Editor's Comments: On Praxis

I am delighted to introduce six essays for my first issue as Editor of Theatre Topics. These essays exemplify the kind of provocative, innovative, and useful scholarship for which Theatre Topics, under the guidance of previous editors, is known. They all consider practice theoretically and ground theory in practice. These essays are all examples of praxis.

As Raymond Williams insists in Keywords, theory "is always in active relation to practice: an interaction between things done, things observed and (systematic) explanation of these" (317). He notes that "praxis" "is a word intended to unite theory and with the strongest sense of practical (but not conventional or customary) activity: practice as action" (William 318). Williams's definition of "praxis" includes performance in its very terms ("things done"), and he differentiates the "practical" from the "conventional or customary." These essays all convey how making performance and teaching and writing about it in a university can break conventions and never seem customary.

In "The Artist as Public Intellectual," Carol Becker, Dean of the Art Institute of Chicago, insists that artists must be trained to see themselves as citizens of the world. While they should certainly be taught techniques of self-expression, she explains, they also should be taught to make art that puts them in the center of political conversations and to be able to articulate the politics of their art. Indeed, the authors of these essays are artist-citizens, scholar-educators.

Stuart Hall, in "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies," writes about Antonio Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual. Careful to differentiate between what he calls "intellectual work" and "academic work," Hall cautions us against the very institutionalizations that mark our success. He writes:

I come back to the deadly seriousness of intellectual work. It is a deadly serious matter. I come back to the critical distinction between intellectual work and academic work: they overlap, they abut with one another, they feed off one another, the one provides you with the means to do the other. But they are not the same thing. I come back to the difficulty of instituting a genuine cultural and critical practice, which is intended to produce some kind of organic intellectual political work. (Hall 1909)

Theatre Topics aims to do both academic and intellectual work.

Hall asks, "What happens when an academic and theoretical enterprise tries to engage in pedagogies which enlist the active engagement of individuals and groups, tries to make a difference in the institutional world in which it is located?" (1906). His question leads me to consider some of the work that the Carnegie Foundation currently sponsors. In their support of what is called "Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," the Carnegie Foundation encourages institutions to examine the kind of work that is considered scholarship and to broaden that definition, so that analytical work about pedagogy or about theatrical practice could and should be considered a form of scholarship. Theatre Topics aims to participate in the production of this scholarship, to bring theory and practice together.

Theatre Topics, I hope, can speak across the languages of scholars and practitioners. It can provide models for thinking about performance critically and theoretically, and can account for practice as a scholarly act. The essays in this issue roughly fall into three categories: performance, movement training, and critical pedagogy.

The first two essays consider specific and quite unconventional performances. Joni L. Jones recounts her installation and performance, "Searching for Osun," about her fieldwork in Nigeria. Diane Brewer describes her experience directing a production of West Side Story with both deaf and hearing actors. In both of the essays, the authors occupy positions of both insider and outsider. Both negotiate cultural difference--Jones as an African American woman in Nigeria, where she is perceived to be white; Brewer as a hearing person working with the Deaf community. Both authors use performance to make connections between communities, and both reveal both the promise and the complexity of performance with very high stakes. Finally, both of these essays engage with other fields--Brewer...