when i was at the bookstore picking up shadow ticket we got to talking nobel and i said i bet krasznahorkai would win. then the owner in all seriousness looked at me and said "oh no... you don't think it will be margaret atwood?" anyway canada has a lot of work to do on itself

clerk, immediately as I'm walking into the bookstore: "You look like you're here for Pynchon"

ok Lozano is now the fourth instance I know of of an "I'm quitting art" work of performance art: see also Suzanne Lacy, Allan Kaprow (arguable), and Tehching Hsieh. others? i want this as a survey show now www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/t...

@aislingmurph.bsky.social has it spot on with the excellent toronto production of Slave Play, and with the (unfair but undeniable) weirdness of this play in 2025. fascinating stuff. www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/stag...

me: the thing about toronto is it has so much easy, untapped potential older canadian artist friend: i've heard every foreigner who moved here say that for forty years. untapped potential is just what canada does. all of you move here and get disappointed and stuck

look things are very bad but also i walked into my bookstore today and reserved my copy of thomas pynchon's "shadow ticket," a real book that we get to read soon, so, in my opinion eventually humanity will make it

my toddler has reached the Gollum stage of speech development

With the Tessa Thompson HEDDA film coming, what are everyone's working theories of why we are living through an Ibsen Revival? even just with my undergrads it seems like they dig Ibsen more year over year.

Giving a public research talk at the University of Milan next month. it will be about why crude economist historicization is, in the case of postdramatic robot/AI/machine theatre, correct. if any of you want to tell me what to do with free time in Milan please go ahead!

does anyone else's university make it weirdly difficult to find out what classroom you are teaching in, or is that just us?

this is an amazing article (from 2015). The core argument is recapitulated in detail in her recent book, but this essay sets it within a broad survey of ideology critiques and their opponents that's missing from the book. extremely clarifying.

NMES at the University of Toronto is hiring an Assoc/Full Professor in Palestinian Literature. I can vouch for an amazing group of students, broadly passionate about Palestine. spread the word! universityaffairs.ca/search-job/?...

if I could tell Teen Me one thing about sleeping with women, a thing that i DO think much mass US culture suppresses, esp. from the right: women actually do want to have sex and if you're interested you can just ask them about it and it's not a big deal

the whole comment section on the NYT wilson obit is worth a read. many specific, remarkable memories. love this one

a more profound emblem of everything postwar wealthy-world theatre became, for better or worse, cannot be found. brilliant, mad, naive, brain-breaking, gorgeous, soporific. the western stage remains wilson's and will remain his for a long time.

What is the consensus on how to style "Volume 1/2/3" or "I/II/III" of Capital? Roman or Arabic numerals? Italics or no? Do I... gulp... have to write "Volume 1" for the Reitter trans (which uses the Arabic on its title page) and "Volume II" and "Volume III" for the Fernbach Penguins?

A thread devoted to George Grosz, courageously provocative modern artist born on this day in Berlin in 1893—and one of my absolutely favorite artists. To me, Grosz is the historical artist who most captures the spirit of our current moment. Here he is in his so-called "Dada Death" costume circa 1918

Pleased to announce that the TDR special issue "Still Exhausted: Labor, Digital Technologies, and the Performing Arts," which I co-edited with Catie Cuan and Sydney Skybetter, has received the 2025 Edited Work Award from ATHE.

superb article with extended discussion on interrelation btw performance (via Marcuse), productivity, and fossil-fuel burning :

i just hope a lot of people take this as an opportunity to watch mississippi masala this weekend

finished @aptshadow.bsky.social 's wonderful children of memory, a bleak, earnest, disorienting star trek riff that forced me to invoke harold pinter's "Old Times" in explaining it to my wife

Hey everyone, some big news: in January, I'll start as Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the National University of Singapore. In their opinion and mine there may be no better place to study performance, capital, and automation. Relieved and thrilled to start.

everyone would have been smarter these last few years if they'd kept benanev and smith on their desks for ready reference

Rest in peace Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

again, I really think anyone who had a job offer and the $$ to buy a toronto house would move from new haven to toronto. they are rich and want to live in a nice place to be rich. it's not complicated

hello followers. I will be giving a talk about the history of theatre lighting, backstage labour, and how not to think about automation in Munich on June 5 at 11a -- open to the public. quite a lineup of scholars here!

it is summer, so i have picked up the "what if smart spiders" sci fi book and damn everyone is right about how good this book is

a fun way to meet folks in your neighborhood is for an unattended car alarm to go off for three hours and counting. we are all hanging around the car complaining about how useless 311 is and building ... community?

