Editor's Note
By Jim O'Quinn
Dancers talking? Well, why shouldn't they? That was was the consensus of opinion among those of us watching New York City's burgeoning postmodern dance scene in the late 1970s and the '80s. We'd go to shows by David Gordon, Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs or Yoshiko Chuma and nobody would blink an eye when the dancers spoke as they moved: Words were just another performance element, another expressive tool, at the inventive choreographer's disposal.
Some 30 years later, the postmodern revolution is part of dance history—and its liberating, boundary-breaching innovations have taken their place in the creative arsenal of today's choreographers. The use of language is, of course, the one such innovation that pushes dance most forcefully toward the realm of theatre—and that's the intersection, the mash-up of forms, that fascinates dance critic Rita Felciano in her richly detailed cover article "Talk to Me." Felciano's longtime beat, the San Francisco Bay Area, is the epicenter for a particular kind of contemporary dance-theatre experimentation—in her words, it's "a mecca for performance by choreographers who dance with words." And language, she demonstrates in bracing evocations of an array of new performances, is the postmodern wild card that intensifies the political, emotional and intellectual import of these artists' work.
Next up in this issue's feature well is another critic's survey—this time of critics themselves. New York-based writer David Cote casts his net north, south, east and west to capture a dozen fellow theatre writers who wield make-or-break influence on the American theatre scene—the kind of influence, he posits, that professional critics may not enjoy much longer. Cote's capsule visits with his counterparts in 12 U.S. theatre communities make for revealing reading—and you may want to supplement what you learn with a look back at "The Future of Criticism," a special section in the Feb. '08 issue of AT that showcases a different crew of writers and solicits the prognostications of such leading practitioners as Robert Brustein, Eric Bentley and Stanley Kauffmann.
Deeper in this issue, two more critics—Robert Avila and yours truly—offer firsthand reports from a major world-theatre community in crisis. Avila and I were part of a delegation invited, under the auspices of Philip Arnoult's Center for International Theatre Development, to visit Hungary earlier this year to gain an in-the-trenches view of the fight now being waged against a wave of political and social repression that is threatening that nation's artistic and intellectual life. Our twin reports will acquaint you with some theatrical heroes you may not have known before.
So listen up—to talking dancers, to regional critics' points of views, to voices from the frontlines of artistic resistance. From the steps of San Francisco's City Hall (on the cover), to theatre centers across the U.S., to the besieged stages of Budapest, the theatre has things to say.
—Jim O'Quinn