Claudia Alick had the pleasure of lecturing at the Emerson College HowlRound Seminar: Topics in Contemporary Theatre Practice. This seminar offers graduate students and senior undergraduate students the opportunity to engage closely with researching and writing on contemporary theatre practices through close engagement with HowlRound Theatre Commons, a knowledge commons that encourages freely sharing intellectual and artistic resources and expertise to amplify progressive, disruptive ideas about the art form and facilitate connection between diverse practitioners. To that end, students in this seminar explore and familiarize themselves with the values, systems and practices of HowlRound by engaging with it as a database/research tool, a teaching tool, as a meeting place of ideas and peers, and as an aspirational home for students’ own interests and developing expertise.  

It was a pleasure to be with future theater leaders who had such incisive and interesting reflections on the material. Claudia presented some core concepts around racial and disability justice that inform her accessible theater process and production design. It was a real pleasure to present in an accessible fashion with this hybrid classroom.

Students read these articles to prepare for the class.

• “Producing with a Disabled Lens” by Claudia Alick, HowlRound Anthology, p. 388

• “Illuminating the Careers of Disabled Lighting Designers” by Michael Maag and Annie Wiegand 

• Moving from Disability Visibility to Disability Artistry (Oct 2022)Read: “This is How We Cripped It” by Debbie Patterson

• Optional reading
  • Read “Read: Our Differences Are Our Strengths: Neurodiversity in Theatre” by Mickey Rowe HowlRound Anthology p. 212
  • Watch/Review: #DeafWoke with Warren “Wawa” Snipe 
  • Watch/Review: Praxis Sessions for Virtual Collaboration: Prefigurative Spaces 
  • Listen: “Creating a Platform for BIPOC, Deaf, and Hard-of-Hearing Artists with Michelle Banks of Visionaries of the Creative Arts,” Building Our Own Tables podcast