The Performance Research Workshop welcomes Trevor Boffone (University of Houston) and Danielle Rosvally (UB).

How do you articulate your research for a broad public via social media? In this workshop, Dr. Boffone and Dr. Rosvally will discuss how TikTok has shaped and informed their work on Yassified Shakespeare, a multimedia project that seeks to better understand the phenomenon of ShaxDrag. ShaxDrag is a creative re-mixing of Shakespeare’s cultural capital that manifests in performances of Shakespeare-the-man that interrogate gender, canon, and authority. Workshop participants will get the opportunity to develop and shoot content, engage with the idea of TikTok trends, and discuss how their work might be adapted for public-facing engagement. Participants from broad spectrums of backgrounds are invited and encouraged to attend; this workshop is not limited to humanities scholars.

Trevor Boffone, Ph.D., is a Houston-based educator, scholar, and avid TikToker. His work TikTok with his students has been featured on Good Morning America, ABC News, Inside Edition, and Access Hollywood, among numerous national media outlets. He is the author of Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok.

Danielle Rosvally, Ph.D., is a clinical assistant professor in the department of theatre and dance. Her work interrogates the use of Shakespeare’s cultural capital in theatrical spaces. Her book Theatres of Value: Buying and Selling Shakespeare in nineteenth-century New York City is forthcoming with SUNY Press.

Together, they are the co-authors behind Yassified Shakespeare: http://www.yassifiedshakespeare.com ; https://www.tiktok.com/@yassifiedshax

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Theatre and Dance, the Performance Research Workshop, and is made possible through a grant from the American Society for Theatre Research.