Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Sarah McCarroll (bio) Theatre is inescapably about bodies. By definition, the form requires the live bodies of performers in the same space and at the same time as the live bodies of an audience. And yet, it's hard to talk about bodies. We talk about characters, we talk about actors, we talk about costume and movement, but we often approach these as identities or processes layered onto bodies, rather than as inescapably entwined with them. It's hard to talk about bodies. Although they are capable of great grace and beauty, they also do awkward, funny, grotesque, physical things. And recent scholarship in both the sciences and the humanities notwithstanding, the Cartesian separation of mind-body is a deeply engrained concept: "I think therefore I am," where identity, being, one's very existence are located in the process of thinking via a disembodied intellect. The opposite of "I think therefore I am" is "I do not think, therefore I am not," and there has been a historical tendency to elide the body as an unthinking not. This decentralization of the body has important consequences, however, in that it reduces the body to an object, something that is not involved in the processes that make up our existence, create our humanity. Further, an object is available—for possession, for conquest, as a blank page subject to authorship by another. This is obviously a matter of urgent importance in the world at large, but it is also the subject of growing concern and attention in the theatrical world. What stories are bodies onstage telling, both as they relate to the given circumstances of text and character, and separately from those constructs? How is meaning made onstage simply and profoundly via the presence of the human form? What does it do, for example, to the American conversation to have the musical Hamilton present black, Asian, and Hispanic bodies in the space occupied by the founding fathers?1 [End Page 5] Bodies on the theatrical stage are liminal; therein resides their great power. They hold the power of transformation, of being always both/and. They have the potential to become other, while at the same time they are also always what they are, the body of the actor: African American actor Daveed Diggs both/and the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton, to continue the example. This is both the exciting possibility contained within theatre, as it makes the unimagined/unimaginable real for a time, and the thing that we as theatre practitioners, scholars, and educators must trouble as we think about what bodies go where onstage, what stories we allow which bodies to tell, and how those bodies help to create the meanings of stories on stage. Many of the essays in this volume touch on ideas of labor, whether explicitly or implicitly. We talk about the work bodies do, where "work" is a critical term of art, but there is a sense in which bodies become fully realized in the moment that they engage in literal work of one kind or another. If bodies are about work, then they are also about economics, class, race, and gender and sexuality (among other attributes), and which jobs classed, racialized, gendered, et al. bodies can take on. This has particular resonance for us in the theatre as we think about creating spaces/theatres in which women, people of color, those without incomes, or people on a broad scope of gender and sexual identities or physical abilities can attend the theatre, or work in positions of power and decision making.2 It also, of course, has application to questions of what bodies can do what work onstage, both within and separate from, the given circumstances of a particular text. What bodies are we willing to put in what roles? A black Hamlet? A female King Lear? A size-22 actress as Juliet, or a paraplegic Beatrice? How might our inclusion of such "nontraditional" bodies blow open the doors of meaning for texts we thought we thoroughly understood? How, too, are we structuring the repertoire to provide roles intended for, not just cast with, a multiplicity of bodies? Theatre Symposium is...