David Savran
Fellow
David Savran is a specialist in twentieth and twenty-first century theatre, music theatre, popular culture, gender studies, and social theory. He is the author of eight books, including the first monograph on the Wooster Group, "Breaking the Rules" (1986), and, most recently, "Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class," the winner of the Joe A. Callaway Prize and the Kurt Weill Prize. He has served as a judge for the Obie Awards and the Lucille Lortel Awards and was a juror for the 2011 and 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He delivered the Messenger Lectures at Cornell University in 2012 on Branding and Cultural Performance and is co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and former vice president of the American Society for Theatre Research. He is Distinguished Professor of Theatre and holds the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
THIS AUTHOR WROTE
David Savran is a specialist in twentieth and twenty-first century theatre, music theatre, popular culture, gender studies, and social theory. He is the author of eight books, including the first monograph on the Wooster Group, "Breaking the Rules" (1986), and, most recently, "Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class," the winner of the Joe A. Callaway Prize and the Kurt Weill Prize. He has served as a judge for the Obie Awards and the Lucille Lortel Awards and was a juror for the 2011 and 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He delivered the Messenger Lectures at Cornell University in 2012 on Branding and Cultural Performance and is co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and former vice president of the American Society for Theatre Research. He is Distinguished Professor of Theatre and holds the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
March 28, 2013
For the first time during my travels abroad, I decided to keep a journal, expecting that I would want to record and process the extraordinary experiences I knew I was going to have. Since I am a careful observer of foreign cultures and always try to get to know local artists, this journal, quite unintentionally, became schizophrenic: half a Western tourist’s Orientalist musings and half the attempts of a student of culture to understand Egypt’s political and cultural economies. Reading it again in light of the uprising in Tahrir Square, I realized that my schizophrenic prose had unwittingly captured a “state of emergency,” a moment of coming-into-being, which, Walter Benjamin notes, “is not the exception but the rule,” and of which we become sensible only by hearkening to the “tradition of the oppressed.” These entries thus document a state of emergency which, like all such states, becomes recognizable only in retrospect. To my own journal, I append the first two emails I received from Egyptian friends after the revolution began.