In the 1915 novel Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagined a utopian society, populated only by women, that has been flourishing in the absence of men for more than two thousand years. When Gilman's narrator—one of three male explorers to “discover” this much-mythologized wonderland—discusses gender distinctions with the Herlanders, he quickly learns that these utopians have long shed any consciousness of what a society with two genders would entail. “And there are two of you—the two sexes—to love and help one another,” a Herlander exclaims, in one of the novel's many ironic flourishes. “It must be a rich and wonderful world.”

In a 1950 letter, choreographer Katherine Dunham mentions trouble keeping dancers with her troupe “[i]n spite of the fact that we are the only non-subsidized professional group that has remained self-supporting over these years, and in spite of the fact that we are loved and respected all over the world and work more weeks out of the year than any other dance group in existence.” Although some of these claims would be challenging to validate empirically, Dunham is not exaggerating when she describes the amount of work it took for her and her dancers to keep going without the benefit of public funding or an enduring private patron. This essay is part of a larger critical mixed methods project on historical dance touring and transmission: Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. We turn here to the scale of the “everyday,” beginning by building a daily itinerary of Dunham's travels so as to understand better the global method necessary for her company's survival, and how the ongoing pursuit of solvency propelled her, her performers, and her work into the world.

The story of South Asian colonial modernity and music offers up a multidirectional and polymorphous conceptual terrain featuring, among many agents, Hindustani royalty, touring minstrel and burlesque troupes, Jesuit missionaries and orientalists, and not least, social reformists. Nevertheless, scholarship on the history of Hindustani music consistently traces its development through classicization against the rise of Hindu nationalism while overlooking other palpable clues in the colonial past. This article argues for a substantial reevaluation of colonial South Asian music by positing an alternative and hitherto invisible auditory stimulus in colonial Asia's aural landscape: opera. Janaki Bakhle contends that “as a musical form, opera put down even fewer roots than did orchestral, instrumental Western classical music,” even though she subsequently states that “Western orchestration did become part of modern ceremonial activities, and it moved into film music even as it was played by ersatz marching bands.” Bakhle further argues that Hindustani music underwent processes of sanitization and systematization within a Hindu nation-making project, a view that has been complicated by historians such as Tejaswini Niranjana. Niranjana describes how scholarship that focuses exclusively on the codification or nationalization of Hindustani music through the interpellation of a Hindu public neglects “sedimented forms of musical persistence.” Not dissimilarly, Richard David Williams highlights how the singular emphasis on the movement of Hindustani music reform risks reducing the heterogeneous and complex musicological traditions in the colonial period to the output of a single, monolithic, middle-class “new elite.” Previous scholarship, he argues, concentrates on “one player in a larger ‘economy’ of musical consumption.” Following these calls for more textured perspectives on South Asian musical cultures, I suggest a somewhat heretical thesis: that opera functioned as a common mediating stimulus for both the colonial reinscription of Hindustani music as classical as well as the emergence of popular pan-Asian musical genres such as “Bollywood” music.

In her 1979 touchstone address, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” Audre Lorde makes it clear that the only feminism that matters is one that includes and even centers the voices of “poor women, black and third-world women, and lesbians.” She argues that this type of representation is not a mere academic exercise, but a means of survival for women within these groups. Speaking at the Second Sex Conference in New York, Lorde also laments the lack of attention paid to the ways women can and should embrace their differences while still relying on a solidarity that she sees as foundational to creativity and liberation. Women of color have always borne the greatest share of domestic and physical labor in the United States, and thus creating this solidarity is a challenge; when workers are spread far and wide, scared of management, and just living month to month, it can be difficult to organize and unite them. In the 1970s, the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) took on this challenge, seeking to organize women of color economically, culturally, and politically, embodying Lorde's charge in the decade prior to her speech. One of the key methods of organizing by the TWWA was a series of original skits, many of which were performed during celebrations of International Women's Day (IWD, 8 March).

