In its scope of interest, Canadian Theatre Review is a forwardlooking entity, concerned always with developments in performance in Canada, the writers attentive to trending theatrical events and perspectives that are innovative and cutting-edge. Each issue of Canadian Theatre Review is a report from where we are now. Immediately now. But thinking about the temporal situation of now inevitably entails awareness of how we got to now and speculation about where we go next. The recent Progress: International Festival of Performance and Ideas, presented by Toronto’s SummerWorks in partnership with the Theatre Centre, embodied a similar impulse. In a reflexive interview on the festival’s name, curator Michael Rubenfeld was asked to consider the question, “What is progress?” In his response, Rubenfeld lauded the concept of progress and recognized its power for change but resisted the notion that progress always and necessarily entails growth, offering instead a secondary definition connoting “increasing in scope or severity” (Poon). That same intonation is at work here in this issue on the topic of performance futures. By bringing together a bold cadre of avant-garde voices, we aim to enrich the ecology, stimulating consideration of how change happens, envisioning what kinds of changes we hope for and what kinds of changes we fear. Contributors to this issue were tasked with considering these futures, not at long range but in the middle distance. These futures are not a thousand years away, nor even a hundred years. We asked them to look around the next corner, to peek ahead a mere fifteen years from now to 2030—a future we can reasonably expect to experience. A future with one foot in the present. And as we look to this near future, our current situation with all its challenges and opportunities comes into sharp focus. Writing about nowhere places and not-yet places, Jacques Ranciere says that utopia is a space of dynamic ambiguity, negotiating the relationship between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. On the one hand, it is, as a non-place, radical and category-breaking, “the extreme point of a polemical reconfiguration of the sensible”; on the other, “it is also the configuration of a proper place, a non-polemical distribution of the sensible universe where what one sees, what one says or does are rigorously adapted to one another” (40). It by Jenn Stephenson