span of Affect Theater. Because I'm acquainted with the text.
But hearing the text read in connection to the bottles, for example, and this, I'm doing my associative comments here reminded me about, in particular, what Favret-Saada was saying about words and magic, and how that containers, like bottles, were very fragile in a way because they're made of glass.
And so inhabiting this space of-- this ambivalent space of something very powerful, but also very fragile. So this is a bit of I think a good example of the type of effects that your Affect Theater can have also in the audience.
And I'm curious about-- so what's the role of the audience? Is there a tension between individual and collecting meaning-making? If you can tell us a little bit more about how you see, and if you see affect theater, as an example of a non-rational way of knowing, yet be meaningful in anthropological work in dramaturgical work and so on. Thank you.
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: I'll start. There are many questions there. But the role of audience-- so there are different kinds of audiences. When we do workshops, we're usually in a group from 10 to 15 people. And we work in small groups. But mostly, each group creates a theatrical episode, that then are presented to the rest of the workshop participants.
So that's one kind of audience. And as Greg was saying that when we present in the workshop, the moment is important too. The feedback is very important because that's the moment where we move from the individual associations that the episode makers made to what the larger group is feeling, thinking, interpreting.
And then we try to integrate. So that's one group of spectators. But then there is also the group of spectators who come like the two times that we made performances at Davis and in San Francisco. We titled this two performances Unstories.
And they were both around the question of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. And we worked with material that I had collected mostly in Southern Italy. And we were trying to work against the official discourse and the official stories about what is a crisis and what is the refugee crisis in particular.
And so we were interested in unstoring the official discourse by trying to tap into minor stories. [FRENCH]. Stories that stay in the margin or stories who would have a different register. And so we had audiences who came to see the two performances.
And the first year the performance, we performed, and then we had a Q&A with the audience. And it was interesting to see what the audience felt. It was academic and non-academic audiences. Some of the students, who were in our classes, brought their family members, mothers, husbands, spouses.
And so it was interesting that some of them were saying, I brought my husband. He's not an academic. I have no idea what he would get out of it. But in that episode, where you did this and this and this, he got it, what it means to be trapped into a category of recognition that the nation state has so many of. Such as being a refugee, being a victim of human trafficking. And he had it. He understood it more at an emotional affected level than rational.
And other participants said, it was almost like entering a dreamscape. Precisely because we were trying not to create a linear narrative. And so the episodes were kind of suggestive of some sites of bureaucratic sites, conversations, documents from archives, but there was not really like a beginning of an unfolding and an end.
And then the second year, we did something slightly different because we organize the performance. I think it was in three or four sequences of episodes. And after each sequence of events, we stopped and we ask a question to the audience.
And so the audience, it was kind of like creating a Brechtian interruption, and then have the audience also be part of the process of trying to associate together or struggle with a collective meaning.
So these are two sets of audience. Then they are the audiences of the students who work with us and come and take the workshops. And the tension that emerge around what are the ethics of this kind of representation, what are we doing with this material while we are talking about, and using the words of people who are not here with that's working.
And it seems that this question of representation is huge. And it emerges always, sometimes, in uncomfortable ways. And sometimes, I know why it emerges in uncomfortable ways. And sometimes, I don't. I don't understand.
And the only way I'm explaining it to myself is that I think when bodies and theater becomes the form of writing or the form of representing ethnographic materials, some tension and some uncomfortable feelings about representation becomes heightened. They become even more.
Because I don't see it as more problematic than writing an academic text, of writing an academic article when we write. We are writing without the people with whom we worked in the field.
GREG PIEROTTI: I think one important issue there is that the people who are encountering, your audience, is not with you. So this idea of the body, and putting the body like staking the body behind a position or what the student might perceive of as a position, feels very challenging to students a lot of times.
And then I also think it's because we're playing. And I think there's a seriousness about ethnographic research that you shouldn't play with this stuff.
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: Exactly. And this is maybe another thing that is important to point out. When we do affect theater, we are not really playing or performing. And that's one thing that often gets misunderstood. Like if I make and I'm not an actress, I have no training, and I have no interest in it.
