A “cold, Friday the 13th in Normal” may sound like the premise for a poorly written television horror show, but for Associate Professor of Theatre Arts Katherine Privatt, January 13, 2006, proved to be a day of enormous personal and professional satisfaction. The Normal was Normal, Illinois, home of Illinois State University and the regional competition of the American College Theater Festival. Lawrence’s Term I production of Naomi Iizuka’s play, Language of Angels, had been selected as a “showcase production” to be performed at the festival. Director Privatt accompanied eight cast members and as many stagehands and lighting and sound crew members to Normal for three performances on that one day. The invitation to perform was in recognition of Privatt’s and the students’ highly innovative approach to the staging of the new play, which had come to Lawrence as part of the “New Plays on Campus” program of the Playwright Center of Minneapolis.
That same enthusiasm for innovation is also to be found in Professor Privatt’s imaginative teaching style. Pictured here are theatre arts students participating in a movement exercise based on legendary director Jerzy Grotowsky’s depiction of the three parts of body expression – thinking, feeling, and moving. The “statue game,” as it is called, explores different postures and body movements, to encourage young actors to extend beyond their natural habits and provide them with new tools of expression, as they take on new acting roles.
Professor Privatt’s research on corporate funding on Broadway was the subject of a program on modern forms of theatre patronage broadcast on Wisconsin Public Radio’s University of the Air. She participated in a panel on “Reinventing the Post Mortem” at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and, along with Lawrence Fellow Annette Thornton, presented “Praxis of Collaboration in the Rehearsal Process: Fuel for the Creative Fire” at the Mid-American Theatre Conference.
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