Introduction: Reflections on DREAM Acts—Performance as Refuge, Resistance, and Renewal: ATHE Conference, Scottsdale, Arizona, 24–27 July 2014

Annual ATHE convenings can have the feel of contemporary nomadism. I have awoken in curtained bedrooms or paused in well-appointed lobbies wracking my brains to recall whether I was in San Francisco, Denver, or Dallas. We flow through such hauntingly similar hotel spaces that we can become ungrounded by location. ATHE conference vice presidents have worked to counter this sense of what cultural theorist Zygmunt Bauman has characterized as “liquid modernity” with, for example, offsite play dates in Orlando or inhouse playwrights in Toronto. Yet, our comfortable base locations have on occasion provoked productive discomfort—about hotel unionization in San Francisco, or Stand Your Ground legislation in Florida. While no site is unburdened by historical or legislative complexities, our chosen location in Arizona provoked more visible dissent, more profound questions, and more forcefully stated proposals to boycott the conference in the face of the state’s discriminatory legislation.

Guided by advisement from ATHE members local to Arizona, the conference committee chose to grapple directly with these contentious issues: to amplify on-the-ground resistance, to frame many Arizonas, and to offer alternative visions that exceeded legislative proposals. Our conference theme—DREAM Acts—referenced specific political legislation around higher education opportunities for undocumented immigrant youth, as well as the capacious possibilities for theatre to activate alternative imaginaries: to serve as a space of refuge, as well as a site of resistance and resilience. Thus, we wanted the conference to explore our dreams for the future of ATHE through the vexed politics and poetics of the here and now (and then) in Arizona.

Site-specific performances invited us to be conscious about the resource of water in the hotel space, travel the region attending to its hidden stories, and engage in intimate acts through the reading of banned plays. The Latino/Latina Focus Group hosted an altera where ATHE members could read aloud excerpts of plays banned when Tucson’s Mexican studies program was legislatively disbanded. Additionally, we felt that the keynote and plenary sessions could offer the most sustained opportunities to address theatre’s potential in moments of crisis.

Our keynote speaker was chosen to highlight the work of a regional artist-activist. In conversation with interlocutor Tiffany Ana López, playwright and professor Luis Alfaro inspired us to consider theatre as a space to enact our citizenship and engage disparate audiences. Within the educational realm he celebrated artistic discipline, as well as bureaucratic subversion in the service of crafting the stories we need to tell. Excerpts from the hour-long conversation between professors Lopez and Alfaro appear later in this issue.

Our conference committee also came to view Arizona as a staging ground for broader field concerns, particularly around our pedagogical mandate. Thus, our plenary panel proposed an alternative direction for dreaming than that aligned with westward expansion, starting from the Indigenous perspectives and on-the-ground activism in Arizona and moving through broader educational concerns. The plenary bridged locally specific activists and artists with a national imperative for responsive pedagogy in higher education. Backed by two films created by Efrain Robles replete with haunting images of the Arizona desert as crossing, we opened with provocative performance poetry by local artist Tomás Stanton. The panel also included a performance from local artist and DREAM activist Dulce Juarez, as well as meditations from Tucson’s Borderlands Theater artistic director Barclay Goldsmith on the theatre’s decades-long sustainability. The plenary also invited comments from Tucson professor Raquel Rubio, who unfortunately was unable to attend.

The written comments of three additional plenarists follow. Arizona State University professor Tamara Underiner sets the frame for the session, welcoming us to and complicating the space of Arizona. Catherine Cole of the University of California, Berkeley offers perspectives on the institutional challenges we face in attracting and serving a new generation of artists and thinkers. ATHE’s president-elect and Brown University professor Patricia Ybarra closed the panel with a response that tied back to the initial urge to boycott the conference, which she herself had admittedly felt...