• Editorial Comment: Informal Archives, Remediations, and Disciplinary Desires
• Laura Edmondson

The 75th anniversary issue of Theatre Journal is replete with pleasure, praise, critique, and desire. The journal’s invitation to think through the past, present, and future of the journal as articulated in the Call for Papers generated a robust response as demonstrated in the fourteen essays that appear in the print issue and six interviews published online.¹ These contributions oscillate between hopes for the journal and aspirations for the field as a whole—a slippage that speaks to the journal’s ability to shape and reflect its many publics over its seventy-five-year history. In these pages, I chronicle the tensions and debates that have played out in the journal since its founding, which sets the stage for imagining the iterations yet to come. I then draw on the rich contributions to this issue to theorize a framework of informal archives, remediations, and disciplinary desires. These concepts not only illuminate the specifics of this issue but also help to shed light on the tensions, turns, and hopes embedded in the field(s) of theatre, dance, and performance studies.

Across its many iterations and publics, editors have consistently commented on the capaciousness of the journal and its “free-wheeling eclecticism.”² As noted by both Sean Metzger and Isaiah Wooden in this issue, founder Barnard Hewitt expressed the hope in the 1949 inaugural issue of the journal, then called Educational Theatre Journal (hereafter ETJ), that it would be “of the greatest possible use to students, workers, and the teachers of educational theatre and drama in all aspects and at all levels.”³ In 1960, incoming ETJ editor Oscar G. Brockett limned this expansive mission with the explanation that the journal seeks to publish “in all aspects of theatre and drama (theatre history, dramatic literature, theory and criticism, acting, directing, all areas of design and production), and it is concerned with all levels of interest (university, community, secondary, children’s theatre).”⁴ This breadth translated into issues in which, to name one representative example from 1964, a discussion of Gordon Craig’s acting theory and an overview of contemporary state-subsidized Swedish theatre coexisted with essays that explored the potential of fiberglass for costume armor and Mixing [End Page xi] Latex Liquid as a paint base for scenery.⁵ Such articles accompanied a plethora of the American Educational Theatre Association (AETA) reports, lists of college and university productions, obituaries, and repeated requests that contributors follow MLA citation guidelines.⁶ In the late 1950s, editor James Clancy wrestled with the implications of these “multifarious” interests, noting that the journal, like Cambises, seems to be “bursting the very confines of definition.”⁷ These early iterations of capaciousness sought to bridge the scholarship/practice divide in university theatre departments, creating a forum in which practitioners as well as scholars would be invested in the present and future of the journal.

These early decades of the journal are seldom addressed in the enclosed anniversary essays; when ETJ does appear, it is usually in the vein of critique. Josephine Lee, for example, describes an article on Thai performance that appeared in a 1953 issue as “reinforc[ing] an imagined opposition between Western artistry and Eastern peculiarity assumed by generations of theatre scholars.”⁸ In a similar vein, Bethany Hughes (Choctaw) locates the first reference to Native Americans in a 1971 ETJ article on the Indian Medicine Show in which Indigenous presence itself is erased. ⁹ Even these fraught and deeply problematic attempts at a more expansive representation (the majority of which focused on Asian performance traditions) were paltry in comparison to countless explorations of historical and contemporary white male playwrights, theorists, and directors based primarily in the US and the UK.¹⁰

Of course, historical narratives are never seamless. Particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, authors and editors challenged what Sue-Ellen Case would later call “white Theatre Journal.”¹¹ In 1969, editor David Schaal articulated a critique of the discipline’s racism and provincialism, seeking to redress it with articles on Japanese theatre [End Page xii] and Black theatre.¹² In one of these articles, the legendary Black director, scholar, and...

