Service to the Profession

I am dedicated to advancing and supporting the field through ongoing participation in the national conversations impacting and catalyzing our industry. In doing so I aim to enhance the level of dialogue at which we approach and consume work as a field, deepening our engagement with issues of shared concern.

Working Groups

In 2024, I joined the newly formed Academic Initiatives Task Force for the Stage Directors and Choreographer’s Union (SDC). Our interest is to examine the connection between our pedagogy and our students’ ability to thrive creatively and professionally in the current state of our industry. Specifically, what it means to “direct” has changed in a post-COVID, post-BLM, post-AI world. For our pedagogy to change effectively, we must first understand how our profession has changed. This cohort is collectively assessing these questions within the infrastructure of SDC.

In 2022 I was invited to the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University to join a panel called “Our One Earth–Artists Engaging Climate.” I was subsequently invited by the Lab and Georgetown’s Earth Commons to convene with a select group of artists, thought leaders, and change makers to grapple with critical questions at the intersection of art, activism and the environment (Surya, June 2023). I now serve as a Global Lab Creative Core member. I am also a founding member of Climate Lens, a network of theater makers and culture workers who pursue an imaginatively expansive approach to the phenomena of climate chaos. We use and teach the Climate Lens Playbook, developed by Una Chauduri with Climate Lens members. My masterclass “Leading by Following: Making Performance through a Climate Lens,” taught most recently for Professor Chaudhuri and Jay Wegman’s Contemporary Experimental Performance at NYU (Sep 23, 2021), is a productive intertwining of my climate-focused work with my Maria Irene Fornés scholarship. In 2022 I joined The Fornés Institute, an initiative of the Latinx Theatre Commons, as an inaugural member. The institute aims to preserve and amplify Maria Irene Fornés’s legacy as a teacher, mentor and artist, through workshops, convenings, and advocacy. As a core group member, I will support a Fornés Symposium at Princeton University in Spring 2025.

Project-based Service: Interdisciplinarity

Ocean Filibuster has opened up new possibilities for service and participation, allowing me to approach ways that theater artists, scientists, and activists can productively infiltrate each other’s fields. This work's heart is a growing partnership with geoscientists Raquel Bryant (Wesleyan University) and Benjamin Kiesling (University of Texas, Austin). Most recently I served as an artist respondent for their Justice in Geoscience Writing Group, bringing an arts-based perspective to scientists seeking innovative ways of communicating their research. I subsequently co-led a workshop with Drs Bryant and Kiesling at the 2024 Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM), a flagship conference for the international ocean sciences community. Using Ocean Filibuster as a case study, participants considered their research in relationship to image, metaphor and participatory play, experiencing how creative methodology can maximize the impact of their science. Ocean Filibuster has also been the focus of three “Theater and Policy Salons,” a series of curated policy discussions that brings artists and local civic policy makers together to investigate themes raised by theater productions. Ocean Filibuster has also allowed me to take part in organizing a significant gathering of Gulf South Artists and Activists, called the Gulf South Climate Justice Artist and Cultural Organizer Convening, in New Orleans/Bulbancha, June 2023.

Mentoring

I am passionate about mentoring young theater artists inside and outside my academic sphere at Wesleyan. This frequently takes the form of talks, guest lectures, and class visits to other universities, often framed by my Ocean Filibuster residencies, which bring me in direct contact with not only theater students (acting, directing, writing, design) but also students of public policy, visual art, and environmental philosophy, among others. A list of these visits and talks can be found in my CV.

I joined a national project called Theater Anywhere: A Cookbook of Activities during the pandemic. Sponsored by the American Alliance for Theater and Education, experimental interdisciplinary artists of note were called upon to concoct original "recipes" for devising performance in the online classroom. The result was a “cookbook” of short, practical, evergreen, multigenerational recipes in video form.

You can watch the video here:

You can also find PearlDamour’s recipe at https://www.aate.com/cookbook-of-activities (scroll to recipe #4)

Link to transcript: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wH7SXg14Dsin8df0m5aod4hrog94RFcm/view

Panels

As a panelist I participate in a wide range of conversations that intersect with my practice, from Fornés-focused Q&A’s to discussions about Site Specific Workflows. One panel that felt particularly impactful to me was “Making Feminist Theater and Making Theater Feminist,” held in March 2021. This webinar from Digital Theatre+ and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education was chaired by Lisa Peck, Lecturer at the University of Sussex and author of Act as a Feminist: Towards a Critical Acting Pedagogy (Routledge 2021). The event focused on the practical approaches that enable theatre-makers to practice feminism in their work.

Watch panel here: “Making Feminist Theater and Making Theater Feminist.” Digital Theatre+, Oct 28, 2021

  • introduction start time: 5.45

  • representative sections: 9.45 - 11.45,  28.05 - 31.30

(Image only)

Peer Reviewer

In concert with my interest in connecting with seminal artists of the experimental theater, I served as a peer book reviewer for Routledge Theatre and Performance Studies division, responding to The Shape of Time: Perspectives on the Theatre of Les Waters, edited by Scott Cummings.

Press

Pamela Newton, The Generative Generation. American Theater Magazine, January 3, 2018

Citizen Artist—Creating Socially Engaged Theater as Civic Practice, Wesleyan University Magazine, issue 2, September 24, 2020