Developing a New Program: The "Creator-Researcher Actor" as a "Postdramatic Writer"

Abstract

This article discusses three performance projects of the Tel Aviv Univer­sity Theater Department, and is an attempt to explore the "Creator-Re­searcher Actor" program as a local pedagogical model that frees the ac­tor from the relatively narrow confines of his/her role as a performer subject to the authority of playwright and director. Since the raw mate­rials of the projects derive from non-dramatic texts rather than plays, the creator-researcher actor can be viewed as a kind of "postdramatic writer." Although the program is not ideologically labeled "Feminist Theater," indirectly it furnishes women actors with a creative space, "a stage of their own" that permits them to lay claim to their works and let their voices be heard. The article examines the poetics that transform the performers into speaking subjects, and how the creative power of writ­ing non-dramatic texts is revealed through reading. Furthermore, it looks at how the attitude toward text as texture encourages stage strate­gies that place the corporeality and materiality of the verbal text by which the text is staged in the foreground as a component, so that the text strikes back