As BuzzFeed News says goodbye to Nancy Clench, she gives a tight hug from the stage while a man named Gareth begins singing “That’s Life”. He is surprisingly good; people are joining in, even hugging and swaying.

His voice is cavernous and meaty, bellowing out his Fife accent with such tuba-like brio that should his career in politics and drag implode he might sensibly consider a job as a town crier.This notion of creative variants is similar to Victor Turner’s discussion of liminal or in-between spaces in social structures that permit resistance and revision (1977). However, unlike essays, identities take a great deal of time and emotional energy to be revised.

In a white, cramped bedroom in Clapham, south London, one of the Scottish National Party’s most trusted senior political advisers is pursing his lips to sweep dark rouge up his cheekbone. He smears eyeshadow next, in multicoloured arches over his brow, but leaves the eyelashes bare. Based on the best-selling British novel by Terry Ronald, this new musical is directed and choreographed by two-time Tony Award® winner Jerry Mitchell (Kinky Boots, Hairspray), with a book by Elliot Davis (Peter Pan, Loserville), and a score by the songwriting team of George Stiles (Music) and Anthony Drewe (Lyrics) (Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, Honk!). BECOMING NANCY will open the Alliance Theatre's 51st season on its newly renovated Coca-Cola Stage, September 6 - October 6, 2019. Opening Night was Wednesday, September 18. The third unit about “becoming” springs from Freire’s use of “becoming” as a trope in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1973) for creating a critically conscious, future-oriented, literate identity. In a previous critical pedagogy seminar, I created an activity based on Friere’s concept of limit situation that guided students to trace moments of frustration to the larger social forces of oppression. Students frequently connected their procrastination in completing assignments with forces inherent to graduate education.

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Red taffeta flies at the Alliance Theatre in Becoming Nancy (mainstage, through October 6; although performances began September 6, reviewers were not admitted until September 18). Two-time Tony Award-winner Jerry Mitchell ( Kinky Boots, Legally Blonde, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) directs and choreographs this world-premiere musical, which has Broadway aspirations. This chapter forwards memoir as a writing assignment that can be informed by a critical notion of subject formation. The heuristic activities that I describe were developed for courses on different levels: first year composition, English education writing pedagogy, and several graduate seminars. Recently, I incorporated a few of these generative strategies into an online graduate course about critical memoir. After commenting on the constraints of theoretical taxonomies, a series of heuristic strategies are outlined to increase awareness of identity as a conflicted representation that is always open to revision through writing.