This personal history of how the field of theatre studies in the United States has evolved during the author’s academic career begins with his entrance to doctoral studies at Cornell University in 1959 and continues to the present. Among topics covered are the national professional organizations and journals, and the changing interpretations of the scope and definition of the field itself.

WAKE is a queer postcolonial ritual centering grief, healing, and solace through movement within the collective. Created by choreographer Jay Carlon with collaborator and vocalist Micaela Tobin, alongside a live electronic musical score, WAKE is a meditative performance imbued with images, sound, and objects derived from Carlon’s Filipinx heritage and dedicated to those born in the wake of US imperialism.

Writers and readers cocreate books. Over time, certain readings, even if they are misreadings, come to summarize the book so thoroughly that the book gets transformed into a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence. While chapter 7 of Unmarked, “The Ontology of Performance,” is the most frequently cited, the Afterword’s meditation on misunderstanding may be the most hopeful for future scholarship.

Film, TV, and social media greatly expanded the possibilities and parameters of theatre and performance. Happenings, multimedia works, and performance art, as well as virtuosic vocal acrobats and shape-shifting innovators like Lily Tomlin, John Leguizamo, Anna Deavere Smith, Tracey Ullman, Barry Humphries, and Charles Pierce have created mercurial, multicharacter spectacles. The cultural fıssion of this performance synergy also encompasses maverick poets, painters, journalists, political activists, critics, and even a nonagenarian fashion model.

After 30 years of groundbreaking work, the SITI Company leaves behind a landscape changed by their presence. Their lasting legacy includes a challenge to how theatre is conceived and executed, a remarkable contribution to the way in which theatre artists hone their craft, and an infl uential example of how a theatre ensemble can thrive.

The closure of SITI Company as a producing organization has left the many artists SITI has impacted feeling stranded. Their practice of the Suzuki Method and the Viewpoints must now be self-initiated and self-regulated. In their calls-to-action to form new training circles, these artists reveal different ethics and values in the metaphors they use to describe the importance of the training in their lives. The community-building functions of the Suzuki Method and the Viewpoints are revealed in the “metaphors they stomp by.”

In the 1990s, performative writing and reading attempted to disrupt the rhetorical and ideological structure of scholarly writing. Performative readings helped expose the ways in which scholarly claims to truth-telling—as in Clifford Geertz’s influential essay on the Balinese cockfight—obscured violent or oppressive rhetorical operations. While most performative writing and reading concentrated on the essay form, experiments with public lectures and creative adaptations of scholarly texts were also undertaken. The verve of performative writing and reading tapered off as other issues came to the fore.

Ventriloquism is marked by an antagonistic intimacy between the ventriloquist and dummy, an antagonism that is rooted in the mechanics of the form. British ventriloquist Nina Conti brings the inherent violence of the ventriloquial conceit to bear on scenes we typically do not think of as contests for naturalized animacy: therapy and pregnancy.

Upon ending his 30-year collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI company, Suzuki Tadashi reflects on the unprecedented longevity and success of the SITI collective in the US, an economically driven, capitalist country.

Digitization is taking over every sphere of life—including the arts. Through the process of digital commodity fetishism, major technology companies threaten to efface the very qualities that make creative expression—particularly the performing arts—distinct and meaningful. To resist or even question these forces, we must excavate an invisible digital politics that can displace (and replace) traditional sources of authority in the performing arts. By examining the basic mechanisms of the “creator economy,” this politics can be found and confronted—in the arts and beyond.

AI and AR do not merely coexist with the archive and repertoire as modes of transmission but profoundly alter them and prove profoundly anti-archival. “Live” transmission from body to body is radically altered by digital technologies that simulate presence. “Feeling truly present with another person,” Mark Zuckerberg stated, “is the ultimate dream of social media.” He aspires to create an avatar that can simulate an emotion that he cannot express—and make him more human. Are we being led back into Plato’s cave? Artists and humanists must be centrally involved in the epistemic, ontological, and political changes that accompany these new and evolving forms of transmission.

Lowrider culture in Southern California and within Chicana/o social relations is a powerful example of minoritarian cultural production and an important yet undertheorized aesthetic, political, and gendered cultural object. Linking the lowrider enthusiast’s body and this cultural object—their vehicle—as a continuous signifying spectrum of self-inscription reifıes an alternative understanding of lowrider identities.

How do you create a dance of self-defense? Brazilian choreographers Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira try to answer this question by performing with, through, and despite racial objectifi cation. Against the backdrop of Jair Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil, the artists challenge the audience’s gaze by refusing the spectatorial demand that expects mastery and predictability—a demand often linked to racist, sexist, and colonial frameworks.

The Judson generation of artists (Rainer, Forti, Childs, Paxton, and others) introduced a conceptual distinction between music and sound that amounted to a soft critique of the institution of music. Dance in the 1960s was a fitting site for this critique due to the generative work of John Cage and the increasingly widespread availability of the technological means for working with sound. These two conditions undermined the institutionalization of musical expertise and opened up the field to amateurs from other disciplines.

From 1992 until 2021, SITI Company held an annual summer workshop at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 2012 and 2013, four artists documented their daily experiences at the workshop on social media to share with artists they had met at a Winter Training session in the city earlier that year. From these memories comes an archival script that offers insight into SITI’s pedagogical models and the variety of ways students experienced SITI training.

In the 21st century, the performance culture of critique has transformed with the increasing implementation of AI technologies upon which the operative functions of data capitalism are built. Operating within the performance-based culture industry, the works of Trevor Paglen, Gerald Nestler/Sylvia Eckermann, and Vladan Joler respond critically to data capitalism’s modes of data extraction and how the societal performances of capitalism condition people’s physical and digital performances.