THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

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• Vanessa in Bedby Diana Grisanti
• Gina M. Di Salvo

Finally, a comedy about dead mothers, millennial flailing, and the legacy of colonial wealth that spans from an abortion clinic along the Ohio River to a bed-rest study in a Texas swamp. Diana Grisanti's new audio play, Vanessa in Bed, centers on the existential and physical stasis of Vanessa, a 37-year-old who recently lost her mother, terminated an unwanted pregnancy, and had a falling out with her cousin Brigid. The titular bed in which Vanessa lays is not the one she shared with the neurotic trustfund hobby pilot who impregnated her during a fling. Vanessa has committed to stay in bed alone for ninety-one days with her head at a sixdegree decline. She expects to incur digestive issues and muscle atrophy. Vanessa's trial of endurance is not for penance but rather for a bedrest study that simulates the effects of antigravity on the body. The space exploration division of Paralax, a commercial enterprise founded by a descendant of Dutch colonizers, aims to launch commercial travel to Mars once the earth has been fracked to bits. This is no science fiction play. It is a financial reality play. Vanessa is giving her body to Paralax to earn $80,000 to fund Brigid's divorce. If she can be a hero, she can win back her cousin. But Vanessa only makes it to Day 49. Her failure is as spectacular as the fall she experiences when she gets out of bed in a fit of anti-neoliberal self-righteousness, breaking her contract. Wheelchairbound with a herniated disc and staph infection on her face, Vanessa is ultimately saved by Brigid.

Vanessa in Bedswitches back and forth between the bedrest study and Vanessa's recent past. At home, Vanessa's life is filled with a chorus of women: seven paternal aunts, Grandma Jane, and Brigid and Mary Beth, two of her twenty-seven cousins. Brigid is a stayathome mom and an volunteer escort at an abortion clinic, and Mary Beth is a nun. The cousins grew up together in the What Happened to Aunt Colette Club. Aunt Colette, the missing eighth paternal aunt, disappeared when she was 17 and pregnant. The cousins' investigation centered on scouring the contents of The New Woman's Survival Catalogfor the addresses of communes and collectives that Aunt Colette might have joined. Grisanti stretches the mystery of Aunt Colette through the play. Although it is never solved, the biggest clue—that book of secondwave feminist resources—provides salvation for the cousins.

The impact of Aunt Colette's absence is a site of intergenerational trauma and reverberates in Mary

Abstract:

This article explores how the police state choreographs active shooter drills as "performances of protection," or embodied actions framed around an anticipatory threat. During these scenarios, choreographic imperatives—or movement directives in response to specific cues—become tools for directing bodies through public space to preempt crisis. While these measures protect students, teachers, and administrators, they also reinforce the school-to-prison pipeline, targeting communities deemed dangerous by the police state. The article examines how such measures embody control, surveillance, and time as methods of discipline. It also analyzes what performances of protection reveal about the school-prison pipeline in the United States.

• Consent Pedagogies:Classroom Lessons from Intimacy Practice
• Lindsay Brandon Hunter (bio)

In 2023, I took part in a conversation gathered under the title "Decarcerating the Field: Building Abolitionist Networks of Care at ATHE" at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Austin, Texas. Where others entered that conversation from a more explicitly abolitionist perspective, I had proposed to offer something that seemed perhaps less intuitive: I wanted to talk about doing intimacy work in academic theatre, and in particular about how my own training and practice in intimacy choreography for the stage has inflected my pedagogy—including my non-teaching work in helping to administer programs and make policy. Although a connection between intimacy choreography and abolitionist practice may not seem plain at first blush, I wanted to speak about how a sustained focus on consent-based practice in classrooms and rehearsal halls has illuminated for me the extent to which our institutions seek to control students, frequently in ways that uncomfortably resemble policing.

Even as I made this case to the group convening at ATHE, I debated whether it was apt to connect highly professionalized discourses about consent in working and teaching contexts to the fundamental and profound commitments that drive abolition activism. The codification of best practices that has been part of intimacy work's relatively rapid ascendance is quite clearly an investment in progressive reform, and so in some ways is antithetical to an abolitionist mode. To speak more honestly, I was afraid that for some folks who work in theatres and universities, enthusiasm for the reform promised by intimacy and consent work might register primarily as a professional fad, or worse: as itself an exercise in controlling or policing students, in the sense that it could involve drilling them to comply with professional standards. I worried, too, that words like "boundaries" and "consent" might read as liberalist buzzwords, [End Page E-31] or that some audiences might find in them echoes of a carceral feminism aligned with policing even as it co-opts the language of abolition.¹

Still, it remains true that a sustained focus on consent—which I offer here not as a panacea, or a set of rules for disciplining behavior, but specifically as an orientation away from coercion and toward self-determination, one which I continue to interrogate and revise—has quietly remade my teaching in ways that I think resonate with aspects of abolition work. Engagement with intimacy work has catalyzed a significant and continual grappling with the power I wield over students, perhaps similar to the way other developments in the past handful of years have called teachers to co

Abstract:

In Atlanta, South River (Weelaunee) Forest is the proposed home of the $90 million Public Safety Training Center, also known as "Cop City." On June 5, 2023, when the Atlanta City Council opened the floor for public comment on Cop City, hundreds of people voiced their opposition for nearly fifteen hours, frequently using humor as a tactic of resistance. What are the radical political potentials of laughter? Which forms of laughter support the power of police, and which disrupt it? This article addresses these questions by closely attending to the comedic performances of #StopCopCity activists.

Abstract:

John Brown is a figure so intensely contested as to embody diametrically opposed meanings according to the varied contexts in which his image has been activated. At times hailed as the man who started the US Civil War, Brown has been variously described as a righteous abolitionist, a religious zealot, a gifted orator, a formidable military strategist, a self-appointed white savior, and a madman. Today, Brown is conjured in the name of all manner of causes, from leftist gun clubs to collegiate sports, while his theatricalized image is activated in wildly disparate ways. The apparent singularity of Brown as a historical figure, together with his ready adoption and deployment across various arenas—from entertainment to revolutionary politics—presents a problem familiar to theatre and performance scholars, namely the space between the image or concept of a person (or a character) and their actual performance, in life or onstage. There is perhaps an obvious tension in the ways that John Brown is remembered and reperformed and for whom he is remembered and reperformed. Or, as Ted A. Smith points out in thinking with Brown: "An image, however iconic, is not an argument."

Abstract:

The technology industry’s recent spatial turn presents new opportunities for theatre and performance in the twenty-first century. One such opportunity is augmented reality (AR), a technology that overlays digitally rendered assets onto the user’s physical space, giving the appearance that those assets populate the physical world. Through an analysis of The Builders Association’s Elements of Oz, which incorporated mobile AR into its stage production, as well as Bitter Wind, the author’s adaptation of Agamemnon for the Microsoft HoloLens headset, this essay analyzes the interpretive possibilities AR creates for theatre and performance.