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Acting, Singing, Dancing, and So Forth: Theatre (Research) in the University

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2004

W. B. Worthen
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley

Extract

About midway through Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake, the protagonist Jimmy (later known as Snowman, survivor of a genetically engineered global epidemic induced by his childhood friend, Crake) leaves home for the university, or in this case for the Martha Graham Academy. In a culture driven by the collusion of technology and capital it's not surprising that the best students are sent to lavish technical universities (Crake attends the Watson–Crick Institute), while arts and humanities students listlessly rusticate at Martha Graham, learning the pointless yet “vital arts” of “acting, singing, dancing, and so forth” and how to deploy them in the service of commodity culture (Jimmy's skill with language leads him to major in Applied Rhetoric, eventually writing advertising copy for Crake's new life forms). Like much else in Oryx and Crake, Atwood's vision jibes chillingly enough with the rhetoric of today's corporate university: compared to jet propulsion, cancer research, or even the battle of Appomattox (on my campus, history is a social science), the arts and humanities can be made to seem “like studying Latin, or book binding: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything” (187).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2004 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

W. B. Worthen is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, was published in 2003; he is currently completing a book entitled Print and the Poetics of Performance.