Performing Exposure: Race, Empire, and Minoritarian Theatre in the 21st Century

Abstract

This dissertation investigates contemporary minoritarian theatrical performances, from 2017 to 2026, that animate racial performativity through immersive and/or participatory theatre techniques. In particular, these works all involve direct audience engagement in dialogue with a trend I call “exposure,” which I define as: a minoritarian theatrical tactic that flips the normative script of theatre and performance—the one that has us in the audience watching them, the onstage professional performers—to enact its gaze upon spectators who are incited to perform. Case studies include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (2018, New York), The Walk’s Little Amal (2023, Philadelphia and San Diego), Fix + Foxy’s Dark Noon (2024, Brooklyn), and Basel Zaraa’s Dear Laila (2025, Portland). In dialogue with these case studies, I ask: how does the solicitation of direct audience engagement by minoritarian artists produce aesthetic, social, political, and communitarian meanings that challenge racial and colonial white logics of spectatorship? Methods include ethnographic fieldwork (artist interviews and documentation of live performance); archival engagement with performance reviews and ephemera; and a survey of production histories. As an unmasking and disruptive theatrical tactic, exposure allows minoritarian theatre artists to query whose racialized gaze animates actors and spectators; reveal racial and imperial logics; and, often, produce utopian affects. Crucially, this work archives the response of global artists turning to performance to disrupt normative, hegemonic ways of viewing and being in the world by aesthetically revealing racial, colonial, and imperialist forces.