Theatre Topics

Reading Teaching Critical Performance Theory is like visiting an imaginary theatre and performance department. Playwriting, design, theatre history, and acting classrooms as well as the communities that support and surround those spaces are imbued with a critical sense of the import and impact of the work we do. I write "we" here because the volume feels like it is written to address fellow artists, teachers, and scholars, especially as it bridges many of the apparent fault lines in theatre and performance pedagogy and training. It is like we are being invited into a thoughtful and ongoing conversation with a community of critical performance theorists. I suspect this is in no small part because the volume emerged from meetings at the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and editor Jeanmarie Higgins and the over twenty contributors should be commended for extending those conference connections from presentation to the page.

Following an introduction wherein Noe Montez reminds us of the potential of theoretical work, that "Critical theory aspires to change society as a whole. It aims to unearth and understand how power and privilege operate within the world" (1), the book opens into four sections of four or five chapters each. The sections on "Course Design: Reimagining the Syllabus," "Classroom Identities: Engaging Students in Theory," "Studio: Theorizing Praxis," and "Communities: Applying Theory" together develop approaches to critical performance theory and offer important ways of critiquing our own work as teachers and artists. The sections offer a neat structure to the book, even as there is generative overlap among the chapters they contain—practical case studies are not constrained to the studio section, for instance—and most of the chapters take up the range of ideas described by the various section headings.

Higgins has assembled an impressive team of authors, spread across professional practice and every academic rank, and this range of contributors itself makes pertinent the ways that critical performance theory finds its ways into theatrical work. Emma Watkins and Stacy Wolf's chapter, for instance, examines feminist pedagogy in the musical theatre classroom and, in its writing, enacts a feminist approach to pedagogy. Here, undergraduate musical theatre student and full professor collaborate to argue for new and critical ways of teaching musical theatre that might shape "a new generation of theatre-makers, empowered to thoughtfully and subversively engage with the materials of the past and to create novel musicals that reflect their contemporary surroundings" (34). Their contribution shows that the work of critical performance pedagogy is not simply an act of thinking about or applying ideas; rather, the chapter drives home the notion that how we approach theatre and performance in our classrooms today affects the theatre and performance of the future.

Indeed, the work in this volume frequently emphasizes the importance of the classroom, not only for emboldening students to think critically, but for our potential as faculty, artists, and scholars to impact the field, the discipline, and the industries of theatre and performance. To this end, the importance of collaborative methodologies in theatre and performance and their ability to encourage critical engagement comes to the fore through other co-written chapters. Jeanmarie Higgins and Michael Schweikardt, for instance, similarly write as professor and former student, exploring two sides of an assignment that asked graduate design students to think through a particular theoretical approach in their design for a play. The Marxist Oliver! that emerges from the assignment shows readers the theoretical possibilities of the classroom, of the production, and of the profession of theatre.

A few chapters stand out for their emphasis on the heightened political and artistic stakes of critical performance theory. Angela K. Ahlgren's chapter wonderfully explicates practical considerations of pedagogical labor nested in a larger argument about teaching "theory over time" in survey courses (38). Jen Plants reminds us that "Theory expands or limits possibilities, impacts what we see and how we see it, frames distinctions in praxis, and opens gateways to clarify values. How...