In 1951, Victoria (1922–2014) and Nicomedes Santa Cruz (1925–92) attended a performance at Lima's Teatro Municipal (Municipal Theatre) by the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. Dunham (1909–2006), an African American choreographer and anthropologist, pioneered a “research-to-performance” method to study African-derived dances in the Caribbean and stage them in stylized choreographies. Elite Lima patrons walked out of the theatre during the danced African fertility rite in Dunham's “Rites de Passage,” but the performance left a lasting impression on the Santa Cruzes. Nicomedes Santa Cruz later described the event as the first positive staged demonstration of blackness in Peru—and Victoria Santa Cruz stated that, when they saw Katherine Dunham's production, they knew they had to do something similar. The Santa Cruzes went on to lead a revival of Afro-Peruvian arts in the 1960s and 1970s.

Almost as soon as Paris was liberated from Nazi Occupation on 25 August 1944, Yiddish actors took back the stages on which they had once performed. In fact, on 20 December 1944, while war and the Holocaust still raged, a small cohort of actors produced what they advertised in the Naye prese as the “first grand performance by the ‘Yiddish folks-bine.’” This performance was to take place at the four-hundred-seat Théâtre Lancry, a performance space located in Paris's 10th arrondissement, not far from the Place de la République and the Marais. “Lancry,” as it was known, had played host to Yiddish theatre as early as 1903 and, during the interwar years, it was the center of Parisian Yiddish cultural activity: dozens of theatre performances occurred there and it was where the Kultur-lige pariz was based, among other institutions. During the postwar years, it also went by the name Théâtre de la République after 1947 and Théâtre du Nouveau-Lancry after 1951, but many still referred to it simply as “Lancry.”

What does it mean to perform presence or selfhood? What conditions necessitate these performances? In the opening epigraph, RCB articulates an instance when transparency was mapped onto his body—a moment in which he was simultaneously invisible as an individual and hypervisible as the projections of stereotypes surrounding homelessness and blackness collided on his body, rendering his history, present, and future as instantly knowable. During the election cycles of 2010, 2012, and 2014, KevinMichael Key, a prominent, formerly homeless Skid Row activist, community organizer, and member of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), ran for a position on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC). As part of his campaigns, Key sought to help homeless residents of Skid Row exercise their right to vote. One instantiation of this objective involved tabling in the neighborhood. In a show of support, RCB lined up to vote and subsequently encountered the tabler. “And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any ID. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible.” As understood by RCB, the tabler did not expect homeless individuals to possess government-issued identification. Instead of acknowledging RCB's individuality and subjectivity, the tabler assumed that RCB's status as homeless meant not having state ID, an official marker of occupancy in a state-recognized residence. In this interaction, RCB's political subjectivity was under erasure, invisible. For RCB, in this confrontation, homelessness marked him as a knowable (non)subject—a generic homeless man.

Writing in 1853, Gábor Egressy, one of the leading actor-directors of the Hungarian-speaking National Theatre in Pest-Buda (Budapest), observed that representatives of different nations were appearing in increasing number on and off the stages of the major cities of Eastern Europe:

Egressy shared this observation with readers when the black, British-American actor Ira Aldridge visited the National Theatre in 1853. Aldridge and his English company received a warm welcome from Hungarian audiences and leading intellectuals. At the same time, however, he was under surveillance by the Habsburg secret police, and was later politely asked to leave the city. In my article, I investigate Aldridge's visit to Pest-Buda using the concepts of surrogation (Joseph Roach) and mediatization (Christopher B. Balme), and pay close attention to the way the actor's contemporaries interpreted his visit.

How much is a theatrical design idea worth? Alternatively, how much should a professional theatre designer be paid? For many working today, standard minimum contract scales and “industry standards” help guide fee negotiations. In the United States, United Scenic Artists (USA) Local 829 was among the first bodies to align theatrical design with organized labor activism, and as such, its standard minimum contract for design is an object lesson in the value of artistic labor. These scales were developed nearly a century ago, and were the product of hard negotiation and legal action taken by US-American designers in the interwar period. Lee Simonson and Jo Mielziner are best remembered for their revolutionary use of space, scenery, and lighting, yet their professional advocacy within USA Local 829 provided the basis for today's standard design fees. Further, their defense of fair payment during the Depression and war years preserved scenic design as a form of labor analogous to other backstage crafts and trades.

