Project MUSE®: Theatre Topics - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Theatre Topics.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1991) through current issueLatest Articles: Theatre TopicsTWOProject MUSE®Theatre Topics1086-33461054-8378Latest articles in Theatre Topics. Feed provided by Project MUSE®G-Dragon: "The King of K-pop" from Indigenous Korean Performing Arts
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985148
<p></p>
Amid the rise in global popularity and circulation of K-pop, Western media often stigmatizes K-pop as a mere reproduction of Western pop culture. K-pop dance, however, stems from Korea's institutionalized elite arts middle and high school curriculum and is even extended to an official major in Korean universities. K-pop dance mediates artistry and industry, pedagogy and commercialism, and Korean heritage and Western culture, as shown by K-pop idol G-Dragon's (called "the King of K-pop") studying traditional theatre at arts middle and high schools. Drawing from autoethnographic fieldwork and on content analysis of G-Dragon's DRAMA (2025) music video choreography, I argue that K-pop dance stems from Korea's long
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallG-Dragon: "The King of K-pop" from Indigenous Korean Performing Arts2026-03-13text/htmlen-USG-Dragon: "The King of K-pop" from Indigenous Korean Performing Arts2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®367842026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13A Note from the Editor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985149
<p></p>
It is just past midnight, and a yellow streetlight is filtering through the window of our apartment in Kolkata. I have finally submitted the grades for my fall courses and am nearing the end of the semester. After a day spent with my mother, who is living with dementia, while also caring for my ten-year-old son—here with me in India during his winter break—I find quiet time only after everyone has turned in for the night. As an academic and an artist, I often find myself compelled to maintain a deliberate privacy around my personal life, foregrounding institutional notions of "professionalism" that obscure the care labor embedded in daily living. In doing so, I separate my everyday self from my professional one
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallA Note from the Editor2026-03-13text/htmlen-USA Note from the Editor2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®182652026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Aged Out or Amplified? Reclaiming the Voice of Women in Theatre
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985150
<p></p>
Jayne Raisborough and colleagues conducted the study "Reduced to Curtain Twitchers?" in which four UK-based women actors aged fifty to seventy shared their experiences of marginalization within the industry. Participants described being sidelined during rehearsals, encountering assumptions of vocal decline, and experiencing a disconnect between their skills and how the industry perceives them. The phrase "reduced to curtain twitchers" encapsulates how these actors were pushed to the margins, treated as less valuable simply because of their age.The study reveals that these actors' vocal identities were reshaped not by biological decline but by lack of opportunity. Their voices were silenced by context rather than
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallAged Out or Amplified? Reclaiming the Voice of Women in Theatre2026-03-13text/htmlen-USAged Out or Amplified? Reclaiming the Voice of Women in Theatre2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®215022026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Playing Childlessness: Motherhood in Performing Arts Academia
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985151
<p></p>
Can I be both a mother all day long, and a professor all day long?I had the delight of attending the National Women's Theatre Festival in 2022, where a devised piece entitled The Momversations Project premiered with great success. At a talk back, parenting as a female academic was debated. I shocked myself by saying that as a tenure-track academic, I felt I needed to "hide my kids."Based on our lived experiences as scholars and mothers, interviewing female academics, and researching published literature, we assert that women are marginalized in academia, even more so when they become mothers, and to an even greater extent in the field of performing arts. We want to bring awareness to the discrimination against
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallPlaying Childlessness: Motherhood in Performing Arts Academia2026-03-13text/htmlen-USPlaying Childlessness: Motherhood in Performing Arts Academia2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®736202026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Braiding Stories: Hair Care and Solidarity on Broadway
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985152
<p></p>
In 2024, hair and wig designer Nikiya Mathis received a special Tony Award for her work on the Manhattan Theatre Club production of Jocelyn Bioh's Jaja's African Hair Braiding.1 The recognition was a first for Broadway's hair and wig professionals, backstage workers whose artistry and craft rarely garner mention, much less receive accolades (Culwell-Block, "Nikiya Mathis"). The production had staged "a celebration of Black hair on Broadway," with specific focus drawn to the skills of hairstylists ("Broadway Show"). Bioh's play recounts a day in the lives of West African immigrants braiding hair in a Harlem salon. Mathis's design "conjure[d] up some serious hair magic onstage," wrote reviewer Emyln Travis, "from
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallBraiding Stories: Hair Care and Solidarity on Broadway2026-03-13text/htmlen-USBraiding Stories: Hair Care and Solidarity on Broadway2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®991992026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Staging the Archive: Dr. Héctor P. García
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985153
<p></p>
García Plaza is situated at the heart of the Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC) campus. The salmon-colored square, with picnic-style seating, is dominated by the impossible-to-miss statue of its namesake: activist Dr. Héctor P. García. Nearly everybody at TAMU-CC—students, faculty, and staff—passes by that statue dozens of times a month. There is even a folkloric ritual where students tap García's foot for luck before exams. Yet few of those approximately eleven thousand students could tell you anything meaningful about him. A federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in a city where 60% of the population identifies as Hispanic/Latine, TAMU-CC has been slowly forgetting the civil rights
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallStaging the Archive: Dr. Héctor P. García2026-03-13text/htmlen-USStaging the Archive: Dr. Héctor P. García2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®629702026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13The Henry Experiment: Exploring Shakespeare's Text with OP-ish Methods
