The Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS) celebrated 70 graduates and 35 award recipients at its annual commencement ceremony in Zellerbach Playhouse on Monday, May 13.
Commencement speaker W. Kamau Bell, an Emmy Award-winning comedian, director and producer (United Shades of America, 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed), offered advice to graduates in a humorous speech marked by his signature brand of social commentary. “I am not qualified to be here” as someone without a college degree, he quipped, before recounting how artists and activists in the Bay Area had shaped him as a person and a comedian. Among his advice to graduates: Know when you need help, and know when you have to forge your own path.
The ceremony also featured a moving tribute to Professor Joe Goode, who is retiring from UC Berkeley after 23 years of teaching choreography and directing productions for TDPS. Professor Shannon Jackson extolled Goode’s acute sense of humanity and the ways he has served as a bridge between the department’s various creative and scholarly disciplines. “He’s a good good good good good good guy!” Jackson concluded, referencing Goode’s groundbreaking dance-theater work, 29 Effeminate Gestures.
Professor and department chair SanSan Kwan applauded the resilience of this year’s graduates, most of whom had missed their high school graduation and started college classes online due to the covid pandemic.
“You have weathered through with grace, and you have contributed so much artistic and intellectual energy to our community,” Kwan said. “From collectively devising a virtual play from your bedrooms to discovering how to magically pull fish out of a stage; from discussions of Judith Butler and gender performativity to recitations of the Iliad and the Odyssey to memorizing the 32 arm positions in Talawa Technique—you all have been ‘everything, everywhere, all at once.’”