Editor's Comments

In a recent dramaturgy seminar, one of my graduate students expressed interest in exploring alternate forms of writing about theatre. Are there are other models for critical discourse, she wondered, in addition to the traditions of the academy that we so painstakingly and yet unreflectively pass down? Is there a place for a more personal, passionate, poetic language in documenting and responding to work that itself is often personal, passionate, poetic? How might we start fashioning alternate discourses that do justice—or at least a different kind of justice—to the intensity of the theatre experience?

As a discipline, we in theatre have joined the American academy late in its history, borrowing methodologies and languages from the humanities or social sciences, using the tools that have produced them in the process of inventing ourselves. The result: we have often produced ourselves in their image. Yet, as my student’s questions suggest, our field is shifting. I resist heralding sea-changes and invoking the millennium, but, if submissions to Theatre Topics are any indication, I do note a gradual migration in theatre studies towards writing that is more subjective, experiential, and experimental. Partly the result of feminist theory, partly the result of the impact of performance studies upon our profession, these alternative approaches to scholarly writing remind us that the position of the performing arts in the academy is less tentative and more promising than it was a generation ago.

In articles that frame this issue of Theatre Topics, Bryant K. Alexander and Geoffrey S. Proehl address my student’s questions by proposing such alternative models. Drawing upon recent scholarship in speech and communication, Alexander describes his personal practice of using both performance and performative writing to respond to student work. Though he draws his examples from the performance studies classroom, his work has potential application to many situations, including acting and directing classes. Proehl advocates and demonstrates a new “affective school of dramaturgical writing” that, he argues, may deepen the quality of the conversations we have about theatre.

Between these “bookends,” we offer four stimulating articles that have a particular emphasis on pedagogy. Tim Raphael and Sally Harrison-Pepper, following logically upon Alexander, articulate innovative ways of using performance to reconfigure theatre pedagogy. Raphael details two experimental courses that employed performance as both a mode of analysis and an activity for helping students critically examine how history is constructed and represented. Harrison-Pepper offers an array of practical activities and exercises that creatively use performance as a way of linking subject matter to methodology.

In contrast to these articles on the frontier between theatre and performance studies, co-authors Suzanne Burgoyne, Karen Poulin, and Ashley Rearden, as well as Paul Kassel, speak more directly to acting and directing teachers. The interdisciplinary research of Burgoyne, Poulin, and Rearden, grounded in interviews with student actors, suggests that the theatre profession should pay more attention to the psychological impact of acting on young actors just beginning their training. If Raphael uses performance as a tool for deconstructing the real, Burgoyne, Poulin, and Rearden suggest the fluid and sometimes risky interplay between the fictive world onstage and the real world offstage. Kassel describes a comprehensive yet flexible system for training such beginning actors in a wide variety of genres and styles. Based upon four basic action words, Kassel’s system reminds us, as does Proehl’s closing essay, that the art of teaching (or directing) is often the art of discovering the word that may do justice to the moment—or even make it.

Finally, I want to signal an upcoming change to Theatre Topics. Starting with our next volume, we plan to drop our subtitle, “Dramaturgy/Performance Studies/Pedagogy.” In making this change, we want to make clear that we still welcome and encourage submissions from each of those areas; indeed, dramaturgy, performance studies, and pedagogy continue to be central to our publishing mission. However, in dispensing with the subtitle, useful when Theatre Topics was a new publication, we hope to make clear that we also publish in a variety of other areas, from advocacy to acting, directing to design, and community-based theatre...