THEATRE JOURNALPub Date : 2026-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tj.2026.a1003496
Karishma Paresh Bhagani
{"title":"Kupenya as Producing Praxis: Arts Institution–Building in Nairobi","authors":"Karishma Paresh Bhagani","doi":"10.1353/tj.2026.a1003496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2026.a1003496","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article examines how women producers in Nairobi resist the \"institutionalization of amnesia\" and navigate neoliberal precarity in arts institution–building through the kupenya practice. Using case studies outlining the producing strategies of Judy Kibinge of Docubox Film Fund and Angela Wachuka and Wanjiru Koinange of Book Bunk, this essay argues that kupenya operates as a nimble, improvisatory approach that creates a buffer and uninstitutionalizes amnesia by recoding the cultural memory of Kenyans. By foregrounding the strategic praxis of kupenya, this article offers a distinctly African method of institution-building centering the producer as a critical infrastructure.","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"25 1","pages":"341-358"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THEATRE JOURNALPub Date : 2026-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tj.2026.a1003497
Ryan Claycomb
{"title":"Courting the Middle: Capital Stages, Supreme Court Performances, and the Aesthetics of Centrism","authors":"Ryan Claycomb","doi":"10.1353/tj.2026.a1003497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2026.a1003497","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Analyzing performances of the US Supreme Court staged in Washington, DC, this essay examines how institutional theatres produce an aesthetics of centrism. The structuration of mainstream regional theatres by fiscal, political, and institutional exigencies drives a centrist aesthetics that is related to but distinguishable from middlebrow aesthetics. Examining examples including Holly Hughes's Preaching to the Perverted , Elevator Repair Service's Arguendo , and John Strand's The Originalist , this essay reveals how institutional forces pressure theatres to variously critique and valorize ideological moderation as a set of narrative and staging ideals, often while obscuring investments in patriarchal whiteness as a governing cultural logic.","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"54 1","pages":"359-376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THEATRE JOURNALPub Date : 2026-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tj.2026.a1003498
Anna Jayne Kimmel
{"title":"Accounting for : Alternative Gestures of Sincerity in Legal Circles","authors":"Anna Jayne Kimmel","doi":"10.1353/tj.2026.a1003498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2026.a1003498","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Punch (2024), written by British playwright James Graham and based on Jacob Dunne's autobiographical nonfiction work Right from Wrong (2022), shines a light on the role of restorative justice measures for truth and reconciliation in contexts of violent crime. Motivated by this performance, this article centers processes of restorative justice as a saturated space of affective accountability—the paradoxical effort to objectively discern emotional, affective, and gestural truths. An ambivalence arrives as restorative justice positions itself as at once alternative to the criminal legal system and yet so proximate it might readily be seduced into its matrix.","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"1 1","pages":"377-396"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THEATRE JOURNALPub Date : 2026-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tj.2026.a1003492
Sarah Bay-Cheng
{"title":"What's Wrong with Mediated Theatre Studies?: An Institutional Provocation","authors":"Sarah Bay-Cheng","doi":"10.1353/tj.2026.a1003492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2026.a1003492","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Beginning as a provocation delivered at the 2025 Association for Theatre in Higher Education keynote roundtable, this essay responds to the deepening connections and overlapping areas in theatre and media studies. Specifically, it frames the argument institutionally to address three objections raised in response to the roundtable: that media studies does not engage equitably with theatre; that enthusiasm for emerging technologies risks uncritical techno-optimism; and that structural integration could harm vulnerable theatre programs. Reframed as challenges and opportunities, deeper cross-disciplinary collaboration may not be the threat some fear but an essential response to the benefit of arts and humanities.","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"54 1","pages":"263-278"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THEATRE JOURNALPub Date : 2026-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tj.2026.a1003494
Miriam Felton-Dansky
{"title":"The Life and Death of American Realness: Infrastructural Interventions for New Dance, 2010–19","authors":"Miriam Felton-Dansky","doi":"10.1353/tj.2026.a1003494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2026.a1003494","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article traces the history of American Realness, a festival of new dance, theatre, and performance founded and curated by Ben Pryor and held annually in New York City from 2010 to 2019. American Realness challenged received ideas about innovation through its interventions into the infrastructural landscape of contemporary performance. Employing interviews, archival materials, and infrastructural theory, the author argues that fully apprehending the history of new performance requires consideration of infrastructural history as well. Supporting this account are examinations of works by choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Dana Michel, which were notably featured in the festival.","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"31 1","pages":"299-320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THEATRE JOURNALPub Date : 2026-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tj.2026.a1003490
