Christopher Grobe
Biographic Data
| ID | 389148 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Grobe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Grobe |
| SIGNATURE | GROBE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Johns Hopkins University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Botface
Evidently, people love watching others pretend to be robots. This article uncovers hidden links between this practice and blackface performance, then theorizes the two as similarly metatheatrical practices in the realm of the infrahuman. Studying the international performance and reception history of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., the science-fiction melodrama that coined and popularized the word robot, this essay demonstrates how robot characters came to…
The Performance of Politics and the Politics of Performance
Performance scholars Christopher Grobe (Johns Hopkins), Joy Palacios (University of Calgary), and Shannon Steen (University of California, Berkeley) sit down for a round table discussion with editor Hank Willenbrink to discuss what they are seeing from their various vantage points about research related to performance, politics, the right, and religion. In the conversation, they discuss moving past the “hero moment” of the 1960s, how performance …
Can the Computer Speak
Macs do it, phones do it—even educated drones do it. And by it, of course, I mean “respond to our words with a synthesized speech of their own.” How did it come to pass that the Internet of Things was suffused with this ability to recognize, parse, and synthesize human speech? How did people come to think of such recognition as “listening,” such parsing as “understanding,” and such synthesis as “speaking”? How did technology and culture combine t…
The Deep, Dark Play of the US Capitol Riots
This article interprets the US Capitol Riots of 6 January 2021 through the lens of various classic and novel theories of play. Its aim, in doing so, is to explain a major shift in US cultural politics after Trump. The weird co-existence of violence and silliness in the Capitol Riots led commentators to declare them "surreal," or else to posit the simple theory that the rioters' playfulness was "camouflage" or "cover" for their true intentions: to…
How to Resist When Resistance Feels Impossible
Interchangeable Parts
Reviewed by: Interchangeable Parts: Acting, Industry, and Technology in US Theater by Victor Holtcamp Christopher Grobe INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS: ACTING, INDUSTRY, AND TECHNOLOGY IN US THEATER. By Victor Holtcamp. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019; pp. 360. Scholarly monographs on acting tend to define their subjects narrowly. They might focus on a single teacher or theorist, or they might measure…
The Artist Is President
Throughout the 2016 US presidential election, pundits repeatedly described Donald Trump as a performance artist and his campaign as performance art. Meanwhile, his alt-right supporters were mounting performance art shows, debating the meaning of Marina Abramović’s work, and developing their own theories of political performance. For experts in performance theory, such punditry and provocation is like the image in a funhouse mirror. It’s hard to m…
It’s All Allowed
March 01 2018 It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells. Edited by DeirdreHeddon and DominicJohnson. London: Intellect, 2016; 260 pp.; illustrations. $28.50 paper. Christopher Grobe Christopher Grobe Christopher Grobe is Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College and the author of The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (NYU Press, 2017)…
A Constellation of Imagined Theatres
In ten one-page hypothetical scores, playlets, and closet dramas, a collection of theorists and artists of the contemporary stage present “imagined theatres” interrogating what is possible and impossible at the intersections of performance and technology. A one-page gloss faces each imagined theatre, expanding on its promise in critical, historical, or personal terms. The dialogues among these texts explore how performances theorize, and how theo…
On Book
Reading, observes Leah Price, is an “activity against which the social defines itself.” How odd then that, during the last sixty years or so, we have witnessed such a proliferation of social reading—in person, out loud, and in public. Literary readings, reader’s theater, chamber theater, docudrama, found-text performances, etc.—together they constitute a newly prominent genre I call “bookish performance.” Highbrow and low, avant-garde and mainstr…
The Artist Is President
Throughout the 2016 US presidential election, pundits repeatedly described Donald Trump as a performance artist and his campaign as performance art. Meanwhile, his alt-right supporters were mounting performance art shows, debating the meaning of Marina Abramović’s work, and developing their own theories of political performance. For experts in performance theory, such punditry and provocation is like the image in a funhouse mirror. It’s hard to m…
A Constellation of Imagined Theatres
In ten one-page hypothetical scores, playlets, and closet dramas, a collection of theorists and artists of the contemporary stage present “imagined theatres” interrogating what is possible and impossible at the intersections of performance and technology. A one-page gloss faces each imagined theatre, expanding on its promise in critical, historical, or personal terms. The dialogues among these texts explore how performances theorize, and how theo…
On Book
Reading, observes Leah Price, is an “activity against which the social defines itself.” How odd then that, during the last sixty years or so, we have witnessed such a proliferation of social reading—in person, out loud, and in public. Literary readings, reader’s theater, chamber theater, docudrama, found-text performances, etc.—together they constitute a newly prominent genre I call “bookish performance.” Highbrow and low, avant-garde and mainstr…
It’s All Allowed
March 01 2018 It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells. Edited by DeirdreHeddon and DominicJohnson. London: Intellect, 2016; 260 pp.; illustrations. $28.50 paper. Christopher Grobe Christopher Grobe Christopher Grobe is Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College and the author of The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (NYU Press, 2017)…
The Artist Is President
Throughout the 2016 US presidential election, pundits repeatedly described Donald Trump as a performance artist and his campaign as performance art. Meanwhile, his alt-right supporters were mounting performance art shows, debating the meaning of Marina Abramović’s work, and developing their own theories of political performance. For experts in performance theory, such punditry and provocation is like the image in a funhouse mirror. It’s hard to m…
How to Resist When Resistance Feels Impossible
Interchangeable Parts
Reviewed by: Interchangeable Parts: Acting, Industry, and Technology in US Theater by Victor Holtcamp Christopher Grobe INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS: ACTING, INDUSTRY, AND TECHNOLOGY IN US THEATER. By Victor Holtcamp. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019; pp. 360. Scholarly monographs on acting tend to define their subjects narrowly. They might focus on a single teacher or theorist, or they might measure…
The Deep, Dark Play of the US Capitol Riots
This article interprets the US Capitol Riots of 6 January 2021 through the lens of various classic and novel theories of play. Its aim, in doing so, is to explain a major shift in US cultural politics after Trump. The weird co-existence of violence and silliness in the Capitol Riots led commentators to declare them "surreal," or else to posit the simple theory that the rioters' playfulness was "camouflage" or "cover" for their true intentions: to…
Can the Computer Speak
Macs do it, phones do it—even educated drones do it. And by it, of course, I mean “respond to our words with a synthesized speech of their own.” How did it come to pass that the Internet of Things was suffused with this ability to recognize, parse, and synthesize human speech? How did people come to think of such recognition as “listening,” such parsing as “understanding,” and such synthesis as “speaking”? How did technology and culture combine t…
The Performance of Politics and the Politics of Performance
Performance scholars Christopher Grobe (Johns Hopkins), Joy Palacios (University of Calgary), and Shannon Steen (University of California, Berkeley) sit down for a round table discussion with editor Hank Willenbrink to discuss what they are seeing from their various vantage points about research related to performance, politics, the right, and religion. In the conversation, they discuss moving past the “hero moment” of the 1960s, how performance …
Botface
Evidently, people love watching others pretend to be robots. This article uncovers hidden links between this practice and blackface performance, then theorizes the two as similarly metatheatrical practices in the realm of the infrahuman. Studying the international performance and reception history of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., the science-fiction melodrama that coined and popularized the word robot, this essay demonstrates how robot characters came to…
Theatre and Performance Studies (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · History (3 works) · History (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Political science (3 works) · Politics (3 works)