Episode 136: Adam Versényi on Dramaturgy, Translation, and the Chairs Leadership Program
October 24, 2024 | Ruby Wang
Adam Versényi is a professor of dramaturgy in the UNC Department of Dramatic Art. In this episode, Versényi shares his collaborative work in dramaturgy and translation projects. He also discusses his previous fellowships with the IAH and also what the current Chairs Leadership Program cohort is up to this year.
Transcript
Kristen Chavez: Welcome to the Institute, a podcast on the lives and works of fellows and friends of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m your host, Kristen Chavez.
Adam Versényi is a professor of dramaturgy in the UNC Department of Dramatic Art, and a dramaturg for the Playmakers Repertory Company. Outside of his dramaturgy work with the playmakers, Adam is also director, translator and editor of the journal “The Mercurian” and more. He is a two-time fellow of the Institute, the Faculty Fellowship Program in 1993 and the Academic Leadership Program in 2004. He is also a three-time participant of the Chairs Leadership Program. Today, he is the director of the Chairs Leadership Program, where he facilitates monthly dinners with new and reappointed department chairs in the College of Arts and Sciences. Adam, welcome to the podcast.
Adam Versényi: Thank you. Glad to be here
KC: So, you are a theater scholar, a dramaturg, critic, translator and director. Can you share a little bit about how you got into this type of work?
AV: Sure. I actually started as a dancer when I was four years old. Started acting when I was nine. Thought I was going to be a performer all throughout college, and then spent several years starving as a performer, and decided that I wanted to continue working in the theater, but in a different fashion. So applied to graduate programs and dramaturgy and dramatic criticism and got into Yale and got my MFA and my DFA there.
KC: Wonderful. Can you tell me a little bit about what a dramaturg does, since you work very heavily with it, and you know, in playmakers,
AV: A dramaturg is part of the creative team of a given production. It could be in the theater, it could be in dance, could be in opera. There are even film dramaturgs, and the dramaturg is somebody who is primarily concerned with how meaning is conveyed in performance, typically with playmakers who will start working on a production four to six months in advance before we ever step into the rehearsal hall.
And what I’m doing is talking with the director, the designers, trying to figure out what our approach will be to this particular production. I supply both a sounding board and information. It could be everything, you know, I’ve worked with, directors, designers who think orally, so music that will send them in a particular direction. It might be visual materials. It may be critical articles, books. It’s a wonderful profession because you’re constantly learning yourself
KC: Is there anything that stands out to you, you know, is there a production that you’ve worked on, maybe with playmakers, that maybe stood out to you as you were going through that journey?
AV: I mean, we’ve had done a number of wonderful productions. I think the production that we did of Cabaret with Taylor Mac as the MC a number of years ago, when Joe Hodge was still here as Artistic Director, that was an incredibly powerful production. One of the things that made it so was the conclusion in doing research for that production, I discovered that there had been a number of Cabaret performers who were sent to concentration camps by the Nazis. So our ending of that production was the performers from our cabaret on cattle cars.
I remember that, yeah, it was, I think that was like my first exposure to that production, and then having that ending, and it’s just like it was a wham moment, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing that. So you’ve, as I mentioned, you’ve also translated plays and books, including Ramón Griffero’s The Dramaturgy of Space in 2002 in 2022 sorry.
KC: What was that experience like?
AV: So I started translating because when I was in graduate school. So I discovered the world of Latin American theater. I knew a great deal about Latin American fiction, poetry, Iberian theater, but for some reason, it had never occurred to me that there was theater in Latin America before, and it’s an incredibly rich area.
So in order to do my research, to be able to convey what I was doing to my faculty, and then when I started to teach to my students, I discovered that the majority of works in translation into English at that point had been done by literature and language people who are great at what they do, but knew nothing about the theater, and the plays that they’d translated were utterly unproducible. So I started translating in order to be able to convey what was so wonderful about these pieces. And the thing about theatrical translation is that you are translating much, much more than the words you know, a play, even written in English, is only a pretext for performance.
So when I’m translating, I’m constantly donning and doffing a series of hats. Translator as actor, translator as director, translator as playwright, translator as designer, translator as dramaturg, translator as audience member, and thinking constantly about how the play is going to work on those different levels.
