A Note from the Editor

Collectively, the eight essays in this issue invite us to deepen our capacities to build what I will call "responsive" theatres. "Responsive" comes from the Latin respondere, which means to "return a promise" (or, more directly, from spondere, to "pledge"). In this sense, theatre emerges as a site that "gives" to all of us as we make palpable the situatedness of our artistic practices, the combined endeavor of a well-crafted training and a profound attunement with the world. These essays help reveal and remind us how theatre-making and daily living are co-constitutive of each other in both surprising and necessary ways. Responsive theatres, then, as returns on promises, broaden the reach of our relationships with the world and with the practices of the theatre.

Jon Foley Sherman's "The Practice of Astonishment: Devising, Phenomenology, and Jacques Lecoq" investigates auto-cours, a key element of Lecoq's pedagogy. In learning how to move from the course exercises and techniques to a process of absorbing and creating one's own work, the students also learn how to open out to the world—what Sherman, following philosopher Renaud Barbaras, calls "astonishment before the world." In order to fully frame this approach, Sherman considers what role responsibility plays in approaching the creative act as a necessity unto itself, rather than as a means to an end or as the manifestation of a specific artistic product. In taking this position, he articulates how this practice requires attention to a "pedagogy of risk." This essay reminds us of the importance of being responsive to the "self in the world" and the importance for the actor of expanding one's capacities to encounter the unknown.

Chad Allen Thomas's "On Queering Twelfth Night" proposes a methodology for thinking about the importance of queer moments in the performance of Shakespeare. After offering a brief genealogy of queer theatre, Chad explores two significant Twelfth Night performances, one by the Globe Theater (2003) and one by Cheek by Jowl (2003). This work reminds us that as students, actors, educators, and/or directors, when we arrive at the theatre, we are brought into a community of exchange whereby we are folded into spaces of identification and dis-identification. The queer mixing of bodies, the unsettling of standard gender boundaries, through the amplification of difference through shifting visual and kinesthetic markers has particular significance, Thomas argues, for staging approaches to Shakespeare. In this essay, we are reminded of the power of classical theatre to both hold and refract diverse frames of reference, including the palpability of diverse bodies.

"Polyphonic Dynamics as Educational Practice," by Kennesaw State University professors Ming Chen, Ivan Pulinkala, and Karen Robinson, highlights how an accident in a particular moment in the early stages of producing Monkey King in 2005 led to the development of a new approach to creating work and to teaching. The three artists discovered the way that shifting from a linear approach to theatre production to one that, following Elaine Aston and George Savona, activated "theatre semiotics . . . as a methodology: as way of working." In brief, the artists found that converging a circle of collaborative theatre where all the theatrical elements have equal play enabled the theatrical composition to unfold more like an improvised and multi-voiced song. This approach, as it allowed for unprecedented input from student performers, invited new levels of shared problem-solving and ownership of the creative process.

"The Built Environment and the Architecture of a Performance: Arcosanti, Chicago, and the Making of Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment," by Chloe Johnston and Ira S. Murfin, explores the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials' development of a site-specific work, Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment, at Arcosanti in Arizona (and later performed in Chicago). The project folded together Shakespeare's Tempest, research on the Manhattan Project, and architect Paolo Soleri's work at Arcosanti, an urban-design laboratory. In addition to articulating how the performance work at Arcosanti was "sited" in relation to the local architecture, the authors also explore important ideas about how the performance itself might become a malleable architecture that can be...