A Note from the Editor

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about collaboration. As a dramaturg, all of my professional work in the theatre has been profoundly collaborative; as a scholar, a surprisingly large amount of my publications have been collaborative as well. Perhaps not surprisingly, over the past twenty-five years members of our profession have shifted priorities away from what was, historically, a combative academy and toward one that features co-creative attitudes about the production of new knowledge. In this late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century context, collaborative writing and coauthored scholarship became familiar—and remain so. Thus, professional collaborations are now as common in the pages of journals like this one as they are in my own CV.

Collaboration stands out as an apt key word that describes and collects many of the essays and engagements in this issue of Theatre Topics. While only one of the pieces here is explicitly coauthored, all the projects and perspectives in this issue place a profound emphasis on collaborative work and the various modes of collective creation.

John Patrick Bray discusses the history and legacy of the New York Writers’ Bloc, a group founded by a collective of playwrights with the goal of supporting the development of new writing. The founders of the Bloc were exceptional in their inclusiveness, incorporating not only playwrights, but directors and performers in their workshops. What may be taken for granted today was innovative at its inception, and Bray makes a strong case for the value of the Bloc’s contribution to American theatre.

In “The Reconstructed Dramaturg,” William Casey Caldwell and Amy Kenny delve deeply into the culture of dramaturgy at two different Shakespeare-based institutions: Shakespeare’s Globe in London and the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. In this collaboratively written essay, these two dramaturgs analyze, compare, and critique the collaborative practices at work in each institution, offering an insightful sociology of dramaturgical collaboration. They close by acknowledging the best of both institutions, while calling for revision of the shortcomings of these two established companies and others with similar practices.

Taking another approach to the role of the artist in an institutional context, Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, in his essay “The Staged Business of Artists in Public Practice: Writing for/about Art,” describes a course that he recently developed and taught at the University of Texas at Austin. “Artists in Public Practice: Writing for/about Art” was a class that Bonin-Rodriguez conceived to support pre-professional arts students as they prepared to move from the university environment and into their respective fields as independent artists. He not only details his teaching practice, but usefully theorizes the constructions of self that his students create in the course of their work for the class.

In “The Odyssey Project: A Martial Arts Journey Toward Recovery and Liberation,” Zachary Price also theorizes practice in his discussion of the use of martial arts in a community-based theatre project for which he served as the fight choreographer. Far more than merely theorizing the ways in which the martial arts can frame embodiment as discourse, Price explores the complex discourses of identity experienced by the young men of a correctional institution when they joined the company of an adaptation of The Odyssey produced at a major California research university. This case study considers the interactions of bodies and identity, place and class in a single, powerful theatrical performance.

Teaching is always collaborative, and the student-centered learning models gaining currency in today’s universities foreground the co-creative element in a higher education context. Megan Shea presents an explicitly collaborative approach to classroom engagement in her essay “Echoes of Performance: Writing and the Play of Pedagogy.” As the title suggests, she describes a teaching practice that applies perspectives gained from the pedagogy of performance to the challenges of engaging the modern, technology-saturated student in a writing-intensive classroom.

Teaching and writing, performance and pedagogy—collaboration: my thanks to the contributors to this issue who, unbeknown to one another, have tacitly collaborated on a collection of essays that is dense with shared engagements.

It is sincerely a pleasure and honor...