The Serendipity Tango: "Volume 1, Number 1"

Marking the anniversaries of the founding of Latin American Theatre Review and Modern Drama as well as the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, this personal essay looks back on the experience of studying theatre at the University of Kansas in the 1960s and learning the importance of serendipity in research projects in the performing arts. It also looks forward to the immediate future of the field by profiling new and forthcoming books derived from dissertations written by members of the Performance Studies Working Group at Yale. Topics addressed include the archival and oral recovery of past performances, critical genealogies of raced and queered identities, the development of modern notions of celebrity and subject-formation in the eighteenth-century theatre, the reactionary avant-garde, and the importance of surveillance and confession in contemporary mediated performance.