Hello, and welcome to this, which is the four panel of the Doctoral Theatre Student Association and all conference 2020. This year's conference. It's called networks mapping labor and theater and performance and I want to, I want to start. I want to start by thanking today organizers for putting together all of these amazing papers and doing all of these technical effort. And I want to welcome to everybody that is joining us on the internet around the world. And particularly I want to welcome to the three amazing speakers that we do have today in this panel that is called historical approaches and devices. Okay, so I will go presenting them why one by one and introducing their papers. So, our first presenter today is Doria Carlson. Doria, it's a PhD candidate at Brown University in the Department of Theater and Arts and Performance Studies. She also holds an MA degree in Theater Arts and Performance Studies and History from Brown. Her dissertation crafts a cultural history of immigrant labor and performance in the 20th century, specifically, she considers the calligraphic of industrial immigrant labor. This is how industry structure mass movements of people and how performance function within liminal spaces of migrations such as labor camps, company compounds and immigrant neighborhoods. Her writing can be found in the dance research journal, Women and Performance in a Residentiality from Rogers University Press called African American Art, Aesthetics, Activism and Futurity. And forthcoming at TDR, the Drama Review. Doria is from the San Francisco Bay Area and graduated with a BA in History and a minor in Dance from Stanford University. She also loves the color orange. Her paper is titled Spectacular Disasters, Fires and Crisis of Labor in the Progressive Era in New York. Thank you so much. Let me just get set up here. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being with us virtually. What I'm going to share today is a very brief extract of a longer chapter in my dissertation, so I'd be happy to entertain any questions about anything that I didn't get to due to time and be happy to answer that in the Q&A. This paper centers on a popular performance at Coney Island at the turn of the century called Sighting the Flames, which premiered in 1904. I consider how the show both spectacularizes the labor of firemen who are representatives of the state and how the show choreographed audiences into particular modes of spectatorship that enabled the reproduction of capital. I'll close by placing Sighting the Flames alongside the Triangle Shirtways Factory fire, which occurred in 1911. The Triangle Fire was the largest workplace disaster in the U.S. in the 20th century, in which 141 people, mostly young immigrant women, perished. I suggest that the similarities between the plot and action of Sighting the Flames and the events of the Triangle Shirtways Fire help make apparent how both events spectacularize labor and various crises of capitalism present in progressive era in New York. In the early 20th century, visitors meandering through Coney Island's amusement parks were greeted at every turn with sensationalism and fantasy alongside technological innovations of the highest caliber. Of all of the performances and exhibits at Coney Island, disaster spectacles were the most sensational and highly attended. Sighting the Flames was the most popular show at Dreamland Park, which was in Coney Island from 1904, the year of its premiere to 1908. Disaster spectacles at amusement parks employed various strategies, both dramatic and technical, to deliver to spectators highly stimulating large scale experiences. While certain disaster spectacles depicted natural disasters, so floods or the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco was a popular topic, Sighting the Flames centered on manmade disasters, namely the relatively common occurrence of fires in tenement buildings in New York. The scale of these spectacles is difficult to overstate. The Fighting the Flames set to the building and its enclosure stood at 130,000 square feet. For scale, that's about twice the size of the White House. On this path, on this massive plot of land was constructed a full city block at scale, complete with a tenement building flanked on either side by various other buildings and set across a wide street, which you can see in this image. Spectators sat across from these buildings in raised seats. In addition to the sheer size of the physical structures of the spectacle, reviews and souvenir booklets from this time point to a truly enormous cast of players participating in this scene. A 1904 booklet boasted that over 4,000 people were employed in this spectacle, including thousands of people cast as city dwellers observing the seat from the scene from the street, which you can also see in this image. Importantly, the critical mass of an onstage crowd for the participating actors inciting the flames helped to model appropriate and inappropriate behaviors, effects and comportments for the offstage audience or the paid spectators of performance as the show progressed. The dramatic action of the spectacle begins when a fire breaks out in the ground floor of the central building. As the fire begins to spread creeping up the floors of the building, the fire brigade arrives as a huge crowd forms, screaming and watching as the firemen conduct the rescue. Using some of the most advanced tools of the time, including fire engines, hose wagons, a mobile water tower, and importantly, extension ladders, the firemen began their work of putting out blaze. The firemen, unperturbed by the mass number of actors as spectators who clogged the area shouting and gesticulating deployed their hoses ladders and life nets and began to climb up the building, taking people out of the building one by one with them on ladders. Or helping people jump from the building into life nets below at extraordinary heights. The onstage crowd of actors as spectators functioned both to direct the focus of the paid audience members by pointing toward the burning building, and also to increase the sensorial experience of the spectacle through their cacophony of screams, their gasping for breath, and the swell of various other noises as people left from the building. Many reviewers describe a spectacular scene at which one, one person who was trapped in the building ends up making their way to the roof, and with the help of a fireman, help leaps safely the 70 feet from the roof to the ground landing safely in a fireman's net. Of course this was highly choreographed and that was a professional acrobat. Huge amounts of water gushing furiously from the hoses the last person is rescued from the tournament. The fire is extinguished and the onstage crowd burst into cheers, celebrating the rescue as the roof dramatically collapses in on itself. The audited responses on the part of the onstage audience were effective in creating a controlled scene of chaos. Audiences were guided and what to see and how to react through the intensely choreographed actions of the actors, and that created a deeply kinesthetic environment that overwhelmed spectator senses, imagination, and capacity to look elsewhere. The excitement and pleasure of watching siding the flames was that it seemed so real. The employment of well executed performance strategies and techniques like the well rehearsed acrobatics and advanced special effects kept audiences on the edge of their feet. Despite the fact that the audience could rest assured of the outcome of the performance. The spectacle was further increased through the employment of professional firefighters in fighting the flames who provided a kind of star power to the performance, in addition to authenticity and expertise that sutured the spectacle to this to date. At the turn of the 20th century firemen were America's heroes who embodied physical strength masculinity discipline, professionalism organization and a tremendous sense of duty. Furthermore, the