Michael M. Chemers

I am an author, educator, speaker, and performer.

I specialize in the study of performance and its power to increase the human ability to feel empathy and compassion. My inquiries often lead me to the weird, the occult, the deviant, and the strange - the edges of human experience where the operation of empathy, and its failure, is clearly visible.

My interests are fairly diverse, so I this page serves as a resource for students, practitioners, researchers, activists, and anyone else who'd like to share this strange journey with me. You are most welcome here. 

The Dramaturgy of Empathy

I am interested in the ways that ideas that either destroy or increase our ability to feel compassion move through societies by way of performance. I began this inquiry looking at disability theatre, particularly how people with disabilities were represented in "freak shows" and how those performers managed and staged their own stigma. This remains a focal point in my work, but I have expanded that into the development of a dramaturgical practice that nurtures the ability of performance to allow the audience to "get inside" the other and recognize their sameness. 

Stigma

Like any other form of political identity, stigma is derived far less form any innate qualities of the stigmatized person than from the manner in which those qualities (or imagined ones) are represented as "less than" or even monstrous. This understanding as fueled my inquiry into representations of monsters in the theatre, and the very real effects that these monsters have had on the lived realities of certain people.

Dramaturgy and Digital Media

My collaborations with the Social Robotics Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon have led to new projects with computer scientists, roboticists, engineers, computational media experts, and astrophysicists. In this, I am following the tradition of scholars who find bridges between theatre and other disciplines. Creative, collaborative skills possessed by dramaturgs are of increasing importance to the work of digital media creators, roboticists, game designers, and theatre practitioners who use cutting edge technology.

Design Note:
Rows and columns on this page are set up using PageBuilder, a flexible way to create a page with just the number of rows and columns you want. How to use PageBuilder link. This page uses: a header image, a tiled background image, an image gallery, horizontal rules, and the Google Font, Arvo.