Although sectarian violence characterized life in Belfast for hundreds of years, 1864 marked a shift in how violence played out in the city. Unlike previous conflicts that occurred in open spaces and reflected long-held rural rituals, the riots of August 1864 took place in the city's rapidly developing urban streets. The violence broke out in response to celebrations around the foundation laying for a new statue of Daniel O'Connell, the late Catholic politician, in Dublin. Thousands of Belfast Catholics traveled to Dublin for the celebration. Upon their return to Belfast, ten thousand Protestant loyalists greeted them by burning an effigy of O'Connell on Boyne Bridge and staging a mock funeral and procession that attempted to enter a Catholic burial ground. The resulting violence and rioting continued for ten days on the city streets, where homes and businesses faced destruction on a scale previously unseen. Expelling residents of opposing views, rioters reinforced older ideas of “communal conflict” expressed through “disagreements over each group's place—literally and imaginatively—in the city” and strengthened notions of neighborhood geography based on religious beliefs. As historian Mark Doyle argues, the shifting patterns of violence resulted from “[t]he steady advance of working-class alienation from the state, the growing hegemony of violent extremists in working-class neighbourhoods, the sectarian alliance between Protestant workers and elites, the insecurity of the Catholics and, above all, the polarising effects of earlier outbreaks of violence.” Lasting reminders of conflict lingered as the city recovered, reminding anyone walking the streets of the city's violent past and the likely potential of future clashes.

In what follows I think through my participation in a 2010 workshop led by Anne Bean, recounted in part above, to understand better the role of play in the conditions of production for theatre and performance under capital. Bean is an interdisciplinary artist, belonging to (or claimed by) multiple experimental art scenes, including visual, performance, and sound art, who has been a central figure of European live art since the 1970s. The workshop, which was conducted largely in the dark and focused on the aestheticization of cooperation through an emphasis on its participants doing play was held at Artsadmin's Toynbee Studios, the influential UK arts producing organization's home in East London. This article puts my account of Bean's workshop in conversation with Victorian economist Arnold Toynbee's demand for a new capitalist morality. Toynbee's appeal was, of course, not directed at me or the other workshop participants disoriented and uncertain in the dark. But, I argue, the situation of play that arose in Bean's workshop is a contemporary iteration of what Toynbee called a gospel of life, a term referring to a commitment to self and civic betterment at the core of a burgeoning capitalist morality. The connection between the shaping of Victorian labor practices and the staging of cooperation between participants in Bean's contemporary workshop is the basis for this essay's core assertion: that the value of play as a counterpoint to work within practices and discourses of theatre and performance needs considerable rethinking.

On 29 January 1956, a new play by up-and-coming Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt had its world premiere at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. From the stage of the venerable playhouse, the young playwright's “tragic comedy,” Der Besuch der alten Dame (lit.: The Visit of the Old Lady—a title I shall employ to distinguish it from a well-known but much-changed English adaptation), presented the story of billionairess Claire Zachanassian's return to her impoverished hometown after forty years. During those intervening decades, she used a string of strategic marriages to amass considerable financial assets, but lost a hand and a leg in various transportation accidents. The people of Güllen, a rundown town whose claim to fame is that Goethe once spent the night there, start off the play finalizing their plans for a strategic grand reception at the train station: they have high hopes of convincing their prodigal daughter to save them from poverty and return them to their former glory. That daughter, however, has justice—not salvation—on her mind for the cruel town that exiled her as an unwed, pregnant teenager. After secretly using her fortune to buy and close each of the town's factories, Claire has returned. At a banquet held in her honor, she offers the bankrupt town “one billion” in exchange for the communal murder of Alfred Ill, beloved citizen and father and heir apparent to the mayorship. He also happens to be the high-school sweetheart who perjured himself to betray Claire and the child they conceived all those years ago.