At the ATHE panel in Atlanta at which my former students—now colleagues and beloved friends—presented these remarks, the first thing I said to begin the discussion was that I was so glad I wasn't dead and that I could be present to hear these lovely, generous thoughts. What a pleasure, for a scholar, a teacher, an administrator, to be present to hear people she loves and has mentored testify to something lasting about her ideas and her work.
What endures, it seems to me, are these relationships. The "field," for me, was never an abstraction, never a line on a curriculum vitae or a summation presumed in a professional title. The field was (and is), rather, the network of interactions—both quotidian and profound—and the ongoing commitments the work required. The pleasure lay in the arc of time, in the collaborations, the conversations, witnessing one another's work on paper and on the stage and even at meetings. The pleasure lay in working to build something new and meaningful in theatre and performance studies through feminisms, queer studies, critical race theory, and other methodologies we borrowed and molded to suit our needs. We began the work in the interstices, pushing at institutional structures until they made real spaces for us. A field that once reluctantly accommodated us came to embrace us. And not through "revolution" (although sometimes it might have felt that way), but through love.
I continue to believe in it all. I believe that activism is important both within an institution or a field as well as from its margins. I believe we need to shoulder the work of institution-building and coalition-forming as we create new ideas, new methods, new practices. I believe that "public theorizing"—a practice of mediating and translating for ever larger audiences—is requisite to our creative and intellectual work. I believe that a fierce commitment to the live co-presence of theatre and performance and teaching and administration (orchestrating a good meeting, after all, is like conducting a rehearsal) will temper the hollow, disembodied abstractions of online life. And most of all, I continue to believe that a rigorous enactment of respect for the deep analytic and emotional pleasure of what we do models a path toward hope for us all.
How to maintain hope in the face now not just of terror, but of censorship, political intimidation, silencing, constraining resources, and all the other looming threats to our field and ourselves? I still worry that conundrum. But over these many years in our field, I've found my faith in the exercise of possibility, in the "as if" not just of theatre practice, but of critical thinking with an eye toward social justice. I've filled my atheist and agnostic cultural Judaism with the profoundly spiritual and hopeful practices of theatre and performance, which allow audiences and performers, critics and artists, theorists and practitioners to commune, to share breath, to share potential, to share those fleeting moments of empathy, love, and indeed hope.
Here's to more. More empathy, more love, more hope, inspired by the incisive, caring, urgent theorized practices—artistic, pedagogical, administrative, activist—of students-turned-colleagues and beloved chosen family. Here's to more writing, in our authentic, honed, crafted and craft-conscious voices, so that we can call out to one another, shore each other up, and push ourselves forward to new moments of joy, possibility, and the active utopias of pleasure in performance.