prevalence of fires, particularly in urban areas, made firefighting and the professionalism of the firefighting force incredibly visible to the rest of the population. The fire, the appeal of the firemen of the allure of their work, and the promise of their success against the flames was critical to the popularity of fighting the flames. Fighting the flames spectacularized the labors of firemen, much of the advertising for and written about fighting the flames centered on the use of professional firefighters in the production itself. Not only as proof of the realism and authenticity of the show, but also because the work of the firemen was the enduring action of the performance as is evidenced in this review from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from the summer of 1904. The actual labor was the performance and the virtuosity of the firemen was the appeal of the display. While virtuosity or the status of the virtuoso is often preferred upon a singular figure in fighting the flames the firemen as a collective functioned as a surrogate for the singularity of the state. The fact that they have the exacterity and climbing ladders, their strength in pulling women out of the windows of the burning building, and their effectiveness in racing to the scene in time, the fireman exhibited and embodied how the state was supposed to function. More importantly, however, the spectacle ran without the participation of spectators, both on stage and off in no account of the spectacle that I've read does it seem like anyone ever called for the fire department, they just kind of appeared on scene. This is, as Judith Hamera describes, quote, virtuosos incarnate plus the possibility for audiences, seeming mastery over one's own labor and the affective surplus it generates, even while demonstrating the audience's inability to activate these plots themselves, quote, quote. The adherence of the fire department as a result ostensibly of some sixth sense of fire detection did not so much reinforce the inability to activate a response to disaster, so much as it rendered spectator activation as unnecessary. Because audiences knew that the fire would eventually be extinguished, the fire itself became a secondary attraction. It serves as an organizing team and background for the real spectacle, which was the relentless activity of the fireman and the technologically advanced stagecraft and effects. In the mix of the affective attachments and physicality of these virtuosic performances is the gender division of labor presents presented in fighting the flames. While audiences fixated upon the fireman's work of upholding their community through power and brute strength, the implicit and explicit domestic laborers and garment work performed by women within the building are made irrelevant to the plot. In short, virtuosity of the fireman performing the quote unquote rescue further ingrained the precarity of female domestic and wage laborers by discerning attention away from them and by reinforcing that audience members need not take action themselves in the face of calamity. Through the spectacularization of the actor's labor, particularly the fireman, fighting the flames conditioned audience members into particular modes of spectatorship that serve to reinforce capitalist disciplining of the body in service of its own reproduction. Certainly, fighting the flames appealed to audiences desire for both horror and pleasure, entertainment and suspense. As John Tassin writes, fires garnered a kind of fascination because of their frequency, the power of their destruction, and their unpredictability, even in quote unquote modern America. As such, disaster spectacles like fighting the flames elevated tenement fires into transcendent experiences that allowed for audiences to experience a range of emotions and physical sensations, like the smelling of smoke, the sounds of bells and screams, the hearing, hearing the water flow from the hoses with the inestimable advantage of allowing them to emerge from the performance unharmed. Despite the undoubtedly intense kinesthetic responses to the sensorial overload that was fighting the flames, and the potential possibility that something would go wrong. Ultimately, the successful reproduction of the spectacles, meaning the fact that it was performed twice a day, six days a week for the entire season of Coney Island, proved that the action would resolve itself through the work of the fireman without any intervention required by the audience members themselves. Ultimately, fighting the flames conditions audiences into a kind of reactive spectatorship that is predicated on the inevitability of disasters related to urban industrial modernity. The capacity of the state to intervene to prevent too much tragedy so here that would mean the death of the people in the building and a willingness to turn away from the root causes of said disasters in favor of the narrative of resolution that enables the show to go on or to reproduce. The scenographic and choreographic similarities between fighting the flames and the triangle shirt waste factory fire of 1911, make apparent the strategies that made the both the performances and the triangle fire both aesthetically effective and politically effective. Namely the spectacularization of the common crises of capitalism at the turn of the 20th century. And here in particular I'm thinking about the crisis of work and the ramifications of extractive labor. At Coney Island, the urban fires in the performances functioned as a metonym for a plethora of crises stemming from mass migration and industrialization, such as poverty, unsafe living and working conditions and economic precarity for the working poor. The triangle fire presented the American public with perhaps its most brazen and distressing example of work spectacular eyes. That is, it made visible and visceral the extractive and exploitative labors of garment workers in New York City. In both the Coney Island performances and in the triangle fire technology and the end state intervention are offered, or were thought to be the panacea to the aforementioned conditions. In fighting the flames overwhelming tragedy so again the death of the people in the burning building is quelled through state sponsored actions and technological intervention. The state of the art fire equipment and the professional fire department prevented any casualties. The guaranteed safety of the actors in these spectacles, ultimately functions to normalize the occurrence and frequency of urban fires and poor and working class neighborhood. Furthermore, they create a false sense of security in the fire department through the entirely successful rescue in this elaborate production. The spectacles on Coney Island reinforce the notion that advancements in technology and intervention from the state could protect all its inhabitants. During the first decade of the 20th century, there was little political will from lawmakers to create legislation to protect vulnerable populations. Nor was there the legal or political capacity to hold individuals and institutions accountable for violating that framework. The reality of this was made all too explicit in the aftermath of the triangle fire. Although preventative technologies like sprinkler systems and fire retardant materials were theoretically available and indeed required in high capacity buildings like commercial factories prior to the triangle fire. In practice at that time there was little legal enforcement or incentive to use said technologies and little recourse for workers who tried to hold their employers accountable. Furthermore, the economic incentives created from corrupt insurance industries encouraged factory owners negligent practices by continuing to provide coverage despite the risk of garment factories. The triangle fire was a public and horrific with public and horrific and sparked tremendous outrage from the American public. Because the fire made visible and spectacular eyes both the