Cover, Front Matter, and CFP

Table of Contents

Editorial: The Recursivity of Consent, Communication, and Care

by Amanda Rose Villarreal, PhD

In this Note from the Field, Welden explores the evolving conversation about fat bodies on stage and how body-size inclusion is an essential part of the work of collective liberation in theater and beyond.

Read this Note From the Field by Bess Welden

In this book review, Emily Edwards considers Directing Desire: Intimacy Choreography and Consent in the Twenty-First Century, a 2023 book by Kari Barclay that lays out principles of intimacy choreography. This review is a quick snapshot of the detailed and well thought out concepts introduced and explained throughout the book. 

Read this Review by Emily Edwards

This Note From the Field distills insights from literature on consent-related topics, as well as from a 2024 ATHE panel titled “Consent Across the Curriculum” to create a list of strategies that theatre faculty and staff might use as they strive to promote ethical engagement with students in contexts across theatre programs in higher education.

Read this Note by Paulette Marty

This article examines how consent is negotiated, handled, and understood within everyday rehearsal work in the Swedish performing arts. Drawing on ninety hours of video‑recorded rehearsals, three interactions involving intimacy, sexuality, and violence are analyzed to identify how practitioners navigate when consent is ambiguous, assumed, or contested. Using a multimodal discourse analytical approach, we show how consent operates as a situated knowledge practice shaped by ideas of artistic freedom, embodied interactions, and organizational power relations.

Read this article by Isak Benyamine and Ann Werner

This article proposes Consent-First Reciprocal Ethnoscenography (CFRE), a theatre-making methodology developed through immersive fieldwork conducted in 2016 in Khoba, a Warli village in Dharampur taluka, Gujarat, India. The study examines how community consent can function not only as an ethical requirement but also as a visible and recurring component of theatrical form. Drawing from Warli circular dances, agrarian rhythms, ritual songs, seasonal labor practices, and local movement traditions, the article develops a compositional system termed Circle-Score Dramaturgy and introduces a recurring theatrical device called the “Chorus of Consent,” through which performers acknowledge the origins and negotiated use of field-derived material.

Read this article by Prafulkumar Panchal

This article argues that Mental Health Coordinators (MHCs) and Intimacy Professionals (IPs) occupy roles that demand a constant balance between artistry and care. Both serve as anchors for safety, consent, and psychological well-being in performance spaces, yet the toll this labor takes on practitioners themselves is often overlooked. This article argues that self-care for MHCs and IPs must be recognized not as a personal preference but as an ethical imperative central to professional competence. Drawing on clinical ethics in psychology and counseling, industry surveys on well-being in film and television, and interdisciplinary scholarship on compassion fatigue, this piece situates practitioner self-care within broader frameworks of professional responsibility.

Read this article by Dionne Mahaffey