Editor's Comments

This issue of Theatre Topics opens with a group of articles reflecting on "community-based" theatre, a term that has emerged over the past decade to refer to a wide variety of grassroots, activist performance practices challenging traditional boundaries between professional and nonprofessional, actor and nonactor, artist and audience. Its practitioners distinguish this movement from what has traditionally been known in the United States as "community" theatre, a term loosely designating local, amateur productions of established dramatic texts. The language here points to the contested nature of the word "community" itself, often glowingly evoked yet murkily defined. What do we mean when we speak of community? And how does theatre reflect, create, or change community?

Many of the authors in this issue grapple with these questions. In the opening essay, Anne Ellis describes postshow talkbacks that model new relationships between productions and their community audiences. Catherine Graham analyzes the work of two Canadian companies to suggest avenues for going beyond a "community-based" to a "communitarian" theatre. Ann Elizabeth Armstrong, detailing an oral history project involving her class and the community in Williamsburg, Virginia, examines the moments when pedagogical and local needs do not so neatly converge. Petra Kuppers, through performance techniques with mental health clients, shows how she challenges this community's public image by resisting the traditional tools used in its representation. These four articles not only offer a sense of the range of community-based work but also demonstrate the ways critical reflection can invigorate and stimulate performance practice.

The next cluster of articles centers largely on issues of bodies, movement, corporeality. Kuppers's consideration of bodies and space leads into Judith Hamera, who invokes her own responses to butoh dancer Naoyuki Oguri to reflect on the desire to read virtuosity into movement. Joan Herrington's appreciation of the Viewpoints maps the many ways contemporary directors are using these movement techniques. On a different note, Robert Barton and Janet Gupton detail an innovative program for incorporating pedagogy into a theatre department's curriculum.

The issue concludes with something I hope you'll find useful: a comprehensive index to our first ten years, compiled by Priscilla Page. The index attests to the breadth of authors and subjects published in these pages since the first issue in 1991.

Many of these articles have benefited from the blood, sweat, and tears of two talented individuals who will be leaving Theatre Topics for other opportunities after this issue. Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, Managing Editor since 1995, has served as chief steward of style and format with three different editors, while handling many aspects of proof preparation normally undertaken by a publisher. Through a variety of transitions, his wisdom and experience have been vital to the journal's high level of integrity and consistency in both look and content. Katy Ryan, Assistant Editor since 1997 (with one hiatus), has been a valuable sounding board for me, doing an impressive service for our authors through many a "queried edit" over the last four years. Our readers and authors are probably unaware of the extent to which Jeffrey's and Katy's high standards, superb eye for detail, and willingness to work long hours at the last moment have helped produce two solid issues a year. They've made my job easier and Theatre Topics better. I'll miss them both.

--Harley Erdman
Editor

...