Greetings Everyone!

At a time when the academic calendar year draws to a close, when daylight lengthens and temperatures creep upwards, we hope you are able to find time to slow down a bit and discover some moments of rest and reflection.

As the current president and president elect of ATHE, we wanted to thank you for your continued labor to, as our mission states, "support and advance the study and practice of theatre and performance in higher education." While the national (and international) landscape presents more and more incessant and insidious threats that endanger human rights, livelihoods, and many people's mere existence, it also highlights the importance of the work we do and propels many of us to action. These conditions also lead to exhaustion, burnout, and mental and physical harm, especially for our members of the Global Majority and the LGTBQ+ community. It is our hope that in ATHE's continuing work to interrogate its structures and center equity and access, we can provide space for advocacy and action to impact theatre and performance in higher education and those who partake in that work. 

It is precisely with this sentiment that we encourage those who are able to join us in Austin this summer. We are hopeful this gathering allows us to come together to share space and collectively engage in potential actions, charting a course for sustained and sustainable change for ATHE, and by extension, our field at large. Dani Snyder-Young and this year's conference committee, along with each and every Focus Group and conference planner, have curated thoughtful and robust panels, plenaries, and workshops that allow attendees to answer the call for action to "build back from the rubble" (as Dominique Morisseau truthfully stated), engage with each other in many different formats and structures, and directly connect with the city of Austin itself and its diverse artistic communities. The CRAFT Institute has also created an exciting group of offerings for the conference that will provide spaces for us to reconsider and reshape our organization and our field itself.  

We sincerely hope that those who are able will show up and show out to participate in this crucial moment for this organization and for Theatre in Higher Education.

We look forward to engaging with you this summer.

All our best,
Chase & CarlosAlexis

Greetings Everyone!

I write to you having just returned from the Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) in Memphis, a rich and full four days of sessions, panels, auditions, interviews, and recruiting activities. I applaud SETC President Maegan Azar and all the SETC management and leadership on a well-run conference. As I settle back into the remainder of the semester following an all-too-short spring break, I am increasingly looking towards the summer and beginning to dream and feel invigorated about our upcoming convening in Detroit in late July. It will be absolutely thrilling to share physical space with all of you again and to process together these last couple years and plan together for the future. We will create spaces that prioritize access, presence, community, Covid safety, and joy.

Conference 2022: Programming, Tour Detroit, Registration Rates

This year, the 2022 Conference Committee had a unique charge: how to create connections and curate programming for sharing knowledge, research, and artistic pursuits while at the same time making and reserving space for all of us just to be - to be present, to be heard, to be together. So this year’s schedule might look a little different. Yes, we will still have the ability to start our mornings with a cup of coffee or tea, browsing the books in the exhibitor hall or attending ATME’s morning warm-ups, but we’ll also experience more time between sessions. Taking a lesson from the previous two virtual conferences, Focus Group meetings will occur virtually the week prior to prioritize access for members and to allow the conference as a space for follow up gatherings, action, and conversation. There will be time to leave the hotel for a meal, for walks with friends, for finding a corner of the hotel or a bench outside to catch up, or for exploring all that Detroit has to offer.

Speaking of, we hope that you’ll mark your calendars for Tuesday, April 19 at 3 p.m. Eastern // 2 p.m. Central for a virtual tour of Detroit. City Institute founder Jeanette Pierce will take you on an interactive virtual tour focused on the question: Why Detroit? By the end of this virtual trip around the city, we hope you’ll be ready to experience Detroit and engage deeply with its communities. City Institute will also be offering a walking excursion on Friday, July 29 for conference attendees to add-on to their ATHE experience.

We’ve also published our registration rates for this year’s conference. We’re offering a virtual option as well, for our colleagues overseas or for those for whom travel is impossible this summer. Virtual attendees will have access to approximately 15-20 virtual sessions, curated by the Focus Groups, as well as livestreaming access to conference plenaries. As we navigate the return to an in-person conference, we want to be intentional and learn from our virtual experiences and work collaboratively to craft future ATHE conferences that prioritize access and advocacy.