The other thing that you want to do with a piece of theatrical translation is leave room in the same way that a creative team picks up a play written in English, they have to interpret it in their own way and then decide how they’re going to approach it. So I mean to me, a translation that somebody calls seamless in English is a failed translation. I want it to retain some of the foreignness, some of definitely the qualities that attracted me to it, to want to translate it in the first place. And often I translate something that I don’t understand initially, but find compelling in some way, and translating it is one of the best ways to get inside of it and figure out what’s happening. And think about, how can I convey that in the target language. What was so compelling about the piece in the source language? How is that going to manifest itself in the target language? And often it’s not a one-to-one correspondence.
KC: There’s a lot more nuance outside of the words themselves.
AV: Or you have to change something. There’s a marvelous Mexican playwright, Sabina Berman, and I translated four of her early plays, and one of them is a play called El Sublicio de Placer, the agony of ecstasy. And it’s these four short playlets, and each of them has two characters, he and she. And in one of them, he is trying to seduce she and he sings a what was, at the time, a very popular Mexican song that nobody in the English-speaking world was going to understand at all. So instead of translating the lyrics of that song, I put in, come on, baby, like my fire. So it’s making those kinds of choices. What is going to do the equivalent for a US English speaking audience as what BAM was doing for the Mexican Spanish speaking audience?
KC: That makes sense. Yeah, like I mentioned in the introduction, you were a faculty fellow in 1993 here at the IAH, and then the Academic Leadership Program in 2004 and of course, you’ve continued your relationship with the IAH ever since. We’ll go back to CLP in a moment. But can you share a little bit about those two fellowship experiences here and what they were like and maybe how they differed?
AV: Sure, so the faculty fellowship, I think I was just coming off of NEA summers fellowship, and I used that faculty fellowship to finish what was had been my dissertation and became my first book. It was a wonderful venue in which to kind of workshop some of that material and see if what I was doing was accomplishing what I set out to do. You know, I’m somebody in we’ve certainly built a faculty in dramatic art of people who are both artists and scholars, teachers and practitioners. I come to scholarly writing. From that perspective, I’m interested in practice much more than theory. As the dissertation, it was theologies of liberation, religion, politics and theater, from Cortez to the 1980s and in working on it as a book manuscript, it sort of shifted a little bit. So the final title that Cambridge published was theater in Latin America, religion, politics and culture from Cortes to the 1980s.
KC: That’s cool. And what about ALP?
AV: ALP. So, actually, when I came up for tenure here, I was applying for positions elsewhere, and one of the positions that I interviewed for was to become the director of something called the Center for the Arts and Society at Carnegie Mellon University. And after a couple of days there, decided there was no way anybody coming from the outside could do that job. But when I came back, I was talking about it to Ruel Tyson, and that was when we were looking at maybe 40% of the faculty retiring in a few years, and rule was thinking about the loss of all of that institutional memory and the fact that in the academy, people frequently are not trained for leadership. You wake up one morning and you’re told you’re a dean, you’re a chair.
So hey, he had he was thinking about how to address this, and he ended up asking me to become part of a working group. I think there were maybe 14 of us who got together once a week for breakfast for about a year and a half to talk about the creation of the Academic Leadership Program. We were from all kinds of different disciplines, and we frequently would bring people in from outside the academy, the ALP, was what was created out of that, and I didn’t have a opportunity to do it myself until 2004 and I think, you know, one of the things that we were very conscious of when we were creating the program, and I think it’s certainly still true today, is that in the academy, leadership doesn’t necessarily correlate to a title like Chair or Dean. There are many, many people who take on leadership roles of different sorts, because they see a need, and that’s something that we very much wanted to cultivate, and it’s certainly been true of my cohort.
We still meet all these years later, even though several of them are retired at this point, but we’ve gone through ups and downs of our personal and professional lives together, and it’s just been an extremely valuable experience and resource for me, and I think for everyone else as well.
KC: Yeah, I hear that as a recurring theme about these ALP cohorts in particular, really staying in touch just years later, and you know, through their own leadership transitions and journey. Yeah, and it was great to hear a little bit about some of their origin stories and early days of the institute. So thank you for sharing that.
AV: Sure.
KC: So, of course, like you just mentioned, too, thinking about, you know, academics and training for leadership. And, of course, the Chairs Leadership Program kind of spun out of the Academic Leadership Program in a bit. What is that program like for a department chair, since you’ve not just been in it and now leading it, what is that? What is that experience like?
