In fall 1970, Njoki McElroy taught the first university-level “Interpretation of Black Drama” course in the United States, which she designed and offered as a graduate student earning her doctorate in the Department of Interpretation at Northwestern University (NU). Her course curricularized epistemic commitments and selections from the Black Arts Movement (BAM) repertoire, bringing its theoretico-aesthetic project and its plays to a unit that was trying to reimagine itself beyond performance conventions resembling those of nineteenth-century platform reading and a pernicious lacuna in its analytical infrastructure. By braiding BAM commitments and texts together with the practices and purposes of oral interpretation in her teaching, McElroy expanded the “intellectual geographies”1 of the former to include the classroom and the intellectual genealogies of the latter into what would ultimately become performance studies.

The East German protest singer, dramatist, and coal miner Gerhard Gundermann came to international attention in 2018 with the release of Andreas Dresen’s film Gundermann. This coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the artist’s premature death in 1998. While the film concentrates on Gundermann’s personal life, his complex relationship with the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) hierarchy in the coal mine, and his controversial entanglement with the Stasi secret police, it glosses over his work as a singer-songwriter and playwright. It says nothing about the numerous productions he wrote and performed with the Liedertheater (song-theatre) group Brigade Feuerstein between 1978 and 1988, nor the extent to which he himself was an object of Stasi persecution.1 Their quite distinctive form of agitprop theatre has been virtually ignored in academia.2 While never published, the written manuscripts and audio recordings of shows such as Geschichten aus dem Koraktor [Tales from the Koraktor], Das große Match [The big match], Eine Sehfahrt, die ist lustig [A sightseeing trip that is fun], Lebensläufe [Paths of life], and Erinnerung an die Zukunft3 [Remembering the future] were collected and stored in the archives of the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin, where they are still available for consultation.4 This article assesses these productions in terms of their use of fairy tales and parables to voice political criticism of dominant SED practice. It observes how, in a climate of censorship, these parables became increasingly direct in their criticism, as Gundermann’s stance gradually changed from that of a loyal singing club member in 1976 to one of a vociferous political critic. Using interviews and Stasi reports, it presents the story of Brigade Feuerstein as an example of the tenacity, cunning, and networking necessary for critical artists to survive in East Germany (i.e., German Democratic Republic [GDR]).

It is well known that Bertolt Brecht’s concept of Verfremdungseffekt was first used in his famous essay on Chinese theatre, “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst” [Alienation/estrangement effects in the Chinese art of acting]. Brecht’s essay was completed in 1936 but was not published in German until 1957, one year after his death.1 It became the text basis of John Willett’s English translation published in 1964.2 Nevertheless, in the winter of 1936, an English translation by Eric Walter White of Brecht’s essay was published in the London-based journal Life and Letters To-day.3 White’s translation differs significantly from Willett’s, indicating that White’s and Willett’s translations were based on two different German texts. Although the German text that provided the basis of Willett’s translation, with the difference of a few negligible editorial corrections, has been reprinted (as I discuss below) in different editions of Brecht’s works, the German text for White’s translation has hitherto never been found and published, even as White’s 1936 translation has been reprinted in the now standard Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe of Brecht’s works4

At the end of the musical Fun Home (2015), Alison Bechdel urges her girl-self to keep challenging her father’s gendered expectations, and to take the road not taken, out of the closet and beyond her parents’ lives. She has the musical’s final word, recalling “a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.”1 At the end of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (2014), Carole also soars, to the heights of the music industry as she looks out at her Carnegie Hall audience of 1971 before the failed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. King is solo, center stage at the piano, in her concert debut, and at Carnegie Hall, no less, singing “Beautiful.” This image of an actual American woman, thriving and succeeding, urging her audience to think positively and define themselves from the inside out, is unprecedented. Her twenty-first-century audience sits on the verge of both ovating her success and raising their voices to feel the empowerment of her songs, just as Alison’s audience felt the power of her soaring.

The Jungle Book (1894) is a nineteenth-century book of children’s fables written by Rudyard Kipling. While the story is often criticized for its colonial overtures,1 this wolf story, as an antithesis to the modern separation of nature and humanity, introduces a romantic view of nature where it is represented as a source of renewal and wholeness. The fiction imagines an amicable relation between humans and other-than-human beings through the myth of child-raising wolves. In the face of worsening climate crisis, the wolf tale in Akram Khan’s Jungle Book Reimagined (2022) takes a step further and expresses contemporary fears of human extinction and environmental deterioration. Jungle Book Reimagined, a dance production that premiered at Curve Theatre in Leicester in 2022, has since been performed at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Théâtre du Châtelet, and multiple other theatres worldwide, and was also presented as a five-minute film at the Edinburgh International Culture Summit in 2022. The emancipatory life in the Anthropocene that the colonial fantasy envisages is adapted in Khan’s ecological makeover as a new mode of theatre situated within the broader narrative of the Anthropocene. Khan takes an ecocritical turn and reimagines Mowgli’s journey in a way that engages with Anthropocene thinking, imagining how the apocalyptic vision of the future of humanity would be different if we were more of a listener to the nonhuman world.

In 1987, LeAnn Fields acquired Lynda Hart‘s Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. By the time Fields retired in 2024, she had built a list of more than 280 books in the field of theatre and performance studies at the University of Michigan Press. Hart’s Making a Spectacle is a foundational and still radical book of critical essays on gender, the body, and spectatorship, topics that continue to chart and reverberate among the many intellectual commitments of our field. Like nearly all the books that Fields acquired for University of Michigan Press, Making a Spectacle drew from and responded to another interdisciplinary field of study, women’s studies, as it simultaneously broke new ground in theatre and performance studies. In this special section, thirteen authors discuss the ways in which Fields encouraged the development of their work and our field. These author accounts are followed by an interview with Fields by Jill Dolan, in which Fields describes how her work as an acquisitions editor began and how it changed, how she navigated the press boards and changes in technology and staffing, and how, from her perspective, our field fosters a unique sense of community. The author accounts and interview offer an invaluable collection of personal histories that trace the development of our field over the past four decades to our vibrant present.