For in-person attendees, we’re offering a new registration level this year for students attending Michigan schools—a great option for our “locals.” For all others, we’ve adjusted the conference rates to an income-based scale, just like our memberships. For many of you, registration rates will have not changed since 2017. Registration opens on April 18.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategic Plan Released Soon

As many of you know, this past year, ATHE hired a consulting firm to help us define and enact an organizational-wide social justice and equity-centered strategic plan, embedding anti-racist practices at the heart of everything we do. Some of you participated in the listening sessions we had earlier this year to provide feedback on the draft plan. We’ll be sharing this strategic plan with all ATHE members next month. The plan will guide our work in this area over the next few years at ATHE, striving to build equitable systems within—and beyond—ATHE.

We will also be announcing plans for the 2022 Focus Group Summit in the next month, as well. This summit will occur as part of the Detroit conference and will work in tandem with our social justice and equity-centered strategic plan to explore (and celebrate) the role of Focus Groups within ATHE and to examine the relationships between ATHE and its Focus Groups and between the Focus Groups and ATHE, looking specifically at areas of accountability, access, and advocacy.

ATHE and its many volunteer laborers continue work on numerous initiatives and projects in addition to the conference and those others outlined above. Elections for many positions on the Governing Council are forthcoming with the slate of candidates circulating in just a couple months. Additionally, we eagerly anticipate the opportunity to celebrate our fields of theatre and performance with awards finalists announced in early June. And then, before you know it, we’ll all be in Detroit to once again share space and build community together.

As I stated in my presidential address last summer, I am hopeful about the future of ATHE. I am hopeful about the work we have to accomplish and our ability to do so collectively together. I am here to listen, to facilitate, to support, to conspire, and to create space with you. Please do not ever hesitate to reach out to me directly to engage in conversation or discussion.

All the best,

Chase Bringardner
President

Greetings Everyone,

As I am writing this over Labor Day weekend, I thought I would take a moment to share my gratitude for the volunteer labor that fuels this organization.

Thank you to all the outgoing, ongoing, and new members of the Governing Council as well as all those Focus Group Representatives, Conference Planners, Members at Large, graduate student representatives and others who so graciously volunteer their time and their energies in service to their Focus Groups, ATHE, and the larger fields of theatre and performance. Your willingness to serve in these particularly challenging times speaks not only to your graciousness of spirit, but also to your commitment to the various fields we traverse. I also want to thank our Executive Director – Aimee Zygmonski – for all her labor. She, along with Devon Binder and Shaun Franklin Sewell, work diligently over the year not only to realize the conference (virtually or otherwise), but also to facilitate all of ATHE's various activities.

I also want to thank Vice President of Conference for 2021, Ann Haugo, and her entire committee. Our 2021 conference was truly a stirring success with 298 individual sessions on the virtual schedule – the most ever for an ATHE conference. The breadth and depth of programing spoke to the attention and thoughtfulness Ann and her committee, as well as the Focus Group Representatives and Conference Planners, put into the entire proceedings. Their conscientious curation is evidenced in the vibrant, engaged discussions and roundtables; perceptive paper presentations, panels, workshops, demonstrations, and readings; the active, vital plenaries, the thoughtful and energizing keynote, and the urgent, challenging performances. Through the virtual space, the conference encouraged important dialogues and discussions, provided spaces for sharing and camaraderie, and urged us to action and movement.

I also want to take this moment to reiterate the centrality of ATHE's commitment to advocate for your labor. As more and more programs grapple with the changing realities brought about through the multiple pandemics of the past years, ATHE confirms its obligation to speak out and act in support. As ATHE goes through the processes of interrogating its own systems and structures, establishing clearer practices of accountability, and increasing access, this commitment to advocacy and to the importance of articulating our labor will remain at the forefront of our work. 

As I mentioned in my remarks at the conference, I am hopeful about the future of ATHE. I am hopeful about the work we have to accomplish and our ability to do so collectively together. I am here to listen, to facilitate, to support, and to help create space with you. Please do not ever hesitate to reach out to me directly to engage in conversation or discussion.

