My scholarly and practice-led research works to facilitate conversations and connections between artists, scholars, arts (and other) administrators, and activists. My first monograph, Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin (Northwestern University Press, 2021), shows how theatre and performance can reshape public institutions both in and beyond the arts. Focusing on the restructuring of Berlin’s major public theatre infrastructures since the end of the Cold War, as well as the interdisciplinary performance practices that responded to these seismic shifts, I argue for a new concept of the relationship between art and the institutions of its support. Cultural policy, I claim, must be thought of as a performative practice of infrastructural imagining and not just an administrative agenda for delegating funds. Moreover, understanding performance as itself a form of policy can help us understand the ways theatre artists lean on and into systems of state support as the very means of enacting their transformation. Institutional Theatrics was named a finalist for book prizes from both the Waterloo Center for German Studies and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE).
This institutional cathexis also animates Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2019). The co-edited volume examines both the aesthetic structures and material conditions of contemporary performance to refine what we mean, and what we don’t, when we speak of “postdramatic” theatre. In doing so, the book also addresses the longstanding suspicion around form within theatre and performance studies. We argue instead that artists and scholars would benefit from a more capacious, avowedly social formalist vocabulary – one that requires we shake off conceptions of form as mere ornamentation or as something that seals a work off from society. Indeed, the book demonstrates how formal experimentation, both onstage and off, serves as a vital strategy for making sense of theatre in imminent crisis.