failure of the state to protect workers and the failed labors of the firemen. The successful rescue conditioned into audiences at fighting the flames were it turns out part of the fantasy of Coney Island. While the triangle fire amidst intense public outcry from both workers and the general public, the state did enact significant and widespread legislation aimed at preventing another industrial disaster. Was enacted after the fire that created safety codes and held manufacturers accountable for negligence are actually still on the books today in various forms. Well, it cannot be denied that these reforms enacted vital protections that dramatically improved conditions for workers. Ultimately, as the rest of this chapter argues and I'll stop here for today. The legal, social and cultural aftermath of the fire, served not to dismantle or undermine the crises of industrial capitalism, but to make them more durable within the framework of the liberal nation state. Thank you. Thank you. Before I go into our next paper, I want to let all the people who is joining us that you can leave your questions for our panel. On Facebook in in the PhD theory CUNY students, a web page, a Facebook page, you can post it also on Twitter, right, using the whole round and using hashtag networks 2020. You can join in our join us with your questions in Instagram, a by private message in Instagram slash PhD theater center CUNY. Sorry, PhD theater center CUNY. So you can leave us your questions there. And I want to present now or our next paper who is this is a by having whitehead who is a doctoral candidate at Yale School of drama in the department of the drama to drama to G and dramatic criticism, Gavin Gavin is a scholar, educator, theater artist and translator who earned his MFA in dramatic criticism from Yale School of drama in 2017. His dissertation examines horror, a horror theater in London from 1794 to 1931, seeking to explain why play goers thrilled at the representation of hideous monstrosity and violent crime. A former full rate scholars scholar Gavin spent a year in Berlin studying theater after completing his undergraduate education. He holds a degree in German comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he graduated with highest honors into his paper is entitled the patent God, ghost, and the problem of collaborative labor on the virtual stage. Thank you very much for that introduction. You mean a second to set up here. Great. So the patent ghost and the problem of collaborative labor on the Victorian stage. In 1863, thousands of Londoners flocked to Regent Street where they had every intention of witnessing a ghost. The Phantom in question haunted the halls of the Royal Polytechnic Institution, an early precursor to the modern museum of science and technology which opened its doors in 1838. Much like its competitor the Adelaide Gallery, the Polytechnic not only exhibited but also explained innovative machinery, offering regular lectures meant to educate the public on matters related to science. To make the construction more enjoyable, the Polytechnic mingled education with amusement. John Henry Pepper, a scientist blessed with a showman's panache served as the institution's chief lecturer and honorary director, and it was he who introduced the celebrated Phantom, an optical illusion usually referred to as Peppers ghost. On December 24, 1862, the spectral effect debuted as part of Pepper's so called strange lecture in a brief dramatization of the haunted man by Charles Dickens. At first Pepper delivered his strange lecture in the smaller of two theaters inside the Polytechnic. The modest auditorium could no longer accommodate the hordes of patrons eager to lay eye on the Polytechnic specter, however, the strange lecture transferred to the institution's larger 500 seat theater. In the wake of its debut, Pepper's ghost spread across the British capital, indeed the whole of the United Kingdom, terrorizing playhouses and music halls alike, and surpassing previous stage ghosts by virtue of its perceived realism. The illusion went down in history as Peppers ghost, perhaps suggesting the lecturer invented the effect himself, but in fact it was born of a collaborative effort. Pepper improved on a prototype invented by a civil engineer named Henry Dirks. By indicating that others would want to cash in on the optical illusion, the two co patented their wondrous apparatus on February 5, 1863, requiring managers who wanted to make use of the spectral effect to purchase the rights or face this controversial measure earned Pepper's ghost the additional sober K of the patent ghost. Throughout this talk I use both terms, Pepper's ghost and the patents ghost to refer to the effect produced by means of the patented apparatus. I choose one over the other depending on context for reasons I hope will be self evident. I also encourage Victorians to think about the invention and optical illusion in terms of ownership. This only naturally, since a patent protects an original invention as intellectual property. However, Pepper and Dirks is patent provided equal protection to two separate inventors. And as I demonstrate that logic was not so readily mapped onto theatrical production, in which a star like Pepper easily outshined his lesser known collaborators. Pepper emerged in the Victorian imaginary as sole proprietor of the patented apparatus, and this perceived ownership effectively erased the collaborative labor that went into its creation. A public dispute erupted between Pepper and Dirks the latter hungry for the former's renown. In the end, I argue, the story of the patent ghost reveals how easily collaborative labor goes unrecognized when individual fame is at stake. Allow me to elucidate the patented apparatus. The spectral effect required a see through sheet of glass to be mounted on stage and tilted at an angle. Remember this tilt as it will prove essential. The performers who portrayed living characters occupied the area behind the sheet of glass which remained dimly lit. The actor playing the ghost stood in front of the glass hidden beneath the stage in the orchestra pit. Likewise position down below in the pit was a stage hand equipped with a magic lantern. When it came time for the ghost to appear up above the stage hand activated the magic lantern emitting a bright light. With the area in front of the glass, radiantly lit by the magic lantern and the area behind comparatively dark. The sheet of glass became at once reflective and transparent. The reflection of the actor playing the ghost materialized on the glass while performers who portrayed living characters remained perfectly visible to the members of the audience. The reflection of the actor playing the ghost melted away to nothingness when the stage hand deactivated the magic lantern. The patented apparatus marked an improvement on Dirks's prototype. The engineer conceived this invention as a means of generating theatrical effects and presented it to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at a conference in Leeds in 1858. His prototype called for an unconventional theater space in which two stages faced each other. The performers who portrayed her portrayed living characters occupied the first stage while the actor playing the ghost appeared on the second. The spectator sat above the second stage in elevated seating banks allowing them to look down on the action on the first stage. This configuration hid the second stage from view. Like the patented apparatus Dirks's prototype employed a see-through sheet of glass on which a race-like reflection would materialize his being mounted between the two stages. Unlike in the patented apparatus however the glass in the prototype stood perfectly upright instead of at an incline. After his presentation in 1858 Dirks approached various London establishments hoping to interest them in exhibiting his invention. His overtures were fruitless and little wonder at that since managers must have balked at reconfiguring