All the best,
Chase

In this, my final missive for ATHENEWS as President, I must begin with thanks to the members, all of the volunteer leadership and Executive Director Aimee Zygmonski. It has been my privilege and the most profound honour of my career to have served as your president. The two years of my term have not been what I’d imagine any of us would have expected, and I long to have been visiting with you all this past week in Austin, sharing hugs, fist bumps, and toasts with each of you. It has been a time unlike any we have experienced and I hope that I leave ATHE in a strong position to weather the challenges ahead.

The landscape of higher education remains dire, with continual programme closures, retrenchments, and threats. The impacts of the COVID pandemic are only beginning to be felt and will continue to affect budgets and planning across the sector for years to come. In conjunction with sister organizations, we have launched a resource to speak up about proposed closures, through the ATHE website which I believe will continue to expand.

In the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others, the rightful calling out of us as an organization grounded in white supremacy has only just begun to lead to change. At the 2020 Conference, I announced that we were dedicating ourselves to that change. After a nationwide search by the GC, all of whom I’d like to thank for their contribution to that process, particularly Vice President for Advocacy Monica White Ndounou, ATHE has begun a DEIJ consultation process facilitated by Samira Abdul-Karim of the consultancy Hyphens and Spaces aimed at embedding transformative change and racial justice within ATHE and making us the anti-racist organisation we want and need to be.

The members of this task force, alongside whom I am privileged to serve, includes new President Chase Bringardner, President-Elect CarlosAlexis Cruz, new Vice President for Advocacy Khalid Long, Gibson Cima, Ann-Marie Costa, Donatella Galella, Patricia Herrera, Alexandra Ripp, Dani Snyder-Young, and Executive Director Aimee Zygmonski. All of them will be reaching out to members and colleagues throughout the beginnings of this process across the next three months as we begin to lay the groundwork for the future, building on the strong work already undertaken by so many of our members and focus groups. Samira Abdul-Karim will also be conducting a cultural audit and holding listening sessions to hear from all of you. 

These past two years have set new challenges and expectations for us, and I am delighted to hand the gavel on to my successor, Chase Bringardner. I look forward to serving as Immediate Past President under his capable and committed leadership; I am truly excited about the initiatives he is launching and look forward (with fingers crossed) to seeing you all in Detroit and Austin in 2022 and 2023. In looking back over my term, I am glad to see that we have succeeded, though somewhat accidentally, in my commitment for ATHE to become a more global organization. The shift over the past two years to online conferences has greatly increased our reach, but that access has also come at a price, as the inability to gather in the same room unquestionably has impacts on each of us and on our profession. The return to in-person conferences, which so many of us so fervently desire, will produce new challenges and our current funding models will not support hybrid conferences without significant changes; I look forward to supporting Chase in this and in making the many changes that ATHE will need to make in these challenging moments to continue to advocate for the importance of theatre, both in higher education and in the world.

See you in the lobby!

~ Josh Abrams

One of the most difficult parts of this role is writing letters to support threatened programs and precarious colleagues, seeking to convince often uninterested administrators of the value of theatre and performance. In this pandemic moment, these threats are coming in regularly from across the globe with frightening, if sadly predictable, regularity. While these are depressing moments, the chance to speak with colleagues at a range of universities and discover the amazing work and creativity across our field in programs with which I often may not have been familiar provides a moment of light in that darkness. Viewing production photos and videos, reading publications, looking at mission statements, course lists and staff bios reminds me how vital our field is. That such exciting programs and work are under threat is a sad indictment on the state of the world and the realities of neoliberalism and one that begs us all to continue to collaborate and work together to support each other.

I’ve been working with a range of colleagues across the world in similar roles, presidents of organizations focused on theatre, performance, dance and related fields to seek to address these challenges; there are about twenty of us, many of whom gathered at ATHE’s 2019 mid-year meeting in Orlando. We continue to speak on a shared Basecamp site and share information, working to collaborate across a range of challenges to the field, working together to support endangered programs, working on shared documents and seeking to distribute a range of the types of advocacy for the field. ATHE will be working on a webpage to support programs under threat—we’re looking to produce a clearinghouse document to provide information for programs in need of assistance, and to provide guidance for those of you able to write letters of support. We’re hoping to launch that later this year.

Help me and us to help you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you fear your program is in danger—the earlier we can reach out, the more possible impact we can have. And if there are other modes of support that we can offer to you or your departments, please reach out to me via email at president@athe.org and let me know. 

