The work of Carolee Schneemann, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday last year, has from the first challenged suppressive sexual and other taboos, and placed her own body as an artist into a fluent relationship with her art. She both pioneered and in her new work continues to energize forms of what we now call performance art. The retrospective of her works from 1963 to 1996, recently seen at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, affirmed her recognition as a major artist – yet threatened also to ‘fix’ her art, which remains very much ‘in progress’. The exhibition included the installation Mortal Coils (1993–94), in which a slide projection system is combined with motorized ropes, flour, and sand to explore taboos of death and loss; Up to and Including Her Limits (1979), a video installation depicting the actions which produced surrounding wall drawings; and Video Rocks (1989), in which a hundred hand-sculptured rocks merge into a wall of seven monitors on which feet walk back and forth over virtual rocks. Vulva's Morphia (1995), a colour grid of photographs with text and motorized components, was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in 1995, and her multi-media installation Known/Unknown – Plague Column (1996), was seen in New York and Montreal in 1996. Schneemann's published books include Parts of a Body: House Book (1972); Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976); ABC: We Print Anything – in the Cards (1977); Video Burn (1992); and More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1997). Her Body Politics: Notes and Essays of Carolee Schneemann is forthcoming from MIT Press, and a selection of her letters from Johns Hopkins University Press. Alison Oddey, Professor of Drama at Loughborough University, interviewed Carolee Schneemann on 29 August 1997 in her Manhattan loft in New York, and what follows is an edited version of that interview, which focuses on her more recent performative work.

In February 1999 Patrick Miles's adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov as Sara opened at a prestigious London fringe theatre, the Bridewell – to a review from The Times largely devoted to the omission of Chekhov's name from the programme. Here, Miles, relates the circumstances (not all accidental) which led to that omission, the consequences that flowed from it in terms of poor audiences and company disharmony – and how such an apparently random happening is also representative of a typology of the fringe which warrants more sustained investigation. Patrick Miles was Russian literary consultant at the National Theatre from 1977 to 1980, and has translated Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky, Bulgakov, and Vampilov for various theatre companies. He is editor of Chekhov on the British Stage (Cambridge, 1993) and translator of Anatoly Smeliansky's The Russian Theatre after Stalin (Cambridge, 1999).

In the foregoing article Deborah Saivetz described the background to the creation of Pino DiBuduo's Invisible Cities on the Newark, New Jersey, campus of Rutgers University in October 1998, and the development, limitations and strengths of that production. Its ‘audience’ – for the most part members of the university community and attendees at the concurrently scheduted ‘Arts Transforming the Urban Environment’ conference – were impressed by DiBuduo's artistic vision and the conviction of the actors, though a few expressed disappointment that, despite the project's urban setting and conference tie-in, Invisible Cities seemed to have little to do with the historically and culturally rich city of Newark itself. Most, however, were fascinated by, and perhaps even grateful to, the visiting Italian director who, with his band of student artists, transformed an ordinary campus building into an at times baffling, frequently delighful, and always provocative sequence of worlds – as if, as one witness put it, ‘watching a dream in real life’. The actors and technicians who participated in Invisible Cities confronted challenges from all angles: the English–Italian language barrier, the University bureaucracy, the physical limitations of the performance space, inclement weather, and the shortage of finances, human resources – and, most of all, time. Yet, despite the constant ‘changes of direction’ that were part of the Invisible Cities process, the actors were inspired by DiBuduo's willingness to allow them complete artistic licence in the conception and execution of their cities, and they came to understand that even artistic tensions can strengthen the bonds within an ensemble, infusing its members with a fighting spirit that refuses to let the project die. In the following interview, the student artists reflect upon the unique process of creating Invisible Cities, the actor–director relationship, the role of the audience, and the effect of the project upon the Rutgers–Newark community.

