JONATHAN VANDYKE (A '08)
Self Evidence

Jonathan VanDyke looks for himself in an a family photograph taken during his childhood. The picture shows his adopted Uncle wearing his mother’s dress while holding the trunk of a stuffed elephant in his mouth. VanDyke’s lecture explores the issues faced by queers who were children during the AIDS crisis and 80s culture wars, and how the hyper-capitalism and theatricality of this period nurtured a certain type of passing (including his own). Augmented by research into a gay panic that happened in his rural hometown, passages from the soap operas he watched as a child, and memories of a disappeared Uncle, he evokes the repressed ghosts of a lost generation of queer mentors while exploring his own transition from theatrical youth to closeted jock.

About the Series

This lecture series folds up and poofs out. It's theater. It's something else. It's ABOUT theater. It IS about itself. It moves over and under that line where the body meets language and where that same body asks, "How is it that I am this way?"  

This lecture series lives under the umbrella of performance art, but collides with a certain kind of academic pursuit and presentation that plumbs boundaries of what "academic" is or might be. It lays claim to its own performativity – its writing - as a non-linear composition that may or may not have been written for us before we even showed up.

This lecture series hinges on the production of gender, theatricality and culture, as things that have NOT been exhausted by art production and NOT overtalked. "But isn't all art about those things?" These are totally self conscious and self-aware enactments and - should we say - pageants, in a framework of kindred ideas. We hope you will enjoy them. We hope you will enjoy them.