Introduction

Introduction JILL DOLAN Art reminds us ofall the possibilities we are persuaded to forget. - Jeanette Winterson The concept of utopia has been a prime political force in various moments of world history, perhaps especially in the United States in the 1960s. Marxist intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch theorized the potential of art practices to model a social utopia through the workings of a creative, often dissident, imagination, one that fantasized the world as it might be to motivate resistance to the world as it is. My own engagement with utopia has followed these Marxist philosophers, finding "utopian performatives" in live performances that reject a fixed, more static vision of utopia. and work instead to offer a fleeting glimpse, an ephemeral feeling, of what a better world might be like (see my "Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative'" and '''Finding Our Feet in the Shoes of (One An) Other"'). Utopian performatives can never congeal into a pennanent, coercive, imperative social or cultural form; their power is inevitably temporary, since they are "doings" crafted from the present moment of interaction between performers and spectators in a specifically situated material, historical performance. Their affective power lie~ in their ability to move spectators and perfonners to communitas, and to inspire them to recreate these utopian "doings" in larger configurations of culture . Utopian perfo.rmatives represent for me an imaginative construction of both thought and action, of both everyday life and theatrical performance. Over the last several years, the term has come to provide a kind of placeholder for my aspirations about theatre and performance, as well as to represent the apogee of the faith I bring to my own journeys into the poetic realms of the not-real, those trips I make to the theatre hoping to be both taken out of myself, however momentarily, and brought closer to something fundamental about who I Modern Drama, 47:2 (Summer 2004) 165 166 JILL DOLAN am in relation to other human beings and our mutual potential. This dual action - of fantasizing the enormous power of the "what ifs" while at the same time critically examining the sometimes frustrating, sometimes exhilarating reality of the "as is" - imbues utopian performatives with all sorts of possibilities that, finally, bring me hope, Why should we come to the theatre with such desires? Why should we expect or want performance to console us and uplift us, in ways that the progress of our daily lives too often disallows, and in the ways that religion or spiritual traditions more often avow? Why shouldn't we be content to confront the necessity for social change in the more prosaic .rituals of democracy and capitalism, in which we're encouraged to pursue our political and personal desires, our public and private needs and demands? Why put so much pressure on theatre and performance to create with us, in the very moment we enact or observe it, the prospect of a better world that so many of us feel is vital to our very survival? The essays in this is~ue answer these questions by showing us how the faith and belief, action and transformation that theatre models makes it in fact a perfect site at which to practice more idealized versions of democracy and more true, more ecumenical, agnostic, atheist, and secular versions of spirituality. Utopian performatives, as I've understood them, have been primarily a practice of reception, but as these essays demonstrate, they can be strategies of different modes of performance and its attendant critical or embodied productions . Some utopian performatives derive from the communitas inspired by audiences and perfonners coming together in a moment of performance; others are created among performers, during their communal labor in rehearsals and on stage. Others obtain from how critics read a play or a performance, inspiring in their writing the feeling of possibility rendered by the very art they engage. Some utopian performatives happen through embodiments in everyday life performances, or in the ways we recreate, in our more mundane lives, the experiences of performance that momentarily lifted us out of banality into somewhere else, somewhere better. W~en utopian performatives appear in more formal theatre experiences, how do spectators recognize and...