But what is performed in the workshop and in the performances that we create is our relationship with the ethnographic material, with worlds that are being conjured by the ethnographic material. But we are not personifying the ethnographic material.
So it is another way of creating a relation between worlds, between us, between collaborators, and the material that we encounter, and to perform that relationship, not personifying the experience of a refugee or personifying the experience of a ethnopsychiatrist working with migrant clients.
It's not that. It's creating a different space for writing and for analyzing, and grappling with the material.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: And if we can add a comment on one of my students, Rebecca. A shout out to her. She claimed in approaching this material and others, that theater today, is, in our society, one of the few places in space where we can experiment with other multiple subjectivities.
And is this an aspect of your work. Because in approaching your work as religious studies scholars, who might be doing ethnography in fields where we do things experience out of the ordinary connection and relationships, the issue about multiple subjectivities comes out a lot.
And somehow, we recognize that theater has a special cultural value and balance now that in our society that allows us to do that. Do you have any comments on this?
GREG PIEROTTI: I think that's right. I'm teaching a course right now. And we're talking about theater of the real, which is a category of documentary theater that was kind of articulated by a scholar, Carol Martin.
But what's coming up for the students a lot is the distinction between documentary film and theater of the real. And I think documentary film has the capacity to do this as well. But I think because of Brecht and this idea of distancing and being able to perform the fact that we're performing, there's all these kind of meta levels of representation that you can avail yourself of in the theater.
It's not that we necessarily are making that point in work, but certainly, the forms of theater that are available to us really allow us to call into question the authority of a particular stakeholder or the authority of a particular interlocutor.
And you can say, OK, now I'm playing this one character, and then you can get dressed as that one character, which is a very Brechtian thing to do right in front of the audience. And you can say, now, I'm being this person. And then you can take that off and put on a completely opposing costume and play a different character.
And immediately, you've raised the problem of making truth claims in a way that it's just not as easy to do in documentary film. Or there's something about the quality of film that seems to convey a sort of realness that it's not true, but it also has that quality we believe in the realness of film in a way that theater just seems like a construction.
It's very visibly we're making constructing representations rather than kind of seeing reality. So I think that's correct from your student's comment.
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: Also I want to say just one thing that a few years ago, I took a workshop with [INAUDIBLE] who is like a big name in theater anthropology. And we've been in conversation since then.
And he made the kind of performance as he makes art completely dreamscapes. There's no linearity. He uses different languages. And he said something very interesting. He said, what the theater allows me to do is to work with simultaneity.
On the stage, you can have 10 different things happening that belong to different times, to different linguistic registers, to different cultural spaces. And it can all happen in the same way, just like in a dream.
And so you can tap into that nonlinear nature of memory, also, I want to say. And so there is something chaotic about it. And one would say fictional, but also extremely real. And so I think that coexistence of different kinds of subjectivities is a little bit this question of also simultaneity. You can have a lot of stuff right there at the same time.
GREG PIEROTTI: And there's also something so undeniably real. I mean, I think part of the idea of affect theater, like the reason we call it affect theater is because in spite of the fact that you're doing a representation, there's also nothing more real than bodies in shared space together. So you're both representing and recreating your field sites, and you're also alive together in the space with the effective kind of environment that's being created between you and the audience.
And I also want to just say this idea of simple simultaneity just because we've left out the last little piece of the work. And so this is a great key into that. So you have a bunch of episodes that resonate for whatever reason for the group.
And then we enter what we would call the dramaturgical phase, where we start to think about how do these different episodes live in relationship to each other. So we can sequence them or we can often layer them, which is where two or three moments or episodes are happening simultaneously because there is a lot of power in that. Anyway, so that's the last little piece of the instruction set.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thanks a lot really. While I encourage the attendees to ask questions in the Q&A feature of Zoom, I want to ask you how is and was your work received in academia? What are the boons or challenges of this work with affect theater? And what advice would you give to students or researchers who are interested in exploring the potential, let's say, of affect theater?
