Your time has come to flyYou have no borders—El Vez, “Órale,” sung to the tune of “Bridge over Troubled Waters”With brightly colored papel picado (cut paper banners), tissue flowers, and Latin American flags festooning the performance area at San Francisco's Z Space, David Herrera Performance Company's September 2023 event, ÓRALE!, promised fun and festivity. On its surface, the performance resembled

In 2010 film and theatre historian David Mayer urged researchers to look to early film for evidence of continuing traditions of Victorian pantomime, arguing its “audiences tolerated, even enjoyed, the same sight-gags and hackneyed routines that amused their Victorian ancestors.” This article is a response to his challenge and in the process explores wider interconnections. The harlequinade was the

In the summer of 1944, Black modern dancer Pearl Primus searched for authenticity. Over the past year, she had achieved critical success for her modern dance choreography that protested racial injustice in the South, informed by a leftist political mission. However, she thought something was missing. She explained to Dance Magazine, “I had done dances about sharecroppers and lynchings without ever

Since its publication in 2005, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau's The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition has provided the received narrative not only for the ways that Viewpoints training is practiced, but also for its history. In their opening chapter, the authors crucially acknowledge that they did not invent this method of training: In 1979, Anne met choreographer Mary Overlie

The story of influential French stage director Jacques Copeau's 1917–19 residency in New York City was documented at the time by Copeau himself and subsequently analyzed by Copeau scholars.1 Copeau (1879–1949) is remembered today for his innovative, experimental theatre work in the early twentieth century; he developed core practices that became foundational for modernist stage artistry, including

Ladies and Gentlemen, [It] may be that never before in my life have I had to meet such a trial as I am undergoing today.

Early in 1850, Charles Dickens went to the Victoria Theatre in Lambeth. One of several theatres sited close to the bridges linking the southern bank of the Thames with the north, the Vic was a prominent neighborhood institution catering to a mostly working-class audience. Launched in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, a move designed to coincide with the opening of Waterloo Bridge, its investors’ hopes

In the winter of 1845–6 the United States Army languished on the border waiting for an opportunity to provoke what would be the Mexican–American War, or, as the Mexicans would come to call it, La Intervención Americana. To break the dull monotony, the army turned to theatre. In January, Second Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in a production staged for the troops and the local community

The jokes that stick in people's minds are the ones they don't quite get.

The preface of Bill Butler and Elin Schoen's 1979 skating instruction manual, Jammin’, teems with encouragement, but offers one slight warning. Welcoming his first-time skaters, Butler tells the reader, “chances are, once you've roller-discoed, you won't want to stop. You'll want to stay on wheels. And there's no reason why you shouldn't, even if you're not in a rink.” With the tagline “[everything

W. B. Yeats's dramatic career was transformed in the 1910s through a series of collaborations in London. In an essay from the period, “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” he writes: “I have invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and symbolic.” This form, like many other modernist inventions, is better understood as something else, in this case the alchemy of his earlier work, some eclectic influences

One day in 2018, I arrived at Playwrights Horizons in New York City excited to see a new play by Lindsey Ferrentino called This Flat Earth. I did not know much about the story aside from the fact that it had teenage actors playing teenager characters, but I quickly realized that it was about two teens trying to make sense of a recent mass shooting event as their school. The most striking part of this

In 2015, I traveled to Havana with the support of an ASTR Targeted Areas Research Grant to work on processing the physical materials of the Photographic Archive of Tablas-Alarcos Press (hereinafter the Tablas-Alarcos archive or collection). The Tablas-Alarcos archive is a unique collection because it exists not in a traditional research institution, but in the offices of a state-run press dedicated

Utopia might always prove impossible. But it should not be entirely abandoned as a concept, or as a goal toward which work might be directed. It is hard to see how meaningful change could arise without at least some sense of utopian possibility. The architectural historian Nathaniel Coleman argues in this vein that simply “making-do with reality may be compensatory, but limits possibility, transforming

Quickly Ascending to Heaven,Hermaphrodite Beautyof the celestial magic,You descend to animateAngelic aura,alone in your clear, eternal beautyall other beauties stand before you.While ANNA's voice,In Deidamia converses,a musical passage dissolvesin the aura, a most divine rayalthough enclosed within an earthly veil,it knows the harmony of heaven on earth.1

In June 2022, after a two-and-a-half-year COVID-19 hiatus, I joyfully returned to Europe for a research trip. My purpose was to develop further my next monograph on queering animal symbols, specifically investigating the history of the Dalecarlian (Dala) horse [Dalahäst]. Dala horses are brightly painted wooden toys that were carved and decorated by farmers through the long Swedish winters as early

In 1901, the popular American actor and playwright, William Gillette, arrived in the United Kingdom to tour his new play, Sherlock Holmes. Born in Connecticut in 1853, Gillette was by this time a well-established actor and playwright in his native United States and not unknown to British audiences. Just a few years earlier, he had brought his play Secret Service to London, where his performance as

Bend your ear to Saturday, 23 July 1853. On that morning, America's first Black concert vocalist and operatic singer, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, performed at Stafford House, home of prominent English Abolitionist the Duchess of Sutherland, during her UK tour. Born into captivity on a plantation in Mississippi and raised free in Philadelphia, Taylor Greenfield's voice sounded out the fever pitch of

For French theatre history, the seventeenth century paradoxically stands out as both the Grand Siècle, or golden age, in which Pierre Corneille, Molière, and Jean Racine produced their masterpieces, and as a period of intense antitheatrical sentiment in which Jansenist theologians like Pierre Nicole and Catholic bishops like Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet composed treatises against the stage and its players

The “experimental” playwrights of continental Europe have been experimental not because they have imitated modern literature or poetry, but because they have sought to express themselves in theatrical terms, and the great directors, like Jouvet, Barrault, Viertel, and Brecht have been there to make their plays “exist” on the stage.

