Special CCS Supper Club Presentation

Special CCS Supper Club Presentation: Thursday, March 3rd, 5:00 - 7:00 PM Pizza and drinks served

PLEASE RSVP TO nadine.amalfi@yale.edu BY WEDNESDAY MORNING, MARCH 2ND.  THANK-YOU!


“The Way of the Language”: Excavating Silence through Documentary Theatre

Nicholas Johnson, Trinity College Dublin

This is the first research presentation from SPECTRESS visiting fellow Nicholas Johnson, who will spend three months at Yale’s CCS from May 2016. The presentation will introduce The Way of the Language: Voices from the War on Terror, his extended documentary theatre project that embodies transcript material from Guantánamo Bay detainees, alongside many other documents from the post-9/11 global conflict, on stage. The project uses strategies of performance, practice-based research, and the discourse of cultural trauma to explore the social, cultural, and philosophical implications of the ‘War on Terror.’


Nicholas Johnson is Assistant Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, as well as a performer, director, and writer. Recent credits include Pan Pan’s Cascando (dramaturge), No’s Knife with Lisa Dwan at Lincoln Center (director/co-adaptor), Ill Seen Ill Said in Dublin and Antwerp (performer), and the first-ever performance of Wyndham Lewis’s Enemy of the Stars in Dublin and Fez (co-director). He has translated works by Toller, Trakl, Frisch, Brecht, and Kafka, and adapted works by Dostoevsky, Berkeley, and Ginsberg. Widely published as a Beckett scholar, he co-edited the special “performance issue” of the Journal of Beckett Studies (23.1, 2014). He has facilitated performance workshops worldwide, including most recently the US, UK, Germany, Turkey, Japan, Iraqi Kurdistan, Morocco, Israel and the West Bank. He was artistic director of Dublin’s Painted Filly Theatre from 2006 to 2014 and is one of the founding directors of the annual Beckett Summer School at TCD.