Project MUSE®: Theatre Symposium - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Theatre Symposium.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 15 (2007) through current issueLatest Articles: Theatre SymposiumTWOProject MUSE®Theatre Symposium2166-99371065-4917Latest articles in Theatre Symposium. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Objects Walk the World: Little Amal from Calais to Baltimore
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966889
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DURING A FEBRUARY 2023 performance of Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play The Jungle, the audience—including Dr. Jesse Njus and me—bore witness to the representation of a society in a state of flux. More specifically, we witnessed a community of individuals, families, and cultural groupings all seeking a hope-filled space that might sustain them as they sought entry into the United Kingdom. According to the artists, the play conjures the anxiety-filled day-to-day experiences and trauma of the many refugees inhabiting a famous refugee camp at Calais that has since been destroyed. We were lucky enough to experience the work during its residency at Brooklyn’s St Anne’s Warehouse. This volume’s cover image of Little
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallIntroduction: Objects Walk the World: Little Amal from Calais to Baltimore2025-07-31text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Objects Walk the World: Little Amal from Calais to Baltimore2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®105742026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31Akbar Imhotep and the African American Object Performance Complex
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966890
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Puppeteer and master storyteller Akbar Imhotep did not grow up with the oral literature that African captives carried with them on the Middle Passage. As an artist, however, he worked to reanimate these cycles of tales and make them relevant for the times in which he lived. He diligently researched folktales from all over the world and became an expert interpreter of the Brer Rabbit cycle of stories, placing his characters within a Black aesthetic by using stylized abstraction in assemblages of found objects to engage audiences more directly in cocreating stories. Storytelling then became a powerful framework around which Imhotep organized community grounded in the values scholars like Maulana Karenga have
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallAkbar Imhotep and the African American Object Performance Complex2025-07-31text/htmlen-USAkbar Imhotep and the African American Object Performance Complex2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®316752026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31Stitched into the Story: Creating Connections through Quilting in A Monster Calls
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966891
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THEATRE DESIGNERS AND scenographers are joining adjacent industries, like fashion and architecture, in considering their environmental impact. Tanja Beer opens Ecoscenography: An Introduction to Ecological Design for Performance by surveying the current state of the field.1 She begins by noting future condemnation as a reason for present action, asking who would be able to justify current, wasteful practices in a future era of ecological crisis. Yet, she admits, the lived reality of the field of theatrical design largely split with lingering practices of reuse in the 1980s, citing not only the pursuit of the unified stage since modernism—which caused the initial turn away from stock costumes, settings, and props as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallStitched into the Story: Creating Connections through Quilting in A Monster Calls2025-07-31text/htmlen-USStitched into the Story: Creating Connections through Quilting in A Monster Calls2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®426592026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31Mask-Making and Performance in Southern Louisiana Mardi Gras Traditions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966892
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THE CONSTRUCTING AND wearing of masks as performance objects is a centuries-old tradition across cultures throughout the world. One vibrant and multifaceted example of this is the use of masks in Mardi Gras celebrations. Mardi Gras has taken many shapes and forms throughout time and place. In this paper, I will examine elements of the history of Mardi Gras masks in southern Louisiana and explain the importance of the practice of making and using them. For most people who have not lived in Louisiana, the impression they may have of Mardi Gras is unbridled debauchery in the streets of the city of New Orleans. While that is part of what the holiday is now, it is not the whole of it, nor how it originated. Many
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallMask-Making and Performance in Southern Louisiana Mardi Gras Traditions2025-07-31text/htmlen-USMask-Making and Performance in Southern Louisiana Mardi Gras Traditions2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®422722026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31Pandemic-Era Mask Performance: An Analysis of the Performing Medical Face Mask
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966893
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WHEN THE WORLD shifted in spring 2020, the medical face mask was brought in to support distanced socialization or collaboration for Western cultures. These masks came in many forms: N95s, medical face masks, handkerchiefs, buckets, and other materials to block the mouth and nose from spreading germs. As expected, this became highly politicized, and mask usage came into question. What was not researched was how medical face masks perform. Most of the internet searches on this topic bring up the fibers, filtration, comfort, effectiveness, politics, and advertisements, to name a few. While these are types of performances within the medical field, this was not necessarily answering what a medical face mask performs
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallPandemic-Era Mask Performance: An Analysis of the Performing Medical Face Mask2025-07-31text/htmlen-USPandemic-Era Mask Performance: An Analysis of the Performing Medical Face Mask2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®349502026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31The “Henry Rifle” on the German Stage: Karl May’s Depiction of the American West as “Dark and Bloody Grounds”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966894
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THIS ESSAY EXPLORES how an emphasis on weapons in Karl May’s novels and dramas frame the way Germans contextualize the United States as a masculine, aggressive, Wild West peopled by independent, violent, unscrupulous “cowboys.” Although German author Karl May never visited the American West during his lifetime in the late nineteenth century, he wrote fifteen adventure novels set in the Oregon Trail territory featuring a close alliance between a German immigrant nicknamed “Old Shatterhand” and his blood brother, an Apache chief named Winnetou. May’s “travel novels” feature the first-person narrative of a protagonist identified as a foreign “greenhorn” in an untamed land, who, like the Lone Ranger, travels on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallThe “Henry Rifle” on the German Stage: Karl May’s Depiction of the American West as “Dark and Bloody Grounds”2025-07-31text/htmlen-USThe “Henry Rifle” on the German Stage: Karl May’s Depiction of the American West as “Dark and Bloody Grounds”2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®414952026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31Silent Reflections—A Clown-Noir Cabaret: Transformation of Object and the Feminist Clown
