In this section, dive into conversations focused on beauty, taste, and the artistic choices made while creating performance. Check out Brendan McCall’s Beyond Ibsen series, which features contemporary Norwegian theatremakers, and Jonathan Mandell’s essay “Pandemic Theatre Aesthetic,” which discusses the immediate artistic responses of theatremakers in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
The Latest
Essay
Shanty Theatre Takes on the Ijele Masquerade Performance
by Eseovwe Emakunu, Angela Okolo
11 June 2025
Essay
On Becoming Bird
by Evan Silver
25 April 2025
Essay
Pleasurable and Perilous Rebellions in ProyectoTEATRO’s Cabarex 2: RevoLUZiones
The team at Shanty Theatre dove deep into Igbo mask and masquerade traditions to stage the largest of them all: the Ijele Masquerade. Angelea Okolo and Eseovwe Emakunu detail the research and creative process they used to bring the masquerade to Benin City, Nigeria.
Evan Silver aka Tiresias details their inspirations and intentions for cryptochrome, a sonic odyssey and ritual meditation that invites audiences to imagine themselves in the sensory worlds of other living things.
In ProyectoTEATRO’s Cabarex 2: RevoLUZiones, history is funnier, sexier, and messier than a textbook ever could be. Khristián Méndez Aguirre writes about the production’s queer, devised cabaret take on Latinx culture and history.
Bringing Together Practicing Festival Artists with Scholars to Consider the Intersection of Puppetry with Other Disciplines and Ideas
Saturday 18 January to Sunday 26 January
Chicago, IL
The 2025 Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium series at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival explores the dramaturgical elements that distinguish puppet theatre and actively engage audiences in endowing material with life.
The premise of the immensely popular solo show ha ha ha ha ha ha ha is simple: Julia Masli will seriously solve the audience’s problems through comedy. Melissa Lin Sturges discusses the production’s roots in Masli’s clowning background and the collectivist, interventionist energy the production engenders in its audience.
Wrestling With Theatrical Forms, Themes, and Conventions
Thursday 31 October through Saturday 2 November 2024
Los Angeles, California
The LTC will be partnering with the Latino Theatre Company to bring the current LTC Steering and Advisory Committee, our partners, and community members together to dialogue with artists brought in from across the country.
Lebanese multidisciplinary artist Khansa shares his artistic journey, blending traditional Middle Eastern music with modern avant-pop, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at his creative process. This episode delves deep into the power of art as a medium for cultural fusion and storytelling.
Translation lives in the slippery area between texts, people, cultures, languages, and sources. In this conversation, Jean Graham-Jones and Caridad Svich engage with expansive understandings of translation and adaptation and apply those ideas to their own myriad translation projects.
Through experimental dramaturgy that privileged sound over visuals, Neo Muyanga created the Visual Radio Plays project at the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, South Africa. In this essay, Tonderai Chiyindiko explores the histories, theories, and personal connections that inspired the project.
In Plexus Polaire’s Moby Dick, the line between the performers and the puppets they control sometimes blurs. Lucy Haskell explores the way that the shifting animacy of humans and objects on stage disrupts the audience’s expectations of where life resides.
Hosts Marina Johnson and Nabra Nelson discuss Ottoman theatre, emphasizing its significance in global theatre history. They highlight the Ottoman Empire as a pivotal point of cultural exchange comparable to the Greek and Roman empires. They focus on three major forms of traditional theatre—Ortaoyunu, Karagöz, and Meddah—and dive into these forms of “plays performed in the open,” shadow theatre, and storytelling.
In Between Two Knees, the 1491s use comedy to destabilize rigid ideas of history. Sebastián Eddowes Vargas discusses the Perelman Performing Arts Center production, highlighting the narrative and political potency of laughing in the face of trauma.
How might neurodivergent adults like to experience theatre? Taking this question as his starting point, Rob Onorato explores an approach to performance that embraces elements of neurodivergence as catalysts for formal innovation.
Hosts Leticia Ridley and Jordan Ealey dig into the dramaturgies and theories of Suzan-Lori Parks and discuss Canadian Stage’s production of Parks’s Topdog/Underdog.
Carl(os) Roa and Rula(s) A. Muñoz share a multi-vocal, non-linear account of their group’s work at the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) Designer and Director Colaboratorio. Through both text and images, they document their group’s explorations of non-hierarchical generative process, as well as the challenges they faced.
This episode will discuss the age old questions of what is Black theatre? What is a Black play? How do you know one when you see it? Leticia Ridley and Jordan Ealey provide an overview of the some of the most popular commentary on this question from Black theatre theorists of the past such as W.E.B Dubois, Alain Locke, and Alice Childress.
Austin’s pop princess, p1nkstar, shares the story of her evolution from performance artist creating a pop star persona for Instagram to real life pop star to community leader creating spaces for fellow trans artists to showcase their work in Texas. This episode also features guest co-host Melissa Lin Sturges, coordinator of the annual Doric Wilson Panel for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) LGBTQ+ Focus Group.
Through a combination of testimony and reenactment, Milo Rau’s Hate Radio stages a broadcast from a notorious media operation that spread racist propaganda during the Rwandan genocide. Joseph Dunne-Howrie discusses the way that Rau’s work, when produced in 2023, reveals a contemporary parallel in the rightwing radicalization that is facilitated by networks like Fox News and GB News.
Host Nicolas Shannon Savard, Dr. H. May, and Dr. Liz Thomson discuss the creative and collaborative possibilities that emerge when audio description (AD) is made an integral part of the artistic process, as opposed to solely an accommodation for individual audience members. They critique traditional models of AD that demand objectivity and propose alternative approaches that embrace self-determination, specificity of lived experience, and universal design.
Playwright Raul Garza discusses the potent connections between environment and Latinx heritage that he explores by employing magical realism in his play Arbolito.
Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas and Erin A. Cowling continue their interview with Octavio Solis, focusing primarily on the development of his most recent adaptation from Spanish Baroque literature: Quixote Nuevo.
Playwright Octavio Solis reinvents early modern Spanish theatre in several of his plays, often instilling these classics with a Texano perspective. Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas and Erin A. Cowling interview Solis about his adaptation process and the way that growing up on the Mexico-United States border has shaped his work.
The 2022 national tour of Oklahoma! brought Daniel Fish’s critically acclaimed revival to commercial theatre audiences nationwide. Those audiences met the production with overwhelming disapproval and animosity rooted in its departures from decades-old conventions. Actor Christopher Bannow, who played Jud in the touring production, details his experience of enduring audience rejection while remaining committed to engaging audiences in challenging conversations through risky theatrical choices.
Joseph Dunne-Howrie examines the way that three of Javaad Alipoor’s plays infuse the internet into theatrical performance, creating intersecting narratives that interrogate identity formation in the age of global interconnectivity.
The Divine Comedy Theatre Festival in Kraków, Poland explored the theme of “Polish Taboo” across its thirty-two productions this year. Howard Shalwitz, who attended the festival as part of an American delegation of artists building connections between the United States and Poland, shares his experience attending the festival.
