A television documentary on speech therapy is visible on the screen. A logopedist (speech-defect expert) coaches a young man to overcome his stutter through hypnosis. “You will speak loudly and clearly, freely and easily, unafraid of your voice and your speech,” she instructs. The boy hesitates but finally musters the words: “I can speak.” Thus Andrei Tarkovsky begins Zerkalo [Mirror], his poetic film about personal memory and cultural trauma (conceived in 1964 and completed in 1974).3 The symbolism of this scene was impossible for Tarkovsky's Soviet intelligentsia audience to miss. The stutterer coming to speech allegorized the artist coming to free expression in Russia after Stalin, struggling to adapt to alternating intervals of liberating “thaw” and oppressive “freeze,” fluency and silence, in the period of de-Stalinization that Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Party Congress of 1956 set into motion. The crisis of the solo stutterer's speech in the film stood in for the larger emerging crisis of how to represent socialist reality, a world that once had been captured solely by socialist realism—that is, until Khrushchev deprived Stalinism of its status as real socialism and thus invalidated the basis of socialist realism.

Aside from hinting at the rift between the two directors that had become evident after their failed 1918 collaboration on Claudel's The Exchange, Tairov's criticism of Meyerhold's The Dawn reveals a widening gap in the two directors’ fundamental conceptions of the purpose of theatre in the wake of the Revolution. Meyerhold famously declared “October in the theatre” after becoming head of the Theatre Department of Narkompros (the Commissariat of Enlightenment) in the fall of 1920; he attempted to liquidate the Moscow state academic theatres, of which the Kamerny was one, and to require that all theatres stage revolutionary works using the radical methods of “cubism, futurism and suprematism.” Although Tairov had experimented with cubist designs, he had spent his immediate post-Revolutionary years defending theatre as an autonomous art form that should express universal truths rather than being a vehicle for topical content, declaring, “A propagandist theatre after a revolution is like mustard after a meal.”

In 2004, the Lyric Opera of Chicago celebrated two milestones: its fiftieth anniversary and the premiere of A Wedding. With music and libretto by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer William Bolcom, film director Robert Altman, and Arnold Weinstein, the opera received intense international coverage. Prepremiere articles, major features, interviews, and reviews appeared in Opera Now, Opernwelt, Opera, and Opera Quarterly. The Lyric's A Wedding dominated the August issue of Opera News, occupying the cover and several features, complete with glossy photos of the photogenic young leads dressed in luxurious wedding attire (see Figure 1).

On 9 January 1964, the 86-year-old E. M. Forster took a curtain call at the Covent Garden revival of Billy Budd alongside his colibrettist, Eric Crozier. The Times review of the event neglected to mention either of the librettists, prompting Forster to write:

As what follows is largely about the ghosting of antiquity, I begin at a broken grave.

Italian prima donna Francesca Cuzzoni (ca. 1698–1770) was the first internationally recognized virtuosa to sing high soprano women's roles. Although her work served as a model to the female performers who followed, no in-depth critical study has been written about her groundbreaking career on the opera stage of the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she was the celebrated prima donna from 1723 to 1728. During her tenure, the Royal Academy became one of the most important opera companies in Europe, rivaling those of the Viennese court, the Paris Opera, and the Italian opera houses of Naples and Venice. Her arrival on the London stage signaled a shift in the ways composers set roles in relationship to vocal categories and gender. In particular, Cuzzoni's superior virtuosic vocal abilities influenced and inspired German George Friedrich Handel's (1685–1759) compositional style and his musical treatment of dramatic elements.

When artist-inventor Samuel B. Morse alleged that the Bowery Theatre performance of French ballerina Madame Hutin was “to all intents and purposes the public exposure of a naked female,” he was expressing an opinion that conflicted with that of other critics, who felt that the performance of French dancers would “put to shame our splay-footed indigenous sprawlers, and will greatly refine the taste in dancing in the play-going public.” In Jacksonian American, citizens who were concerned with the direction of the nation's culture engaged in a debate about the respective merits of the less-polished art created in the New World and the more refined offerings of the Old World that was played out in critical reactions to an increasingly popular theatrical form: ballet. Ballet gradually became an important part of American theatre during the first half of the nineteenth century as dancers appeared on stages in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston in front of the same audiences that attended the dramatic plays whose productions have received the bulk of academic attention. Three waves of European dancers came to the Americas during the period 1790 to 1845. The first wave (1790–1825) consisted of small companies who presented dance to a broad range of audiences, typically before other plays or during entr'actes. This article focuses on performances that occurred during the second wave (1825–40), when impresarios recruited established (though not top-tier) European ballerinas to come to specific theatres. These dancers brought the repertoire and styles of the Romantic ballet to America, including evening-length performances with fairy-tale plots and an emphasis on charismatic female stars, such as La Sylphide. The first American ballerinas, Mary Ann Lee and Augusta Maywood, made their debuts during this period. The third wave (1840–5) consisted largely of “headliners” such as Fanny Elssler, who toured the country performing selections from their famous roles and pas with a corps de ballet recruited from each city they visited.