Damon Krometis,Su Kyong Isakson
{"title":"Fostering Deaf-Led Blended Theatre, Shifting Institutional Norms: Notes from the Community College of Baltimore County","authors":"Damon Krometis,Su Kyong Isakson","doi":"10.1353/tj.2026.a1003490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2026.a1003490","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"32 1","pages":"E-15-E-21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THEATRE JOURNALPub Date : 2026-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tj.2026.a1003495
Judith Hamera
{"title":"The Counterpublic Institutional Work of High Performance Magazine, 1986–92","authors":"Judith Hamera","doi":"10.1353/tj.2026.a1003495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2026.a1003495","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Periodicals are institutional, epistemic, and political projects. They provide material and infrastructural conditions of possibility for cultural production while functioning as cultural products themselves. Yet they remain underexamined in theatre and performance studies. This essay redresses this lack of attention with an analysis of High Performance magazine's apparatus and editorial ethos during a transitional period between 1986 and 1992. An independent outlet focused on experimental live art from 1978 through 1997, High Performance combined the predictability and stability of an arts institution with an oppositional disposition, connecting artists, arts administrators, critics, and scholars, including those from theatre and performance studies.","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"13 1","pages":"321-340"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THEATRE JOURNALPub Date : 2026-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tj.2026.a1003493
Sarah Wilbur
{"title":"The \"End\" of Arts Administration: A Case for Infrastructural Embodiment","authors":"Sarah Wilbur","doi":"10.1353/tj.2026.a1003493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2026.a1003493","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay departs from a public dispute between two arts economists wherein one challenges epistemic defaults embedded in US arts administration, management, and policy discourse and the other dismisses her critique through a defense of the status quo. Rather than adjudicate either position, I situate the exchange as a case study in what I call \"infrastructural embodiments,\" acts by which white institutional insiders (beneficiaries of dominant systems) acknowledge or deflect responsibility for structural harm. Following Spade, Gilmore, Lorde, and Rothberg, I call for an end to administrative accounting and its replacement with a corporeal economics attentive to labor's felt costs.","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"33 1","pages":"279-297"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149210568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THEATRE JOURNALPub Date : 2025-01-28DOI: 10.1353/tj.2024.a950294
Bethany Hughes
{"title":"Remapping Relations: Contract Riders, Care, and Indigenous Performance","authors":"Bethany Hughes","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a950294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a950294","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Drawing on Indigenous feminist theories of futurity and care, interviews with Indigenous theatre artists, and a case study on decolonial acts of relational care refused, this article explores how carework in theatre production contracts reveals the labor of Indigenous artists to sustain and expand their communities. It explores the informal challenges Larissa FastHorse issues to producing companies, the contract riders about casting and consultation used by Mary Kathryn Nagle, an accountability rider Madeline Sayet created for the national tour of her solo show, and the conflict between Emily Johnson and her one-time commissioning organization Peak Performances.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143054800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
THEATRE JOURNALPub Date : 2025-01-28DOI: 10.1353/tj.2024.a950298
Elizabeth W. Son
{"title":"\"Stitching Korea Back Together\": Jogakbo Aesthetics of Care in Peace Advocacy","authors":"Elizabeth W. Son","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a950298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a950298","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This article examines the peace advocacy of Women Cross DMZ, a Korean diasporicled collective of feminist activists who are calling for a formal end to the Korean War and the centering of women in peacebuilding processes. During peace symposia in North Korea and South Korea and walks in 2015, Women Cross DMZ utilized objects—scarves, banners, and quilts—inspired by <i>jogakbo</i>, a Korean patchwork-style cloth that originated during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). As technologies of care, jogakbo cloth objects serve as a means through which people practice care and embody ideals for peace. Looking at the multiple crossings of Women Cross DMZ through jogakbo as an object and process attunes us to the temporal and scalar aspects of varied practices of peace advocacy.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143054813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}