The 31st Annual Mid-America Theatre Conference

Going

Hyatt Regency Cleveland at the Arcade Cleveland, Ohio March 4-7, 2010

The 2010 Mid-America Theatre Conference will be held at the beautifully restored Hyatt Regency Cleveland at the Arcade. Designed by John Eisenmann and George H. Smith and financed by John D. Rockefeller and other wealthy Clevelanders, the Arcade was constructed in 1890 to emulate the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. Like other European arcades. the Galleria invited public gathering, interaction, idling, passing through, experiencing, and detached spectatorship-what Walter Benjamin would famously write about as flanerie: the civilized individual's interaction with the public.

Apropos of this space, for MATC 2010, we invite scholarly and creative work circulating around the ideas of Public-broadly construed: How have our discipline and art engaged with issues of audience, citizenship and public life? What is the public face of academic theatre in the community? What crises and opportunities do we face in the areas of public funding and other subsidies? What are the intricacies and complexities historically surrounding public and private life, and how have these been dealt with on the stage? How do we in the academy balance our commitment to art and service with the demands of publication? How do we effectively and competitively publicize our programs to prospective students?