ABSTRACT
The creativity and open-endedness of ethnographic theater making is liberating, full-bodied, and vital for anthropological knowledge production that is collaborative, non-extractive, and accessible. This chapter explores the craftwork, transmutation, and joy in ethnographic theater making, based on the author’s collaborative, pedagogical, and directorial work over the past decade. As argued elsewhere, ethnographic theater making in and as anthropology is not just about staged representation or reenactment, but about co-authored argument construction and the dynamic activation of ethnographic methods and theories with acting ensembles (Vidali 2020). It is thus simultaneously theory, method, and representation. This chapter unpacks the two-step process and supporting equipment that scaffold the movement from fieldwork into performance. I highlight how ethnographic theater emerges through creative assemblage, verbatim extraction from interviews and fieldnotes, choral elements, intertextual crafting, and physical movement. The chapter presents and examines techniques that channel ethnographic presence, commentary, and analysis on the performance stage, and that use the stage’s physical and temporal affordances to communicate anthropological insights and presence. The chapter represents a commitment to bring legibility to the craftwork, value, and magic of ethnographic theater making. As such, it joins other disciplinary efforts in multimodality and collaborative knowledge production that signal an “anthropology otherwise.”
