Doing the Time Warp: Strange Temporalities and Musical Theatre

Doing the Time Warp explores how song and dance - sites of aesthetic difference in the musical - can ’warp’ time and enable marginalized and semi-marginalized fans to imagine different ways of being in the world.

While the musical is a bastion of mainstream theatrical culture, it also supports a fan culture of outsiders who dream themselves into being in the strange, liminal timespaces of its musical numbers.

Through analysing musicals of stage and screen - ranging from Rent to Ragtime, Glee to Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music - Sarah Taylor Ellis investigates how alienated subjects find moments of coherence and connection in musical theatre’s imaginaries of song and dance.

Exploring an array of archival work and live performance, such as Larry Gelbart’s papers in the UCLA Performing Arts Collections and the shadowcast performances of Los Angeles’s Sins o’ the Flesh, Doing the Time Warp probes the politics of musicals and consider show the genre’s ’strange temporalities’ can point towards new futurities for identities and communities in difference.

SARAH TAYLOR ELLIS is a composer, teaching artist and scholar based in Berlin. Recent compositions include the National Theatre’s Hamlet for young audiences, a hybrid musical/chamber opera adaptation of The Trojan Women (recipient of a 2019 OPERA America Discovery Grant) and the original feminist rock musical These Girls Have Demons. Sarah has taught with ArtsEd, the University of Chester, the Nightingale-Bamford School, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, Roundabout Theatre Company and UCLA. Sarah’s theatre criticism and scholarship have been published in American Theatre, L.A. Weekly, Studies in Musical Theatre, and anthologies with Palgrave and Routledge. She holds a Ph.D. in Theater & Performance Studies from UCLA and a B.A. in Theater Studies/Music and English from Duke University.