Jill Dolan has been my mentor since graduate school, teaching me not only about feminist theatre, but also about ways of moving through and being in the academy. Her generosity manifests in all of her relationships—with students, colleagues, administrators, and an international network of academic leaders. Even as she prepares for retirement, Jill continues to spearhead organizations committed to citizenship and sociocultural equity. The impact of her leadership has shifted the academy to include ever-more diverse scholars.
My contribution considers Jill's scholarship around the utopian performative. Her theoretical musings around utopia began to circulate with the publication of "Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative'" in Theatre Journal in 2001 and culminated with the publication of Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope in the Theater (University of Michigan Press) in 2005.1 As with most of Jill's scholarship, the project developed in conversation with multiple voices from the field of performance studies and beyond.
"Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative'" ruminates on how performance might provide us with experiences of utopia. Jill seeks to understand the emotional and spiritual reasons people attend theatre, relating it to the desire for change and transformation outside of the enclosed walls of the playhouse. She is hopeful that our profession can provide insights into a more equitable and just world. It is this spirit of possibility that has infused all of Jill's relationships throughout the course of her career. Jill leaves behind an army of artists and scholars who can point to her as a springboard for the amplification of their visions.
When "Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative'" was released in the aftermath of 9/11, Americans were confronting the vulnerability of our nation and the need for mutual understandings across ideological belief systems. Jill's insightful writings provoked theatre studies departments to reconsider their role in advocating for the inclusion of social activism and empathy as a core component of each department's educational practices. Jill's essay resonated within a nation undergoing transformation and offered a performative solution for those considering how to respond to the tragedy of 9/11 terrorism in progressive and activist ways. These lessons become even more relevant as today in 2025 we wonder how theatre studies in the academy can continue to be "a site of progressive social and cultural practice" in light of political and societal divisiveness.2
"Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative'" articulates Jill's interpretation of theatrical utopia, and it also demonstrates how Jill, through her processes of public theorizing, implicates herself in activism in collaboration with her students and colleagues. In the essay, she describes how she expanded on her class offerings by curating a season of performance artworks that recognize feminist artistry. The slate of performers included Holly Hughes, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin—"a femme/a butch/a jew."3 Even though her students registered to study performance studies, Jill ensured they were introduced to the discipline not only as a academic endeavor, but also with an understanding of the discipline's potential for activist transformation. This interweaving of theory with socially conscious practices is what makes Jill's contributions to the academy so impactful.
My personal engagement with scholarship about the utopian performative began when Jill invited me to contribute to her 2004 special issue of Modern Drama.4 This was Jill expanding her research by assembling a series of essays written by established and emerging scholars to investigate, through multiple lenses, core themes of her soon-tobe-published book about the utopian performative. At the time, I was unaware of the Theatre Journal publication and not sure how my personal experiences with the African American dance performance troupe Urban Bush Women might contribute to theoretical discussions about feminism and utopia.5 Today, in rereading "Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative,'" I can see how Jill's ideas drew her to the company's work. She writes: "This project is also about citizenship and subjectivity; it imagines how a commitment to theater and performance as transformational cultural practices might offer us consistent glimpses of utopia."6 Jill posits that some utopian performatives derive from communitas. Embedded in her concept of utopia is an affection for liveness, for living within the human experience of breath. Since communal breathing coupled with sensory kinesthetics was central to the work of the Urban Bush Women, it made sense for a description of this work to become a part of the Modern Drama volume on utopian performatives. I came to understand how the physical bonding within the company's ensemble created a temporary sense of utopia. Once again, Jill was able to guide me, as an emerging scholar, into a deeper recognition of the potential for feminist performance practice to contribute to scholarship within the academy.
In the years that followed the publication of Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope in the Theater, Jill continued to mentor my work and career, recommending membership in organizations whose missions aimed to advance diversity in the arts and humanities and suggesting pathways for career advancement, all in the hopes that the breadth of my experiences might augment an academy striving for inclusion. I remain deeply grateful for all that Jill Dolan has taught me—about scholarship, activism, and, above all, how to move through university structures with grace.
Footnotes
1. Jill Dolan, "Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative,'" Theatre Journal 53, no. 3 (2001): 455–79, https://doi-org.proxy.library.nd.edu/10.1353/tj.2001.0068; Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2005).
2. Dolan, "Performance," 456.
3. "Throws Like a Girl" poster, in Ibid., 463.
4. Jill Dolan, introduction to "Utopian Performatives," ed. Jill Dolan, special issue, Modern Drama 47, no. 2 (2004): 165–76, https://doi-org.proxy.library.nd.edu/10.3138/md.47.2.165.
5. Urban Bush Women is a Black woman's performance company founded in 1984 by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. I was a founding member of this ensemble and participated in the development of its early works.
6. Dolan, "Performance," 456.