Editor’s Note

Michel de Certeau, in his writings on everyday life and spatial practices, specifically “Walking in the City,” articulates a rhetorics of walking, comparing it to pedestrian “speech acts,” which manifest themselves as a “spatial acting-out” of topographical place.¹ For him, “walking as a space of enunciation” is like a performance act that functions as an utterance. Moreover, de Certeau suggests that space is a “practiced place,” where we transform street space through our enunciated embodiment. The relationship of place to space for de Certeau encompasses an ordered environment of what is “here,” not “there.”² His analysis of rhetorical gestures, including quotidian practices of movement, reveals the power dynamics embedded in governmental institutions which organize and regulate urban space. The authors of the six articles featured in Volume XXXIII.1 similarly open discursive spaces of enunciation, inviting us to reflect upon a sampling of performance acts whose utterances alter or resist the physical space in which they occur. The essays also engage us in spectatorial and aural spaces, where we may acknowledge our own agency in the cultural, dramaturgical, and linguistic worlds they present.

Phillip Zapkin, for example, proposes a model of tragedy from ancient Greece, in “Reading Two Greek Refugee Plays in the Season of the Syrian Refugee Crisis,” to suggest an emulative response we may bring to contemporary issues of refugee (im)mobility. The author’s focus on spatiality and enunciative acts in two plays recalls Agamben’s biopolitics, eliciting our ethical accountability to see in antiwar plays from centuries ago a democratic model for protecting today’s displaced. Warren Kluber centers antiwar “worlds” in his “Theatre of Operations / Operating Theatre: Militarist and Medical Theatrical Frames in Edward Bond’s Lear.” He examines the spectatorial relationship we may have with performances of the post-WWII playwright, whose theatricalized, martial backdrop to Lear urges us to recognize what being human is like in the age of war. In “Between Theory and Practice: Tracing Improvisation with British Muslim Youth,” Asif Majid calls attention to the creative spaces of “in-between” as he theorizes the social dimensions of his devised theatre practice in Manchester (UK), exploring how race, gender, and religion intersect within the liminal world of theatrical improvisation. Dramatic space intrigues Letizia Fusini as well, as she explores the post-exilic dramaturgy of Gao Xingjian in her article, “From Refuge to Prison: The Self as Tragic Space in Gao Xingjian’s Plays Between Life and Death and The Death Collector.” She positions “Self-as-Spatiality,” drawing on Sartre to highlight a “poetics of captivity” in which boundlessness and confinement coalesce. In “Ionesco’s Forgotten Plays: Meaning and Speech Acts in ‘The Niece-Wife’ and ‘Bedlam Galore,’” Jeremy Ekberg’s analysis of modernist dramaturgy focuses on linguistic and psychophysical spaces in Ionesco’s post-war short dramas. The author builds on the work of J. L. Austin to reveal an ambiguous dramatic world in which speech acts figure predominantly, offering a perspective where performative utterances subvert and make meaning. Meaning-making, performance, and temporality also occupy Nicole Winsor in her “Comparative Modernist Performance Studies in the Context of the Postcolonial: A Not So Modest Reappraisal.” This essay extends a scholarly debate that began in the JDTC in our Fall 2016 issue, where Julia Walker and Glenn Odom proposed a new paradigm of Comparative Modernist Performance Studies. In our Spring 2017 issue, Aparna Dharwadker expanded this debate on pertinent issues related to postcolonial performance. Winsor now joins the discussion, locating geographic, temporal, and theoretical spaces in which to situate both articles. This final essay provides a fitting opening of discursive space for future issues of the journal.

With this Volume XXXIII.1 I end my four-year term as Editor. For the past eight issues of the JDTC, I have had the privilege to work with many fine scholars, from the United States to the Pacific Rim, publishing their work in Theatre and Performance Studies, while enlisting the best reviewers I could find from a wide range of departments and international universities. I began my term in January 2015, making a transition to Editor from what had been a collective...