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10 Questions with Professor Lian Sifuentes
When I first meet Lian Sifuentes, the new drama department professor, I almost mistake her for a student. She arrives to the interview directly from a costume fitting for Block 2’s production of “Romeo and Juliet,” in which she plays Romeo’s best friend, Mercutio, explaining: “Since this is a modern take on the play, I’m playing Mercutio as female. Playing the role as female is interesting because it allows you to really look at different relationships, particularly Mercutio’s relationships with Romeo and Tybalt.”
Lian Sifuentes & her dog Sifuentes grew up in a western Massachusetts environment she describes as a “haunted house, Emily Dickinson, dark gray aesthetic.” She initially became interested in theater because she enjoyed “inhabiting another persona” and gaining novel perspectives through the roles she played. She attended the University of Massachusetts and majored in theater, but found herself striving for more. “Although I really enjoyed theatre, I felt limited by always being directed by someone else and telling someone else’s story,” she says.
She received two masters degrees at NYU: one in performance theory and the other in interactive telecommunications. At NYU, Sifuentes began to see technology as a metaphor for performance. She tells me, “I started to become interested in technology in performance, which was something I never expected. I found that I wanted to see not what technology is in performance, but how technology effects the way we make connections between things, or how our minds think in networks and not straight lines.” She continued working on performance projects in New York and even taught an experimental theory class for Trinity College’s drama and dance program in the city.
The program explored “the lens of performance and analyzed spectator-actor audience dynamics.” Sifuentes explains that she was “drawn to projects that looked at the body’s relationship to technology.” For example, one project she worked on, “Corpus Projecti,” “looked at the live body as an image map and metaphor for transmission of data and bodily contact.” Yet Sifuentes emphasizes that the primary concern should be the artwork and not the technology. She elaborates: “I want to always make sure that technology is an amplification of the story and not proxy for the story. It’s important to make sure that technology makes the story better, rather than just makes the story. If you can tell the story with just you, get rid of everything else.”
Currently, Sifuentes teaches performance studies and digital media classes that examine everything from online social spaces, to the history of performance, to stop motion animation. Although she classifies her courses as either being “deep investigation of performance classes” that involve studying history and philosophy, reading plays, writing, etc. or as being “practical art making” classes that involve more hands-on work, she hopes to incorporate both techniques into all the classes she teaches at CC.
Lian Sifuentes & her dog This block, Sifuentes is teaching a Latin American performance course subtitled as: “Theatre as Resistance.” Specifically, the course examines Latin American plays between 1950-1980 and focuses on how theater functions as a coping mechanism for oppression. Sifuentes explains that this is “an activist theater” and is “far from frivolous.” Furthermore, she emphasizes that for many oppressed individuals, “theater can be the only way to articulate problems, hold people accountable for actions, and resist oppression.” After this block, she is teaching “The Performing Object: Fetish and Technology,” which emphasizes stop motion animation, puppetry, and the performance of things, “The Performing Persona,” which addresses the issue of “online social spaces,” “The Language of Performance,” which functions as an intro to the performance theory course, as well as another contemporary performance class.
Sifuentes clarifies that CC is unique from other campuses because the nature of the Block Plan presents opportunities for immersion. She tells me: “At all college campuses, there’s always the same social groups. But here, the style of education changes the dynamic of the campus. There’s a real commitment to the thought process.” She cites her favorite thing about teaching as “the conversation” and elaborates, “I know what I think about things, but I’m interested in what students have to say—fresh eyes that have new things to bring to the table. I want there to always be a discussion and hopefully never a lecture. My goal is to share their perspectives and facilitate the storytelling of my students.”
This is only Sifuentes’ third day teaching at CC, but she feels comfortable and at home. She explains, “I’m very happy to be here and work with people.” When asked about what she hopes to accomplish here, she stresses that she values the accessibility of a liberal arts education. She tells me, “I really take an interdisciplinary approach. I’m interested in the philosopher coming in and making an animation. I want to have students that might not be interested in the arts or for artists that think that they really have a handle on their one craft. Making that jump, pushing yourself—that’s what this is about.”