A television documentary on speech therapy is visible on the screen. A logopedist (speech-defect expert) coaches a young man to overcome his stutter through hypnosis. “You will speak loudly and clearly, freely and easily, unafraid of your voice and your speech,” she instructs. The boy hesitates but finally musters the words: “I can speak.” Thus Andrei Tarkovsky begins Zerkalo [Mirror], his poetic film about personal memory and cultural trauma (conceived in 1964 and completed in 1974).3 The symbolism of this scene was impossible for Tarkovsky's Soviet intelligentsia audience to miss. The stutterer coming to speech allegorized the artist coming to free expression in Russia after Stalin, struggling to adapt to alternating intervals of liberating “thaw” and oppressive “freeze,” fluency and silence, in the period of de-Stalinization that Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Party Congress of 1956 set into motion. The crisis of the solo stutterer's speech in the film stood in for the larger emerging crisis of how to represent socialist reality, a world that once had been captured solely by socialist realism—that is, until Khrushchev deprived Stalinism of its status as real socialism and thus invalidated the basis of socialist realism.

Aside from hinting at the rift between the two directors that had become evident after their failed 1918 collaboration on Claudel's The Exchange, Tairov's criticism of Meyerhold's The Dawn reveals a widening gap in the two directors’ fundamental conceptions of the purpose of theatre in the wake of the Revolution. Meyerhold famously declared “October in the theatre” after becoming head of the Theatre Department of Narkompros (the Commissariat of Enlightenment) in the fall of 1920; he attempted to liquidate the Moscow state academic theatres, of which the Kamerny was one, and to require that all theatres stage revolutionary works using the radical methods of “cubism, futurism and suprematism.” Although Tairov had experimented with cubist designs, he had spent his immediate post-Revolutionary years defending theatre as an autonomous art form that should express universal truths rather than being a vehicle for topical content, declaring, “A propagandist theatre after a revolution is like mustard after a meal.”

As what follows is largely about the ghosting of antiquity, I begin at a broken grave.

When artist-inventor Samuel B. Morse alleged that the Bowery Theatre performance of French ballerina Madame Hutin was “to all intents and purposes the public exposure of a naked female,” he was expressing an opinion that conflicted with that of other critics, who felt that the performance of French dancers would “put to shame our splay-footed indigenous sprawlers, and will greatly refine the taste in dancing in the play-going public.” In Jacksonian American, citizens who were concerned with the direction of the nation's culture engaged in a debate about the respective merits of the less-polished art created in the New World and the more refined offerings of the Old World that was played out in critical reactions to an increasingly popular theatrical form: ballet. Ballet gradually became an important part of American theatre during the first half of the nineteenth century as dancers appeared on stages in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston in front of the same audiences that attended the dramatic plays whose productions have received the bulk of academic attention. Three waves of European dancers came to the Americas during the period 1790 to 1845. The first wave (1790–1825) consisted of small companies who presented dance to a broad range of audiences, typically before other plays or during entr'actes. This article focuses on performances that occurred during the second wave (1825–40), when impresarios recruited established (though not top-tier) European ballerinas to come to specific theatres. These dancers brought the repertoire and styles of the Romantic ballet to America, including evening-length performances with fairy-tale plots and an emphasis on charismatic female stars, such as La Sylphide. The first American ballerinas, Mary Ann Lee and Augusta Maywood, made their debuts during this period. The third wave (1840–5) consisted largely of “headliners” such as Fanny Elssler, who toured the country performing selections from their famous roles and pas with a corps de ballet recruited from each city they visited.

In the title essay from Choreographing History, Susan Leigh Foster interrogates the belief that the body serves as a site for dance to be enacted upon and through. She, along with several others in this edited volume, sought to reposition and consequently enhance the contribution of dancers' bodies by not limiting the essays within to observational accounts or choreographic reviews. Instead Foster and her colleagues query “the possibility of a body that is written upon but that also writes” as means of urging dance scholars to “move critical studies of the body in new directions.” I take this position as an entry point and use it to contemplate the process of making and writing about contemporary ballet history using Alonzo King LINES Ballet, a San Francisco–based troupe, as a case study. In this essay, I describe the challenges I and others have faced in our efforts to collect and interpret a visual and verbal archive for this dance troupe, which has been performing for more than a quarter of a century. This process highlights a larger issue for dance historians, namely, how to create a critically sensitive archive for a company when the most reliable (and oftentimes the only available) source is the personal memory of its choreographer. I anchor this analysis to the different models of critical writing about bodies offered by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, and Hayden White and suggest that companies such as LINES offer challenges to those engaged in the archival process and in the practice of writing history.

I am being haunted by a dance I saw more than a year ago. Ever since it was performed as part of the Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas conference at UCLA in November 2008, I have been reviewing it in my mind every few weeks. I am unsettled by its seeming simplicity and by the integrity and power that this simplicity conveys. Therefore I am writing not about a work I have just seen, but rather one I have been rewatching for several months. The dance, titled Woman and Water, was created and performed by Alutiiq artist Tanya Lukin Linklater. It premiered on 22 May at Visualeyez 2006, Canada's seventh annual festival of performance art, produced by Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture; the festival's theme was “Domesticity,” and it was curated by founder Todd Janes in Edmonton, Alberta. When she was invited to UCLA, Lukin Linklater inquired about the availability of water near the conference where the piece might be performed, and, upon seeing the site, determined to stage the work in the plaza in front of Royce Hall, which is adjacent to a large fountain. This is what I remember watching:

Editor's Note: Under Mike Sell's excellent editorship, the Critical Stages column in Theatre Survey was developed as a venue for representing current issues for subdisciplinary divisions within the broader field of theatre and performance studies. As the new editor for the column, I hope to build upon Sell's previous editorial work by shifting the form of these short essays in two ways: first, by spotlighting concerns that reach both inside the many corners of our field and outside into a range of broader “publics”; and second, by engaging multiple scholars and artists in “conversations” in order to provide plural perspectives on these concerns. For this first column of my editorship, Eng-Beng Lim, Lisa Duggan, and José Esteban Muñoz track several micro- and macromaneuverings of neoliberalism—from the classroom to the department to the “global university”—and consider how theatre and performance scholars might approach the political difficulties currently threatening the mission of higher education.