Breaking the Glass Grid: Gender and Transgender Bias Across the Performing Arts Industry



This is Episode #56 of Will Call, here at the Greylock Glass, released Tuesday, February 28, 2017.  I’m your host, Jason Velazquez, and I hope you’ve been enjoying our opening music, “Dark Sky Day,” by pianist and composer Lisa Hilton. We’ll play more from Ms. Hilton later in the show. Well, we had a grand time covering the 10X10 Upstreet Arts Festival, with our unauthorized submission of 10 Micro-casts over the course of the event, didn’t we? Now, though, it’s time to focus our attention on North County, as we speak with Amy Holzapfel about a panel discussion being held on the Campus of Williams College as part of its “CenterSeries” on Thursday of this week:



Our teaser trailer for this episode, featuring Amy Holzapfel, produced by Jason Velázquez.



Ms. Holzapfel will moderate this conversation among some of the most respected personalities of American theatre today. The evening is CERTAIN to unflinchingly dissect some of the most troubling aspects of gender disparity plaguing the arts. The glacial pace of withdrawal of white male dominance on both sides of the curtain, as well as in the board rooms and administrative offices, has given rise to increasingly frequent and vocal dialogue in recent years.



Hosted by the Williams Theatre Department, the event occurs March 2nd  at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance’s Adams Memorial Theatre, located at 1000 Main Street, in Williamstown, Mass. The event is free and open to the public, but due to the immense interest, the audience is advised to arrive early to secure a seat.



And now, let’s welcome to the show Amy Holzapfel, who manages to make contemplation of this weighty topic as refreshing as it is thought provoking.



Amy Holzapfel



Amy Holzapfel, Chair and Associate Professor of Theatre at Williams College; photo by Roman Iwasiwka.



Amy Holzapfel is Chair and Associate Professor of Theatre at Williams College, where she teaches courses in theatre history and literature, performance studies, and dramaturgy. She also serves as dramaturge on Theatre Department productions and on the advisory committees of the Departments of Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her principal research interests include: nineteenth-century theatre, theatre and visual art, dance-theatre, and contemporary performance. Her monograph, Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeing (Routledge, 2014) explores how modern theories of vision in art and science impacted the rise of the realist movement in theatre. She has published articles in Contemporary Theatre Review, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism, Modern Drama, and Theater, as well as chapters in the anthologies Spatial Turns: Space, Place and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture (Rodopi 2010), The Oxford Handbook on Dance & Theatre (Oxford 2015), The Routledge Companion to Scenography (Routledge 2017), and August Strindberg & Visual Culture (Bloomsbury 2018). She is currently at work on two research projects: the first exploring the lost chorus in modern performance and the second theorizing a post-Recession genre of “subprime critique and performance.” She received her M.F.A. (2001) and D.F.A. (2006) in Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award, a Hellman Fellowship, a Lehman Fellowship at the Oakley Center for the Humanities & Social Sciences, and a Research Fellowship from the American Society of Th...