For all the lip-service French culture pays to reason and logic, it undergoes periodic eruptions of déraison or unreason. In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, ballroom dancing began to be infiltrated by such unbridled popular dances as the cancan and the chahut. Exuberant, even bacchanalian physical display served as a safety-valve in a heavily censored society. In the Second Empire, four working-class amateurs introduced the high-kicking, parodic Clodoche quadrille at the Paris Opéra. A non-verbal equivalent of the Marx Brothers, they became bywords through the Western hemisphere of zany, comic demonstrations of the hysteric convulsions described by the medical establishment. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a contributor to the International Encyclopedia of Dance. His many books include British Music Hall: A Bibliography (1981), The Age and Stage of George L. Fox (1999), and Cabaret Performance 1890–1940 (2001–2005).

This interview took place during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (August 2017), where Impromptu Shakespeare has been performing since 2013. An improvised theatre group, Impromptu Shakespeare weaves in one new ‘Shakespeare’ play at every show. The conversation was led by Marina Cano, as part of her research on improvised Shakespeare and improvised Jane Austen. It involved Impromptu actors Ailis Duff and Rebecca MacMillan, and touched upon matters of improvisation, methodology, adaptation, Shakespeare on stage, and gender-blind performance. Marina Cano is a Research Associate at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Jane Austen and Performance (Palgrave 2017) and the co-editor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film, and Performance (Palgrave 2019).

Featuring hybridity, transgression, and improvisation, New Concept Kun Opera refers to experimental performances by Ke Jun and other Kun Opera performers since the beginning of the twenty-first century. From telling the ancient stories to expressing the modern self, this new form marks the awakening of the performer’s subjectivity and develops a contemporary outlook by rebuilding close connections between Kun Opera and modern life. A synthetic use of intermedial resources contributes to its appeal to today’s audiences. Its experimentation succeeds in maintaining the most traditional while exploring the most pioneering, thus providing Kun Opera with the potential for renewal, as well as an alternative future for Chinese opera in general. Chengzhou He is a Yangtze River Distinguished Professor of English and Drama at the School of Foreign Studies and the School of Arts at Nanjing University. He has published widely on Western drama, intercultural theatre, and critical theory in both Chinese and English. Currently, he is the principal investigator for a national key-research project, ‘Theories in European and American Theatre and Performance Studies’.

This article examines the relationship between medieval Islamic philosophy and contemporary Tunisian Sufi ritual. Focusing on the metaphysics of time and space in the writings of the twelfth-century Andalusian saint Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, the author explores the dhikr ritual within the framework of Sufi ontology in order to highlight the relevance of Islamic intellectual history to the religious practices of the ‘Issawiya Sufi community. The dhikr is one example of many indigenous performance traditions that are part of the rich cultural life of Tunisia. These are spaces where adepts engage with complex philosophical ideas through embodied performances. Thus, Sufi rituals raise important questions about the relationship between theory and embodied practice, which, although grounded in a particular cultural context, could be of relevance to the broader range of theatre. Dia Barghouti is a playwright and PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her plays have been performed at the Ashtar Theatre, the SIN festival of video and performance art, and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, all in Ramallah, Palestine.

This article discusses the relationship between drama and performance, using the Derridean concept of ‘supplement’ in theatre, which exceeds polarities and attempts a more dialectic approach. A review of Marvin Carlson’s theories of illustration, separation, translation, and fulfilment is a starting point for a comprehensive analysis of the views that encourage the binary drama-performance. This is examined in combination with Diane Taylor’s distinction between the ‘archive’, which preserves and bears all the written culture, and the ‘repertory’, which contains the world of performance. The ‘supplement’ holds two meanings: as a supplement, an external addition-to, and as a complement, a supplement-of, that comes in to fill a gap. One example is used to present the relationship between archive, repertory, and supplement: Brecht’s The Downfall of the Egotist Johann Fatzer. Theatre can be thought of in formations of heteropoietic sequence, through chains of supplements, including the texts, the performances, the rehearsal devices, the publication context, and the director’s notebooks. George P. Pefanis is a Professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and also teaches theatre and cinema history at the Open University of Greece and Cyprus. His publications include Adventures of Representation: Scenes of Theory II, Spectres of Theatre: Scenes of Theory III (both 2013), and Theatre Adherents and Philosophers (2016). In 2006, he received the award for the best book in the study of theatre for The Kingdom of Eugena (2005).

Taishū engeki occupies a niche in Japanese popular theatre between the all-male troupes of state-subsidized Kabuki and the highly commercial, all-female troupes of the Takarazuka Revue. Its origins are disputed: while some scholars trace it back to the thirteenth century, others say it is mostly a post-war phenomenon. Family-based, itinerant troupes comprising both sexes book theatres for a month at a time. They live in the theatre, sleeping onstage or in the house. They perform twice daily for largely working-class audiences. Tickets are cheap, but troupes supplement their box office with merchandise sales and with generous tips which patrons deliver in mid-performance. The form draws heavily on onnagata performance in Kabuki, less heavily on the otokoyaku (women in men’s roles) of the Takarazuka Revue. In taishū engeki, however, actors of both sexes often cross-dress with star performers appearing en homme and en femme in quick succession. Like vaudeville, whose demise was repeatedly announced in the early decades of the last century, taishū engeki has often been pronounced dead. Yet despite its notorious geriatric core audience, there are signs that taishū engeki is coming back. Robert Schneider is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois. He is also a playwright and translator whose articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, American Theatre, and Plays International & Europe. Nathan Schneider is a writer and translator who lives in Tokyo.