To consider Jill Dolan's body of scholarship in relationship to the word "criticism" is to reckon with a classic iteration of the "is/as" of performance studies. As both scholar and critic, Jill has thoughtfully assessed criticism's always evolving definitions and functions and modeled how to write criticism in a manner both generous and precise.
Reviewing Jill's body of criticism is no small task. In her eight books—not to mention the introductions, afterwords, and coediting she has offered to others' books—her many articles, and her blog, The Feminist Spectator, Jill writes about performances that range from Broadway to DIY feminist and queer collectives, and, more recently, from stage to screen. Across these sites and platforms, Jill examines questions of representation and engagement, always with a tone both caring and careful. The breadth is impressive. But what is most impressive is her persistent insistence, across all her writing, that theatre can intervene in even the darkest moments. Whether it be the cruelties of the Reagan years or the chaotic brutalities of the post-2016 US, Jill resolutely maintains an openness to what performance, performers, and criticism might contribute to the creation of a more just society.
Jill's writing makes her case for why theatre matters by always supplying details of and perspectives on performance that invite hope. Hers, however, is no superficial plea for the relevance of performance. Instead, Jill's body of criticism is a study in how those denigrated and marginalized—particularly women, particularly queer people, and oh so particularly lesbians—invent powerful, alternative ways to be together. Whether it comes in her early encounters with the work of performance artists like Carmelita Tropicana and Holly Hughes or in her writing about television and film, Jill's criticism gives us much-needed proof that feminist, queer, and lesbian life is not only imaginable, but that those imaginings are powerful enough to wedge space for us into even the most difficult times.
What is it exactly that gives Jill's critical writing such power? One answer comes in the almost absurd degree of clarity in her prose. Her sentences are always so clear. They're never longer than they need to be—a feat many an academic could learn from. And her attunement to what people actually do onstage lets active voice reign. This lively, accessible prose demonstrates that she cares for her readers, neither assuming knowledge nor condescending to us. A second before a question can fully form about what a word means or who someone is, the brief definition or overview appears. Who else could summarize Mulvey's "scopophilia" in a four-word parenthetical? ("Pleasure derived from looking," if you were wondering.1) In 2011, when Jill was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism from Cornell University, the citation described her writing as prose that moves "graciously [and] compellingly."2 This pairing captures Jill's layered skill in both attending to her readers and pushing us toward new ideas. Her criticism manages to look into complex theatrical worlds, both onstage and off, and to assume a stance that is always sympathetic, but never sycophantic, toward artists or readers.
Perhaps what is most illuminating in Jill's writing—particularly for those of us working within the worlds of performance, theatre, and dance—is her commitment to the fact that the audience matters. Reading Jill is a such a gift to those of us whose favorite place in the theatre is in a seat, in the dark, gazing and loving and getting mad at performance from the position of the spectator. That's not always a spot that our fields, especially our academic departments, have sufficiently valued. Yet in reading Jill's performance criticism, we learn again and again all that can be gained from being one who watches. Jill's critical perspective emerges from the collision that produces representation, the moment when the performance meets its audience.3 With a warm self-consciousness, she writes of the magic in the communal agreement that an audience makes to show up and be together with sometimes strangers and sometimes friends—and the pleasurably confusing alchemy that is produced as that audience, as Gertrude Stein characterizes, catches up to the worlds unfolding before, for, and with them.4 In writing about these charged illuminations produced at the site of performance, Jill's criticism becomes a step toward imagining—as she describes it—"what theatre and performance might mean, what it might do, how it might be used in a world that requires ever more and better conversations about how we can imagine who we are and who we might be."5 Thank you, Jill, for always reminding us of the many "might(s)" of criticism.
Footnotes
1. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1991; University of Michigan Press, 2012), 92.
2. "George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism," Cornell University, https://english.cornell.edu/georgejean-nathan-award-dramatic-criticism.
3. Dolan, Feminist Spectator, 122.
4. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2005), 3; Gertrude Stein, "Plays," in Lectures in America (1935; Beacon Press, 1985), 93.
5. Dolan, Feminist Spectator, xxxvii.