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985154
<p></p>
Shakespeare's histories get a bad rap in educational theatre. For every high school Midsummer or university Romeo and Juliet, there's an abandoned Henry or all-but-forgotten Richard. In a time when, as Danielle Rosvally has argued elsewhere, teaching Shakespeare is vital to the health of the humanities at large, the histories are an underused resource (Rosvally). Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh have asserted that Shakespeare is a key tool in educators' antiracist toolkits and that efforts to teach Shakespeare can and must include such antiracist pedagogy. As part of this antiracist approach, Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh highlight the importance of foregrounding salience as opposed to relevance in Shakespeare's
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallThe Henry Experiment: Exploring Shakespeare's Text with OP-ish Methods2026-03-13text/htmlen-USThe Henry Experiment: Exploring Shakespeare's Text with OP-ish Methods2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®852832026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13ATHE 2025: The Real
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985155
<p></p>
I have been a member of ATHE since 2000. Like most, my experience of the organization is going to the conference. That first year, I shared a smoking (!) room with three other graduate students in Washington, DC; in 2024, I luxuriated alone in Atlanta. Working as adjunct faculty at Colorado State University, I wept on the car ride home from the Denver airport as I told my partner about talking with a former professor, hearing other performance historians extol the joys of the archive, and eating Cali-Mex food in a fancy restaurant. I shopped and ate and visited museums in New York City, performed with a Butoh group in Denver, saw shows in Chicago, spoke French in Montreal, and visited Disney World for the first
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallATHE 2025: The Real2026-03-13text/htmlen-USATHE 2025: The Real2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®276202026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13The Real, the Vital, and the Visionary: The Evolution of Theatre Education in Higher Education
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985156
<p></p>
If we don't gather, we can't conspire.And gather we did. … In late July 2025, the screens of theatre educators, scholars, and practitioners across the nation flickered to life for our annual Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference, online. The theme was "The Real," a provocative title for a virtual gathering held in a year when reality itself felt increasingly contested. As the digital dust settled and the fall 2025 semester neared its conclusion, the conversations sparked during those engaging summer days ignited a momentum toward a search for a new identity in US theatre education.We find ourselves at a precipice. The sessions I had the privilege of leading, alongside the dialogues that
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallThe Real, the Vital, and the Visionary: The Evolution of Theatre Education in Higher Education2026-03-13text/htmlen-USThe Real, the Vital, and the Visionary: The Evolution of Theatre Education in Higher Education2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®172832026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Destabilising the Established Canon: Emergence of Feminist Theatre in India by Lata Singh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985157
<p></p>
Lata Singh's Destabilising the Established Canon: Emergence of Feminist Theatre in India (2025) is an exercise in recovering women's experiences within Indian theatre. Focusing on theatre created by women, the book attempts to define an alternative history of Indian theatre beyond the androcentric canon of modern Indian theatre. Instead of characterizing women's participation and contributions within Indian theatre as absent or lost, the book locates a female tradition within both historical and modern forms of Indian theatre by looking in other places, such as outside the canons of text-based theatre, in domestic and personal experiences, and in women's movements across time. Singh asks if women's theatrical
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallDestabilising the Established Canon: Emergence of Feminist Theatre in India by Lata Singh (review)2026-03-13text/htmlen-USDestabilising the Established Canon: Emergence of Feminist Theatre in India by Lata Singh (review)2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®94522026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Directing New Plays: Tools for Art and Collaboration by Evan Cabnet (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985158
<p></p>
The epigram goes that the only way to learn directing is to direct. Yet stage directors have long turned to books for guidance. The pages of these books, including such standards as Katie Mitchell's controversial The Director's Craft (2008) and Damon Kiely's How to Read a Play (2016), usually follow a familiar pattern: an overview of the author's directing philosophy, methods of play analysis, pre-production steps, rehearsal strategies, and post-production reflection. Directing New Plays: Tools for Art and Collaboration by Evan Cabnet follows this formula, but he introduces a crucial twist: His book focuses on directing brand new, never-produced plays—"not musicals, classics, established or devised work," as he
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallDirecting New Plays: Tools for Art and Collaboration by Evan Cabnet (review)2026-03-13text/htmlen-USDirecting New Plays: Tools for Art and Collaboration by Evan Cabnet (review)2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®81072026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor, 2nd ed. by Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159
<p></p>
A book in the review, Disney Parks and the Construction of American Identity: Tourism, Performance, Anxiety, is misidentified as an anthology when it is really a monograph. The online version of this review has been updated.Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor received first publication in 2019, prior to the societal and psychological upheavals of the COVID-19 global pandemic, the 2020 electoral defeat—and subsequent victory in 2024—of Donald Trump, and the 2022 replacement of Disney CEO Bob Chapek with his former boss, Bob Iger. In the following years, as "cultural and social conduct has grown more hostile and violent" (vii), Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson also published a
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985159">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/200/image/coversmallPerformance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor, 2nd ed. by Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson (review)2026-03-13text/htmlen-USPerformance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor, 2nd ed. by Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson (review)2026-03-132026TWOProject MUSE®142462026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-13