The DAMU Department of Authorial Creativity and Pedagogy invites you to attend an online lecture by theatre scholar, historian and educator at Tufts University Laurence Senelick entitled From Drag to Trans. The lecture is based on his book, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (2000), in which he explores the phenomenon of cross-dressing and gender in theatre from shamanism, through the Elizabethan era, to the present. In an online lecture he will present the latest findings from his own research in this area. 

Prof. Laurence Senelick is an expert on Russian theatre and drama, with interests in the history of popular theatre, the context of gender and performance, and the history of directing. He is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books, most recently Soviet Theatre: A Documentary History; Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters (2014); The American Stage: Writing on the American Theatre (Library of America) (2010); and A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2015). In addition, he has published more than one hundred articles in various scholarly journals, translated the plays of A. P. Chekhov, J. Giraudoux and G. Feydeau. Prof. Laurence Senelick also has practical experience in the theatre: he has worked as a director mainly in university theatres, where he staged his own translations of The Reviser, The Bacchantes and other plays. In an academic setting, he has conceived new courses on cabaret and slapstick comedy and, as an actor, produced Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. 

About the book The Changing Room: sex, drag and theatre: from a review by Elizabeth Homan for Theatre Journal 53 (2), January 2001: 

„Lawrence Senelick's most current and comprehensive investigation of sex, drag, and theatre is astonishing not only for the fantastic amount of historical information it contains, but also for its authoritative examination of theatrical transvestism as a vigorously time-honored cultural and political phenomenon. Written as a sort of cultural and historiographic reclamation of the inherent connection between cross-dressing and theatrical performance, the present volume is overflowing with exceedingly well-researched examples of the pervasiveness of theatrical transvestism from its earliest shamanic and divine purposes through its twentieth century manifestations as an "effective weapon in the arsenal of the artist of outrage.“

Prof. Laurence Senelick will be lecturing via the Zoom platform. The lecture will be broadcast live as a video conference in the Haller Hall at DAMU and streamed on YouTube. Participants can also join the video conference on the Zoom platform HERE, stream is available HERE. 

Only the audience in Haller Hall and participans of the video conference on the Zoom platform will be able to interact in the discussion!

The lecture takes place within the framework of the doctoral seminar of the study program Authorial Acting, its Theory and Psychosomatics (KATaP DAMU) and is open to all students or teachers of study programs in the arts and arts science.