Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (review)

A key question informing Jill Dolan's full-hearted book, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, is one that haunts theatre practice, whether of explicit political persuasion or otherwise, and is one that theatre and performance studies scholars continue to excavate via many routes and from as many different perspectives: in what ways does theatre performance help to transform social structures, political formations, and behaviours by modelling socially and ethically constructive instances of communitas and citizenship? Drawing upon her personal "archive of spectatorship" (10), and unabashedly situating her feeling-self at the centre of her readings (which, not surprisingly, include solo works by feminist performers Deb Margolin, Peggy Shaw, and Holly Hughes; performances by Lily Tomlin, Danny Hoch, and Anna Deveare Smith; the shows Def Poetry Jam and The Laramie Project, and the postmodern choreography of Ann Carlson to name some), Dolan's enquiry into how we find hope at the theatre turns its regard to the interconnections between embodied, somatic response and our more intellectual, culturally learned response as theatregoers. She does this in order to map some of the ways that theatre might redress the sociopolitical injustice and inequities endured by minority communities, which reflect the assumptions of a discriminatory social system she finds "sorely lacking" (37). Part of the book's overall contribution (and also its provocation) is an attempt to recuperate the meaning of common but troubled terms, such as faith, sentiment, and, of course, hope, from the religious, nationalistic, and moralistic discourses to which they have been tethered in recent years by the bloated rhetoric of the Bush administration. According to Dolan's reading, the reanimation of a belief in humanistic values through theatre acts might begin to play a critical role in moving theatre's many diverse publics to understand that veracious political commitment and utopian longing can be read as mutually constitutive, complementary practices of being. In order to identify how humanist values may be reinvested with agency, she seizes upon the notion of the "utopian performative."

Rather than intending utopia as the imagination of an unobtainable no-place located in the future, the utopian performative invests the utopian impulse with a more mutable identity, so that it is perceived as "a utopia always in process, always only potentially grasped, as it disappears before us around the corners of narrative and social experience" (6). According to Dolan's reading, the utopian performative - a doing more than a saying, an intense, momentary, processual experience contoured but not defined by longing - offers what Marxist utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch describes as the "rehearsal for the example . . . a laboratory of the right theory-praxis on a small scale, in the form of play" (qtd. on 131). Alongside Bloch, whose meandering and marvellous three-volume work, The Principle of Hope, and his more frequently referenced collection of critical essays, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, influence her approach, Dolan draws on Herbert Marcuse and Martin Buber and a range of contemporary performance and cinema studies scholars whose work increasingly intersects with utopian studies, phenomenology, and readings that understand affect and emotion as potentially vital and politicized modes of response. Dolan suggests that theatre's emergent and expressive realizations offer not simply narratives that propose a better world but, more importantly, the co-involvement of performer and spectator in "felt" instants (the utopian performative) that enact change that may persist beyond the brief temporality marked by the event. For in such moments, the individual shifts closer towards the "condition for action" if not action itself (169). Citing film theorist Richard Dyer's explanation of utopia's function within the broader realm of entertainment, Dolan argues that, as a mode of cultural production, theatre presents "what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized" (39). Certain theatre events, therefore, offer a uniquely sentient experience to which we might want to pay more attention.

Proceeding through six chapters, the first a useful introduction...