Seeking Critical Frameworks for Global Majority Theatre

Abstract:

The essay advocates for expanding theater studies publications to more effectively engage with global majority epistemologies as core methodologies for analyzing theatrical phenomena. Academic theatre classes often incorporate performance studies paradigms, but most theater programs remain centered around practice-based exercises for acting, directing, designing, and producing Eurocentric theater. Global majority ways of telling stories are either not taught to students or are integrated into curricula in carefully measured doses as alternative approaches to art-making. This essay encourages twenty-first century scholars to more astutely respond to cultural productions based upon vernacular and indigenous ways of theatrical storytelling, arguing that a significant step would be to incorporate more indigenous languages, and perhaps have the journal publish in multiple languages (with translation) to expand the readership. However, even foregrounding text-based performance may be limiting. Many of the aesthetics that underly arts production in global majority cultures are constituted outside of text-based paradigms; they use symbol, myth, sound, gesture, dance language, and music as poetic containers for delivering their messages. They also build from local epistemologies connected to spirituality, religion, or alternative beliefs about the rationale and intention of performance. This essay calls for more time and space devoted to critical analysis of theatre created and performed outside of standard theatre venues, as well as a more nuanced discussion of complex ecosystems that support artistic innovation.