How can computer intelligence best be employed in the theatre? Imagine that a computer is given the ability to control electronically all the media of the stage, and is able to sense and understand in an abstract way what is happening in that space. Furthermore, suppose that the computer is given the ability to reason about what is happening and could construct abstract responses through media. What would it be possible for the computer to do? The theatrical space is the computer's body, the electronic media the limbs, cameras and microphones used as sensors are the eyes and ears, a speech generation program the mouth, and the CPUs and internal programming are the brains, used to interact with the physical world. The space that holds the performance becomes an environment generated from behaviours of the computer, responding to and shaped by performers, designers, and technicians. Robb E. Lovell describes how this kind of intelligent environment can expand the expressive potential of traditional theatre in many ways, and considers how this will affect the viewers' and performers' perceptions, setting out some of the pros and cons of the involvement of computer intelligence in performance settings. Computer involvement is not, he argues, about the death of traditional theatre forms, but rather about their growth into new realms of expressiveness. Robb Lovell is a resident artist/technologist at the Institute for Studies in the Arts (ISA) at Arizona State University. He is co-creator of the Intelligent Stage, a theatrical space that registers sensory input through video and audio, and responds through lights, sound, video, animation, and robotics. He is currently creating tools for artists and technicians based on the technology of the Intelligent Stage – tools that allow artists to create interactive mediated works. He is working on a practical PhD in Interactive Theatre Design through the Institute for New Media Performance Research.

Eugenio Barba is founder and director of Odin Teatret, and of the International School of Theatre Anthropology. A longstanding Advisory Editor of NTQ, he is also a prolific writer on the nature of acting and the actor, with a special concern for what is shared by and what divides the traditions and styles of East and West. In the following article he explores the fundamental differences in approaches to the training of the aspirant actor, distinguishing between ‘acculturation’ as the usual point of departure in eastern traditions, and ‘inculturation’ as the dominant western mode. He explores the differing natures of the young actor's apprenticeship which have historically derived from these traditions, and the consequences of new emphases and social movements in the twentieth century which threaten the future of the ‘accultured’ approach, while requiring a new range of responses from the ‘incultured’. This article was first presented at the international symposium ‘Tacit Knowledge – Heritage and Waste’ which was held in Holstebro from 22 to 26 September 1999, on the occasion of Odin Teatret's thirty-fifth anniversary. Eugenio Barba's most recent publications are Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland, including a long correspondence from Jerzy Grotowski, and Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt, both from Black Mountain Press.

Jan Cohen-Cruz argues that in the hyphen separating community theatre from community-based theatre lies a world of difference – of intention as of realization. Where community theatre tends to assemble the more self-confident members of a majority group to emulate successes from the Broadway repertoire, community-based theatre prefers to draw upon minority and deprived groups in an attempt to create original modes of performance that help the participants make sense of and improve their society. Drawing upon her own experiences and those of other community-based theatre practitioners over a period extending back to the heady days of the 'sixties, Jan Cohen-Cruz identifies weaknesses and failures as well as strengths – as also the ambiguous area where the success of the product may carry dangers of compromise or unhappy collaboration. Associate Professor of Drama Jan Cohen-Cruz co-edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism, and edited Radical Street Performance: an International Anthology. Her articles have appeared in TDR, High Performance, American Theatre, Urban Resources, Women and Performance, The Mime Journal, African Theatre, and the anthology But Is It Art? From 1995 to 1997 Cohen-Cruz co-directed NYU Tisch School of the Arts AmeriCorps project – President Clinton's domestic Peace Corps – focusing on violence reduction through the arts. She has since co-directed Urban Ensemble, through which Tisch School of the Arts students undertake community-based art internships.

Few studies of African ritual and festival performance have been written from a theatrical perspective, and Sam Ukala believes that the richness of such events has yet to be fully explored by African dramatists – while most of the western paratheatrical experiments derived from them have been influenced more by anthroplogical models than aesthetic principles. In pursuit of a dramaturgical approach to the study of African rituals and festivals, he focuses on the role and nature of impersonation in these events, and examines the relationship between the forms, objectives, and contexts of the performances and the kinds of impersonation to be found in them. Distinguishing between the western actor and the African role-player, and between ‘intense impersonation’ and possession, he suggests also some generic parallels between western theatre and African performance. Sam Ukala is a Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Edo State University, Ekpoma, Nigeria. A theatre director and playwright, his published plays include The Slave Wife, The Log in Your Eye, Akpakaland, The Trails of Obiamaka Elema, Break a Boil, and Two Plays: The Placenta of Death and The Last Heroes. In 1998–99 he was resident writer and director at Horse and Bamboo Theatre in the United Kingdom, where, with Bob Frith, he wrote and directed Harvest of Ghosts, a first experiment with wordless visual theatre, an extension of his preoccupation with ‘folkism’, a dramaturgy based on folk compositional and performance aesthetics formulated in his article in NTQ47 (August 1996).

