Abstract: How is time made to mean in gameful performance? In this essay, I explore the implications of time being put into play in Addressless (2022) and argue that the regimentation of time in this theatrical work casts its protagonists as neoliberal agents, undermining its creators’ intent. Seeking an alternative model for time-based play, I turn to a thematically similar work: Jay Dragon’s tabletop role-playing game Wanderhome (2021), which operates in a queer temporality that troubles the reproductive time modeled in Addressless. Finally, I speculate briefly on how the emerging field of gameful theatre might adopt new temporal strategies in performance.
Abstract: The essay mobilizes the old Prague School concept of the “stage figure” for a counter-intuitively political reading of Franz Kafka as an author of hope for hopeless times. While the context is literary, the concept itself reflects a fundamental aspect of theatre practice that encapsulates an important social or political potential therein: The stage as a laboratory for the production of human beings—the performance not only of illusions and anxieties, but of hopes and potentials as well. With an arguably political edge beyond either text or theatre, the stage figure emerges as a cluster of bodies, objects, and settings that tends to feed static assumptions (of identity, process, debt, and transcendence), but may also break into its loose components for a more liberatory dynamic.
Abstract: Theatre studies as a discipline—and physical theatres operating in the Global North—are increasingly engaged in efforts to address the colonial power dynamics inherent in our field. This essay wrestles with the question: What might decolonial theatre look, sound, and feel like? I examine how the Global South “occupies” the space of empire through Zimbabwean feminist performance artist Nora Shumba Chipaumire’s five-hour-no-intermission opera, Nehanda. I map how Chipaumire advocates for African noise and the politics of sound, how she turns up the volume on the historical silencing of Africans, and works to decolonize the usual Western ecology of theatremaking. Chipaumire engages in a creative practice of nhaka (the chiShona word for inheritance), a choreography of “animist technology, practice and process” celebrating “radical black african presences.” Visually, aurally, and viscerally Nehanda asks: Who gets to hear? Who gets to see? Who understands? With whom does this resonate? Whose (hi)story is this? Whose opera is operating here?
Abstract: This paper explores the performance and phenomenology of time, both on and off the stage. In the paper I contrast phenomenological differences of time experienced as a US immigrant living in Ireland, drawing on theories from Edmund Husserl, Edward Hall, and others who articulate why I experience time as difference interrelated to culture and consciousness. The paper then explains that once at the theatre, I instead experience time’s similarity because of theatre’s own phenomenologies and particularities regarding time. The paper posits that because of these phenomenologies of similarity, time and consciousness experienced in the theatre may supersede the experience of time and difference that exist outside the theatre doors.
Abstract: As intimacy professionals are increasingly working in theatrical spaces, power dynamics have begun to shift between the intimacy professional, the actors involved in the intimacy, and members of the production team. Throughout this process, however, well-intentioned actors can shift the power dynamics and emotional labor of theatrical intimacy work that, in turn, reinforces gender roles. This shift often happens with the utterance of the phrase "I'll do whatever she's comfortable with," when used in theatrical intimacy staging practice. By using this phrase that has been uttered in many intimacy rehearsals I have facilitated, I will challenge the good intentions of this phrase, complicate the emotional labor that this (im)balance of power then necessitates and offer strategies for intimacy professionals to rebalance the rehearsal space and offer alternatives for affirming and honoring boundaries.
Abstract: This paper examines Black madness in Angelina Weld Grimké's 1916 anti-lynching play Rachel . The pathologization of madness and disability has shaped existing criticism of Grimké's play. I draw from mad studies, critical disability studies, and queer theory to reconsider the titular character's rejection of motherhood, unusual psychic experiences, and psychosocial deviance as forms of Black madness that eschew the normative politics of gender, race, and reproductive futurity. Refusing ableist interpretations of madness, I demonstrate how Grimké's play challenges Black racial uplift politics as well as white supremacist violence.
Abstract: Consent commonly determines the distinction between sexual intercourse and assault. In 2024, boxer Devin Haney extended this logic into the ring through a lawsuit against his recent opponent, Ryan Garcia. The suit argued that because Haney did not consent to a fight against someone using performance-enhancing substances, Garcia's victory was also an assault. Proceeding from Michel Foucault's identification of combat as the ancestor of both juridical procedure and athletic competition, this article examines Haney v. Garcia (2024) in both the ring and the courtroom. It explores the limits to which legalist consent discourse can capture what transpires between boxers and sexual partners, compelling us to embrace more dynamic practices of care in performance and life.
Abstract: Liliana Padilla's play How to Defend Yourself takes place in a self-defense class on a college campus in the immediate aftermath of a sexual assault. This essay draws on recent scholarship about campus sexual violence—how to prevent it, how to educate students about it—to better understand why New York Theatre Workshop's 2023 production had such a profound impact on the undergraduate students with whom I saw it. The essay argues that Padilla successfully theatricalizes a paradigm that the students know well – one in which institutional, social and cultural forces erode the efficacy of policies that focus exclusively on individual behavioral changes to keep women safe on campus, and beyond.
Abstract: Ryan J. Haddad's Dark Disabled Stories (DDS) dramatizes how access can reshape aesthetic form and reimagine consent as an ongoing, relational act grounded in care, risk, and sensory exchange. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz's reading of Samuel R. Delany, the essay frames queer cruising as a technique of generating sensorial excess through fragmentation. This opens a conceptual portal to Mia Mingus's notion of access intimacy: a justice-oriented interdependence rooted in disabled sensation. I analyze fragmented scenes and layered accommodations as they generate what Tobin Siebers calls an "assault on autonomy." While this assault may initially seem at odds with consensual interdependence, it instead produces aesthetic excess that overwhelms and touches the audience, provoking a reciprocal ethic of care and consent. Considering the sexual, practical, and aesthetic dimensions of cruising as a staging method cripped by access dramaturgy, this essay argues that DDS reconfigures how audiences engage with access, discomfort, and consent.
Abstract: This essay argues that universities that stage performance and train students in its practice bear a responsibility to contend with and scrutinize consent rather than merely aim to institute professionalized norms for consent-based practice. Committing to critical examination of consent and its tenets, even when or as consent-based performance work is practiced, could better illuminate the limits of consent frameworks, making consent's troubling histories, its infelicitous promises, its hopeful and its vexing implications available for exploration, confrontation, imagination, and invention.
Abstract: Using performances by Rhonda Vincent and Appalachian Road Show at Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Festival in 2022, I demonstrate how musicians paradoxically alienate themselves from the perspectives contained in their songs to posit competing counterimages of authenticity: one based on shared values, the other based on shared heritage. If applied to bluegrass musicians, contemporary popular music performance theory would hold that their song selection would support their stage personae. However, this article finds that bluegrass musicians at this festival separate their stage personae from the narrators of the songs they sing through performer-narrator separation, a form of Brechtian alienation. Doing so reinforces a group fan base identity aligned with a historical reference point, while obviating the need for performers and fans to possess once common, now historical, life experiences from which authenticity was previously derived. This article highlights the role of emotions in alienation, as the alienation effect in this context does not stop spectators' emotional response but mobilizes unexpected emotions toward the end of crafting new visions of authenticity.
Abstract: While the field of theatre and performance studies has understood for some time that digital memory repositories have shifted the ways scholars engage with and analyze performance, there has been no consensus about what we should call these repositories, and how specifically they might be treated as serious collections of performance memory. This essay proposes the term meso-archive and suggests that digital meso-archives can and should be examined using similar methods to more traditional archival spaces. I use TikTok, currently the most popular social media app worldwide, as a case study to show how meso-archives enact and expand traditional archival paradigms.
