This week, Off the Cuff spoke with UW-Milwaukee theater professor Rebecca Holderness about her background, artistic philosophy and UWM’s upcoming production of George Bernard Shaw’s astute 1906 comedy, Major Barbara. The play centers on a young woman and major in the Salvation Army whose estranged father donates to her cause using monies from his successful munitions-making business; his daughter objects to this “tainted” wealth being used to benefit the poor, and the debate builds from there.
What brought you from New York City to Milwaukee?
I came here 10-12 years ago to be part of the founding faculty for the BFA [Bachelor of Fine Arts program] at UWM. I was recruited out of New York, where I was born, bred and raised. I’ve always been a choreographer and a theater maker at the same time. I had my own company for a decade in New York, Holderness Theater, which is devoted to heightened language and heightened physical theater. I also direct around the country and in Europe from time to time.
You have several special trainings in areas ranging from voice work to yoga. Please tell me more about your unique approach to making theater and training young performers.
A question that was in Holderness Theater Company’s work that I brought to Milwaukee in the development of the curriculum is whether we silo training—whether we train the body and then train the voice and then train the mind. All of my personal education, and all of my research, is about finding ways to integrate those kinds of training on the assumption that, if the training were integrated, the performer would be more integrated. My entire life as a choreographer, visual artist, theater director and actor is devoted to an authentic, embodied truth that I think is more constant, safer and closer to the heart. That authentic, embodied truth is a healing place to put performance—a place where a community can come together and be confident in its relationship to its art.
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Please tell me about Major Barbara and student involvement in the production.
Because the theater is still under repair from the fire, we were invited to use a big art gallery on the second floor of the PSOA [Peck School of the Arts] building that has several large rooms. We’re performing in the round—or in the square, really—in an art nouveau boxing ring, because I was really devoted to engaging the students and the audience in a debate that is very connected to our current moment. It’s also framed in video assemblages that explore the military-industrial complex, the women’s movement and other protest movements from 1906 to the present.
The mission of the student actors was to embrace their roles with what we call “radical empathy,” to take on the point of view of their characters—whether they agreed with them or not—with a radical commitment to understanding and presenting them passionately.
The storyline of this play, although more than 100 years old, taps into many issues still relevant today. What do you hope audiences will consider through the historic presentation of these subjects?
Shaw was really compelled by the lives of the common man as he saw it. As a socialist, he would have been acutely aware of post-industrial poverty. I think he cared about the ever-increasing divide between the rich and the poor and the temptation to blame poverty on the poor and to assign it a kind of character fault as opposed to understanding it as a social ill that brings with it crime, fear, anxiety and disease. Shaw felt that if you address poverty over all, then many of these things that we feel we need to spend a lot of money on taking care of would actually go away.
The play is presented in such a way to, in an entertaining way, compel you to think about the subjects as they relate to today without bending the play out of shape. I’m interested in the quality of the debate in the play, and I would love to see that inspire people to a more articulate debate among themselves where they actually listen and talk and are moved by each other—people across the line, across the aisle, across the divide. Also, empathy and awareness that it’s extremely difficult to come up with a single answer—that there probably isn’t a single answer. We keep repeating history, so history is useful to us as something to take a look at and to have respect for.
Major Barbara runs Dec. 6-10 at UWM’s Arts Center Gallery, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd. For tickets, call 414-229-4308 or visit uwm.edu/arts/box-office/tickets.