GREG PIEROTTI: Well, I'll just start off by saying that it's been-- the big boon for me has been like meeting and working with Christiana. Because I feel like-- and this gets back to this question of shared meaning-making too.
I feel that in the theater, there's this emphasis in training for the theater. There's this emphasis on commercial theater. And what's commercial is usually, not always, but usually like tells a shared story that everybody can agree upon. The more kind of clarity there is in the storytelling, the better the piece is.
And so a lot of times in the theater world, I feel like there's a presumption that what we're trying to do is tell clear stories that make us feel good for whatever reason or entertain us. And so this base assumption often makes my work in this field sort of hard for people to grasp in the theater because they just don't quite know why anyone would want to create confusion or not knowing.
And so what I've found, working with Christiana, is that people in anthropology and ethnography and social sciences are a little more open to these different ways of using narrative and affect to kind of understand the world differently.
And so it's very refreshing for me to be introduced into these circles because I feel like it's more where the heart of my work is, even though I'm technically in show biz.
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: I mean, we are invited to give workshops after-- we have been working on this for seven years. So we are mostly invited from anthropology departments to give workshops.
It's been very hard. I mean, we published articles in anthropology, but now that we're working on a book, it's been very difficult to find a publisher. So as much as in anthropology, there is all this experimental energy. When you actually want to ground it in a publication, it's not easy.
And in part, it was because sections of the book are graphic. And we want to make like a performative text that it also somewhat engages the reader. And so we had QR codes and links and things that we want the reader to do. And that did not fly very well.
We found a Bloomsbury now, who is interested and we will go with them, but not easy. So I think the reception is challenging. I think students, those who are interested in performance and theater, it's more straightforward, their relationship with our practice.
Those who are not necessarily interested in the arts, but are curious about experimenting, and this is actually I love working with the students in particular because they're skeptical. They don't believe it's going to work.
And then some of the students I'm working with now, not interested in theater and performance, they kind felt that they could draw inspiration in how to write, how to assemble and curate the ethnographic material from empirical raw stuff into a written text.
Because through the workshop, so they were able to create association between material associations that were not obvious, but they are interesting. And they are evocative.
So for me, it's very interesting to work with those who are not interested in theater and who can draw some inspiration from the workshop. And the book that we're working on also has voices of seven of the people who collaborated with us. Most of them are not in the arts.
And then, as we were saying before, the tension in the room is usually around the question of representation and what to do with our bodies and with other's words. And I just came to-- we both came to realize that the workshop or the seminars that we organize, we want to make them as much as possible places where people feel comfortable making ethical mistakes.
Because we are surrounded by so many politically correct, the practices that we want to honor, but sometimes, it's difficult to conform our languages or our material, or our questions to also norms of political correctness.
Sometimes, we make mistakes, inevitably. But sometimes, it's paralyzing not to want to make mistakes. And we have experienced that sense of paralysis in some of our workshops, where people don't want to make episodes because they're afraid of making a faux pas.
But mistakes are so generative. And so the idea is also to create a space for mistakes-making and conclusion-making.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you a lot. And I'm really on board on this. I think all the mistakes and the generative opportunities that they have. So thank you very much. I think it's time to wrap up, unfortunately. I would have gone on forever.
But thank you, Christiana and Greg, for your participation and for this wonderful conversation. And thank you all for having been here with us. Please stay tuned on the activities of the CSWR, the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative and Ideologies.
And you can find all this information on the CSWR website that you can find in the chart, including the link to the event entitled The Varieties of Spiritual Experience , 21st Century Research and Perspective, a conversation with David Yaden and my T&T colleague.
Michael Ferguson, this event will take place online tomorrow at 5:30 PM.
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: Thank you so much, Giovanna.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you all for being here. And have a great rest of the day.
GREG PIEROTTI: Thank you.
CHRISTIANA GIORDANO: Goodbye.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Goodbye.
NARRATOR: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.
NARRATOR: Copyright 2022, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.