Workshop Details 

Affect Theatre is a theatrical technique for working with empirical questions and material, such as ethnographic data, archival documents, etc. The workshop will be led by anthropologist Cristiana Giordano and theatre practitioner Greg Pierotti, creators of the Affect Theatre process. It will be hosted by faculty Cassandra Hartblay and Valentina Napolitano, with support from the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, the Ethnography Lab, and units across UofT. 

This is a two-day workshop. On the first half-day, workshop participants will learn the building blocks of the affect theatre devising technique. Participants are encouraged to bring source material from their own research, such as short excerpts from fieldnotes, interviews, archival documents, medical and legal reports, media sources, etc. On the second half-day, workshop participants will apply the foundations established on the previous day to an extended experimentation with one ethnographic project. This allows the participants to see the technique carried through to a more developed phase through concerted work. Participants who wish to take part in day 2 of the workshop should commit to attending day 1. Those who do not want to commit to two days can attend Friday only. 

Day 1: Friday, Jan 31, 2-6pm  

Day 2: Saturday, Feb 1, (roughly) 12-6pm 

Location:  

The workshop will take place on the St George Campus of the University of Toronto, details to be shared with participants. Snacks and coffee will be served on both days, lunch will be served on day 2. 

Register to participate: 

The workshop is open to approximately 25 participants. Please use this sign-up form to reserve a spot. The form will close 24 hours before the workshop or when capacity is reached. If you have access needs or questions about the workshop that may affect your registration, please direct them to Cassandra Hartblay, cassandra.hartblay@utoronto.ca  

About the technique 

Affect Theater, a devising technique influenced by the Moment Work technique originated by Greg Pierotti’s former theater company, Tectonic Theater Project, and Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints. This theatrical devising technique is a practice for working with non-theatrical source material (interviews, archival documents, medical and legal reports, media sources, etc.) to construct narratives for the stage. The practice departs from traditional theater in that a finished script is not the starting point for the staging and direction of a play. Devising emerged as a means to revitalize how theatrical texts are created. It is a collaborative process involving the members of a company devising and writing together. Our workshop aims to extend this way of writing to other disciplines and their forms of textual production (books, articles, essays, installations, exhibits, etc.). In our weekend workshops, we encourage participants to include their own empirical data as a part of the source material we utilize in our devising practices. This creates the opportunity for the students and faculty to shift their relationship to their research through a collaborative engagement with our theatrical exploration. Learn more about the Affect Theatre technique here, or in the recent book, Affect Ethnography: Exploring Performance and Narrative in the Creation of Unstories (available as an ebook from UToronto Libraries). 

About the Workshop Practitioners 

Cristiana Giordano is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book, Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (University of California Press, 2014), won the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing (2016), and the Boyer Prize in Psychoanalytic Anthropology (2017). Her current research investigates new ways of rendering ethnographic material into artistic forms. She has been collaborating with playwright and director Greg Pierotti on a new methodology at the intersection of the social sciences and performance. They have created Unstories, a 50-minute performance around the current “refugee crisis” in Europe, and Unstories II (roaming), a 45-minute performance that furthers the reflection about movement and borders. 

Greg Pierotti is an assistant teacher of Fitzmaurice voice work and a professor of theatrical devising at the University of Arizona. He is a playwright, theater director, actor, and scholar. He co-authored the plays The Laramie Project, Laramie: 10 Years Later, The People’s Temple, and Unstories. He co-authored the devising workbook Moment Work. His honors as a writer/director include a Humanitas Prize, a Bay Area Will Glickman Award for Best New Play, an Emmy nomination, an NY Drama Desk nomination, and a 2013 nomination for an Alpert Award for outstanding contribution to the theater. Since 2015 he has conducted research focused on structural racism and police violence. Since 2015, with anthropologist Cristiana Giordano, he has developed a method for research, writing, and theatrical devising called “Affect Theater.” Together they have authored articles playing at the intersection of Anthropology and Theater. They have published on a variety of platforms for The Society for Cultural Anthropology. The Drama Review published Getting Caught, their latest journal article in February 2020. They teach workshops in “Affect Theater” internationally.