Week Twelve: Jules Odendahl-James

Nov 28 - Dec 3: Jules Odendahl-James 

Focus: "This week I plan to ruminate on two dramaturgical projects completed this semester (Self-Defense and Doll's House), two projects entering the beginning phases (Me Too Monologues and Ragtime: the musical), any other dramaturgy related tidbits that show up during the week's arts news, pose a few digiturgy and production blog queries, and was hoping to delve into a general discussion about the position of "resident dramaturgs" at university theaters (how close/far are/can/should be such positions from their "professional" counterparts in the non-academic theater world.)"

Bio: Jules Odendahl-James is a Visiting Lecturer and the Resident Dramaturg in the Department of Theater Studies at Duke University where she also serves as the coordinating director of the Performance and Embodied Research Colloquium (PERC) and the co-convenor of the Franklin Humanities Institute working group: EPASquared: Environment, Performance, Art/Engagement, People, Action. Over the 2011-2012 season she will provide dramaturgical support for productions as divergent as Carson Kreitzer's Self-Defense or, The Death of Some Salesmen, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, Shakespeare's Henry IV (Parts 1&2) & Henry V, the documentary play The Me Too Monologues, and Ragtime, The Musical. She holds an MFA in Directing from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA/PhD in Performance Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a founding member of Bold Maids Productions, a feminist performance company (1996 – 2003) who, in addition to producing work by women playwrights, composed a series of original scripts tackling issues of identity, sexuality, and politics through a vaudevillian approach to academic theory. In her current book project, Over My Dead Body: Documentary Performance and the Forensic Imagination, she traces intersections among individual trauma, public memory, and social activism by tracing the shared origins, divergent visual technologies, and complimentary narrative constructs of contemporary documentary performance and forensic media. 

Questions from LMDA:

What is your definition of dramaturgy?

"I keep trying to whittle this down to a sentence and, depending on my audience, it seems to be a very malleable sentence. I've offered "interdisciplinary research and outreach hub for a theater production" to non-theater colleagues at my institution. But in conversation with a filmmaker the other day, she observed how connected dramaturgy seemed to be with "advocacy," so this week I'm trying out this one-line definition: Dramaturgy is artistic advocacy connecting audiences and productions in ways that provide context, expand experience, and spur conversation."

What is your favorite project?
"I try to make each project my "favorite." : ) But most recently I had the great pleasure of working on a production of Carson Kreitzer's Self-Defense, or the Death of Some Salesmen. The play is a loosely fictionalized account of Aileen Wuornos who killed 7 men in the late 1980s in Florida, was caught, tried and convicted of 6 death sentences in 1990 and executed in 2002. I wrote part of my dissertation about Wuornos and found Carson and her play in the process of that writing. For the past few years I've been trying to find a company in the area to produce the piece and was thrilled when I happened to notice it on the season at UNC-Greensboro (about 45 minutes away from the Triangle). I contacted the director and she very generously invited me to share my mounds of Wuornos research with the cast and come into rehearsals as a dramaturgy consultant. It was the second time in about six months that I had a chance to work on a play that had been haunting my dramaturgical consciousness for many years."

What is your dream project?
"Wow. There are really too many to count. For a while I've been kicking around an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. It's a novel that I absolutely love because it brings together my love the the late nineteenth-century, forensic thrillers, and women who kill. But I think my biggest dream would be to find a way to do my partner's adaptation/translation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit (one of my top 10 favorite plays). However, since there's a copyright block on other stage versions beyond the Maurice Valency adaptation (from 1958), so perhaps a good compromise might be the Kander & Ebb musical version. I'd also just love to work with The Civilians on any one of their many investigatory theater projects."