Dr P.A. Skantze

P.A. Skantze has been teaching across the disciplines of theatre history, theatre practice, writing and performance since her postgraduate experience at Columbia University. Her method has always been one of engaged translation between practice, practitioners and theorists influenced by her traditional training in an English department that required study from 1600 to contemporary performance, from Dante to Angela Carter. Setting the history of print and sound in the early modern period against current conversations about the live and the virtual, she has explored the characteristics of stillness and motion throughout the forms and practices of performances: Shakespeare, dance, European drama in translation, sound art and radio, adaptation and the performance score.
Her book Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century (Routledge 2003) is the first installment in this transnational, transmedial, transtemporal exploration.

Her articles include examinations of national identity, the choreography of Bill T. Jones, surtitles and contemporary theatrical performance, gift exchange and creative generosity, Shakespeare and Mabou Mines, gender and motion. She has done workshops in the UK, the US and Italy. Her radio play All That Fell was staged, an “experiment in physical radio, in May 2006 and is being recorded in 2008 in New York. Currently her performance projects include: KusseBisse, a butoh version of Kleist’s Penthesilea for which she wrote the libretto scheduled to be staged in London in early 2009 [see youtube link on this page]; Cassandra Float Can, performance based on a text by Anne Carson, London 2008/9; and “Stacks” a musical in homage to the New York Public Library with a heroine who saves New York by entering five famous books about the city and retrieving the necessary elements for New York’s survival

She has supervised and examined dissertations about the ‘stage life of props,’ voice and gender in early modern theatre, dreams and dreaming on stage from Calderon to Strindberg, female masochism in film and performance art, practice as research project on a queer method for playwriting, documentation-lies-videotape.

She welcomes projects that are practice based, theoretical and/or a mix of both on: early modern practice; the history of sound and sound in performance; transnational identities; new and old and east and west European drama; reception and cognition; questions of spectating; writing for performance; dance; the gender making performance and in the making of performance; gift theory and inventive methods of scholarly circulation; stillness and motion and performance; creating flexible modes of academic exploration of performance, historical and contemporary.

Publications
Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (May 2003) Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture.
“Itinerant Specator/Itinerant Spectacle” current book project on the peregrinations of maker and audience identities on European festival stages.

“Lillian Hellman” in Modern American Women Writers. Edited by Elaine Showalter (New York 1991).
“The Lady Eve; or, Who's On First?” in Women in Theatre: Occasional Papers 2 (University of Birmingham, Warwick, England 1994).
“Making It Up: Improvisation as Cultural Exchange between Shakespeare and Italy” Shakespeare and Intertextuality: the Transition of Cultures between Italy and England in the Early Modern Period. Edited by Michele Marrapodi (Bulzoni Editore 2000).
“Watching in Translation: Performance and the Reception of Surtitles” Performance Research International, v. 7, no. 2, June 2002.
“Dancing Away Towards Home: the Influence of Bill T. Jones on Contemporary European Dance” in Blackening Europe: How African America Changed Europe. Edited by Heike Raphael (Routledge 2003).
Who’s Watching Whom?: Abbas Kiarostami’s TA’ZIYE at the Teatro India, Rome” in Western European Stages Fall 2003.
“Uneasy Coalitions: Culpability, Orange Jumpsuits and Measure for Measure” Shakespeare v.3., no. 1, Winter 2007.
“A Good Catch: Practicing Generosity” Performance Research International vol. 12, no. 2 June 2007.
“Unaccomodated Woman: a Cross Gender Lear, Performance and Universality” in Shakespeare Redressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance edited by James Bulman (Fairleigh Dickinson Univeristy Press) 2008