• 社论评论：非正式档案、补救措施和纪律愿望
• 劳拉·埃德蒙森

《戏剧杂志》 75周年纪念号充满了喜悦、赞扬、批评和渴望。该期刊在征文中明确邀请人们思考该期刊的过去、现在和未来，这引起了强烈的反响，印刷版中出现的 14 篇论文和在线发表的 6 篇采访就证明了这一点。¹这些贡献在对期刊的希望和对整个领域的期望之间摇摆不定，这种偏差说明了该期刊在其七十五年的历史中塑造和反映众多公众的能力。在这些页面中，我记录了该杂志自创刊以来所出现的紧张局势和争论，这为想象未来的迭代奠定了基础。然后，我利用对此问题的丰富贡献，对非正式档案、补救措施和纪律愿望的框架进行理论化。这些概念不仅阐明了这个问题的具体情况，而且有助于阐明戏剧、舞蹈和表演研究领域中的紧张、转折和希望。

在其多次迭代和公开中，编辑们一直对该杂志的容量及其“随心所欲的折衷主义”发表评论。²正如肖恩·梅茨格 (Sean Metzger) 和以赛亚·伍登 (Isaiah Wooden) 在本期中指出的那样，创始人巴纳德·休伊特 (Barnard Hewitt) 在该杂志 1949 年的创刊号（当时称为《教育戏剧杂志》 （以下简称ETJ））中表达了希望，该杂志将“最大可能地用于各方面各层次教育戏剧的学生、工作者和教师。” ³ 1960 年，即将上任的《ETJ》编辑奥斯卡·G·布罗克特 (Oscar G. Brockett) 概述了这一广泛的使命，他解释说，该杂志力求出版“戏剧和戏剧的各个方面（戏剧历史、戏剧文学、理论和批评、表演、导演、戏剧的所有领域）”。设计和制作），并且涉及各个层次的兴趣（大学、社区、中学、儿童剧院）。” ⁴这种广度转化为以下问题：举 1964 年的一个代表性例子为例，对戈登·克雷格 (Gordon Craig) 表演理论的讨论和对当代国家补贴的瑞典剧院的概述与探讨玻璃纤维在服装盔甲和混音方面的潜力的文章并存[结束第 xi 页]乳胶液体作为风景的油漆基料。⁵此类文章附有大量美国教育戏剧协会 (AETA) 报告、学院和大学作品列表、讣告，以及对撰稿人遵循 MLA 引用指南的反复要求。⁶ 20 世纪 50 年代末，编辑詹姆斯·克兰西 (James Clancy) 苦苦思索这些“五花八门”的兴趣所带来的影响，并指出该期刊与《康比斯》一样，似乎“突破了定义的界限”。⁷这些早期的容量迭代试图弥合大学戏剧系的学术/实践鸿沟，创建一个论坛，让从业者和学者能够投资于期刊的现在和未来。

随附的周年纪念文章中很少提及该杂志的早期几十年。当ETJ确实出现时，通常会受到批评。例如，约瑟芬·李 (Josephine Lee) 将 1953 年出版的一篇有关泰国表演的文章描述为“强化了几代戏剧学者所认为的西方艺术与东方特色之间的想象对立”。⁸同样，Bethany Hughes (Choctaw) 在 1971 年《ETJ》关于印度医学展的文章中首次提到了美洲原住民，其中原住民的存在本身被抹去了。⁹与主要来自美国和美国的历史和当代白人男性剧作家、理论家和导演的无数探索相比，即使是这些令人担忧且存在严重问题的更广泛代表性的尝试（其中大部分集中于亚洲表演传统）也是微不足道的。英国。¹⁰

当然，历史叙述从来都不是无缝的。特别是在 20 世纪 60 年代末和 1970 年代初，作者和编辑对苏-埃伦·凯斯后来所说的“白人戏剧杂志”提出了挑战。¹¹ 1969 年，编辑 David Schaal 对该学科的种族主义和地方主义提出了批评，并试图通过有关日本戏剧[End Page xii]和黑人戏剧的文章来纠正这一点。¹²在其中一篇文章中，传奇的黑人导演、学者和……