• Editorial Comment
• Ariel Nereson

The March 2024 issue of Theatre Journal comes on the heels of the landmark seventy-fifth anniversary issue (December 2023, coedited by Laura Edmondson and Sean Metzger) and is my first issue as coeditor. To say that I sense the weight of the journal’s history as I step into this role is an understatement. It has been my good fortune that the four essays that were waiting for me exemplify Theatre Journal’s commitment to publishing new historiographic and theoretical interventions into performance. The March issue features two essays that take up distinct sites in Asian American popular performance and demonstrate the diversity of experience, expectation, and intervention found therein, and two essays that theorize performance from very different locations: dirt and drone, other-than-human performers that complicate foundational assumptions about subject, spectator, and actor. As a quartet, the essays energetically mark the beginning of the journal’s next seventy-five years, offering exciting vectors of inquiry that speak to current and evergreen concerns of theatre, dance, and performance studies. Individually, each offers to readers a distinct model of careful, enthusiastic research that broadens the scope of performance studies inquiry.

Maria De Simone’s essay introduces (or reintroduces, as the case may be) the reader to the early twentieth-century figure Jue Quon Tai, tracing her performances across North American vaudeville stages and in immigration courtrooms to demonstrate how performance culture impacted the conceptualization of immigration law. De Simone’s essay joins a vibrant conversation in performance studies about performance and the law while also restoring Jue’s fascinating career to already-robust but generally separate histories of early twentieth-century popular entertainment and immigration and citizenship law. In De Simone’s analysis, Jue mobilized her hyphenated Chinese American identity to navigate racist and exclusionary policies on stage and in the courtroom, yet of equal significance is how the extant archive of Jue’s performances documents racialized regimes of perception that were mutually reinforced across aesthetic and legal domains.

The entwinement of geopolitics and popular performance continues in Donatella Galella’s exploration of David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s 2019 musical Soft Power. For both De Simone and Galella, Asian American identity, critique, and experience form a kind of limit test for the promise of US American democratic inclusion. Galella activates a welcome critique of musical theatre’s affective influence on its audiences and of the ideologies that find support through the deployment of affect and attachment. Through examining the dramaturgy of Soft Power alongside its lyrics, song structure, and performers’ experiences of the work, Galella reconsiders the paradigmatic staging of encounter between “the West” and “Asia” in The King and I. Galella compellingly demonstrates the contemporary reactivations of that encounter and its white supremacist violences in Hwang’s lived experience of anti-Asian violence [End Page ix] and its metatheatrical repetition in Soft Power as she builds on Dorinne Kondo’s concept of “reparative creativity” to argue for the production’s significance to Asian American audiences.

In her essay on ecological performance, Angenette Spalink takes us to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh as she recounts the 2019 installation Below the Blanket. Weaving together current concerns in performance studies about ecology, care, and ethics into the emerging field of critical plant studies, Spalink analyzes the work of several artists in reorganizing perceptual experience of the garden in order to animate the agency and carework of plants in sustaining all existence. Spalink carefully considers the material and representational lives of sphagnum mosses as she poses possible answers to her question, “how can we ethically encounter plants in performance?” In parsing colonial histories of the field of botany and colonial legacies of humanism on performance practice, as well as their always-present counterhistories and alternatives often articulated through Indigenous and feminist methods, Spalink provides a detailed description and incisive analysis of the interspecies relations that Below the Blanket invites.

Challenges to humanism (and, indeed, human existence) are posed by a quite different agent in Eirini Nedelkopoulou’s essay, as she tracks drone performance cultures in the early twenty-first century. In positioning drone technology as a pharmakon that threatens as much as it promises, thus...

•  编辑评论
•  阿里尔·内勒森

《戏剧杂志》2024 年 3 月号是继具有里程碑意义的七十五周年纪念号（2023 年 12 月，由劳拉·埃德蒙森和肖恩·梅茨格共同编辑）之后推出的，也是我作为联合编辑的第一期。当我担任这个角色时，说我感受到了该期刊历史的分量，这是轻描淡写的。我很幸运，等待我的四篇文章体现了《戏剧杂志》致力于发表新的表演史学和理论干预的承诺。三月号刊登了两篇文章，它们占据了亚裔美国人流行表演的不同地点，并展示了其中发现的经验、期望和干预的多样性，还有两篇文章对来自不同地点的表演进行了理论分析：泥土和无人机，非人类表演者使关于主体、观众和演员的基本假设复杂化。作为一个四重奏，这些文章有力地标志着该杂志下一个七十五年的开始，提供了令人兴奋的探究向量，涉及戏剧、舞蹈和表演研究当前和长期关注的问题。每一本书都为读者提供了一种独特的仔细而热情的研究模式，拓宽了表演研究探究的范围。

玛丽亚·德西蒙 (Maria De Simone) 的文章向读者介绍（或重新介绍，视情况而定）二十世纪早期的人物 Jue Quon Tai，追踪她在北美歌舞杂耍舞台和移民法庭上的表演，以展示表演文化如何影响移民的概念化法律。德西蒙的文章加入了表演研究中关于表演和法律的充满活力的对话，同时也将觉的迷人职业生涯恢复到了二十世纪早期流行娱乐、移民和公民法的历史上，这些历史已经很强大，但总体上是独立的。在德西蒙的分析中，觉利用她连字符的华裔美国人身份来应对舞台上和法庭上的种族主义和排他性政策，但同样重要的是，觉现存的表演档案如何记录了在审美和法律上相互强化的种族化观念体系。域。

多纳泰拉·加莱拉 (Donatella Galella) 对黄哲伦 (David Henry Hwang) 和珍妮·特索里 (Jeanine Tesori) 2019 年音乐剧《软实力》(Soft Power) 的探索中，地缘政治与流行表演的交织仍在继续。对于德西蒙和加莱拉来说，亚裔美国人的身份、批评和经验构成了对美国民主包容承诺的一种极限测试。加莱拉对音乐剧对观众的情感影响以及通过情感和依恋的部署寻求支持的意识形态提出了受欢迎的批评。通过审视《软实力》的戏剧结构以及歌词、歌曲结构和表演者的作品体验，加莱拉重新思考了《国王与我》中“西方”与“亚洲”相遇的范式舞台。加莱拉令人信服地展示了当代的重新激活她以近藤多琳的“修复创造力”概念为基础，论证了这部作品对亚裔美国人的意义，从而在《软实力》中对那次遭遇及其白人至上主义暴力行为在黄的反亚裔暴力生活经历中进行了描述，并在《软实力》中进行了元戏剧式的重复。观众。

在她关于生态绩效的文章中，Angenette Spalink 带我们去了爱丁堡皇家植物园，讲述了 2019 年的装置作品《毯子下面》。斯帕林克将当前对生态、关怀和伦理的表演研究的关注融入新兴的批判性植物研究领域，分析了几位艺术家在重组花园感知体验方面的工作，以便激发植物的代理和关怀工作，以维持所有的一切。存在。斯帕林克仔细考虑了泥炭藓的物质和表征生活，并为她的问题“我们如何在道德上在表演中遇到植物？”提出了可能的答案。在解析植物学领域的殖民历史和表演实践中人文主义的殖民遗产，以及它们始终存在的反历史和通常通过土著和女权主义方法阐明的替代方案时，斯帕林克提供了对以下物种间关系的详细描述和深入分析：毯子邀请。

在 Eirini Nedelkopoulou 的文章中，当她追踪二十一世纪初的无人机表演文化时，对人文主义（实际上是人类存在）的挑战是由一个完全不同的代理人提出的。将无人机技术定位为一种威胁与承诺一样多的药物，因此……