I hope you and yours are staying healthy and sane in these moments, and I hope that some of the recent news provides a glimmer of hope for the future for all of us for a more just, fairer, more inclusive and equitable world.

In solidarity,
Josh

ATHE is our members. Thank you to everyone who participated in the conference this summer. It’s certainly been an incredibly difficult year and I know lots of time, thought and care went into the conference on every level—planners, participants, attendees. Thank you for rethinking what you were doing, for engaging with the current moment and all the challenges that we all, collectively, and individually, are facing. All of that work produced an incredible and powerful experience, which not only spoke to the moment, but provided a massive range of content and ideas for all of us. The centring of Black voices was and continues to be crucial. I was thrilled to be at all the sessions I was able to attend live—from the business meetings to the opening with The Tetra, Jamil Jude and Nicole Brewer, to the plenaries and a wide range of concurrent panels—and to be able to catch up on some afterwards. The creativity, intelligence, thoughtfulness, engagement, politics, and generosity of our members is astounding. 

ATHE is our focus groups. Thank you for the incredible work that our focus groups have been doing to support and advance the field across this year and to make ATHE into more of a year-round organization. From the quick-action response of BTA to help plan the all-conference events this summer to a range of events like MTD’s Telephone Hour: Musical Theatre quarantine colloquia, the Acting Program’s online fora on “Decentring the Acting Studio” and contribution to drafting ATHE’s statement of support for teaching studio-based classes, LIA’s zoom member meetings, among a list of other initiatives, our focus groups continue to ensure that there is a home in ATHE for all our members and potential members throughout the year and across time and space.

ATHE is our publications. Thank you to the editorial teams for Theatre Topics and Theatre Journal, who continue to lead and shape the field through their careful curation, editing, and publication of world-leading articles, reviews, and other work, both in print and, increasingly in online spaces. Thank you to Digital Theatre+ for partnering with us on webinars about teaching online, the first of which has led to a publication available to ATHE members and DT+ customers on the DT+ website.

ATHE is theatre in higher education. Through it all, we’ve each been pivoting this way and that, caring for students and fellow staff members and providing safe spaces to think about what our industries can and should look like going forward. Thank you for the commitment that you show to your students, your institutions, and the field. At the first Governing Council meeting this year, we coordinated a task force dedicated to helping to preserve our departments and programs. In addition to letters that I will continue to write on behalf of departments threatened by institutional challenges, budget cuts and the temper of the times, we will be compiling a resource site on our website, including sample letters, a clearinghouse of information on the state of the discipline globally, and a space for institutions in need of support to reach out to us directly, so that we can help to coordinate action and response.

Thank you. I look forward to sharing this next year of my presidency with you all, wherever it takes us. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me, using my president@athe.org address. I look forward to seeing you online and I hope in person in the not too-distant future.

At the mid-year meetings, we had a great Zoom meeting with many of the Focus Group Representatives, who gave up some of their Saturday to join the GC volunteers to consider what matters most to us as an organization. Aimee gave us all a great presentation on some new online possibilities for Focus Group communication through the website, with a new social network platform on the website once members login. In the autumn, Data and Communications Manager Shaun Franklin-Sewell provided all Focus Groups with lists of the members who had expressed interest in being part of those particular groups, and we’ll be updating that quartery, as well as supporting FG communication through Google Groups, and the website. As a reminder, if you’d like to know what’s going on within a particular focus group, you can sign up to join them through the website when you’re logged into your account.

ATHE, as you may have seen, is a signatory to a letter from a group of theatre, performance, and dance organizations regarding the attacks on Indian Universities in the wake of the Indian government’s Citizenship Amendment Act. ATHE is an advocacy organization and the Governing Council believe that we should be more proactive in speaking up with regard to challenges higher education faces, particularly around theatre and cognate art forms. If any member of the organization, or a focus group, wishes to bring something to our attention along these lines, please feel free to email me (or any member of the GC), and we will explore the organizational possibilities. This could include both governmental and political challenges, as well as threatened department closures.