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966895
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“Was it me that wavered, stretched and shrank in silence? I was warped in the folds of time like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.”FOUNDED IN 2013 by Francesca Marie Chilcote, Dory Sibley, and Echo Sunyata Sibley, Women from Mars (WFM) Theatre came together to share the stories of women and explore female archetypes. Inspired by feminist performance theories, WFM experiments with the form of clown to attack the portrayal of women in media and the role women play in supporting these highly sexualized and, many times, demeaning and powerless stereotypes. Out of this collaboration came Silent Reflections, a “clown-noir cabaret” that explores women’s insecurities and societal pressures through the aesthetic of silent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallSilent Reflections—A Clown-Noir Cabaret: Transformation of Object and the Feminist Clown2025-07-31text/htmlen-USSilent Reflections—A Clown-Noir Cabaret: Transformation of Object and the Feminist Clown2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®405152026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31The Costumes of Sonia Biacchi: Exploring the Object+Body+Dynamic
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966896
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IN JANUARY 2020, I was huddled at a table in a small flat in Dorsoduro, Venice, fighting with a sewing machine I had purchased just three weeks prior. I had spent the month in Venice creating costumes like those of Sonia Biacchi, a native Venetian theatremaker and designer who experimented heavily with unconventional materials and methods. She was primarily influenced by the work of Bauhaus designer Oskar Schlemmer and later influenced by her choreographer-collaborators—most notably Atsushi Takenouchi, a Butoh performer. While the Bauhaus and Butoh styles diverge dramatically in their instigation, method, and visual aesthetics, they simultaneously bring to mind experiments with the proprioceptive experience of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallThe Costumes of Sonia Biacchi: Exploring the Object+Body+Dynamic2025-07-31text/htmlen-USThe Costumes of Sonia Biacchi: Exploring the Object+Body+Dynamic2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®540482026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31Why Objects Matter
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966897
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PETER SCHUMAN WRITES that “object exists only because we are deceived into being subject,” a statement that can be deconstructed both grammatically and rhetorically.1 As humans, we view ourselves as the center of all things. Whether or not we believe Adam was given dominion over the animals, we view anthropocentrism as the proper way to organize the chaos of the world. We are the creators and achievers while the objects around us serve as the focus of our desires and actions. Our perspective as individuals and as humans is paramount, and even a thought experiment that attempts to decenter humanity with an object in the subject position—for example, how do trees experience the world?—can be almost unfathomable. In
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallWhy Objects Matter2025-07-31text/htmlen-USWhy Objects Matter2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®124272026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31Ethos Statement
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966899
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THEATRE SYMPOSIUM is resolutely committed to equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in creating a space for theatre scholarship, and we are actively engaged in EDIJ (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Justice) work as a valued practice within our activities as scholars and practitioners of theatre. We embrace work representing a diverse spectrum of writing styles, editorial perspectives, performance types, and critical analyses. In choosing personnel, managing the peer review process, and planning our annual event and subsequent journal, Theatre Symposium seeks opportunities to center the voices, bodies, and stories of the global majority.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallEthos Statement2025-07-31text/htmlen-USEthos Statement2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®16782026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31A Note in Memoriam: Remembering Dr. Edmond Williams
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966900
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SETC PAST PRESIDENT and recent Hall of Fame inductee Dr. Edmond “Ed” Williams passed away shortly after our convention in March 2024. For those of us who knew him well, we have great memories of a man whose legend preceded him. I can remember many a rehearsal strolling up to Rowand-Johnson Hall on the University of Alabama campus to find Ed pulling weeds while smoking a cigarette in front of the building. I always found it funny—the chair of the department doing yard work—but as I look back on it, I can see that Ed’s tireless devotion to excellence was always exhibited in the most charming and understated ways. Whether it was upholstering in a new fabric a piece of furniture that was about to be onstage or telling
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallA Note in Memoriam: Remembering Dr. Edmond Williams2025-07-31text/htmlen-USA Note in Memoriam: Remembering Dr. Edmond Williams2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®31002026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31Keynote Lecture: Objects and Bodies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966954
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I AM VERY HONORED to have been invited to give this keynote address, especially at a conference dealing with material performance and performing objects, a subject that has, in its own way, absorbed my professional work and seeped into many aspects of my life for more than twenty years. Thanks to Keith and Jesse for inviting me and treating me so well. Thanks to all those who made and served our lovely dinner and those from SETC and Agnes Scott College who helped in various ways arranging this wonderful event. I have planned scholarly conferences, and they are a lot of work, so everyone’s efforts are greatly appreciated. Thanks to all of you participants for being here and to my fellow featured speaker, Paulette
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/578/image/coversmallKeynote Lecture: Objects and Bodies2025-07-31text/htmlen-USKeynote Lecture: Objects and Bodies2025-07-312025TWOProject MUSE®558502026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-31