At the cusp of the ‘eighties and ’nineties, theatre in what was soon to become the Slovak Republic had to come to terms not only with the disintegration of the communist system, but with the break-up of the former Czechoslovakia into its constituent nations. During the previous decade, the theatre had in many ways helped to undermine the decaying authoritarian regime, but now many of its practitioners found themselves disaffected by the disappointment of early ideals, and their livelihoods threatened by the loss of state funding, which had at least acknowledged the importance of theatre to the nation's cultural prestige. In this article, the authors trace the distinguishing strands of the work of major directors and writers of both the older and the younger generations, and attempt to define the changing role of theatre – not forgetting the influence of the puppet theatre tradition – as the Slovak nation seeks a renewed vitality through reclaiming its cultural past while re-defining its present. Daniela Bacova teaches English literature and drama at the Department of English and American Studies in the University of Constantine the Philosopher, Nitra, Slovakia, and is one of the editors of the journal Dedicated Space. Dagmar Institorisová works in the Institute of Literary Communication in the University of Constantine the Philosopher, and has just published her doctoral thesis on Variety of Expression in a Theatrical Work.

With hopes for a repeal of Clause 28 poised for imminent realization or disappointment, a successful European challenge to Britain's policy on gays and lesbians in the armed forces, and an overwhelming House of Commons vote to equalize the gay ‘age of consent’, gay issues are high in the public consciousness. But to what extent are these political events being reflected in contemporary theatre? In this article, Brian Roberts considers the fluctuations in gay visibility, and asks what happened to the gay theatre that sprang to prominence in the 'eighties. He situates the best of present gay theatre work as standing in a critically defining role to mainstream theatre culture, not only through its political conscientizing of ‘queer’ and theatricality, but also in its opposition to an assimilationist gay subculture. Brian Roberts lectures in Drama and Theatre at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is presently revising his book Artistic Bents: Gay Sensibility and Theatre for publication.

With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into the auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. The first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’. Rachel Fensham is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, and Denise Varney is Lecturer in the School of Studies in Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

The pressures of Thatcherism on theatre funding in the 'eighties were severe, but the early harshness was tempered by several factors. One was the positive influence of the Cork Report, particularly on touring and experimental theatre. Another, the authors believe, was a careful strategy of reallocation of funding to support creativity in English theatre, notably through the touring franchise scheme. Here, they analyze in detail the ways in which the English Arts Council operated the scheme in an attempt to revitalize aspects of English theatre from 1986 onwards, trace the change in the values of ‘political’ theatre over that period, and critically examine some received ideas in the light of the available evidence. Ian Brown is Dean of Arts and Professor of Theatre at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh, Rob Brannen is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Bedford. Douglas Brown is Assistant Director, Scottish Centre for Cultural Management and Policy, at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh.

Spiritualism enjoys an equivocal reputation not unlike that of wrestling – for whatever their intrinsic qualities, both benefit greatly from the trappings of showmanship. Supposed spiritualist mediums first manifested themselves during the Victorian era, which seems to have been highly susceptible to such fraudsters as the American Davenport brothers – whose touring ‘seances’ were, however, greeted with rather more scepticism in the North of England than in London. While audiences seemed to enjoy the way in which such demonstrations of spiritual possession were presented in a manner resembling a professional conjuring act, professional conjurers were properly offended by such presumption. So, too, was the young Henry Irving, who, with two companions, took up a challenge in The Era, the newspaper of the variety profession, to emulate the mystical achievements of the Davenports. The following paper, which was originally presented in July 1995 at the Theatre Museum as part of the celebrations of the centenary of Irving's knighthood, traces the rise and development of the spiritualist craze, and illuminates this previously obscure aspect of Irving's career. Helen Nicholson is currently completing her PhD on the life of the Victorian actress and singer Georgina Weldon, before taking up an appointment as a drama lecturer in the English Department at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has published articles on Georgina Weldon in Occasional Papers on Women and Theatre, on the Victorian supernatural, and on Victorian fairies in History Workshop Journal.