ATHE will also be publishing a new handbook for theatre faculty and chairs. Cultivating Leadership: A Primer for Academic Theatre Programs, edited by former ATHE LI convenors Barbara O. Korner and Mark A. Heckler, supersedes a previous ATHE publication from 2001, Creative Leadership: A Handbook for Theatre Department Chairs. We’re anticipating that the book will be available through ATHE as well as Amazon by this year’s conference.

We continue to work on updating and streamlining the ATHE Operations Manual, as well as revisiting our membership models, following the bylaw amendment voted on last year and will have more information about all of this shortly. Immediate Past President Harvey Young and the Nominations Committee are starting work on identifying a slate for the Governing Council Officer roles that are up this summer. All the current Officers are working on a breadth of initiatives, many of which you’ll hear about in the pages of ATHENews this spring. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts and concerns at president@athe.org

All my best for a healthy and happy 2020!

Happy Holiday Season!

I can’t believe that the end of term is upon us and hope that you’ve all had productive semesters. As you read this, much is happening within ATHE to keep all our volunteer leadership and contracted staff busy. Focus Groups and Committees are evaluating the many proposals we received for the Detroit conference, which looks like it will be an incredible event! Devon Binder and her team at Red Door Alliances, whom many of you met and interacted with in Orlando, is soliciting bids for 2021 and future conferences, and there are some really exciting possibilities on the list.

As I mentioned in September, the Governing Council and Executive Director are updating the Operations Manual, which has gotten somewhat out of date. We’re planning to have an up-to-date version published in the spring. One of the things we’re considering in line with that is developing and updating official ATHE statements and policies (including both a Diversity and Inclusiveness Policy and Domestic Partners Position Policy); if you have thoughts about position statements and policies that you think it might be appropriate for ATHE to consider developing, you might send me an email at President@athe.org. The aim here would not be necessarily about specific one-time or localised political issues, but about ongoing conditions that we might seek to address. What might you want from ATHE?

ATHE is a co-signer of the American Sociological Association’s Statement on Student Evaluations of Teaching and we’re looking at more instances where we can support such advocacy challenges. If you see things where you’d like us to co-sign with other organizations on such issues, please send them to me for the Governing Council’s consideration. Both the GC and Operations Committee are meeting regularly and at our last GC meeting, we finalised the list of committee members for the year. Thank you to all those of you who volunteer for the organization—we’ll be sending formal appointment letters out shortly to each of you.

Happy Holidays and all my Best,

Greetings!

I find myself watching the leaves change outside my window and wondering how another year has passed so quickly. I’m very excited by all the proposals we’ve received for the Detroit conference and look forward to seeing that all pull together. As you likely saw, we opted to reopen the conference call briefly after the initial deadline, as we received a number of requests from people adversely affected by situations outside of their control, including the evacuations and power problems from the massive fires in California. All of our members who have been in touch seem to be alright, thankfully, but we felt it was best to reopen to provide a possibility for people to submit proposals in those instances.

I’ve just returned from the ASTR Conference in Arlington, Virginia, where I had some very productive conversations both with members of the Governing Council and some individual ATHE members. Thanks to those of you who found me to make suggestions and ask questions. We held an open “Field Conversation” with some of the participants from the January Summit of Organizational Presidents that ATHE hosted. In addition to myself, the participants in Virginia included ASTR’s Marla Carlson, MATC’s Beth Osborne, SCUDD’s Kate Newey, LMDA’s Martine Kei Green-Rogers, and AAP’s Jennifer Goodlander. In addition, both Dance Studies Association’s Melissa Blanco-Borelli and Theatre Library Association’s Francesca Marini were both present and have joined the summit’s online discussion group. There was an audience of about 15 attendees, most of whom have attended other conferences (including ATHE in many cases), and we held the session as an open conversation, asking people about their histories of conference attendance, key concerns and issues, and what they look for both from organizations generally and differentially from specific organizations in the field.