The New York Hippodrome theatre brought together many different types of performance on its massive stage. Its opening production in 1905, for instance, included circus acts, a ballet, and a fictionalized Civil War battle (Fig. 1). Many of the acts focused on a key feature in the theatrical environment, a water tank beneath the apron of the stage that could be filled to a fourteen-foot depth. High

In 1967, the US Vocational Rehabilitation Administration (VRA) awarded $331,000 to the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Foundation to fund a new company, the National Theatre of the Deaf. Endowing such an enterprise was bold, but not entirely unprecedented for this federal agency tasked with restoring disabled Americans to productive employment. Founded in 1920, the federal–state vocational rehabilitation

As most of my human contact became restricted to the Zoom screen in spring 2020, I discovered a serious limit to my capacity for looking. I also began finding it difficult to read. A ten-month headache taught me to stop taking ibuprofen and learn to manage tensions around my eyes and head as well as to shift roughly half of my reading to screenreaders and audio books. The need to restructure my own

In 1920, Oscar Hammerstein II—fresh from the modest success of his debut musical Always You—was eager to write the show for Frank Tinney that his uncle Arthur was to produce. As Hugh Fordin wrote, “Arthur, confident of his nephew's ability but aware that he needed to learn more about his craft, brought in Otto Harbach to collaborate on the book and lyrics.” The two men joined forces on that show—Tickle

Stock characters named “Nobody” and “Somebody” were mainstays of British performance culture in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Playbills and newspaper advertisements show that these roles were popular with audiences in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, as well as on the regional stages. Men and women alike took on these personae to deliver songs, prologues, and epilogues, often as part of benefit

The effect of this “colonial cringe” is an enduring and debilitating performance anxiety on a global stage.

It was May in Eau Gallie, Florida, and Zora Neale Hurston was headed to church. Shutting the door to her cottage near the shores of the Indian River, Hurston set out to join the local Baptist congregation, where she would hear a sermon delivered by its pastor, the Reverend C. C. Lovelace. Hurston had been pondering the question of how to represent the experience of a church service in a theatrical

ideas and landmarks in theatre and political economy since the 1850s: nineteenthcentury industrialization, the waxing and waning postwar UK welfare state, Irish peace in the 1990s, North American border panics after 9/11, and austerity politics in the 2010s. In all of these frameworks, McKinnie sees and communicates clearly how the mechanics of theatremaking make political and economic meaning as much

the burgeoning field of reenactment studies by adding significant insight into the eighteenth-century origins of the form and its relation to the performance of justice. It is a pity the author does not engage with Rebecca Schneider’s influential work on the topic, as dialogue with her main terms and ideas would have broadened the implications of his excellent analyses and arguments. One also wonders

appears amid discussions of the common use of the term “bourgeois” as a pejorative in contemporary (bourgeois) culture. Disidentification thus describes the author’s (and perhaps reader’s) own sense of their relationship to the term “bourgeois.” In subsequent chapters we find that the figure of disidentification may in fact be intrinsic to theatre (insofar as the use of theatre as a machine of ideological

For good reason, proscenium staging has fallen out of favor in recent decades. Taken to be a synonym for passivity, its constraints on the theatrical imagination have been largely replaced by a suite of more active, immersive, and site-specific strategies. In performance spaces across the Global South, however, it is not only this rising taste for interaction that has driven the proscenium’s demise

A raging global pandemic handled inadequately and indifferently by the Republican-led US federal government, with Dr. Anthony Fauci in a featured role; an antiracist uprising in response to police brutality; a resurgent political Right fomenting and stoking culture wars; activists’ demands for a diverse and equitable art world; increasing fiscal precarity for small, innovative live art spaces; a looming

In an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, William Wells Brown stated: “Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.” In these oft-cited lines, Wells Brown makes a strong claim for the

In April 1885, a New York Herald journalist rushed to Madison Square Garden for a special reception highlighting Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy. A feature of P. T. Barnum's traveling show, Jo-Jo was confounding scientists who had requested a stand-alone inspection of the mysterious attraction. Accordingly, the reporter provided an anthropological description of the boy: “He stands about five feet high.

