Teaching

I am an Associate Professor at Wesleyan University, where I support my students within incredibly vibrant student and department theater scenes. My classes range through directing, devising, and collaborative and alternative theater-making. Some of my students’ biggest take aways are around the possibility of working from their values, claiming their own points of view, and seeing theater-making as community-building. Making a piece of performance is not so different from making a society– as theater directors and collaborative leaders, we have the opportunity with each new project to create the kinds of spaces — and the build the kinds of worlds— we want to work in and live in.

Before coming to Wesleyan, I taught courses in Site-Specific Playwriting at University of Texas @ Austin, Fordham University and SUNY Purchase. I was an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton in the American Studies department which allowed me to develop my course the Artist-Citizen; I also taught this class to undergrads at Harvard. In 2017, I was honored to be the Quinn Martin Guest Chair of Directing at UCSD, where I taught a collaboration workshop to the entire cohort of theater MFA’s and directed What of the Night? by Maria Irene Forné.

SAMPLE Courses

Directing 1 and 2

The Live Event: Politics and Performance of Socially Engaged Theater

Performance Ensemble: Devising

Following Fornés: Creativity, Intimacy, and Imagination

The Artist Citizen

  • read this article about a final project from the Harvard semester of this class called “The Failure Wall”

I am currently developing a new class called Emergency! Theater responds to Climate Change. This course will introduce students to conventional plays, performance art, live event, installation and land art in which artists and audiences can confront, engage with, and respond to the climate crisis.

My teaching and scholarship is supported by my association with these amazing groups:

Mentoring

I am a frequent guest to other universities, often framed by our Ocean Filibuster tour, which brings me in direct contact with not only theater students (acting, directing, writing, design) but also students of public policy, visual art, and environmental science and environmental philosophy, among others.

Lisa D’Amour and I joined a national project called Theater Anywhere: A Cookbook of Activities during the pandemic. Sponsored by the American Alliance for Theater and Education, experimental interdisciplinary artists of note were called upon to concoct original "recipes" for devising performance in the online classroom. The result was a “cookbook” of short, practical, evergreen, multigenerational recipes in video form.

You can also find PearlDamour’s recipe at https://www.aate.com/cookbook-of-activities (scroll to recipe #4)

Link to transcript: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wH7SXg14Dsin8df0m5aod4hrog94RFcm/view

Panels

As a panelist I participate in a wide range of conversations that intersect with my practice, from Fornés-focused Q&A’s to discussions about Site Specific Workflows. One panel that felt particularly impactful to me was “Making Feminist Theater and Making Theater Feminist,” held in March 2021. This webinar from Digital Theatre+ and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education was chaired by Lisa Peck, Lecturer at the University of Sussex and author of Act as a Feminist: Towards a Critical Acting Pedagogy (Routledge 2021). The event focused on the practical approaches that enable theatre-makers to practice feminism in their work.

You can watch it here: “Making Feminist Theater and Making Theater Feminist.” Digital Theatre+, Oct 28, 2021

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Some articles that highlight my teaching:

Pamela Newton, The Generative Generation. American Theater Magazine, January 3, 2018

Citizen Artist—Creating Socially Engaged Theater as Civic Practice, Wesleyan University Magazine, issue 2, September 24, 2020