Editorial Comment

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Editorial Comment
• Ariel Nereson

The March 2024 issue of Theatre Journal comes on the heels of the landmark seventy-fifth anniversary issue (December 2023, coedited by Laura Edmondson and Sean Metzger) and is my first issue as coeditor. To say that I sense the weight of the journal’s history as I step into this role is an understatement. It has been my good fortune that the four essays that were waiting for me exemplify Theatre Journal’s commitment to publishing new historiographic and theoretical interventions into performance. The March issue features two essays that take up distinct sites in Asian American popular performance and demonstrate the diversity of experience, expectation, and intervention found therein, and two essays that theorize performance from very different locations: dirt and drone, other-than-human performers that complicate foundational assumptions about subject, spectator, and actor. As a quartet, the essays energetically mark the beginning of the journal’s next seventy-five years, offering exciting vectors of inquiry that speak to current and evergreen concerns of theatre, dance, and performance studies. Individually, each offers to readers a distinct model of careful, enthusiastic research that broadens the scope of performance studies inquiry.

Maria De Simone’s essay introduces (or reintroduces, as the case may be) the reader to the early twentieth-century figure Jue Quon Tai, tracing her performances across North American vaudeville stages and in immigration courtrooms to demonstrate how performance culture impacted the conceptualization of immigration law. De Simone’s essay joins a vibrant conversation in performance studies about performance and the law while also restoring Jue’s fascinating career to already-robust but generally separate histories of early twentieth-century popular entertainment and immigration and citizenship law. In De Simone’s analysis, Jue mobilized her hyphenated Chinese American identity to navigate racist and exclusionary policies on stage and in the courtroom, yet of equal significance is how the extant archive of Jue’s performances documents racialized regimes of perception that were mutually reinforced across aesthetic and legal domains.

The entwinement of geopolitics and popular performance continues in Donatella Galella’s exploration of David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s 2019 musical Soft Power. For both De Simone and Galella, Asian American identity, critique, and experience form a kind of limit test for the promise of US American democratic inclusion. Galella activates a welcome critique of musical theatre’s affective influence on its audiences and of the ideologies that find support through the deployment of affect and attachment. Through examining the dramaturgy of Soft Power alongside its lyrics, song structure, and performers’ experiences of the work, Galella reconsiders the paradigmatic staging of encounter between “the West” and “Asia” in The King and I. Galella compellingly demonstrates the contemporary reactivations of that encounter and its white supremacist violences in Hwang’s lived experience of anti-Asian violence [End Page ix] and its metatheatrical repetition in Soft Power as she builds on Dorinne Kondo’s concept of “reparative creativity” to argue for the production’s significance to Asian American audiences.

In her essay on ecological performance, Angenette Spalink takes us to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh as she recounts the 2019 installation Below the Blanket. Weaving together current concerns in performance studies about ecology, care, and ethics into the emerging field of critical plant studies, Spalink analyzes the work of several artists in reorganizing perceptual experience of the garden in order to animate the agency and carework of plants in sustaining all existence. Spalink carefully considers the material and representational lives of sphagnum mosses as she poses possible answers to her question, “how can we ethically encounter plants in performance?” In parsing colonial histories of the field of botany and colonial legacies of humanism on performance practice, as well as their always-present counterhistories and alternatives often articulated through Indigenous and feminist methods, Spalink provides a detailed description and incisive analysis of the interspecies relations that Below the Blanket invites.

Challenges to humanism (and, indeed, human existence) are posed by a quite different agent in Eirini Nedelkopoulou’s essay, as she tracks drone performance cultures in the early twenty-first century. In positioning drone technology as a pharmakon that threatens as much as it promises, thus...