AV: You know, when Bill Balthrop, who was the first director of the Chair’s Leadership Program, and is actually in my ALP cohort, when he first started going around campus and asking people, if we were to create a program like this, what would be valuable. What he discovered was that there are plenty of places to go for the kind of mechanics, the nuts and bolts of being a chair. How to put together a budget. Who do you contact in HR. The college has a chair’s manual with all of the dates that you need to keep in mind. What was missing was, how does first time chair deal with the tsunami of everything else that hits you that you’re not going to find written down somewhere, what happens in the chair’s leadership program is, and we always establish from the start that it is a confidential space.
You have people who are new chairs, sometimes returning chairs, folks like myself who have been chair in the past each week or each month. Rather, we ask folks to tell us what was the highlight, what was the low light of the past month, and then is there a particular issue that you’re struggling with? Generally, we can’t get to everything each month, but we triage what seems to be the most urgent. And then you ask the person to briefly describe what the issue or the problem is, and then everyone in the room starts asking questions, and we try to figure out, or to at least offer the chair who’s brought the issue to the table a variety of options so that they can decide what their next step should be.
You know, I think of academic leadership. For me, it’s doing dramaturgy outside of the rehearsal hall. And I’m using all the same skills in the CLP that I would be in the theater. You’re troubleshooting, you’re identifying a problem, trying to determine what causes it, and then how might you fix it. Nobody ever wrote a play in or produced a play in a vacuum. It always comes out of a specific historical, literary, economic, cultural, Oracle context and every performance, every production, is being produced in a particular context. So for dramaturgs, context is all, and I think in a lot of ways, for chairs, context is all if you don’t understand the context out of which this problem has emerged, you’re not going to be able to figure out how to deal with it.
The CLP has affectionately become known as “Chairapy.”
KC: As in “chair therapy?”
AV: Yes, and that’s how I think most chairs going through it experience it. What we often tell them is, you know, you’re gonna find that one month you’re leaving going, thank God I don’t have to deal with that problem, and the next month you’re the one with the problem.
KC: Yeah, yeah, I guess it’s good to have that mix. And yeah, everyone has a has a turn. I hope, to go through that. So you are going into your second year as the program director. What do you hope that this academic year will bring for the program? What do you think new and reappointed chairs can expect this year?
AV: Well, everything that I was just talking about, the way in which we work, the process, the content of the experience, in broad terms, doesn’t change from year to year. It is always different each year, because there are different. People involved, and because the context is going to be different as well. So I hope that participating chairs are going to get as much out of it as certainly I did, and hopefully previous cohorts did.
It will be a little bit different this year, because we recently learned that Rob Kramer, who has been a long time co-facilitator of the CLP and also works with the ALP, will be leaving North Carolina at the end of this semester. So while he’s joining us for the fall, we’ve also brought in a another faculty, co facilitator, Misha Becker, who will be joining us, and then Misha and I will co-facilitate for the rest of the year. So the dynamic is going to be a little bit different.
It’s certainly in the past, there have been three co-facilitators for the CLP. That just hasn’t been the case in the past number of years, and each of us brings different things to the table, the wonderful thing that Rob provides because he has his own consulting business that works nationally with chancellors, provosts, deans, he’s able to give a kind of national perspective as to issues that come up, whereas Misha and I, through our own various leadership roles on campus, know a great deal about UNC in particular, and I would say that, you know, I’m also bringing those dramaturgical experiences and skills that’s
KC: Great. Before we started recording, we were chatting a little bit in terms of semester, starting back up again, back to teaching. Is there anything else that you were currently working on or that you’re excited about?
AV: Well, I’m teaching the new course this semester on martial arts and theater. I started studying martial arts when I was 13, short little kid with long hair, flashy clothes and a smart mouth getting knocked around in the halls of my seventh through 12th Regional High School in northwestern Massachusetts, and after about two months, I hadn’t told anybody that I was studying karate, but those kids who were bullying me were like animals who could smell fear and I no longer exuded that. I had enough confidence in myself that they left me alone. That’s actually fairly common. People get into martial arts for self defense reasons, but the longer that you study, the less it’s for that it’s an art form.
