Abstract: This article traces the history of American Realness, a festival of new dance, theatre, and performance founded and curated by Ben Pryor and held annually in New York City from 2010 to 2019. American Realness challenged received ideas about innovation through its interventions into the infrastructural landscape of contemporary performance. Employing interviews, archival materials, and infrastructural theory, the author argues that fully apprehending the history of new performance requires consideration of infrastructural history as well. Supporting this account are examinations of works by choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Dana Michel, which were notably featured in the festival.
Abstract: Beginning as a provocation delivered at the 2025 Association for Theatre in Higher Education keynote roundtable, this essay responds to the deepening connections and overlapping areas in theatre and media studies. Specifically, it frames the argument institutionally to address three objections raised in response to the roundtable: that media studies does not engage equitably with theatre; that enthusiasm for emerging technologies risks uncritical techno-optimism; and that structural integration could harm vulnerable theatre programs. Reframed as challenges and opportunities, deeper cross-disciplinary collaboration may not be the threat some fear but an essential response to the benefit of arts and humanities.
Abstract: This article examines how women producers in Nairobi resist the "institutionalization of amnesia" and navigate neoliberal precarity in arts institution–building through the kupenya practice. Using case studies outlining the producing strategies of Judy Kibinge of Docubox Film Fund and Angela Wachuka and Wanjiru Koinange of Book Bunk, this essay argues that kupenya operates as a nimble, improvisatory approach that creates a buffer and uninstitutionalizes amnesia by recoding the cultural memory of Kenyans. By foregrounding the strategic praxis of kupenya, this article offers a distinctly African method of institution-building centering the producer as a critical infrastructure.
Abstract: Analyzing performances of the US Supreme Court staged in Washington, DC, this essay examines how institutional theatres produce an aesthetics of centrism. The structuration of mainstream regional theatres by fiscal, political, and institutional exigencies drives a centrist aesthetics that is related to but distinguishable from middlebrow aesthetics. Examining examples including Holly Hughes's Preaching to the Perverted , Elevator Repair Service's Arguendo , and John Strand's The Originalist , this essay reveals how institutional forces pressure theatres to variously critique and valorize ideological moderation as a set of narrative and staging ideals, often while obscuring investments in patriarchal whiteness as a governing cultural logic.
