By Julia Munemo
Spend a week with theater professor Amy Holzapfel and you’re as likely to sit in on a tutorial about gender and sexuality in performance as you are to listen to her tell the director of an upcoming play what she thinks about its sightlines. Straddling the worlds between dramatic arts theory and practice, Holzapfel says she fits right in at Williams.
Though she’s an accomplished scholar (her book, Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeing was published by Routledge in 2014), Holzapfel says she got the Williams job “because I can walk the walk. I spent years hanging lights; I know the apparatus that is the theater.” An apparatus she was exposed to from an early age. Growing up in New York City, Holzapfel accompanied her parents to Broadway previews of anything and everything. “I saw Phantom and Cats before they were legendary,” she says, Phantom of the Opera standing out in her memory in part because she was scared the chandelier would hit her.
A comparative literature major at Brown University, Holzapfel worked and performed with a student-run production house not unlike Williams’ own Cap and Bells. After graduation she interned at Center Stage in Baltimore, getting her start as a dramaturg. “A dramaturg is an in-house critic,” she explains. “Sometimes we adapt or translate work, and we do a lot of production and historical research for a performance.”
She describes her year in Baltimore as one of the hardest of her life, working around the clock, bartending to pay bills, and getting a taste for life in a regional theatre. Center Stage put on six big shows that year, for an audience she describes as “tremendous, local, passionate—and one that didn’t want to change.” The audience didn’t love every choice the artistic staff made—one white member asking from his aisle seat, “When are you going to stop doing black plays?” The experience revealed the burden of arts organizations in their communities, an idea that sparked Holzapfel’s interest.
Armed with questions about what the theater was becoming and whom it was reaching, Holzapfel enrolled in Yale’s MFA program. There she read and wrote about the entire canon of Western drama, from Sophocles to Kushner—and, in her free time, hung lights and did just about every other job it takes to put on a theatrical production. In the process, she says, “I realized that my interest lay in academia.” So she stayed on at Yale to earn her Doctorate of Fine Arts.
Holzapfel, whose research interests include nineteenth-century European theater, theater and visual culture, dance-theater, and contemporary performance, longed to teach at a small, liberal arts college—a place where she could pursue her dual interests in scholarship and practice. She joined the Williams faculty in 2007.
One of her favorite parts about teaching here is exposing students to artists working in the field. When professional directors like David Levine and Charlotte Brathwaite come to teach and direct performances, dramaturg Holzapfel is there every step of the way.
Another of her passions is exposing students to other forms of art. She brings her classes to the Williams College Museum of Art every semester, and loves to watch their faces when they see the Kabuki prints for the first time. “I’m always trying to get students to think about what it means to look at an image in relation to a performance and to look a performance in terms of an image,” she says.
“Williams does this really well,” she says. “We can be so cross disciplinary in our work, the through lines are there for us to make connections within our curricula.”