their venues to accommodate a stage hidden beneath the spectators. In 1862 however the prototype came to the attention of John Henry Pepper who proposed that Dirks tilt the glass a minor adjustment with major implications. Marvin Carlson notes that tilting the glass enabled the actor portraying the ghost to hide down below in the orchestra pit eliminating the need for a second stage entirely and thereby making the apparatus compatible with the ordinary theater. So Dirks excited a great deal of interest with their patented apparatus to begin with the resulting appellation the patent ghost was oxymoronic an outlandish blend blend of new and old where the patent represented the modern rise of industrial capitalism was interpreted in part by the protection of inventions as intellectual property, the ghost harkens back to a bygone age characterized in part by genuine and widespread belief in the supernatural, the kind of irrational superstition the enlightenment had eradicated at least theoretically. What was intriguing was that pepper and Dirks had taken out a patent on a theatrical invention. Hardly anyone had done so before they came along, mostly because the application process was prohibitively expensive and time devouring until London opened a centralized patent in 1852. Still, theatrical patents remained uncommon until the patent ghost appeared. As Terrence reason David Wilmore's compendium British theatrical patents 1801 through 1900 shows, only 28 applications for theatrical patents are known to have been submitted between 1801 and 1862, the year before pepper and Dirks filed theirs. The number would skyrocket well into the hundreds by the end of the century, partly because the inventors garnered such attention with their buzzworthy patent. In theory Victorians should have understood the patent ghost as jointly owned property and the result of collaboration. This acknowledges Dirks and Pepper as inventors and owners of the apparatus granting equal recognition to both in those capacities. In practice, however, many Victorians would regard things otherwise. They focused on product rather than process disregarding how the invention came to be and the collaborative labor involved in the enterprise. David Wilmore was who appeared to own that product. And one of the inventors emerged as imagined sole proprietor. Even the published patent, published patent written not by the inventors but examiners at the patent office reflects this outcome. In its very first sentence, it does the illusion pepper's ghost, as if ascribing ownership to the lecturer alone. Such unequal recognition led to a falling out between the two patentees. Pepper arose as the imagined sole proprietor by virtue of his strange lectures and his position at the polytechnic. To be sure, he credited Dirks as his co inventor during his performances, but it was pepper alone who appeared on stage to introduce the illusion. In this illustration, a living character passes through an apparition spectators look at each other and wonder while pepper stands to one side calm and collected. The drawing need not have included the lecturer, and the decision to do so can be viewed as an attempt to highlight the mind supposedly responsible for the effect. Clutched in one hand pepper's lecture notes mark him as a keeper of knowledge, and he shared only some of it. Apart from the actors, after all, pepper alone knew how the apparatus produced these otherworldly effects. The illusion of supernaturalism depended on the imperceptibility, the invisibility and inaudibility of the apparatus involved, and so it remained hidden throughout the performance. Even after the show was over however, pepper kept the invention concealed from spectators, a striking irony since the polytechnic intended to educate patrons by illuminating technologies rather than obscuring them. Hiding the apparatus that produced pepper's ghost reinforced the perception that the spectral effect, along with the invention, belonged to the lecturer and none but him. It thus became pepper's to exhibit as he pleased, a treat he reserved for only his most illustrious visitors. He once escorted the imminent scientist Michael Faraday behind the scenes to demystify the illusion. On another occasion, he did much the same for the Prince of Wales, later to reign as King Edward VII. Pepper's perceived ownership of the patented apparatus occluded Dirks' equal claim to the invention as intellectual property, along with his role in conceiving the prototype. Indious of pepper and feeling unappreciated, Dirks attempted to win recognition through what might appear an unlikely gambit. He urged the public to consider the invention not in terms of ownership but authorship. In 1863, the civil engineer published a short book titled The Ghost, A Veritable Study in Indignation. In it, he endeavors to expose the patented apparatus as virtually indistinct from his original prototype, charging pepper with taking credit for what was truly his invention. Dirks laments that his had been the fate of countless inventors who often found the products of their quote, intellectual looms, unquote, appropriated by others for shameless self-aggrandizement. With this metaphor, Dirks calls attention to intellectual labor, inviting readers to contemplate whose intellectual loom had woven the invention into existence. There could only be one and it must have been his because he came up with the original prototype. But Dirks bases this thinking on what he perceives as widely held views about literary authorship. The inventor asks, quote, when Milton sold the copyright for his immortal poem for about 10 pounds to Thompson, his publisher had not Thompson had not the tenacity to print Thompson's Paradise Lost, unquote. Put another way, Milton was recognized as the towering genius who offered the poem, even though his publisher owned the copyright. Strikingly, Dirks enjoins readers to view scientific invention as virtually identical to literary authorship, even conflating them when he declares himself, quote, the true author of the optical illusion and resulting Spectre drama, unquote. By Spectre drama, Dirks refers to any play whatever that deploys his apparatus and, as an aside, can anybody name another genre of theater entirely defined by a piece of technology involved in its production? In any case, Dirks is Dirks entreats the public to think beyond pepper as the perceived sole proprietor of the patented apparatus and recognize him as the real mastermind. Invoking Milton, not to mention Homer and Shakespeare elsewhere, Dirks clearly craves the undivided glory of a literary luminary, and that aim requires him to downplay peppers vital contribution, and thus the collaborative labor involved. Dirks's arguments fell on deaf ears, however, in part because he addressed them to a society inclined to understand collaboration more in terms of profit sharing than intellectual labor. So much was made manifest by a musical burlesque at the Olympic Theater in 1863, written by Tom Taylor and emphatically entitled The Ghost, The Ghost, The Ghost. The inventors' avatars take the stage under the cringe-worthy names of Kepper and Quirks. They steal into a churchyard under cover of darkness hoping to catch ghosts they can exhibit for a profit. The premise, you may have noticed, puts a comic twist on the so-called resurrectionists who dug up cadavers and sold them to doctors for anatomization. Right from the outset, Quirks professes his hatred for Kepper, going so far as to accuse him of fevery, quote, that polytechnic drone who stole my honey, my ghost, my patent ghost, and haves the money, unquote. In real life, Dirks did not share these pecuniary frustrations. He explains in his book that he signed away his share in the profits to the polytechnic without reservation. While the apparatus remained his intellectual property then, he never saw a penny of the windfall it generated. He agreed to this arrangement under the condition that he received credit for his intellectual