Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater

by Jill Dolan

"Jill Dolan is the theatre's most astute critic, and this new book is perhaps her most important. Utopia in Performance argues with eloquence and insight how theatre makes a difference, and in the process demonstrates that scholarship matters, too. It is a book that readers will cherish and hold close as a personal favorite, and that scholars will cite for years to come."
---David Román, University of Southern California


What is it about performance that draws people to sit and listen attentively in a theater, hoping to be moved and provoked, challenged and comforted? In Utopia in Performance , Jill Dolan traces the sense of visceral, emotional, and social connection that we experience at such times, connections that allow us to feel for a moment not what a better world might look like, but what it might feel like, and how that hopeful utopic sentiment might become motivation for social change.

She traces these "utopian performatives" in a range of performances, including the solo performances of feminist artists Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, and Peggy Shaw; multicharacter solo performances by Lily Tomlin, Danny Hoch, and Anna Deavere Smith; the slam poetry event Def Poetry Jam; The Laramie Project; Blanket, a performance by postmodern choreographer Ann Carlson; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; and Deborah Warner's production of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. While the book richly captures moments of "feeling utopia" found within specific performances, it also celebrates the broad potential that performance has to provide a forum for being human together; for feeling love, hope, and commonality in particular and historical (rather than universal and transcendent) ways.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theatre

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Jeff Wax · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is it about performance that draws people to sit and listen attentively in a theater, hoping to be moved and provoked, challenged and comforted? In Utopia in Performance, Jill Dolan traces the sense of visceral, emotional, and social connection that we experience at such times, connections that allow us to feel for a moment not what a better world might look like, but what it might feel like, and how that hopeful utopic sentiment might become motivation for social change.

She traces these "utopian performatives" in a range of performances, including the solo performances of feminist artists Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, and Peggy Shaw; multicharacter solo performances by Lily Tomlin, Danny Hoch, and Anna Deavere Smith; the slam poetry event Def Poetry Jam; The Laramie Project; Blanket, a performance by postmodern choreographer Ann Carlson; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; and Deborah Warner's production of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. While the book richly captures moments of "feeling utopia" found within specific performances, it also celebrates the broad potential that performance has to provide a forum for being human together; for feeling love, hope, and commonality in particular and historical (rather than universal and transcendent) ways.

[Juniper · Rating 4 out of 5]

excerpted from my blog (https://jprambles.wordpress.com/2019/...)

In Utopia in Performance, Dolan soaks you with her theatrical experience. She frames each chapter around a set of performances, drawing from Broadway (Def Jam Poetry, The Laramie Project), experimental dance (Ann Carlson’s Blanket), one-woman monologues (Peggy Shaw, Anna Deveare Smith), and more. Threads from performance studies, aesthetic philosophy, and dramaturgy all make appearances as Dolan writes about the “never finished gestures toward a potentially better future” the above productions made manifest.

Dolan suggests that these moments lay the conditions for social progress at a human scale, allowing individual theatregoers to radically envision better ways of living. “The performatives I’m engaging here aren’t iterations of what is,” she writes, “but transformative doings of what if.”

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book for anybody interested in the ways that performance affects us and even helps mold our attitudes and moral principles. She stresses the immediacy of experience in live performance. Art evolved as a mode of teaching people what to value and what to shun, so the effects of live performance are not really arguable. The Greek playwrights knew the power of performance and the deep chords it plucks within an audience.

What Dolan does is show how recent performances have provided us with feelings of utopia, of what can be even if it isn't yet. For a scholarly book, this is well-written, but I lowered it one star for the tedious introduction -- well, not completely tedious, but it does go on a bit.

She doesn't discuss film, but what she says about live performances applies equally to film

[Meiver · Rating 4 out of 5]

read only portions.

[Karen Jean Martinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why hadn't I read this 5 years ago? Great stuff.

[Daniel]

Why do we need theater? To have little glimpses of no-places, of our past present and future combined in a brief moment where we see what we can be if every moment were as full of joy, emotion, mutual recognition, community as can be felt for fleeting moments in the theater.

This book is very accessible as theater theory goes and while it doesn’t provide a roadmap towards creating utopian performatives, its faith in the need for theater gives me hope and energy for continuing to dream and imagine in the theater.