I wrote a rather manic essay, "On Chance Performance and Indeterminate Value," for a package discussing Alisa Zhulina's "Theater of Capital in the new MLN. Privileged to be in conversation with Alisa, Leonardo Lisi, Rebecca Kastleman, Pannill Camp, and Sarah Townsend. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

toronto should make drinking baiju fashionable (mimi's on dupont already leading the charge on this)

*after forty minutes of working with our campus Canvas expert on why my final exam posted early by accident* him: so. I have a guess as to what's going on. me: ok him: it'll need context. me: ok him: well last year the private equity firm who owned canvas sold it to another private equity firm

thank you jesus

as asian markets collapse due to us late-imperial psychosis, a timely cover from 50s communist Burmese mag "The People" c/o the National Gallery of Singapore

working on slides, thinking as ever on raymond roussel as the first and not coincidentally the richest automation-obsessed artist

I would like to note that toronto is a much nicer place to live than new haven, with much better students at its premiere university, so I would not read too much into two famous writers taking lateral moves out of the grim fortress known as "yale"

weird that we had to live through two years of the press winking and hinting at this story instead of printing it, but better late than never!

after many months of reading goodnight moon every night, i have progressed from "this is the best children's book" through "this is a work of art" and am now at "this is the greatest achievement of American modernist poetry"

I’m a professor at a public university, a proud union member, and a fierce believer in the value of a humanities education for my students. I felt every word of this essay by Peter Civiello in my bones. READ IT. SHARE IT. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

The National Film Archive of Japan has just uploaded 29 films shot by the Lumière company during the Meiji Period between 1897-1899. The films depict Japanese farmers, performing, geishas, city shots, and especially interesting are two films of Ainu dances. meiji.filmarchives.jp/lumiere-works/

stumbling on old jesse green theatre reviews and shaking my head yet again that THIS guy got hired at the times

Adorno covers this -- it's better if the leader is obviously performing, because then you identify with the process of performing rather than with the unattainable image-ideal. In this way Trump is a natural obverse of your inhuman, fantastical Marvel masculinity.

mishima yukio week in my fascist performance class. i remain convinced that grappling with mishima's theatre is necessary for understanding the whole range of late fascisms.

i gave the first version of my 'butler's gender performativity for freshmen' lecture deep in lockdown and just can't bring myself to update my very Zoom School slides

in a year or two the kennedy center will be the perfect emblem of trump's washington: empty, bankrupt, and falling apart. they will kick the NSO and WNO out. they will stop all community programming. it will just be DC's third-tier broadway tour venue.

My article "Immediacy and Exchange: The Market Theory of Performance" is out at the JDTC. In it I work through a paradox identified by Simon Shepherd -- why do performance theorists seem enthusiastic about 'media' but skeptical of 'mediation'? 1/10 doi.org/10.1353/dtc....

Appears the feds are leaking a years-long investigation into Shen Yun in fear of Trump shutting it down. Infuriating that this cult can continue to abuse and confine its underage performers, out in the open, with impunity. Also: any space that accepts their rental $$ is complicit.

The new JDTC isn't online yet, but I have it in hand. Had not realized I would be published with such great company! This Zien piece is a banger

As long as people are wishing for things, I think a good step for the Canadian government to take would be to introduce some kind of policy of specially allowed entry and/or asylum for transgender U.S. citizens who are being denied passports and are therefore effectively trapped in the country

Showed my students Faye Driscoll's "Thank You For Coming (Attendance)," in which the performers do a lot to spectators: move them, sit on them, steal their clothes. It's cute, funny, sexy. The vast % of them objected that they would never want to be touched at the theatre. I worry about them...