labor. And what it gets wrong about Dirks, however, the dubious couplet nevertheless encapsulates the patent ghost's place within the Victorian imagination. It belonged to a single proprietor who stood to make a killing and sharing that property seemed out of the question. In completely disregarding both Pepper and Dirks' role in the process of inventing the apparatus, the couplet further captures the trend of not crediting the collaboration involved. Thank you. Thank you, Gavin. Okay, so we have our third speaker, Caroline Proversy-Rosman, who is a PhD candidate in history at Stony Brook University and the daughter of a New York City stagehand. Her dissertation in progress charted the creative hands, stagehands, their union, and the backstage front stage divide is a gender-labour history that focuses on the relationship between work, culture, gender, and race. In Major City, a city's entertainment industry between 1945 and 1995. Her work has appeared in Gotham, a blog for scholars of New York City's history, while at Stony Brook, Caroline served as a chief steward of the Graduate Student Employees Union CWA Local 1104. She's currently working with 1199 SEIU, organizing healthcare workers in upstate New York. Her work is titled Choreographed Labor, Arts Unions and Cold War Cultural Exchange. Thank you so much for having me today, and I am going to get right down to it. So, like we said, my paper is titled Choreographed Labor, Arts Unions and Cold War Cultural Exchange. Just making sure this will share. There we go. But like Christine, I am very interested in tearing down arts hierarchies. So, without further ado, Cold War Cultural Exchange was an ambitious public relations campaign, and this is not news to anybody. It sought to change minds about American society and culture, preventing a version of the United States that was enlightened, free, and seemingly non-threatening. But there's, and there's a growing historiography on these tours, as well as the Cold War Cultural Exchange. And this historiography primarily focuses on governments, not-for-profit groups and artists who sought to shape and dictate the terms of exchange. But it quite often overlooks the labor done by crafts people without whom it would not, like these tours would not have been possible. So my work looks at the tours from the perspective of arts workers and their unions. Again, without which these exchanges would not have been, they just would not have happened. So what does this mean? What is looking at the tours from this perspective do for us? And why should we care about dancers' unions, scenic artists' unions, and stagehands? And it's because when we look at the other stakeholders in these projects, we can see different approaches to the exercise of power, both in the interest of capital, and in the interest of the workers who produce said capital. And by capital, I mean both the way that we traditionally think of it. But I also mean cultural capital here because we are talking about a cultural phenomenon. And while I'm tempted to bring you on a journey of worldwide defiance of service to American capital, that's just not what happened. American trade unions danced a tight choreography as they sought to claim their piece of the cultural Cold War. So scenic artists' unions engaged in a multi-pronged legal strategy to protect their jurisdiction from the threat of imported scenery. And dancers' unions approached the cultural exchanges with an eye towards expanding their membership, if not in reality, then we think in sheer numbers. Finally, the position of stagehands was very different from that of the scenic artists and dancers. And that can demonstrate both the growth and necessity of a professionalized cadre of stagehand labor outside of large art centers. And specifically I'm thinking about big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and LA, and Chicago. So these cultural exchanges generated this huge demand for American art. It also demonstrated, sorry, it also created a great investment in the location of the arts production. This meant jobs, and it meant jobs for artists of all types. So people that we would see on stage, people who we would see off stage, and people whose labor we saw the products of on stage. So, costumer, shoemakers, wig makers, all people who are featured in Timothy R. White's book Blue Collar Broadway. And arts unions and their members knew that they had a certain amount of control over the access to the labor that produced the art that was in such high demand. So as long as they were able to exercise their control over this market, the workers were able to negotiate good contracts and the unions that represented them were able to protect their members. So any loosening of this group could be detrimental to the welfare of both the unions and the workers that made up the unions. And the influx of imported shows under the umbrella of cultural exchange became a barrier to the tenuous control that New York City arts unions had over their labor market. So I'm talking about three unions here today. The first is United Scenic Artists. The second is the American Guild of Musical Artists. And the third is the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. And the Scenic Artists, sorry, the United Scenic Artists and the American Guild of Musical Artists responded to the Cold War exchanges by tenaciously defending and expanding their membership jurisdiction through any available means that they had. So the Scenic Artists represented by United Scenic Artists defended their turf in New York City because they depended on this local demand for new sets and new costumes for new shows. And their welfare was threatened by any production that did not employ Scenic Artists. So if it was a rebroadcast or a rerun of a show where there was no new demand for new sets, new costumes, that became a problem because the members were not working. And we see that domestic tours arranged under the auspices of the American National Theater Association as well as international tours that were organized through partnerships between producers and the State Department were very problematic. So in response to this, the United Scenic Artists adopted a legal strategy that included fighting stagehands for jurisdiction and scenery shops at home, reporting traveling artists to the Department of Labor as well as customs and immigration service. But a much larger part of this legal strategy was revolving a concept of harm reduction. So rather than then fight so hard in the courts, the United Scenic Artists decided to start levying a fairly small fee on imported scenery and on reuse, including broadcast. So this, this fee was then used to supplement and create a sick benefit for Scenic Artists. So what we see from this legal strategy, especially the fee, is that the Scenic artists who originally fought very, very hard against this, started to be grudgingly and very conditionally accept importation and reuse, while still exercising their, the power of their union to shape their jurisdiction. So now I'm going to put down United Scenic Artists and start talking about the American Gilda musical artists. So dancers were able to travel both domestically and internationally. They went to venues that were very, very different. No two tours and, sorry, new tours and new repertoires did not always make more opportunity for all dancers. And this is a very simple math problem. So no two shows could run at the same time on the same stage. So while some New York City dancers were able to leave their home stages in their home studios to tour domestically, and even smaller number of these dancers were able to leave the country to do these international tours, it was virtually impossible for the American Gilda musical artists to ban foreign dancers without also hindering their members progress on the international stage. So it's the end of the math problem. So the American Gilda musical artists was forced to deal with foreign companies in a very