Abstract: 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.

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 works 4

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.

Performing Disability in Medieval and Early Modern Britain By Mark C. Chambers. Early Social Performance. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2024; pp. ix + 200, 5 illustrations. 136 e-book. - Volume 66 Issue 2

One of the world's most enduring and successful cultural diplomacy organizations, the British Council (BC) has played a prominent role in promoting and exporting British theatre, literature, and language across the globe since its founding in 1934. A key component of the BC's self-proclaimed remit of “forging links between Britain and other countries through cultural exchange,” the organization's Drama Division has over its lifetime worked to sponsor and facilitate the overseas touring of a significant number of British theatrical enterprises, exporting both large-scale national company productions with substantial casts and a repertoire of shows, as well as individual actors, directors, and academics embarking on speaking tours. From the stage, renowned actors and star names such as Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Vivien Leigh, Peggy Ashcroft, and John Gielgud were routinely chosen by the BC to appear in series of “theatrical manifestations,” serving in dual capacities both as actors in productions and ambassadors for a nation—the word “manifestation” being the BC's own preferred terminology used to refer to the export of a cultural event during the middle of the past century. Yet unlike comparable accounts of the relationship between the Arts Council and theatre, we possess no systematic study of the BC's involvement in this field, meaning that fundamental questions about the nature, range, and impact of the BC's cultural activity remain unanswered. Indeed, until comparatively recently, the history of the BC has failed to generate much scholarly interest at all, but the nature of its imbrication within British theatrical culture in particular remains severely occluded.