THEATRE DIRECTING + CHOREOGRAPHY — Selected Sources by + about Women
“In the spirit of the SDC Statement on Diversity and Inclusion, for the Summer 2016 issue of the Journal, which contains several pieces about women leading, we initiated a forum similar to the one on the relationship between the academy and the profession which introduced the new Peer-Reviewed Section last summer. We invited members of our board and others teaching in various types of institutions around the country to write about texts that they use in their classes, sources by or about women directors and choreographers.
In an initial brainstorming meeting, a member of the board queried: ‘Are there many texts by women about directing?’ Beyond the several books by Anne Bogart, which have become standards in the field alongside Peter Brook and William Ball, others do not as readily come to mind. Additionally, books compiling information about directors and directing have been skewed for decades, often with fewer than twenty-five percent of their entries based upon women.
In response to this imbalance, we created a nonexclusive, complementary list of sources by and about women directors and choreographers, primarily composed of books and scholarly journals. Because of their influence on practitioners, we included a handful of texts by feminist theorists in performance as well, though we could only print a few of many in this substantial area of scholarship. Likewise, we note that women of color and trans women working in the two fields are even less fairly represented in print, and women working in fields such as children’s theatre and devising deserve more thorough coverage than we are able to offer here. Please, send us additional sources to be considered for this list, which will be maintained and updated periodically. Email suggestions to TheSourceList@SDCweb.org. We regret that we are unable to respond to every message; however, all submissions will receive careful consideration.”
—Anne Fliotsos + Ann M. Shanahan, SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section Co-Editors