different way than the United Scenic artists was able to. So they could not exclude visiting dancers, and they could not report them for by for immigration violations in the way that the name scenic artists had done. They really had to think outside the box and they had an additional problem, so very similar to the scenic artists, where the American Gilda musical artists and equity association shared shared some membership and they shared some reciprocal remits through both unions membership and a larger body. So that was another sort of jurisdictional issue that was at play here. So, the American Gilda musical artists ended up partnering with European unions that represented the same population of arts workers to create what could be viewed as an internationalist union exchange system. So American artists sometimes joined European unions European artists that joined the American Gilda musical artists. So this is a just a photo of these dues files there are quite a few of them, and they are not as exhaustive as one would like. So these files are fairly limited. Many of them just contain a ledger of dancers names and do status. So there was a tour, who was in that tour and if they were, if they had done the paper work for an associate membership which is what we called it the guest dues. And the only interaction that some of these dancers may have had with the American Gilda musical artists was signing a temporary membership application. So it's unlikely that all of them were would receive an education about what the American musical artists have done what its history was, and other things that that we consider part of union membership now or at least that I consider a part of union membership. It's also unlikely that the dancers who are visiting the United States as part of their tours were paying their dues directly to the American Gilda musical artists, or if there was some other financial structure there. That is something that I am very eager to find out once archives reopen. So, the relationship between the union and the touring dancers may have been very superficial, but regardless of the relationship or the direct mobilization between the American Gilda musical artists and these touring dancers. The dancers still had access to workplace benefits and safety members that the union had one. So, what we can see here is that the membership exchanges in the American Gilda musical artists offered this very different critique of capitalism and worker exploitation that was available to dancers who signed on to the American Gilda musical artists for the duration of their tour. So, this is just what a guest status application looks like. And this is a signed copy that that does show that the sometimes things were done for producers like your concerts. So, I'm going to leave that up. And we see that that this is this membership exchanges saw through touring dancers and other interest is under other interested parties. You could see what American unions could do within the limits of very restrictive labor laws, and then, and in an era of labor management cooperation. So, there are also union writers in the files for American dance companies who went abroad, like this one my apologize for the quality of the picture. The American writers and the American Ali, sorry in the album Ali American dance theater files demonstrates that the American Guild of Musical Artists negotiated on behalf of American dancers working abroad. And because the tours were overseen by the American Union, the dancers paid paid dues to strengthen the union. And the company's groundbreaking tours included performances workshops recorded broadcast, all of which were governed by the union's rules. And reminder that despite these, the very, the international import of these of the tours, especially of the Ali tours and the State Department's use of black dancers to demonstrate that Americans were capable of achieving these very these great cultural feats, the cultures and the dancers performing this work hard carrying union members. And I think that is something that should not should not be forgotten or should not be minimized. And we can see that the American Guild of Musical Artists may have been able to do these things, because it was a very powerful and relatively high brow interlocutor that moved between the interest of the state which was a seamless exchange of workers, and the dancers who were the means of materializing that exchange. So I'm going to put down the dancers and the scenic artists I'm going to move on to stay chance. So we see that the Broadway boom and the cultural exchanges impacted stage hands in a very, very different way. And that's because some stage hands worked in theaters and some stage hands traveled in companies. So the international tours did not necessarily threaten their job security in the way that these tours and an imported scenery threatened dancers and scenic artists. So what does this look like a stage hand could work for their entire career in a single venue, loading shows in and out with the tides, and also creating the platform for those shows to run. Or a stage hand could work for a company and travel shoulder to shoulder with the artists who flit across the stage every night. But like the Cold War and Cold War cultural exchange work on the domestic expansion of arts funding and regional performance performing art centers. It has not yet fully accounted for the impact of this funding on job, jobs in the arts. So we can see that from, see from records in the Albanalia American dance theater that as arts funding expanded the industry also experienced a steady growth of professional stage craft outside of New York City. And we see this very clearly in a couple of records from tours. The stage hands traveled with it with and worked alongside the dancers whose labor was was readily seen on stage, and had this very interesting power will say to permanently alter the fate of diplomatic relationships. And sometimes there are very few material differences between the dancers on the stage hands, especially when they were in transit. The Alvin Ailey companies records show that professionals stage hands accompanied the their tours in 1974. When the Alvin Ailey American dance theater company traveled with a sound man is paid through a Department of State line item in the tourist budget. So this person and their labor was so important that they made it into the budget as a line item. I don't know if any of you have ever done budgets but line items were very important. The unionized professional stage hands were so important to the success of a tour, about 10 years later, that a letter from the State Department to the International Alliance of the actual stage employees to the union that represents stage hands was found inside of the Ailey company's file for their tour in China. And now there's much more work to be done on the role of stage hands and touring companies. So using the data that I have, I can reasonably infer that professional and therefore, I think unionized stage hands will become increasingly important as the productions that they toured with became more complex and more spectacular. So, going to wrap up now, in conclusion, the three unions that I discussed today, approached labor and cultural exchange differently, because they and their members had adapted to the American labor climate in a manner that best suited that. You could say that the unions practiced a business form of unionism that was developed in response to decades of union busting campaigns. But that's a discussion for another time and another paper. But I wanted to end with a question. We're currently writing this new wave of worker militancy in the 21st century. It's been propelled by casualization, transnational exploitation, digital connectivity, including these new broadcasts and rebroadcasts of archive performances, and a global crisis, which I can assume that we're all aware that we're living in. So I can't help but wonder how