Editor’s Note

Abstract

Editor’s Note Eero Laine, Assistant Professor I am hearing from friends and colleagues in various parts of the world that they are attending theatre again—in person. Of course, some never really stopped going to the theatre because of exceptional public health measures in their area or country and others still are now in the midst of the worst crises of the pandemic to date. Indeed, in light of these extremely uneven turns of the past year and as we labor over and through theories of drama and criticism, we might mark both the sometimes insignificance of theatre in the face of a virulent disease, and yet how much it means. That is, those everyday experiences from before the global sweep of the pandemic are anything but mundane today. Not that attending theatre was necessarily steeped in mundanity, but it was and is and will be part of the day-to-day life of the cities and communities we live in and around. The bulk of this issue is devoted to Michelle Liu Carriger’s edited special section “#PerformativeX,” which examines the uses and misuses of the term “performative” and the ways its definition may have changed through circulation. As theatre was disrupted by the pandemic (at least for most of the authors in the special section, from what I can tell of their geography), theatrical and performance studies language crept outward into popular discourse and on social media. This timely special section reframes central questions of theatre and performance theory and offers readers a number of entries into a term that is both common and complex. Together, the authors of the special section direct us toward the etymology and theoretical genealogy of performative actions, gestures, and utterances, while thinking through their current and potential future uses. The three original research articles in this issue examine a range of subjects and methodologies through which the journal considers dramatic theory and criticism. In “Against the Flows of Theory: Expanding the Ghost with Japanese Noh,” Jessica Nakamura reconsiders theories of ghosting and ghosts in the theatre. Furthering field-defining conversations on the directionality of knowledges and assumptions around epistemological centers, Nakamura’s article pushes the field to move beyond many of its assumptions about both its form and representation. Alison Walls’s “Black and White in Black and White: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Sensation Scene in An Octoroon,” examines the key scenes in the critically acclaimed play and the ways that plays on theatrical genre opens the play to and implicates the audience. Finally, Patrick Scorese takes on longstanding questions of the field in “‘The Act of Sepulcher’: Effigies and Other Affects Toward a Theory of Historiographic Performance.” Here, Scorese draws on a comparative approach that places his own performance work among other theatre and performance artists and playwrights to show theory in practice. There are a number of other current and upcoming transitions at the journal. I want to first thank Chris Hall for his many years of service to the journal as the Managing Editor. Chris has been an invaluable member of the JDTC team during my [End Page i] time as Editor. Chris will be leaving JDTC as he recently defended his dissertation in the English Department at the University of Kansas and has accepted a tenure track job for the upcoming school year. Congratulations to Chris! We are quite happy to welcome Kaitlyn Tossie as the new Managing Editor, who has already begun work with this issue of the journal. Lastly, we’re incredibly pleased that Michelle Liu Carriger will be taking over the role of Editor from me at the beginning of 2022. If the special section in this issue is any indication, the journal is in very good hands and has a very bright future. That means that this is my penultimate issue with the journal—in the meantime, I am working with Kevin Brown and Felipe Cervera, the editors of Global Performance Studies, along with Kristof van Baarle and Kyoko Iwaki, to co-edit a joint issue of GPS and JDTC this fall. The joint issue will feature collaboratively written theatre and performance scholarship, a topic and methodology that has become especially dear to...