There was a general sense from most of the attendees that these organizations are where they have “found their people” and that continued attendance and presence remains personally and professionally important. However, and this will come as no surprise to most, the cost of conferences remains a significant boundary. There’s a worthwhile article (semi-ironically behind a paywall) about this in the most recent Times Higher Education, with the suggestion from a professor of business and governance at Tokyo’s Waseda University that “There are the haves and the have-nots. If you’re cashed up, you get the opportunities to meet people, make connections, improve your knowledge, engage with people as research subjects. [If you] can’t afford to participate you’re dependent on web-based shares. You’re simply not part of many of the interesting conversations (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/steep-conference-fees-exclude-academics)." We continue to look into possibilities to reduce costs and offer more cost-effective options to enable all of the “interesting conversations” we wish to have.

There was a great deal of discussion about how we might consider possibilities such as joint conferences (and/or joint memberships), as well as discussions about how livestreaming could be productive, but also limiting. One attendee requested, and it was broadly agreed that it would be good to develop, a glossary of organizations and important things for prospective members to know. We agreed to share and update the detail of related organizations currently hosted on the ASTR website, linking to it from websites for other organizations. There was also a discussion of services that members don’t always realize are available within each organization—calls for member news, updates about membership, etc., and we agreed to look into ways to ensure that communication is better across organizations. There was a request for a push for publicly available teaching resources: for instance, we could use our collective voice to build a database of Creative Commons licensed production images for use in the classroom. ATHE’s focus group model was also singled out for the shared community that it can foster.

This event was very positive, and we’ve discussed the possibility of hosting a further summit around the MATC conference in Chicago next March. Our online forum continues to be lively, and we are discussing the possibility around a joint membership survey across a number of organizations in the spring in order to push some of these questions further, ensuring that we each continue to best serve our particular membership, while providing service and advocacy to the field at large.

Once again, I look forward to hearing from you with your ideas for ATHE as an organization and the ways that we can support you and the field. Please feel free to write to me at president@ATHE.org.

All my best,

Happy Autumn! The Governing Council and staff are working hard to ensure that ATHE is well positioned in terms of organisational stability. It’s going to be a challenging year for us, financially, as we seek to recover from the transition costs, as well as some ineffective historical systems and reduced membership numbers. However, we’re confident that in working together, we will come out strong.

I know that one of the major concerns expressed to me in Orlando was the organisation’s communication within the Focus Groups. We’ve worked to update the internal mailing lists (for the Governing Council, Focus Group Reps and Focus Group Conference Planners) and can generate lists of members who have registered interest in each focus group. We will circulate these to FGRs, with a plan to send regular updates as well. (Please note that we are aware of privacy concerns, so will be working with the FGRs about how these lists can be used in generating mailing lists). On that note, we will research various platforms for Focus Groups, so that your communications can be effectively used and useful. We’re also aware that many Focus Groups are using social media channels for communication (Thanks to Design, Tech, Management FGR Elena SV Flys for helping collate a list of those), and we’re working on getting ATHE’s organizational social media structures in hand.

The transition to our new Executive Director Aimee Zygmonski continues, and she is quickly getting a handle on the organisation. She and I speak regularly, and I’m delighted with her organisational focus and skills. We’ve put a regular schedule of meetings for the Governing Council and Operations Committee on the calendar, so if you have issues that you’d like us to discuss, send them along to me or to the relevant Governing Committee officer, and we’ll aim to put them on an upcoming agenda.

Finally, I will be at the ASTR conference in Arlington, Virginia in early November and will be participating as ATHE President on a Field Conversation at 2:15 p.m. on Friday, November 8 entitled “Theatre/Performance Studies Associations and Their Members.” This is a follow-up to the initial summit of organizational presidents that ATHE hosted last January and is a chance to think about the ecosystem of theatre and performance studies organizations in and around higher education. I hope that for those of you attending the conference, you’ll be able to join us. Once again, I look forward to hearing from you with your ideas for ATHE as an organization and the ways that we can support you and the field. Please feel free to write to me at president@ATHE.org.

All my best,

Greetings ATHE members, I am writing to open the ATHE/ASTR adjunct survey to the the general public. If you are employed as an adjunct instructor in a theatre, performance or performance studies department please take this survey! If you know other adjunct instructors PLEASE share the link to the survey.

The survey is anonymous and quick. If you are interested in doing a second, more detailed survey, let us know. If you do so, you will receive a free year long membership to either ATHE or ASTR.

Take the survey here.