the historical approaches of these unions, the United Scenic Artists, the American musical artists and the International Alliance of the actual stage employees, have set the stage for resilience in an industry that is currently facing mass unemployment and a very uncertain future. Thank you very much. Thank you Caroline for that paper. So I think we are, we have around 15-20 minutes to talk among us and to answer the question that our audience can have. So I will start by repeating the channels that we have to receive your questions, the audience question. On Facebook and the Ph.D. Theatre CUNY Facebook page, on Twitter, at whole round using the hashtag networks 2020, and to our Instagram, which is Ph.D. Theatre Grat Center, you send us the questions there. Thank you all, you, for your papers, and I think they are all connected in different ways. The first one that it comes to mind is that the three of you are raising awareness of different kinds of invisibilization or invisibility of certain particular kind of labors that are involved in theater and performance, making in the case of Dorian's paper to the gender spectacularization of labor, in the case of Gavin, through this weird combination of patent bureaucracy and fame, in the case of Caroline, through the work of the division of labor that is involved in the work of unions. So I will open myself with a question to the three of you, and I want to start by an observation that Caroline gave us in her paper, which is that in the topic that you are discussing, which is called World Cultural Exchange, you said that the current historiography overlooked the work of craft people. Right, so I want you, the three of you, if you could talk to me about a little bit about how in your particular fields, those exploring in your papers, but in your research at large, how historiography accounts for labor and in theater making and performance making, how do you see your own research in dialogue with that context, but also how is this, what do you see as an advantage point to think from. So any of you. Sure, I mean, I guess I can go ahead and start in response to that lovely question and thank you for drawing together our papers in such a thoughtful way. Yeah, I mean historiography is really important to me when it comes to the issue of peppers ghost right because one thing that I'm really fascinated by is the fact that it has by and large gone down in history as peppers ghost right that's what we call the spectral effect. And when we discuss it in theater history, and I like to use that term in my research because, while it does sort of downplay Dirks's role in the process of creating the invention, it captures what for me is something really just essential about the way Victorian people thought about the effect right it was property. It belongs to pepper in the form of intellectual property and it also has to do with the issue of branding, right and whose name gets stamped on on which invention I didn't get to go into this actually in my talk but what we forget as theater historians perhaps is that Dirks himself attempted to rebrand the invention after it had sort of captivated London and Victoria's realm. In general so in his book, he tries to rebrand the invention the Dirksian fantasmagoria, right doesn't have quite the same rank to it as peppers ghost rather clunky, you might say and so I mean that's also part of why I think, you know, we remember peppers ghost more as peppers ghost, rather than the Dirksian fantasmagoria it's I mean there's just a certain euthany to the first one. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I can talk a little bit about history and historiography in the. I mean I think there's a always kind of a multiplicity of questions when it comes to history and especially you know in performance these what constitutes as as an archive and I'm not going to go into all of those. Many debates at this point but something that I'm, I'm grappling with or trying to think through in this particular chapter of my dissertation is the triangle short ways factory fire and how normative historiography or labor historiography that the triangle fire as this watershed moment for labor rights and labor labor activism in the United States and while that's absolutely true in a kind of broad broad strokes. I look at the role of unions in particular with 20th century liberalism. What I'm trying to ask is what what happens if we reframe the triangle fire not as a disaster, or a kind of accident but rather as a spectacle or as a production. And what does it change how we think about labor historiography in the 20th century. And what does it mean if we think about the triangle fire not as a complete pivot a complete 180, rather as a way in which exploitative labor has been transformed and changed to, I guess I would say, increase the public tolerance for exploitative labor in a particular way. So that's one kind of history of actual question and the way that I'm coming about that is through kind of I guess I would say traditional archival sources so similar to I'm sure Gavin and Caroline, or in the archives. But also thinking about the ways in which we might be able to figure out, for example, a kind of choreographic archive of the triangle fire how can we how could I think about how people move about space and recreate space from a kind of dance studies perspective is another question that I'm grappling with in this chapter. Thank you. Yeah, so thank you for that question. And thank you for, you know, commenting in a way that really, you know, unites the three papers. It's been fascinating to be here all day and listen to everyone's ideas. So in terms of how how I think about my work in a historiography. In some ways I am reading a very traditional labor history. So I'm looking at an industry of looking at the people who work in that industry and I'm looking at the organizations that those people had developed to to push back against some of the excess on the part of producers and managers. So in that way it's a very traditional labor history in in in an industry that has not received the type of attention that more traditional objects of labor history have been studied with so. So this is not the UAW or this is not, this is not, this is not auto workers this is not mind workers. This is a very different type of industry. But in order to do that, I am thinking a lot more about art as something that is inherently so so so thinking out of performance as labor and thinking of so I talk a lot about dance, thinking about dancers as union members. And what does that mean to be a dancer and a member of an organization that belongs to the American Federation of Labor. So I think about that a lot. But you know, I think that we're all moving towards a very like ecumenical labor history. I think all of us are doing that right now. And that's really interesting. It's a really interesting moment to be a historian. I mute myself for a second. And so thank you for for for for reflecting on that and I and I really see your papers connected like a from different points. And how you are building it through your research, a history of labor that can enlighten our analysis as theater scholars a from about some aspect that we we tend to to be oblivious. So sometimes so I do have one question asked by one of our central faculties, a professor David sovereign is a specifically to Doria. He asked, if could you speculate on the social political activity of Julian, Julian's wall civilian music theater, firing the mouth from 2019 in comparison with the Connie Island show. