Performed by students of Peter Hawkins and Karin Coonrod.
A group of Yale Divinity School students has been working with the poetry of T. S. Eliot in order to enact texts that usually are only studied. They have turned poems into scripts and literary analysis into performance. The class has been led by Peter Hawkins, professor of religion and literature at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music, and Karin Coonrod, a lecturer in directing at the Yale School of Drama and founder of the international theater group Compagnia de’ Colombari.
The performance builds on interpretive work done over the spring semester, ranging from very early poems to Eliot’s crowning achievement in the “Four Quartets.” Because of his notorious difficulty, Eliot is often treated as a complex puzzle to be solved. Performance, however, turns his poetry into a world to be explored, once silent texts are vocalized, embodied, and shared with an audience.