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Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Theatre, Bryan Schmidt finds performance in everyday life
The following story is part of a series of profiles on the recipients of the Arts & Sciences Teaching Faculty Grants Fund. Grants are available to Teaching Faculty, and to Professional Faculty or Staff who have contractual responsibility for teaching. You can support efforts like the Teaching Faculty Grants Fund by giving to the Arts & Sciences Annual Fund.
Bryan Schmidt, Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Theatre, attended the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) Conference in November, as part of his efforts to develop a course on workers theatre in the Global South, with a focus on South Africa.
As a recipient of the Arts & Sciences Teaching Faculty Grands Fund, Schmidt is passionate about bringing greater awareness to the history of workers’ theatre in South Africa.
“I do work in South Africa on cultural policy and theatrical criticism. So, this particular project was about a place called Ponte City which is this giant building in Johannesburg that has been called at some point the ‘tallest and grandest urban slum in the world.’ It's this very iconic tower, in the middle of Johannesburg that has gone through a long period of ups and downs from its time where, during apartheid, it was initially used as an optimistic outlook, as a place that would be sort of a grandeur of South Africa's apartheid success,” said Schmidt. “The most iconic thing that happened there was people would start throwing their trash outside of their windows into the hollow center of the spherical building. The trash piled up to the point where it was, like, 14 stories of just trash in the center of this building that was meant to be this beautiful middle class high rise.”
Interested in the performance and theatrical elements of this protest, Schmidt also examined the current examples of urban tourism in Ponte City.
“My research was on an urban tour operator that operates in Ponte City called Dlala Nje. What they're trying to do is bring people in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa into the space that was seen as such a no-go space. The kind of place where no middle-class South African would ever be caught dead. "Essentially, [Dlala Nje does] corporate excursions for people in professional settings to get to know the neighborhood in Johannesburg again and reacclimate to this place that many people never would dare to set foot in," said Schmidt. “So, in their urban tourism, they integrate performance, and I was talking in my paper presentation about the history of Ponte City and sort of what it means to utilize this form of revitalization tourism, through performance of that space.”
Along with presenting these findings at ASTR, Schmidt also participated in a series of sessions alongside other people interested in the Global South.
“As it happened, there's a long-standing subfield of people working in South Africa or sub-Saharan Africa. There was a group of three of us who all were in some ways dealing with South African performance. One of whom I knew and the other one I had not met before, but it was a really cool experience, getting to discuss with folks who have that kind of deep engagement with place,” said Schmidt.
Schmidt also had the opportunity to meet with the contributors and reviewers for his work as the book review editor for the Journal of Dramatic Theater and Criticism and with his writing editor, Weston Twardowski, with whom he is putting together an edited volume for the University of Michigan Press about tourism called Staging Visitation.
On April 24, Schmidt’s original theatre piece called A New and Well-Ordered City will premiere as part of the Theatre & Performance Department’s onstage season.
Showcasing the imagination of a city planner, this play focuses on “exploring the aspirations we invest in urban spaces, the labor of designing them, and the cycles of action that bring them to life.”
Through his approach to research and teaching in efforts to expand the purview of theatre, Schmidt’s work highlights “how theatricality spills out from beyond the stage so that theatre isn’t something we just encounter when we go to the theater, but we see in our everyday life.”