Ithaca College

 Theatre Arts Assistant Professor Walter Byongsok Chon and Associate Professor Chrystyna Dail presented at ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) Conference in Las Vegas, NV. 

 At the ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) Conference, Walter Byongsok Chon, Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy and Theatre Studies in the Theatre Arts Department, organized and moderated the panel, “Storytelling: The Essential Force of Virtual Reality in Live Spectacle,” which explored how virtual reality could revolutionize the creative possibilities of theatre.  He was joined by panelists Patty Rangel (Resident Artist at the Arena Stage Mead Center for American Theater, Virtual Reality specialist), Devorah Medwin (playwright working at the intersection of theatre, medicine, technology, and emotion), and Anne Hamilton (dramaturg, founder of Hamilton Dramaturgy). He was also part of the roundtable, “How and Why Do We Read Plays in Class?: A Roundtable on Strategies for Incorporating Script Analysis into a Theatre Curriculum,” where he presented about Script Analysis in the IC theatre curriculum. He will be serving as Member at Large for the Dramaturgy Focus Group for the next year.  

Chrystyna Dail, Associate Professor of Theatre History, chaired and presented on the ATHE panel, Violence Has a Gender, which was co-sponsored by the American Theatre and Drama Society as well as Women and Theatre focus groups. Dail’s paper was titled, “She Was As If Her Flesh Had Been Pulled From Her Bones: The Body of the Witch on Stage” and is based on her current research project. The panel interrogated the cycle of violence enacted on and by women on the stage over the past two hundred years. Additionally, Dail’s book, Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s, was one of six books chosen to be highlighted in the fields of American Theatre, African-American Theatre, and Latino/a/x Theatre published in 2016. Other authors on the panel included: Ramón Rivera-Servera (Northwestern University), Adam Versényi (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Heather Nathans (Tufts University), Soyica Colbert (Georgetown University), and Baron Kelly (University of Kansas).  

The full ATHE conference program can be found at: http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.athe.org/resource/resmgr/2017_conference/documents/2017-Conference-Program.pdf