As President of ATHE, I want to hear your voice so we can advocate for theatre in higher education together.

As I write this, my own campus is working through what inclusion and diversity mean in productive, but quite difficult ways. In solidarity with students at Mizzou, Yale, and many other campuses, a group of Brown graduate students of color protested, students from the Africana Studies department conducted a teach-in and made a list of demands of the university. The administration responded quickly with a Diversity Action Plan they had already been working on, which is currently being revised and re-imagined by students, faculty and staff. To be fair, there is as much distrust as enthusiasm and good will, but I choose to hopeful. The push to radical inclusion will be a long road and one that will not progress evenly forward. At the end of the day, however, I do believe in institutions and more specifically, in productive, painful and often slow and frustrating institutional change. And that theatre and performance might help us find our way out the other side.

Here is why: the same week as the protests, our department staged The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry by playwright (and fellow faculty member) Marcus Gardley, directed by Kym Moore. The play follows changes in a community of Black mixed blood and full blood Seminoles before and after the Civil War; a mythic story shot through with queer love, deep hatreds and long histories. The play comes to an end only when the characters allow themselves to weep. It takes a while after the well runs dry for the healing to begin, and, in that space of two and a half hours, a group of actors from various cultural backgrounds narrate the story. Although no one in the cast was Seminole, the majority of the actors were African American, Latinx, and Asian American. International actors and Anglo actors joined them onstage, telling this story while getting in touch with their own identities and the privileges that come with them. This type of casting is what I call coalitional casting because being onstage in these roles is not only an act of becoming a culturally different person, but an act of committing to the cause of telling a marginalized story; it is committing to doing the work it takes to get over one’s trepidation over telling someone else’s story. And it requires realizing that no single story is universal unless everyone’s story is. It is ironic that this was also the week of Lloyd Suh’s cancellation of Clarion University’s Jesus in India because it did not feature South Asian actors. It is easy to take sides on either side of this debate. I will not do that here, as many others have done this with more subtlety and full knowledge of the situation than I have. Certainly, though, the situation underscores that we have a lot of work to do in terms of thinking about how we take on diversifying university theatres in collaboration with professional artists.

A week after this event, and after Road Weeps closed, our department held a campus forum on theatre and diversity. Rather quickly planned, and set for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I anticipated a small crowd. But when a set of students I was working with informed me that 75 people had RSVPed for the event, I talked to the staff and I moved the event from a classroom to the theatre. We sat on a proscenium stage—about 100 of us faculty staff and students --and talked for two hours in a largely free form discussion. What became clear was that there was a rich desire by students and faculty alike to create welcoming spaces in the theatre and to diversify the repertoires of our seasons. Yet many students, particularly students who might be great allies (white and straight students who wish to support students of color and queer students) were paralyzed by the fear of “doing it wrong.” These students felt that they did not how to open their spaces and invite people over without stumbling. If the students are scared of making an invitation, it is no surprise that the more complex issues that come with acting, directing and producing theatre written by playwrights of color was daunting. In the context of this fear, students of color voiced the importance of reaching out anyway and provided strategies for doing so even as they challenged that fraught word: diversity. Faculty encouraged students to take the risk of getting it wrong. It was a challenging conversation, with a lot of raw emotion, but it was also a good dialogue in which future directions showed themselves. I know that there will be more conversations, and more actions. (Thank you faculty, staff and students at Brown—you make the theatre a better place. )

What was striking to me about this conversation was not that it was original. It wasn’t. It was a conversation I had had before at ATHE and in other professional theatre settings—but it was much more honest. Rather than saying that there were no women/queer or authors of color in the pipeline, the students simply admitted that they that they did not know these plays and wanted to know them; instead of defending themselves as “good” allies and producers, Anglo and cisgendered students admitted their fears --in portraying characters different from themselves, in learning how to undo their privileges as cisgendered actors, in learning how to direct across difference (which includes people of color directing plays by other minoritarian cultures, as students and faculty honestly pointed out.) The openness of the conversation underscores a belief that held firm throughout our talk—that the university theatre CAN radically transform and be a model for the professional theater rather than the opposite. Unlike many in the professional theater and particularly older generations of artists, student theater makers, although sometimes awkward or less than ideally informed, do not seem to feel threatened by the increasing diversification of the US or its theatres. They welcome the change and this gives me hope. In this spirit, I ask that we quit asking students to serve the professional theater and ask instead that they transform it. ATHE can be a leader in this regard by supporting our work as faculty.

