The most important things I know, I learned from my peers. Where I was born in suburban Boston, philosophical and political discussions were common with my friends whose parents were professors, ministers, and journalists. When I moved to rural Japan at twelve, my new friends were mostly children of farmers and factory workers. They taught me not only Japanese language and culture, but an intense work ethic as well as a respect for land and natural resources. At Oberlin College, where I studied Music Composition, my composition process reflected the music I discussed with my closest colleagues. Communities create knowledge. My approach to teaching reflects this.

Human curiosity is the fuel that propels knowledge sharing, and social justice is the lens by which we examine what we know. Drawing from Paulo Freire’s notion of pedagogy of the oppressed, my explicit assumption is that all people have innate knowledge about their own experience and together we seek ways to use the wisdom of that knowledge to live more freely. I teach best when I expect to learn from students. In classes designed for artists-in-training, my aims are two-fold. I introduce students to practical skills in form, function, and virtuosity—the ability to manipulate time and space as artists through examining models and parsing elements of success and failure in work they analyze. Equally important, I foster students to examine how their creative training links them to the world at-large. I challenge them to bring in examples from their lived experience, to discuss social and political commentary, and to share examples that excite or sometimes disgust them. I pursue these goals through creative group projects and project specific individual meetings. For both my Theatre History and Play Analysis courses, I assign groups of 4-8 students to perform excerpts from plays we read for class. I task them with making this group a microcosm of their planned career. While the presentation is short, I stress they need to treat it like a mainstage performance and therefore to be mindful of design, staging, architecture and to memorize fully. Last Fall, one group presented a short excerpt from Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal. Drawing from discussion of technology and communication through history, they presented a School set in a reality show, with gossip blogs, and Instagram posts—culminating in social commentary along lines of race and queerness. One of the students told me afterwards how delighted she was with the potential of such an old play for her as a queer woman of color to direct.

I still try to learn from my peers. I surround myself with the smartest and most talented colleagues I can. In class, I model those first peer-teachers who influenced me growing up. In many ways, my teaching philosophy is selfish: I want to nurture the best future colleagues I can so they can in turn teach me more important lessons.

Jump: Futurity, Utopia, and Time Travel through Queer of Color Critique

Jump argues that queer people of color (QPOC) performers and theatre artists create ruptures of temporal pockets—jumps—that can only be described as time travel. Through performance analysis, artist interviews, auto-ethnography, and practice-as-research, I delineate how QPOC artists draw on our personal histories of resistance to prophesize the future, commune with ancestors, and embody simultaneous and layered temporalities. The dissertation begins with analysis of two process-oriented solo works by Allison Akootchook “Aku” Warden, a Iñupiaq/Native Alaskan artist, and collaborative works initiated by Anna Luisa Petrisko, a Filipino American artist/director. The second half of the dissertation focuses on the devising process and performances of two full-length shows, The Mikado: Reclaimed and Scheherazade, which I directed for my own theatre troupe, Generic Ensemble Company. QPOC not only learn from the past and imagine a new future, we physically inhabit those pasts and futures defying traditional notions of time via prophetic divination, ancestral communion, and healing trauma through resistive creative acts. Through the direct, honest, and painstaking confrontation with histories of violence through devised theater and performance, QPOC artists employ resistive healing strategies that invite temporal jumps and enact utopic futures.

shorb’s academic article, “Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed“ appeared in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre.

shorb also has written for American Theatre Magazine.

“prelude and fugue in yellow and grey” from Restoried Selves: Autobiographies of Queer Asian Pacific American Activists, edited by Kevin Kumashiro

Two essays in The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys, edited by Eileen Tabios

shorb’s story “Hara-chigai” was a finalist for the 2009 Fish Publications Short Story Prize