LIKE Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, I find myself wanting to ring up ‘old Baz Kershaw’. The insertion of personal history into an academic text that is to be found in The Radical in Performance, in itself radical, inspires this tactic. It also inspires my determination to refer to ‘Baz’ throughout this response. The available alternatives just don't feel right: ‘Kershaw’ carries reminders of the 1950s grammar school that (mis-) shaped me; ‘Professor Kershaw’ seems curiously over-formal in the context of my enjoyment of this book; ‘Barrie Kershaw’ (yes, I saw him once quoted as such in the THES) is frankly unfamiliar; ‘the author’ a coy statement of the obvious.

The premiere of The Carrier Frequency took place in 1984, the result of a collaboration between Leeds-based Impact Theatre Cooperative and the novelist Russell Hoban. Impact was founded in 1978 by Claire MacDonald, Pete Brooks, Steve Schill, Graeme Miller, Tyrone Huggins, and Richard Hawley, with Nikki Johnson and Heather Ackroyd joining in subsequent years. Many companies since have cited Impact as a major inspiration, with The Carrier Frequency in particular achieving almost mythic status. Today, Impact has long since disbanded, and little documentation of their work remains to enable their legacy to be passed on. In April 1999, the theatre company Stan's Cafe (none of whom had seen the original show) decided to restage The Carrier Frequency as part of Birmingham's ‘Towards the Millennium’ festival; in association with this project, a symposium was held on the subject of ‘Archaeology, Repertory, and Theatre Inheritance’. What follows is a personal response to the experience of attending the symposium and performance, and records a variety of attitudes towards myth-making, re-creation, and the potential and problems of documentation. Frances Babbage lectures in Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds.

Augusto Boal is one of the best-known contemporary practitioners and teachers in the use of drama as a means of challenging the status quo. Starting as a self-proclaimed revolutionary, challenging the artistic theories of Aristotle and seeking to supersede those of Brecht, he developed his ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ working with the poor of Brazil. Now he is perhaps best known for his work in ‘Forum Theatre’ and ‘Image Theatre’. In this article, David Davis and Carmel O'Sullivan argue that not only have Boal's methods been far from revolutionary for many years, but that they are now focused on individual needs, enabling the individual to survive a little longer within an oppressive social structure. They propose that this is not a case of Marxist revolutionary ideology becoming diluted over time, but that the roots of the change are to be found in a lack of grounding in Marxist theory and philosophy from the beginning. David Davis is Director of the International Centre for Studies in Drama in Education and Professor of Drama in Education at the University of Central England, teaching on the MA programme as well as supervising PhD research. He has presented workshops in many parts of the world, and published widely. Carmel O'Sullivan lectures in the Education Department at Trinity College, Dublin, and is currently completing her doctoral thesis critiquing the theory and practice of Boal at the University of Central England.

After fifteen years absence, Jerzy Grotowski returned to Wroclaw on 6 March 1997, for the presentation of an award for his contribution to Polish Culture made by the Cultural Foundation's chairman, Stefan Starczewski. Grotowski was accompanied by his protégé and collaborator, Thomas Richards, and went to great lengths to establish Richards's equal and often major contribution to the laboratory work at Pontedera in Italy, which they had been jointly leading since 1986. This work has eschewed publicity, has never sought an audience, and has only been witnessed by chosen groups of sympathetic experts, who have been felt necessary at times for its validation. Initiated and sustained because of the reputation which had accrued to Grotowski during the various phases of his earlier career, the danger was that it might cease to attract support on the demise of its principal validator – which, as one of Grotowski's replies at the Wroclaw meeting anticipated, sadly occurred last year. By acknowledging the functional and artistic importance of Thomas Richards, Grotowski here establishes the argument for his work – described in detail in Richards's own At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (Routledge, 1995) – to be continued, as the status of the old master passes to the new. Joanna Ostrowska, who is currently working at the Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, here offers her own impressions of the Wroclaw meeting.