How does our understanding of theatre history change when we focus on networks of support and community rather than individual stars?

This section of the website features a series of color-coded webs showing the connections between individual artists, their mentors and collaborators, and those fellow artists/thinkers/collectives with whom they are in conversation. The visualizations below are based on interviews I conducted with artists for my dissertation, Queer Legacies: Tracing the Roots of Contemporary Transgender Performance and Season 1 of Gender Euphoria, the Podcast.

The webs, posted here as PDFs, were generated using Gephi, an open-source, graph-based data and network visualization software. The specific graph functions and numerical data are not especially meaningful in this context, since I’ve manipulated the values and spacing to prioritize readability. However, in translating my interview and archival research into this new format, I’ve been able to produce a visual representation of how trans artists are in conversation with one another and who has been supporting the development of our work.

Definitions

I didn’t see the need to explicitly define the terms “mentor” or “collaborator” when I was first recording the data from my dissertation interviews into this new format. I simply documented the names of the people the artists described using those words. However, when I attempted to add my own queer-trans artistic family tree to the table, the distinctions didn’t seem so clear-cut anymore. You can read more about how I came to these definitions and why I chose to add “in conversation” to the relationships considered here [link podcast/essay]. For the moment, these are my working definitions:

Collaborators: personal relationships; people the artist has worked with in-depth on a shared project OR has worked with multiple times, even if for shorter periods.

Mentors: personal relationships; teachers (formal or not) who have modeled artistry and activism for the artist and whose lessons and practices show up in their work OR people who have had a direct, intentional influence on the trajectory of the artist’s career.

In conversation: (this definition is more fuzzy) those whose work the artist is responding to or drawing upon in their own, regardless of whether they have a personal relationship (i.e. I directly invoke Kate Bornstein in the first minute of my first solo show Five and a Half Feet of Fearsome; the choose-your-own adventure style of my second show, Un/Packing, was inspired by and built upon Scott Turner Schofield’s Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps). It also may be the artists’ social and professional relationships, the spaces or collectives to which they belong, the people who influence their work even if they haven’t created a tangible *thing* together.  

Additional Context

For further context about connections drawn between individuals, see the data table below. I’ve embedded the spreadsheet these graphs are based on into this webpage. Included within that table are the names of artists and those they are in relationship with, additional contextual notes about how the two are connected, and citations. Click below to see the full table and an explanation of how to read it.

See all data, explanations, and citations

The table below contains each of the datapoints from which the most recent network graph was built. Names listed in the “artist” column are those I have spoken to in interviews and/or whose work I researched–most often they are the direct source of the information. Names listed beside them in “connection” column are people and/or collectives the artist is in relationship to. The “relationship” column designates how the two are connected to one another, as reported by the artist. In the network graphs, “collaborator” and “in-conversation” relationships are represented by simple lines, and “mentor” relationships a represented by arrows pointed from the artist toward the person who mentored them. To give an example, during our interview, D’Lo mentioned that Adelina Anthony is someone that he often brings in to direct his work, so here that is recorded as Artist: D’Lo; Connection: Adelina Anthony; Relationship: Collaborators. On the graph, there will be a regular line between D’Lo and Adelina Anthony. When asked about his artistic background and journey into solo performance, D’Lo described the lessons he learned from Sharon Bridgforth at The Austin Project and how formative her work in the theatrical jazz aesthetic was to him in his early career. That is recorded in the table as Artist: D’Lo; Connection: Sharon Bridgforth; Relationship: Mentor. On the graph, there will be an arrow pointing from D’Lo toward Sharon Bridgforth. The next column over contains additional details about the context of the relationship between the two people. Finally, the “Citation” column indicates the source of the information (and where one might find the complete account).

See all Network Graphs

The graph below was created on March 8, 2023. In this version, I added in connections that I knew about from other contexts, outside of my interviews with the artists themselves–production histories, other pieces they’ve written, mutual collaborators/professional acquaintances. I hadn’t yet formulated the definition of “mentor” I used to record my own queer-trans artistic family tree when I was entering other artists’ data. This graph is missing a couple of connections that would fall into that category. When I generate a graph applying the definition of mentorship I used for my own career, the couple of artists who appear in this version as outliers are folded into the one larger network pictured through have connections to other people within it besides just me.