For many years ATHE has attempted to think about how to make the organization, and by extension, the field, a welcoming place for people of all backgrounds and identities. For most of that time, this has been a friendly conversation, and one that has seen real gains in the possibilities of the Association. But I am not sure we have gone as far as we want to yet. We may get enthused at the conference, but back home, we run up against the conditions we face in our own institutions, where various pressures might mitigate against the diversity of our seasons, of our faculty and of our student populations. These pressures are both internal and external to the university: shrinking budgets, privatization of public institutions, and the need for departments to prove themselves viable through very limited metrics of success lead departments to make conservative choices to draw audiences and donors. Compounding this problem, fears about the economic value of undergraduate degrees in our fields often means that first generation students and students of color can’t take the risk of delving into the arts. If students have not had access to theatre before college and do not feel it to be a welcoming space, they seem increasingly unlikely to walk through our doors. If students have to work three jobs, they can’t be in rehearsal. Economic equity for college students goes hand in hand with diversification at the level of curriculum and season selection. This especially affects graduate education in the theater, particularly the MFA degree that is often not fully funded, thus barring access to professional training to low income students of all ethnic backgrounds and first generation students who cannot afford to take on debt. This means not only are these potential MFA students denied access to professional networks, but they also do not become future faculty, and the cycle of exclusion remains firmly in place. This problem is one that strikes close to home. At Brown, the faculty are currently working with a sympathetic administration to create a debt free MFA, but it won’t happen overnight. I am hopeful, again, that this drop in the bucket, along with many others, can make a splash. We also have work to do at the Ph.D. level in terms of student recruitment and retention as well as faculty recruitment and hiring as our scholarly field has its own inherent biases as well. As ATHE, I hope we can support these types of transformational change at the level of advocacy within the Association and as a bridge between educational theatre and the professional world.

We are entering a conversation at an interesting time. Over the past few years, there has been increasing attention to diversity, or perhaps the lack thereof, of U.S. professional theater. We have seen the rise of the Kilroys, a group of L.A. playwrights committed to gender parity for women and trans* playwrights, the founding of the Latino Theatre Commons, the Asian American Performers Action Association and diversity initiatives in many other organizations such as TCG that have asked the US professional theater to do it differently. I think we can support these organizations and at the same time, make their work easier by transforming academic theatre.

Presently, moving toward this goal within ATHE takes many forms. On one hand, we hope to provide resources. We are currently working toward creating a database of plays by women, queer folks and people of color complete with pedagogical materials to accompany them. We must make these plays accessible for teachers who wish to diversify but to do not know where to begin, whose universities won’t give them time to explore and who would like the support of experts in doing the work of curricular change. We also hope that these tools will encourage the wholesale transformation of university seasons by providing plays and materials that will allow multicultural and multiethnic casts and production teams to produce plays that take on racism, sexism, classism, homophobia and transphobia as they culturally democratize the seasons of which they are a part.

We are also deeply committed to supporting the work of senior level administrators who may need additional resources for creating welcoming and inclusive spaces on their own campuses and face opposition, mistrust or confounding glances when they do so. We are working with the Leadership Institute to make this a reality. In our everyday practices, we continue to work on programming and supporting true diversity—in terms of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality and income status at future conferences. We are hopeful we can make a difference. The hard work of my colleagues Becky Prophet, Daniel Banks, Eunice Ferriera, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Kelly Howe, Christine Evans, Elaine Romero, Irma Mayorga, Noe Montez, Lisa Hagen Hall, Aaron Thomas, Harvey Young and many others make this possible.

One cannot of course, ride a wave of enthusiasm such that we can forget what is happening outside of our theatres and the gates of the university, where the systematic destruction of Black lives, by civilian and law enforcement alike makes it necessary to remind a populace that Black Lives Matter. We can however, try to make the very idea of violence anathema to our students, colleagues and audiences.