Anticipation

Anticipation is an energy that can enliven or evacuate a moment. It tells us to look forward to what is to come, but it can also keep us from sitting with the specificity of the present, moving us too hastily from the significance of what is right in front of us. As scholars of performance history, we are trained to look for the most meaningful change over time, the specialness of specific moments. The authors in this issue document and interpret the past in order to weave skillful bridges toward the present, sometimes illuminating, without falling into teleological framings, the ways that artists and critics of the past anticipated some of the most pressing concerns of contemporary times. Rebecca Kastleman opens this issue with a study that uplifts Zora Neale Hurston’s foresight as both a performance theorist and a leader in university-based theatre practice. Building upon the work of other Hurston scholars, she identifies the ways that Hurston’s creative practice, particularly after the termination of Charlotte Osgood Mason’s patronage, worked expansively to uplift the artistry of Black life across media and social spaces. Kastleman adds to the movement to recognize Hurston as part of the genealogy of American performance theory, providing a foundation for our understanding of precisely how relationships between participants and audiences constitute performance events. Hurston’s deployment of her anthropological training shed light on the interpersonal, institutional, and communal dimensions of social relationships, developing a framework that extends toward the ways in which subsequent articulations of performance theory evolved a scalar model of representational efficacy in the construction of social meaning. In addition, her work within university settings provided spaces where she could both refine her personal craft as a writer and theorist, and also contribute to a vision of what arts curricula at the collegiate level could and should include. In the first half of the twentieth century, Hurston was advocating for the well-rounded course offerings that many of us continue to implore our campus leaders to fund! Bradley Rogers offers a biographical contribution that highlights the signal influence of Otto Harbach upon what we now appreciate as “integrated” musical theatre. Harbach entered the field at a time when musical comedy was a disaggregated assortment of musical numbers and narrative, with no deep sense of connection between the two that would maintain an audience’s connection to the story’s emotional through line. Instead, Harbach leveraged his extensive training in (and subsequent employment as an instructor of) elocution and oratory to advance a more holistic approach to the musical, deploying songs to advance rather than interrupt the narrative, and did so quite early in the twentieth century, years before the theatrical works that are most commonly celebrated as achieving this formal synthesis. Rogers’s essay reasserts Harbach’s place in this developmental narrative, and pays particular attention to the historical context of his work—a contemporaneous