In 2015, I traveled to Havana with the support of an ASTR Targeted Areas Research Grant to work on processing the physical materials of the Photographic Archive of Tablas-Alarcos Press (hereinafter the Tablas-Alarcos archive or collection). The Tablas-Alarcos archive is a unique collection because it exists not in a traditional research institution, but in the offices of a state-run press dedicated to the performing arts. Also, it consists of materials that have been saved after critics, researchers, and editors have completed the process of publishing their work. Much more than photographs, this collection also contains programs, unpublished manuscripts, and various theatre ephemera from all over the globe and in multiple languages.1

Utopia might always prove impossible. But it should not be entirely abandoned as a concept, or as a goal toward which work might be directed. It is hard to see how meaningful change could arise without at least some sense of utopian possibility. The architectural historian Nathaniel Coleman argues in this vein that simply “making-do with reality may be compensatory, but limits possibility, transforming apparent pragmatic agency into its capture by enclosing realism.”1 Dealing with reality—often enough by making do—while keeping an eye on more magical possibilities has sometimes appeared, and has certainly been claimed, as the founding experience of making theatre. Theatres have seemed unique places where much might happen. If they are indeed special places, able to achieve special things, then they are not simply ebullient, but like Foucault's “heterotopias” able to combine dissident elements at the margins. Even when viewed at considerable historical distance, theatrical companies can appear truculent, wayward, and unsettling, even when they remain exploitative, manipulative, hierarchical—as many utopias are.2 Inequities and exclusions based on race, sexuality, gender, and class are not absent from theatrical life. Coleman's point, however, is really to argue that that it ought to be possible to imagine sites and patterns of work that are not already foreclosed by the demands of the market, the law, or other forms of curtailment. It should be equally possible to imagine people coming together, bringing their skills, and working out how they might be combined. Reality and its utopian antithesis might then valuably contradict and coalesce. The combination is never easy. Imperatives, financial and otherwise, loomed large over theatres in Georgian England, as they do today. But improvisation and collective effort could both respond to and yet resist such downward pressures, to make something that is at least potentially dissident, as much a way of working as the work produced.

Quickly Ascending to Heaven,
Hermaphrodite Beauty
of the celestial magic,
You descend to animate
Angelic aura,
alone in your clear, eternal beauty
all other beauties stand before you.
While ANNA's voice,
In Deidamia converses,
a musical passage dissolves
in the aura, a most divine ray
although enclosed within an earthly veil,
it knows the harmony of heaven on earth.1

In June 2022, after a two-and-a-half-year COVID-19 hiatus, I joyfully returned to Europe for a research trip. My purpose was to develop further my next monograph on queering animal symbols, specifically investigating the history of the Dalecarlian (Dala) horse [Dalahäst]. Dala horses are brightly painted wooden toys that were carved and decorated by farmers through the long Swedish winters as early as the seventeenth century. Thereafter, Dala horses became a national icon and symbol of Sweden at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. Scheduling also allowed me to attend Midsommar (Midsummer) celebrations in Dalarna (Dalecarlia) County,1 Sweden (Fig. 1). This is the region not only where Dala horses first appeared, but also where many of the traditions surrounding the folkloric, highly theatrical, and now de facto Swedish national holiday of Midsommar most likely originated.