And you know, I’ve been doing this, as I said, since I was 13. It’s very much a part of who I am, how I operate. And several years ago, a friend of mine, who teaches at University of California, Santa Cruz, and is also a dramaturg and I were talking and between us, anecdotally, we each knew half a dozen dramaturgs who were also martial artists. So we ended up writing an article called Kinesis as mimesis, the dramaturgical applications of the martial arts. And I’ve always wanted to find a way to kind of put together those two portions of my life, the theater and and martial arts.
So this course is an attempt to do that. I’m teaching a karate class once a week for a couple of hours, and then we have another hour session later in the week where we’re reading about the history and theory and practice of the martial arts. We’re looking at theater, at design, at plays, seeing films talking about how these two things feed into each other, and how do you bridge that very common Western divide between the mind and the body
KC: That sounds so cool and just fascinating. Yeah, wow. Yeah. I’m like, How do I audit this class?
AV: Come and join us!
KC: Yeah, thank you! That’s really cool. Is there anything else that you’d like to talk about that we maybe haven’t gotten to?
AV: I mean, the other thing that I am working on, co-writing with a colleague is say a article about the work that this is a fellow named Neil Blacketer who translates from French and German primarily, and now retired from Knox College in Illinois, and both with my journal, and with a number of other things, since at least 2007 we’ve been advocating for theatrical translation to be produced on us stages in theaters and universities. We’re co-writing an article at the moment for “HowlRound,” which is an online kind of, I don’t know, I guess you would call it a journal. They publish articles, but they also archive productions, seminars, conferences, and we’re sort of charting what has been done in this area of advocating for theatrical translation and what needs to be done.
Still, you know the thing about theatrical translation virtually any other country in the world, beyond the United States, produces a lot of translations. They publish translations, even though we are by no means a monolingual nation. The dominance of English and the fact that we’re such a vast landmass means that most people do not have a second language. I think the last time I looked, the statistics were that 70 percent of US citizens don’t even possess a passport. They see no reason to leave the contiguous United States. So those are some of the cultural facts that you’re fighting against. But the more that you can bring in material from other theatrical cultures, the richer our theatrical culture becomes
KC: Keep us posted on the article, because that’d be interesting to share. So as we wrap up, I’ll ask a question that we ask all of our guests, but I’ll also keep it broad. So our usual question is, what is a book that has changed your life? But I think we can also extend that to anything broader, whether it’s a theatrical production or play or anything along those lines. Is there anything that has really spoken to you?
AV: So for many years, I would go back and reread a collection of books each year, the complete works of Sherlock, Holmes, the Lord of the Rings, Dune and the Grand Inquisitor sequence from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I mean, when I look back on that now thinking about it, all of those texts have a kind of philosophical orientation to them, and my father was a philosophy professors may have influenced that.
You know, at a certain point, I decided there are too many books and too little time. And I’m not going to keep rereading these things more recently, the work of Walter Mosley, not only his pi novels, easy Rollins, Leonid, Trotsky McGill, but a lot of his other work, he wrote a book. It’s actually a collection of stories called walk the dog, where he introduces his character, Socrates, Fort Lowe and Moseley is a brilliant writer about race in the U.S., somebody younger who works in that vein, is well as Attica Locke, who I think she’s just published a new novel in her series about a Black Texas Ranger, and the things that he encounters.
Another writer who I love, and I think is one of the most beautiful prose writers in the U.S., is James Lee Burke, who writes a great deal about the South and the various layers of southern culture that come out in surprising ways.
So the first piece of theater I ever saw was when I was five years old. Old, and my mother, who was a singer and a dancer at that time, Williams College, was still all male, and all of the female roles and plays were performed either by Bennington women or faculty wives. And so the first thing that I ever saw was my mother is Jenny Diver and Brecht’s Three Penny Opera. She would take me to rehearsal rather than hire a babysitter.
Apparently, at one point, I got up on stage during a break and started marching around, carrying my blue balloon, singing the Army song, the chorus of which is, let’s all go bar me live off the army, see the world we never saw. And when we get feeling down, why we wander into town, if the population should greet us with indignation, why we chop them to bits? Because we like our hamburgers raw. I think you know, it was sort of my first exposure to what the theater could do. Apparently, the entire cast started following me with my balloon and singing with me.
KC: Theater and a leader early on. Thank you so much for sharing that. That’s great. You’ve also given us a nice, comprehensive reading list. Yeah. Thank you so much. Adam, so glad to have you on the podcast.
AV: My pleasure.
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