This personal history of how the field of theatre studies in the United States has evolved during the author’s academic career begins with his entrance to doctoral studies at Cornell University in 1959 and continues to the present. Among topics covered are the national professional organizations and journals, and the changing interpretations of the scope and definition of the field itself.

Film, TV, and social media greatly expanded the possibilities and parameters of theatre and performance. Happenings, multimedia works, and performance art, as well as virtuosic vocal acrobats and shape-shifting innovators like Lily Tomlin, John Leguizamo, Anna Deavere Smith, Tracey Ullman, Barry Humphries, and Charles Pierce have created mercurial, multicharacter spectacles. The cultural fıssion of this performance synergy also encompasses maverick poets, painters, journalists, political activists, critics, and even a nonagenarian fashion model.

Ventriloquism is marked by an antagonistic intimacy between the ventriloquist and dummy, an antagonism that is rooted in the mechanics of the form. British ventriloquist Nina Conti brings the inherent violence of the ventriloquial conceit to bear on scenes we typically do not think of as contests for naturalized animacy: therapy and pregnancy.

Lowrider culture in Southern California and within Chicana/o social relations is a powerful example of minoritarian cultural production and an important yet undertheorized aesthetic, political, and gendered cultural object. Linking the lowrider enthusiast’s body and this cultural object—their vehicle—as a continuous signifying spectrum of self-inscription reifıes an alternative understanding of lowrider identities.

How do you create a dance of self-defense? Brazilian choreographers Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira try to answer this question by performing with, through, and despite racial objectifi cation. Against the backdrop of Jair Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil, the artists challenge the audience’s gaze by refusing the spectatorial demand that expects mastery and predictability—a demand often linked to racist, sexist, and colonial frameworks.

Asylum seekers are routinely characterized as in limbo or escaping disaster, characterizations that dangerously dismiss their agency and personhood while rendering them helpless victims of circumstance. However, my devised theatre work with asylum seekers in Washington, DC, has opened up asylee futurism, a political aesthetic characterized by magic, hope, and imagining the future amid the trauma of statelessness and catastrophic loss of homeland.

Jean Genet’s 1966 epic play The Screens offers a unique insight into Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent devastation of Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces. Seen from this perspective, this is not a local war, but an event that has global significance.

Since August 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time of bans against public gatherings and protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu, a hybrid clown-policewoman has attended political and social demonstrations in Jewish West and Palestinian East Jerusalem. Officer Az-Oolay places heart-shaped stickers on people’s foreheads as a radical political act and deconstruction of the coercive force of the Israeli police.

Written 10 days after the 7 October 2023 massacre, Israeli playwright Maya Arad Yasur’s How to Remain a Humanist after a Massacre in 17 Steps captures the trauma and dilemmas of a woman, a mother, and a writer whose world and worldview have been shattered. Yasur’s work has been produced in theatres in Europe, Israel, and the US.

By mid-March 2024, when Bread & Puppet Theater began rehearsals for a new touring show, the State of Israel had killed more than 31,000 people in Gaza over the preceding five months, with the full military and diplomatic support of the United States. The Hope Principle Show: Citizens’ Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide toured in the US during the month of April 2024, with the aim of contributing to the ongoing revolt against the US’ complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza.

Jogging: Theatre in Progress tells the story of four women, including Euripides’s Medea, who must grapple with what it means to be a woman and how to navigate the roles they take on, both consciously and unconsciously. Lebanese actress, playwright, and director Hanane Hajj Ali’s dark yet comedic one-woman show challenges stereotypes and preconceived notions that affect women in the Middle East and beyond.

This critical reflection on the category of locality, which is associated with the performative practice of scaling, is based in the embodied experience of activism on the Polish-Belarusian border. Using the latest texts in the field of object-oriented ontology, locality is presented as a significant challenge to the (inter-/trans-/post-)disciplinary approach and confronted with new materialistic approaches to universality.