A Note from the Editor (2015)

A Note from the Editor D. J. Hopkins, Editor It seems fitting that the first issue of the twenty-fifth anniversary volume of Theatre Topics would be the product of a lot of collaboration. A year ago, when I wrote my first editor’s introduction for an issue of Topics, I put an emphasis on collaboration. Since the time of that writing, I have written an article for a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review that focuses on editing, and, by a happy accident, the keyword that I was assigned to unpack in that article was collaboration.1 In that piece, I make the claim that editorial work, like the work of a dramaturg, is always unavoidably collaborative. That said, this issue of Topics feels especially collaborative; in addition to a long roster of authors, the editorial team was temporarily expanded for this issue as well. Sonja Arsham Kuftinec assembled a robust collection of documents from the most recent ATHE conference, in Scottsdale, Arizona (24–27 July 2014). As ATHE Vice President for Conference 2014, she organized a capacious and responsive conference; and then she did an extra lap, serving as an invaluable aggregator for the contributions that comprise the conference reflection in this issue. Kuftinec introduces and frames the essays in this section, most of which are drawn from a plenary session that focused on the key pedagogical and political concepts at the heart of the Arizona conference. Additionally, Kuftinec, in collaboration with Tiffany Ana López, prepared a transcript of Luis Alfaro’s keynote presentation, which included both a conversation with López and readings from his compelling solo performance, St. Jude. Wade Hollingshaus and Will Daddario served as guest editors for a special section in this issue. These essays and a Notes from the Field do not constitute a special issue unto themselves; instead, I think of these contributions as more of a “pop-up capsule collection.” Hollingshaus and Daddario are active in the international Performance Philosophy network, and they are eager to introduce the readers of Topics to the ideas, methodologies, and pedagogical practices of performance philosophy. In their introduction, as in each of the contributions included in this performance philosophy section, the guest editors are at pains to introduce the subject in an accessible way, knowing that their readership, while well-versed in performance and theatre, may be less actively engaged with classical and contemporary philosophy. Of course, the readers and authors of Topics are no strangers to philosophy and critical theory: Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Rancière have been making regular appearances in the last two volumes, along with a host of other, less well-known contributors to philosophical and theoretical discourses. So the pieces in this special section do not stand to inform anyone with their bibliographies alone; rather, what I welcome in this engagement with performance philosophy is the innovative perspective of this emerging discourse, which provides an opportunity to look at performance and theatre in new ways, refreshing a field of vision whose subjects sometimes become all too familiar. In addition to the special sections described above, this issue includes two “general” essays. Angela Sweigart-Gallagher and Aaron Thomas discuss place-based, community-engaged theatre in their essay on Virginia’s Endstation Theatre. It offers a theoretically informed survey of Endstation’s work—work that is not only strongly site-specific, but energetically engaged with audience and community. The regional theatres in my own home city of San Diego, La Jolla Playhouse and The Old Globe, have begun exploring site-specific productions that reach audiences outside the confines of their usual stages, taking their subscribers to new places and generating innovative experiences while reaching new audiences. Major theatres in the United States and elsewhere that are “dipping their toes” into site-specific theatre have much to learn from fully committed companies like Endstation—indeed, as Sweigart-Gallagher and Thomas convincingly argue, we all do. [End Page ix] Sharon Green’s essay, “Teaching Theatre in Precarious Times: Strategies for Survival in the Liberal Arts Curriculum,” plays to Topics’s base: as an academic who directs plays in a university context, Green writes about the generative symposia that she has mustered...