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In the high modernist quest for medium specificity, the theatre appeared the greatest of adversaries, shifting with protean ease as it welcomed all and sundry arts to its ever-expanding stage. So also has it incorporated all manner of new technologies, such that a screen onstage feels nearly as welcome today as a telephone or radio. Bearing this slippery ontology in mind, I would like to provisionally suggest that, among its many other applications, the theatre is itself a technology for imagining times to come, a means to theorize about our world as if it were another. This is the supposition guiding the following pages, a selection of texts derived from the book I am currently editing for publication with Routledge in 2017.
Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage brings together very short conceptual performances exploring what is possible and impossible in the theatre, as written by close to a hundred theorists and artists of the stage. Each writer offers a text that is one page in length, describing an event that may or may not be staged in some theatre of the future. These "imagined theatres" might seem illogical or fantastical; they might break the laws of physics or those of accepted behavior. Or perhaps they could be staged in some ideal architecture where the finances, conventions, ethics, or other practicalities of actual production do not hold sway. Each is a thought experiment about the expectations of the theatre, a parable or paradox that touches upon its nature, and elaborates on the many ways in which that nature might be conceived. Imagined Theatres gathers together what may initially seem impossible in order that its readers might interrogate where that impossibility lies, and what lies are obscured by calling it "impossible." (For is anything truly impossible in a theatre?)
A second single page of text faces each imagined theatre: a gloss written by the same author or another, outlining a critical context, history, or personal reflection, which models one of many possible responses to the hypothetical event. Discourse around the theatre usually presumes a binary that sets "practice/performance/art" on one side and "theory/criticism/scholarship" on the other. Imagined Theatres prefers to see a continuum in place of an opposition: an imagined theatre lies closer to the...