Devising Our Future

Regina Victor paints a picture of a future for the theatre industry with cultural strategy at the center.

Taylor Leigh Lamb and Sabine Decatur share emails, letters, social media posts, and more from the future that represent the period of profound change in the theatre industry beginning in 2021.

Charlie Peters asks, “What if the role of a director was conceived primarily as one of listening rather than visioning?”

In this entry of Devising Our Future, Aly Perry asks, “How might we position and design theatre as an essential space for healing, pleasure, and connection through an intertwining and interdependent realm of the senses?

Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen shares how new story bundles can “disrupt the noise of colonialism” through what she calls protocols of theatrical Indigeneity.

Dane Figueroa Edidi muses on how imagination provides the power to conjure an equitable theatre.

Carra Martinez, with thoughts from Justin Favela, Ty Defoe, Ron Berry, and Leyya Tawi, writes about how the future is a structurally minded labor of the everyday.

Matthew Glassman shares his commonplace—a collection of quotes, poems, reflections, dreams, doodles, images, and more, and a portal to reach forward to our future selves and for our future selves to reach back to us.

Mike Lew and Rehana Lew Mirza sit down to discuss how COVID has forced a breakup between artists and theatres and what it will take to get back together again.

Vera Starbard wonders if the time of the American theatre has come to an end and imagines the future of the performing arts looking a lot like it did in the past, pre-colonization.

Mihaela Drăgan introduces digital supratheatre—a theatre of the future with two underlying principles: technological change and social change.

Melisa Pereyra writes to students of the American theatre from the future, sharing what the field looks like years down the road.

Zenkő Bogdán believes public cultural institutions should be redefined from the perspective of the people around it: it’s artists, employees, and audiences. As an exercise, she has begun to reimagine a future public theatre’s rules of organizing and functioning—and wants each and every reader of the document to participate.

JD Stokely and Nkenna Akunna speculate about what a Black queer future looks like, speaking to sleep and rest, spirit, cyclical time, and more.

Mary Kathryn Nagle predicts four main ways the American theatre will devise a future where theatrical storytelling does not directly contribute to white supremacy.

Georgina HL Escobar believes the impossible can be written into existence and shares that the power of imagination is the first step towards active realization.

Marta Keil and Grzegorz Reske share letters from the past and the future, from June 2020 to June 2029, detailing the changes to the theatrical landscape in their hometown of Warsaw, Poland.

Daniel Alexander Jones shares his prayer of late for whatever is next in “theatre.”

Deborah Cullinan reflects on the path that enabled us to arrive in a future of shared resources and collective power.

Annalisa Dias and Ronee Penoi, on behalf of Groundwater Arts, argue that there cannot be a just arts sector within an unjust world, and that contrary to what people think, arts workers do have the means and the agency to make change. What is needed is a new narrative.

In envisioning of the future, Jared Mezzocchi begins by questioning: “What if theatre’s identity is not lost in the digital, but instead is enhanced in it?”

Nia Farrell shares her vision of the future—one that exists now, on this very Earth, and that begins with the declaration: “I am adamant that Blk people exist in the future.”

Jamie Gahlon, HowlRound’s director, kicks off the Devising Our Future series by reflecting on the necessity of working together now to co-envision and co-create the future we need for the theatre field.