Oliver Gerland
Associate Professor

Email: oliver.gerland@colorado.edu

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This past August, Associate Professor Oliver Gerland stepped into the role of Chair of the Theatre and Dance Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After eight years as Director of Graduate Studies, he is very excited to assume the greater responsibility of running a department.

Since I’ve had children, I’ve realized there is nothing more interesting in the world than people. I just felt like I was ready to manage people.

How do you develop a system whereby humans can be encouraged to excel at what they love? This is what fascinates me.

 

As Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Gerland was responsible for organizing admissions and awards for the graduate programs as well as supervising the department's GPTI/TA program. He has directed numerous dissertations and theses, and in 1998 he was awarded Outstanding Graduate Advisor for all of CU-Boulder. As a teacher, Dr. Gerland focuses on the environment of the classroom.

Rapport is crucial for engaging students' attention and helping them understand the vital importance of theatre and dramatic literature. I want to create an atmosphere where people feel free to share ideas, even wacky-sounding ones.

As Director of Dramaturgy for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival since 1998, Dr. Gerland has wrestled with the problems of a still-evolving position.

It’s difficult to define the role of dramaturg: it's a theatre position that is highly context-sensitive. For example, to dramaturg on new play development is different than "dramaturging" on a finished play. Basically, I like to think that the dramaturg listens closely, speaks carefully and has the play's best interests at heart. Dramaturgs have historically been educators, interested in educating the audience. Nowadays they’re also involved with literary management. And, of course, they contribute to the rehearsal process by conducting research for the director and actors and conversing with the director about what they see and hear. CSF and department dramaturgs do all of these things.

In focusing his research on the plays of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, Dr. Gerland sees two basic attractions to Ibsen's work.

One, plays like A Doll's House raise intriguing and complex questions that are directly relevant to a young person's life, e.g. when should one put self over others? How important is marriage really? What does one need to be (or create) oneself? Secondly, Ibsen is just a wonderful playwright whose work rewards close attention, something I think undergraduates need to become practiced at. On closer inspection, for example, one finds that Ibsen raises more questions than he answers, which makes for great discussion.

Last year, Dr. Gerland published A Freudian Poetics for Ibsen's Theatre: Repetition, Recollection, and Paradox . Here’s the publisher's blurb:

This study offers a new, historically-based psychoanalytic approach to Ibsen’s plays, fashioning a Freudian poetics that stresses the dramatist’s formal technique rather than his unconscious fixations, the textual surface rather than the subtextual depths. Not only does this approach avoid the methodological briar-patch of the unconscious, it also offers insight into the paradoxical openness of Ibsen's endings.

Dr. Gerland is happy with the reception the book has received. At the University of Kansas, where he went to give a lecture in 2000, "The director of Hedda Gabler saw a manuscript copy, and he was very interested." The publisher of the book is The Edwin Mellen Press.

As chair, Dr. Gerland is learning the job, the system, and the process of how the job and the University are run. "I'm very excited about working with the new faculty; we’ve hired six new faculty members in the last seven years, and they will be bringing changes. I see it as my job to help facilitate those changes, and I’m excited to see what they are."

This article was written in 2000 by Jeff Grapko, a Master's student in the Department of Theatre & Dance.