I think, then, that Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. That they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps—and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.—Lorraine Hansberry (1962)

In March 2020, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIU) went into lockdown. With the annual Big Muddy New Play Festival about to kick off—two productions entering tech and four full-length staged readings rehearsing—SIU's M.F.A. Playwriting Program had been left in the lurch. COVID-19 and the scramble to move courses online and to graduate our M.F.A.'s canceled the entire festival. A year later

During the summer of 2020, I intended to make my second visit to Iqaluit, Nunavut, to speak with people involved in performance and climate science practices, engage in “co-performative witnessing” (methodology after Dwight Conquergood), and work to make my doctoral research useful to communities in Nunavut.1 Needless to say, that didn't happen. However, the limitations imposed by COVID-19 have also

As collaborators who have been working together virtually since 2017, we have written plays and articles, conducted artist interviews, and are in the process of writing a book about teaching older adults theatre. When the pandemic came, everything else in our lives moved online, and we encountered new challenges with both our teaching and our scholarship. We were tasked with transitioning our theatre

In April 2020—only weeks after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic—the New York Times published an article titled “Why Zoom Is Terrible.” Quoting a gustatory simile from Sheryl Brahnam of Missouri State University, the article declared, “In-person communication resembles video conferencing about as much as a real blueberry muffin resembles a packaged blueberry muffin that

Because sensory theatre productions are designed with neurodiverse audiences in mind, practitioners are first and foremost concerned with accessibility at all levels for their audience members, incorporating multiple senses throughout a performance to allow a variety of entry points for audiences that may have wildly divergent—and often competing—access needs. One-to-one interaction between performers

In March 2020 I came home from a theatre conference with a nagging cough, which I had been fighting for some time. Yet, it deepened and strengthened over the next few days. In the following week, symptoms accumulated and were strange and fluctuating: an experience with which I would become all too well acquainted in my COVID journey. Two weeks later on a second telemedical appointment a doctor heard

My experience of this pandemic began with bureaucracy. I want it to end with dancing.

There was certainly much about the hurried switch from in-person to online teaching and learning in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic that inspired angst. The decisions that many colleges and universities made to halt on-campus activities and deconcentrate their communities left scores of us scrambling to pack up some of the things we hoped would help us withstand a few weeks away from our

The last seminar of my “Introduction to Literary Theories” course in the fall semester of 2020 involved really difficult material on gender and race; it was exposing; none of the students had their cameras on. I was nearly in tears. Kept composure. We had been navigating well through the semester, with this and the other first-year module on poetry—subjects adjacent to theatre as a result of my situation

The year of COVID-19 social distancing is a reminder that people can and will gather in person in mass acts of resistance and community care, even in a pandemic. This year highlights how theatres, theatre skills, and theatrical techniques can be a key part of community building and dissent. The examples of the Twin Cities in summer 2020; Portland, Oregon, in 2020–1; and France in spring-summer 2021

The crowded marketplace in Thiruvananthapuram (aka Trivandrum) thronged with people in the late nineteenth century. Men and women clad in white mundu teemed about the busy street buying oil and salt, horseshoes and iron farm implements, coarse cloth, coir rope, jaggery, and palm toddy. The men were mostly bare-chested, though some, unmindful of the sweltering heat, wore white long shirts or an upper-body

dell’arte aurally conditioned early modern audience to the emergence of opera (32). The final focus of the chapter is on discussions of gesture in performance. Turning again to Quintilian, a touchstone in this book, Crohn Schmitt explains that he “lays out general guidelines about the interrelationship between words, gesture, and voice, and between gestures” (40). Crohn Schmitt next applies Quintilian

potential and prompts a kind of productive destabilizing of artistic hierarchies. Such mischief making, she argues, is relevant to the work twenty-first-century artists and audiences are creating and consuming. Notably, Hunter makes good use of some data from actual game players and television fans in the latter half of the book; similar use of audience data in her other case studies, especially the

The passing of the Trump presidency has left much of the academic world in a state of PTSD. “How could this have happened?” we ask in delayed shock. “Has the virus merely been suppressed?” It seems the right moment to ask ourselves fundamental questions, and the publication of The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, a collection of twenty-four essays meticulously edited by

in original. 10 See Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225–48. 11 Academic debate about this term was triggered by Rustom Bharucha’s essay “Notes on the Invention of Tradition” in his Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (1990; London: Routledge, 1993), 193–211. 12 Dipesh Chakrabarty

various cultural trends—a Grecian style of dress and posing inspired by Isadora Duncan, orientalism, wartime patriotism, and of course, European modernism— to spice up her act. As in previous parts, Stalter-Pace’s analysis illuminates the intersecting attitudes toward art, gender, and race in the reception of Hoffmann’s performances, as with the implications of the not-so-temporary dye she used to

On the first day of April 1649, on the predominantly rural manor of Walton, Surrey, the sight of people preparing land for the plow was unremarkable. To see men up at dawn, dressed for the field in broad-brimmed hats, homespun waistcoats, and short breeches, loosening or breaking up clods with their spades, stooping to toss aside root and rock, was typical. What did raise eyebrows, however, was the

Stephenson argues that although the theatre of the real promises authentic encounters, these are not possible;instead performances "meditate on that impossibility and the conditions under which a singular secure real fails to manifest" (17) The book comprises eight chapters, the first ("Introduction") and last ("Coda: Theatres of the Real in the Age of Post-Reality") of which situate the project geographically