Casting, Four Ways : Gloss

Controversy routinely overdetermines critical conversations about casting. Contravening pressures of property and propriety inevitably hobble even the most searching casting conversations. Recurring paroxysms over “best practices” deploy teleologies of mimesis, authorship, and career as paper, rock, and scissors in a seemingly endless war among the righteous. Yet how might casting itself – as a performance technique that marshals the force of surrogation – prompt generative, creative, and transformative routes beyond such critical cul-de-sacs? What might be revealed about casting as a method or mode of creative investigation if the typical limits of time, talent, and tradition were ignored? How might the conventional processes and protocols of casting be thereby transformed? What else might be revealed about casting’s force as concatenated act of performance, of interpretation, and of power?