Section Editor's Note: For this edition of “Critical Stages,” appearing within the journal's special issue on opera, I posed three sets of questions to Daphne Lei, author of Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity Across the Pacific (2006), and Tony Award–winning director Mary Zimmerman, cocreator with Philip Glass and Arnold Weinstein of the opera Galileo Galilei (2002).

In the title essay from Choreographing History, Susan Leigh Foster interrogates the belief that the body serves as a site for dance to be enacted upon and through. She, along with several others in this edited volume, sought to reposition and consequently enhance the contribution of dancers' bodies by not limiting the essays within to observational accounts or choreographic reviews. Instead Foster and her colleagues query “the possibility of a body that is written upon but that also writes” as means of urging dance scholars to “move critical studies of the body in new directions.” I take this position as an entry point and use it to contemplate the process of making and writing about contemporary ballet history using Alonzo King LINES Ballet, a San Francisco–based troupe, as a case study. In this essay, I describe the challenges I and others have faced in our efforts to collect and interpret a visual and verbal archive for this dance troupe, which has been performing for more than a quarter of a century. This process highlights a larger issue for dance historians, namely, how to create a critically sensitive archive for a company when the most reliable (and oftentimes the only available) source is the personal memory of its choreographer. I anchor this analysis to the different models of critical writing about bodies offered by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, and Hayden White and suggest that companies such as LINES offer challenges to those engaged in the archival process and in the practice of writing history.

Francis Robinson (1910–80; Figure 1) fell in love with opera the day that a lady wearing a tailored suit, pince-nez, and a bird hat came from the Victor Company to his school to demonstrate the Victrola. That was the day he first heard Enrico Caruso sing. Later, still a schoolboy and never having heard the tenor in person, Robinson mourned Caruso's death. The beauty and magnificence of opera entranced him, and the celebrity of opera personalities intrigued him. He found his dream home in the Metropolitan Opera. The correspondence, photographs, clippings, programs, memorabilia, and other materials that he received, wrote, and collected during his many decades with the Met reside at Vanderbilt University Special Collections and provide a rich resource for opera scholars.

I am being haunted by a dance I saw more than a year ago. Ever since it was performed as part of the Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas conference at UCLA in November 2008, I have been reviewing it in my mind every few weeks. I am unsettled by its seeming simplicity and by the integrity and power that this simplicity conveys. Therefore I am writing not about a work I have just seen, but rather one I have been rewatching for several months. The dance, titled Woman and Water, was created and performed by Alutiiq artist Tanya Lukin Linklater. It premiered on 22 May at Visualeyez 2006, Canada's seventh annual festival of performance art, produced by Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture; the festival's theme was “Domesticity,” and it was curated by founder Todd Janes in Edmonton, Alberta. When she was invited to UCLA, Lukin Linklater inquired about the availability of water near the conference where the piece might be performed, and, upon seeing the site, determined to stage the work in the plaza in front of Royce Hall, which is adjacent to a large fountain. This is what I remember watching:

What might one read for an opera course? I teach an occasional survey that looks at opera in the context of theatre. It is intended to demystify opera for those who have no experience of it but also to explore some nooks and crannies that even fans might not know well. The general layout is chronological, but local production schedules may mean that we start out of order or that there are interruptions. My concern is that students be somewhat prepared when they go to see an opera on the syllabus. Rather than choose warhorses for their own sake, I seek out pieces that offer historical, political, or aesthetic choices that are surprising to many students. Thus, with John Adams's Nixon in China, we also read three plays about Madame Mao. With the intermezzi presented as part of the Medici wedding festivities of 1598, we read one of the plays the intermezzi graced, Bargagli's La pellegrina; for the production process, we read excerpts from James M. Saslow's wonderful 1996 book about the wedding, and so on. I change the overall content to accommodate available productions and to keep the course interesting for me and (I hope) for students. Since I keep an eye out for books that might be useful, this essay combines things I have actually read with things I will consider for the syllabus the next time I teach it.

Editor's Note: Under Mike Sell's excellent editorship, the Critical Stages column in Theatre Survey was developed as a venue for representing current issues for subdisciplinary divisions within the broader field of theatre and performance studies. As the new editor for the column, I hope to build upon Sell's previous editorial work by shifting the form of these short essays in two ways: first, by spotlighting concerns that reach both inside the many corners of our field and outside into a range of broader “publics”; and second, by engaging multiple scholars and artists in “conversations” in order to provide plural perspectives on these concerns. For this first column of my editorship, Eng-Beng Lim, Lisa Duggan, and José Esteban Muñoz track several micro- and macromaneuverings of neoliberalism—from the classroom to the department to the “global university”—and consider how theatre and performance scholars might approach the political difficulties currently threatening the mission of higher education.