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Bright Gal Gets Fulbright
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Gal Gets Fulbright
Janice Perry, a native Vermonter and internationally acclaimed performance artist known as Gal, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant. She will use the grant to lecture at the Julius Maximilians University in Wuerzburg, Germany during the 2004-2005 academic year.
"It's great that they recognize the teaching potential of artists,"Perry said in a phone interview from her home in Ferrisburgh. Asked about why her politico-comedic performances are so popular in Europe, she joked, "Well, the Puritans did leave England because it was 'too loose' over there." But the real reason, she said, is that Europeans "expect theatre to be political. Here, producers underestimate their audiences."
Perry will conduct seminars for the fall semester on autobiographically based performance as identity construction and on creative writing. Her seminars are ground-breaking as two of the first creatively based academic seminars in Germany. "There is no 'art' in schools there. If you want to do art, you go to art school," she said. The appointment as a Fulbright Scholar means that her airfare is paid, along with a substantial ("to an artist") stipend of $2,000 per month. She has received previous grants as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in order to develop curriculum at Wuerzburg and at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt.
Perry will be teaching students to begin with their personal histories and transform and communicate them, she explained, "to show what it's like to be alive in the world now." What makes it interesting to German students is the opportunity to experience American English as a rich, living, emotional language, rather than just for academics, shopping and bureaucratic form-filling.
The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement and because they have demonstrated extraordinary leadership potential in their fields. Asked whether she felt a sense of irony at receiving this international grant from a government that is often the target of her searing humor, she said, "I am happy to take money from the government that might otherwise be used elsewhere. I am happy to supply an alternative for them."
Perry's performance work has also been supported by the Vermont Arts Council, The Vermont Community Foundation and The Autumn Harp Foundation.