Recent Essays

Amanda L. Andrei uses an understanding of hapa identity to explore the liminal and voluminous identities at play in David Johann Kim’s Pang Spa—both onstage and off.

After experiencing how collectively reckoning with traumatic queer theatre history can also be joyful in his classroom, professor John Michael DiResta led a series of readings of queer period plays from the last half-century. He reflects on the way this process led to community building and healing beyond his expectations.

The partnership between Twin Cities Theatres of Color Coalition (TCTOCC) and the Racial Equity Funders Collaborative (REFC) has become a groundbreaking model in sustainable, socially engaged relationships between theatres and funders. In part two of this two-part essay, kt shorb offers up experiences from the partnership as best practices that other initiatives tackling issues around race and equity might learn from. 

The partnership between Twin Cities Theatres of Color Coalition (TCTOCC) and the Racial Equity Funders Collaborative (REFC) has become a groundbreaking model in sustainable, socially engaged relationships between theatres and funders. In part one of this two-part essay, kt shorb traces the formation of both groups and the TCTOCC-REFC super-coalition.

UP UNTIL NOW: midair for some time used film, sensory storytelling, American Sign Language dance theatre, and music performance to create an inclusive new world. Carmen! shares what it was like to be enveloped into this theatrical experience.

Teaching commedia dell’arte to theatre students can be a powerful way for them to gain useful skills. But it can also cause great harm. In this essay, Tara Cariaso explains the potential harms inherent to the form, and the need to reimagine commedia to create stories centered on joy, justice, and liberation.

Translator and playwright Amanda L. Andrei offers a beginner’s guide to translation for theatre, with tips on everything from securing translation rights to finding the right community to support your work.

Theatrical translation demands cross-cultural collaboration. Henning Bochert traces these collaborative vectors by illuminating the scope and funding structures of a number of projects, reaching from German theatres to European Union cultural initiatives and beyond.

A decade ago, translators dreamt of a formalized network for the promotion of theatrical translation in the United States. Neil Blackadder and Adam Versényi write about the ways this effort now feeds into a variety of development and production strategies for works in translation.

Translation lives in the slippery area between texts, people, cultures, languages, and sources. In this conversation, Jean Graham-Jones and Caridad Svich engage with expansive understandings of translation and adaptation and apply those ideas to their own myriad translation projects.