In looking forward to the important issues of this coming decade, we need only turn to the events of the past year for a sense of what is at stake for theatre, performance, and performance pedagogy. Last year, student activists protested racism on college and university campuses across the United States. At Yale, students protested the hostile racial climate on campus following several incidents, including a professor's dismissal of concerns about racist Halloween costumes, numerous swastika graffiti, and the explicit exclusion of black women from fraternity events. At the University of Missouri, the student group Concerned Student 1950—named for the year the first black students were admitted to the university—called for the resignation of university president, Tim Wolfe, citing the administration's inaction in the face of numerous racist incidents on campus. At Ithaca College, Claremont McKenna University, the University of Kansas, and many other colleges and universities across the United States, students held rallies, performed die-ins, and signed petitions in support of students at the University of Missouri and Yale and to call attention to inequality on their own campuses. Set against the backdrop of Ferguson and an increased awareness of institutionalized violence against black and brown bodies, these events remind us that colleges and universities have always been sites where racial discrimination and inequality have been both perpetuated and protested.

The powerful enactments of campus racism, from racist costuming to smeared feces in the sign of a swastika, together with enactments of resistance, from hunger strikes to demand letters, exemplify the connection between performance and race. These performances of racism and of protest demonstrate that, as Brandi Catanese has argued, “performance has become the medium through which American anxieties about race (and in particular, blackness) are pondered, articulated, managed, and challenged.”Footnote ¹ Given the historical moment in which we find ourselves, the relationship between race and performance, and the university as one key site of these racialized performances, the stakes for theatre and performance studies departments are high. We must consider how we are addressing this relationship between race and performance not only in what we teach but also in how we teach in theatre departments. Furthermore, we need to consider the unique role of theatre departments in institutions of higher learning.

In some ways, our students have made the stakes clear for us already. As campus protests have bloomed across the country, those of us in theatre and performance studies departments have found ourselves in dialogue with these movements in various ways. From the highly publicized issues surrounding casting at Clarion University and Kent State University to the more quotidian classroom conflicts over trigger warnings, curricular content, and season planning, many of us have been grappling with what diversity and inclusion mean for our departments and on our campuses. In an open letter to the community of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Patricia Ybarra eloquently articulates some of the challenges facing theatre departments in 2015 and offers a response from her perspective as chair of the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Department at Brown. In describing her department's response to campus protests at a forum on theatre and diversity, Ybarra identifies many of the concerns of students and faculty and recognizes the possibilities that are embedded in the context of the university: openness to new ideas, a desire for more knowledge, and the possibility of transformation. Ybarra writes, “[T]he university theatre CAN radically transform and be a model for the professional theater rather than the opposite. … In this spirit, I ask that we quit asking students to serve the professional theater and ask instead that they transform it.”Footnote ²

Considering Ybarra's call in the context of continued institutionalized racial violence, we need to examine carefully the unique role of theatre pedagogy from the position of educators, practitioners, scholars, and researchers and the multiple overlaps and intersections of those identities. We must ask how our curricula can better prepare our students not only to shape the theatre profession but also to engage critically the ways theatre and performance reveal, and at times replicate, the inequities of the institutions that house them. We must think deeply about how we can actively train our students to identify and dismantle the violences and inequities of those institutions from the unique position of the theatre. In her introduction to the Canadian Theatre Review special issue titled “Toward the Activist Classroom,” Kim Solga asks a series of key questions that get at the heart of this issue: “What makes us good teachers? What makes our classrooms collaborative learning spaces? What makes our classrooms safe spaces to try out unsafe ideas? What makes our classrooms places where large-scale change can, in tiny steps, appear to begin?”Footnote ³

Over the next decade, it will be essential that, as theatre researchers, we address the role of theatre and performance in institutions of higher education and work to make our classrooms the sites of an engaged performance pedagogy: one that does not simply replicate or enforce existing structures but also gives our students a critical lens through which to understand the mechanisms of power—and the means by which they might dismantle them, one tiny step at a time.