Corrigan, Caitlin2016-04-042016-04-042004http://hdl.handle.net/11603/2678From A. Rebecca Free: I responded strongly to Caitlin’s piece on Emmy Hennings, not only because there is genuinely a need for more scholarship on the subject matter, but also because Caitlin’s approach revealed a scholar with enough control of her material to engage me as a reader in a kind of conversation about it. Theatre is a notoriously ephemeral and multidimensional art form, and the best theatre scholarship respects those qualities and the academic challenges they pose, without being overwhelmed by them. From its inception, Caitlin’s work on her Hennings project showed a solid appreciation of the dynamic intangibles and complicated layers that shape a theatre event, even as the scholar’s focus remained squarely on a literary text. The resulting study inventively drew connections between cabaret, avant-garde theatre aesthetics, Hennings’ poetry, and the idea of the outsider, viewing gender as a matrix within which all these elements of the artist’s work intersected.When I first began research for my final project in an avant-garde theatre seminar, I thought I’d take advantage of the open ended-ness of the assignment and simply ape the Dada style by presenting a piece of bizarre, amusing performance art. But as I read more about the central movers behind the crazy sound poems and robotic costumes of these early 20th century artists, I was drawn again and again to the relationship between artistic power and rebellion, and how the categories of insider/outsider related to and defined that tension. An analytical paper focusing on Dada gender dynamics as manifested in the work of Emmy Hennings blossomed pretty organically after that, resulting in more interesting work, I hope, than my flailing about speaking German would have been16 p.en-USCollection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain information or permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the Goucher Special Collections & Archives at 410-337-6347 or email archives@goucher.edu.Research -- Periodicals.Humanities -- Research -- Periodicals.Social sciences -- Research -- Periodicals.Text