Live Feed In-Process – Fragments, Lists, & Lacunae

Alexandra Chasin and Zishan Ugurlu’s Fragments, Lists & Lacunae is a multi-media production focusing on three college students who are grappling with their own blind spots as well as the (resonant) concepts in a course entitled “Fragments, Lists, & Lacunae.” In each scene, a professor presents material on absence, silence, negation and nothingness; examples range from the 18-minute gap in Nixon’s White House tapes, to Sappho’s poetry, Swiss cheese, and the politics of “disappearance.” On both conceptual and subjective planes, students, professor, and audience re-think – and re-experience – presence. At the center of these students’ education is their Professor, played by seminal queer theorist and writer Judith Butler.

Zishan (Zisan) Ugurlu has worked extensively both in New York and abroad as a theater artist since 1995. She is an actress and director-in-residence at La MaMa and Great Jones Repertory Company. She has performed in numerous productions with Great Jones Repertory Company, including Panorama directed by Italian company Motus as part of The Under The Radar Festival 2018. Panorama has already presented in Italy, Belgium, Spain, and will be presented in Austria and Germany in April. She is the founding artistic director of “Actors without Borders-ITONY.” Her recent directing credits include Agamemnon (in Greek) by Aeschylus, Measure for Measure (in Turkish) by William Shakespeare,  Not About Nightingales by Tennessee Williams, She Talks to Beethoven by Adrienne Kennedy. She graduated from Columbia University with a MFA degree and holds a Ph.D. She is an Associate Professor at Lang College, The New School University. She is the recipient of the prestigious Fox Foundation Fellowship granted by Theater Communications Group.

Alexandra Chasin is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Lang College, The New School. Past recipient of Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY, Chasin is the author of four books, most recently Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs. Chasin was Artistic Director of Writing On It All, a public participatory writing project in New York City (writingonitall.com), 2013-2017. Trained as both a scholar (PhD in Modern Through & Lit., Stanford, 1993) and an artist (MFA in Fiction, Vermont College, 2002), Chasin works at the crossroads of scholarship, theory, and creative textual practice. alexandrachasin.us.