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. So for those tuning in who aren't familiar. Julia Wolf is a composer who created, I guess I would say, I think the question phrased it as a music theater piece and I think, maybe she would say it's yeah, it's for choir, she's a composer, there's instrumentals, and it's also definitely theatrical so I think that's a really great characterization. And this was in commemoration of the triangle shirt waste fire the quote, or the title rather fire in my mouth is, I believe attributed to a labor organizer Claire Lemlich, who points to the triangle she was a labor organizer prior to the triangle fire and then after the triangle fire she really points out that incident as the kind of galvanizing force behind her labor activism, particularly with the International Garment Workers Union that. And I guess without having I've only seen video of fire in my mouth so I can't fully speculate I mean, I guess the question was about speculating and I think there is something about the kind of multi sensory experience of being both together with a series of spectators and also having a kind of sensational or spectacular experience in the theater with a large number of people as well so I think there is something really important about embodiment and embodied spectatorship and proximity that has to do with both the fighting the flames and fire in my mouth. Obviously, music and the medium is really different and so I would have to do a little bit more research to think about that but you know something about, I guess I would say that a contrast would be in one in the Coney Island fire because there is certainly the resolution is joyous right there is something to be honored about the work of the firemen and the labor as the ability to escape death, which is obviously the complete opposite from fire in my memory through kind of narrative eyes is a young immigrant woman's journey from I believe from Eastern Europe through through her eventual demise of death in the triangle fire so it's a really great question and provocation and I'd have to do some more research to think about that but the kind of immediate answer would be thinking about proximity in terms of affect sensorium so meaning surrounding of sensation and music and multimedia and ultimately a kind of divergent ending would be how I would answer that. Thanks for the question. Again. Thank you. I have many other question I encourage the people we still have like five minutes to talk. I do have some other questions, particularly to Gavin I am particularly interested in. You, you were mentioning in your paper the, the, the, this, this contradiction between a enlightenment and, and the, all of this spectacular double of ghost. And so I was wondering, and because the, the span of your research and your dissertation as I, I understand is what it goes from 18th century to 20th century, more or less. So how did you see like this particular ghost machine like in dialogue with both enlightenment but maybe also a little bit with early romanticism. If you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. I would love to do that. And let me make sure I'm not muted. So thank goodness there. So I have to go ahead and cite Dion Boosico here. Dion Boosico. Most of you probably are familiar with his work, especially because of Brandon Jacobs Jenkins's wonderful play and octaroon which, you know, adapted Boosico's play the octaroon thing for that reason he's really kind of a resurgence and just feeder people's awareness but toward the end of the 19th century a drama critic named William Archer writes he's one of the imminent trauma critics at the time and he writes in 1880s that Boosico has written the two best ghost plays in the 19th century. So back then he was known for writing ghost plays. And Archer in this article says today, we are just so restricted by science in the 19th century we've seen so many inventions, and we keep hearing that science can explain everything. Nowadays we want apples to fall upwards. And he says that people find exactly that kind of sensation in ghost plays precisely because it goes to the supernatural it goes to the realm beyond our senses and a realm that cannot be explained by science. And Boosico wrote the course and brothers great ghost play with another astonishing piece of stage technology in it, as well as Ruth Van Winkle and Boosico himself just to really put this in perspective and to get back to the this issue of the enlightenment which you addressed. He says, in the 16th century. And in Shakespeare's day people believed in the ghosts that visited Richard on his couch. Nowadays, ghosts are generated by machines and held by patents by Professor Pepper, right. So he really sees an opposition between the kind of mechanically produced ghost and the so called real ghost in Shakespeare's day the kind people believed in before the enlightenment. Yeah, and a lot of ghost plays in the 19th century are in many ways meant to excite a kind of nostalgia for that, that lost time that pre industrial pre enlightened time where there was a sense of mystery and there was belief in the spirit world and people liked that. Yeah, does that begin to answer your question. No perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. I think we have to start like grabbing up but I really want to have the chance of asking to Caroline like we have a couple of minutes left. And I will like, because I am very interested in the, in the work that you mentioned in the union work in by Albany, which is a very politically engaged company. And how do you see that and what do you have discovered about their work in the context of cold war. So, thank you for that question yeah that mute button is a doozy. I, so my, I'll kind of like twist your question a little bit. So one of the. The reason why I've chosen to use the Alvin alley company as a case study in my dissertation, and especially, especially for the tours is because the company was relatively new when it was selected to tour. But it was fairly new. And the, the choreography that got the alley company, kind of like on the map was the choreography to revelations, which if you haven't seen revelations. I don't think I could do it justice. Go watch it. I think it's, it's, it's in New York for I think like a total of a month and a half every year so definitely go go if you can. So, the way that the reason why I use the company is because it went so far. Like, just, they went everywhere within the, like within an international context, but also within the United States, and the, the really, really, really interesting thing that I think that we can tease out of revelations is that the audience for the piece is so large. It's not, but like by no means is the only interesting thing or thing worth talking about about that piece, but the audience is so large and it has been performed so many times. It is, at least I think I've read some more that it has been seen more times in Swan Lake. I think that sort of familiarity with the, with the piece with the company let has lent the company, like to to the work that I'm doing in my dissertation as, as this like excellent case study of how, of how work and workers move around the world. Thank you so much. Thank you. The three of you for your wonderful papers and I am really looking forward to your research to be published. So we, we are at the end of our panel and I would like to invite you all to, to join us in a few more minutes with our keynote speaker, a professor Shannon Jackson. I think it's going to be at five, at five, I think. Yes, so it's at five. Please stay tuned and thank you so much for your papers. Thank you for my so much. And thank you for moderating. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all.


To other parts of Africa, Sudan's warring parties began a ceasefire on Sunday after two months of fighting pushed the African nation into chaos. Residents in the capital Khartoum and its neighbouring city of Andaman reported relative calm in the first hours of the ceasefire after first clashes were reported the previous day. The three-day truce came ahead of a pledge in conference. The UN and all the nations will organise on Monday to raise funds to cover Sudan's humanitarian needs. The United States and Saudi Arabia announced a ceasefire agreement. Baudelaire can set a diplomatic effort to stop the war over the past two months.