To the Academy

Two performers of unusual talents rehearse how they will delight and confound a group of earnest schol- ars. Intent on conjuring the colonial object of inquiry who refuses to cooperate and the privileged angst of the postcolonial, diasporic intellectual, the performers grapple—literally—with the gendered, raced, and sexual assumptions that construct knowledge. Multiple performance codes intersect and collide with Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy” and the Natyashastra as the collaborators slip and slide across the boundaries of theatre and “reality.”