Performing Utopia ed. by Rachel Bowditch and Pegge Vissicaro (review)

In the edited volume Performing Utopia, readers are offered utopia and its corollaries, dystopia and heterotopia, as optics for understanding the relationship between politics and performance. The editors and contributors take their lead from Jill Dolan's Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (2005) to explore the momentary and fragmentary glimpses of political possibility that performance permits. As the editors reiterate, utopia for Dolan is not a place, but a condition, sensation, or feeling conjured in the interstices of performance, audience, discourse, archive, and repertoire. Dolan argues that theatre audiences are participants in the performance and therefore essential to conjuring "hope at the theater." The parades, festivals, and public gatherings in Performing Utopia require a different approach to thinking utopia precisely because they are public and participatory, and therefore already presumed to be utopian. By offering in-depth histories, geographical contexts, and political-economic positioning, the authors probe the utopian discourses that surround festivals, rituals, and parades. In doing so, Performing Utopia engages a methodology very different from Dolan's and José Esteban Muñoz's, author of Cruising Utopia (2009). Rather than cruising for and happening upon communitas across heterogenous archives, the anthology's essays home in on venues where participation, joy, and ecstasy seem central to their ethos. The authors detail the histories and economies of their research sites, and they trace the genealogies of performance that make sociality contingent. These methods reveal the complex systems before and beyond the moment of performance that inform affects and aesthetics.

While the first essay, by Luis Alvarez, explores the global travels of New Zealand–based Maori filmmaker Dean Hapeta, the editors have taken a primarily hemispheric approach to curating the volume, moving us across the Americas from western Canada through the continental United States to Brazil and Chile. Given this wide and varied geography, a strength of the collection is the detailed attention the authors give to situating the locations of their case studies. Katherine Nigh's study of the first Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans following the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Katrina details how divergent discourses and experiences of the parade emerge at the nexus of the negligence of the Bush administration and the racial histories and geographic textures of the city. Similarly, Bowditch maps an intimate history of the All Souls' Day procession in Tucson, which traces its exponential growth and changing style to explain how it offered a stage for national mourning after 9/11, while choreographing itself around urban structures and policies. In Néstor Bravo Goldsmith's chapter, we begin by gathering around a collapsed mine in Chile that has trapped thirty-three miners. He introduces us to the fascinating communities, performances, and rituals that popped up around the mining site, and to the hope and joy surrounding the miners' eventual rescue. But Goldsmith also pans across the country to concurrent events—in particular, a military parade and a hunger strike by incarcerated Indigenous activists—to demonstrate how the Chilean government capitalized on the rhetoric of hope surrounding the miners' rescue to obscure state-sanctioned violence.

In addition to the geographic contexts that the authors offer, they also pay attention to the genealogies of their performances in valuable ways. In Christian DuComb's study of "wench" figures in the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, he details the anti-black origins of the forms of dress and gait enacted by white men performing the role. This performance historiography becomes a valuable way to interrupt a utopic approach to thinking about these particular white men reveling in drag. Laura Dougherty's detailed mapping of the contemporary burlesque world is paired with a genealogy of burlesque style that helps illustrate both the aesthetic techniques of older performers and the nuances of neo-burlesque performers riffing on the genre's past. Charting the recent history of Renaissance festivals in the United States and their hybrid and playful aesthetics, Kevin McHugh and Ann Fletchall name the incongruences between the contemporary "faire" and medieval feasts, festivals, and rituals. In examining...