Listening to animals is not only about hearing howls, chirps, snorts, mews, nickers, and other vocal articulations; it is about recognizing preferences, perspectives, and relationships that animals communicate through movement, gesture, feeling, and resonance. When humans observe the complex ways that animals make meaning through performance, space emerges for animals to claim their rights to voice and agency in the presence of humans.

In 1953, Shanghai Film Studio produced a Shaoxing opera film version of The Butterfly Lovers as the first color film of the People’s Republic of China. Noted for its immense popularity in the Sinophone sphere throughout the 1950s, the film actually exemplifies a history of Shaoxing opera that is connected to urbanization and nationalism as well as women’s liberation and the cultural politics of early communist China. It is an early example of how Chinese opera and modern media technology contribute to transnational negotiations and imaginations of Chinese identities.

Through the story of Ihsane Jarfi’s murder, Milo Rau suggests there are shades of gray between the actual event and the staged event, and between murder and performing murder. This performance text was developed by Rau and his Ensemble of professional and amateur actors.

Swiss director Milo Rau holds a mirror up to theatre to call into question its assumptions, conventions, and relationship to daily life. Rau’s nonfictional story of the murder of Ihsane Jarfi takes place within two overarching narratives with different timeframes—what happens on the stage now, and what happened beyond the stage then. His dramaturgy cautions against both suspension of disbelief and catharsis and against confusing the fictional with the real.

A collaboration between actors and musicians of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Almaty, Kazakhstan, and local electronic musician and community activist Brother El of Chicago highlights the difficulties of translating embodied performances of race and ethnicity in a transnational post–Cold War context. In a comparative reading taking up a play by the Ilkhom Theatre of Tashkent alongside its citation in the Chicago collaboration, the framework of “embodied philology” exposes the limits of post–Cold War international political alignment.

Okada is one of the most internationally produced contemporary Japanese playwrights. American directors approach his work both as uniquely Japanese and as a synecdoche for the world. The story of Okada’s web of institutional, professional, and personal relationships is an object lesson in the foreign assembly of international works.

The scenic experiment Silence of the World brought together indigenous leader Ailton Krenak and performer Andreia Duarte. The show deeply explored the perception of time in mythology as a space for reinventing the world and evoked the recognition of humans as just another planetary species alongside so-called nonhumans: animals, rivers, mountains, plants, and everything that exists. Silence of the World drew attention to indigenous peoples who connect with the living organism that is the planet.

Nancy Stark Smith passed away due to ovarian cancer on 1 May 2020. Her dedication to contact improvisation for nearly half a century—as a dancer, teacher, writer, and editor—contributed to its development and will continue to inform its ongoing vitality. But much remains uncertain for the future of contact improvisation. Complicated by the challenges of Covid-19, what sort of bodies will result from the practice going forward, and how might the form itself change?

Henry Box Brown, a Black man born into slavery in the American South, devised an unforeseen yet ingenious plan to achieve emancipation: he was shipped to the North in a cramped, wooden box. The first testament of Brown’s escape was not his emergence from his box, but instead his voice responding to the box’s addressee. Later, Brown reenacts his original escape in Victorian England and becomes “The King of All Mesmerizers” by envisioning an alien future for himself, much like musician and philosopher-poet Sun Ra.

A close reading of Yvonne Rainer’s archival papers reveals new insights into the postmodern iconoclast. Revivifying Rainer’s early choreographic practice and verbalembodied explorations, Rainer’s own notes and journals illuminate and challenge reductive interpretations of a writing dance artist’s work over time.

Director and playwright Stan Lai premiered his marathon play Ago in Shanghai at the end of 2019. Staged in his signature “lotus pond” theatre-in-the-surround, Ago is fueled by Lai’s cross-cultural sensibilities and Buddhist philosophy. If theatre is an art of illusion-making and life is like a dream, Lai turns theatre-going into a ritual of self-encounter and self-reflection, where an illusion mirrors a dream.

Teaching theatre and drama in primary and secondary schools is a very difficult task worldwide. In China, there is a huge demand for drama teachers who also know practical theatre. Taking on this mission, the Shanghai Theatre Academy started a program of “drama etudes.” This pedagogical experiment stimulated debate about opposing concepts in theatre education: imitation vs. improvisation.

In her conversation with TDR, Hadestown director Rachel Chavkin discusses the development, casting, music, and choreography of the Broadway hit musical—a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus.

In her solo performance, Knot in My Name, Ita Segev utilizes transaesthetic strategies and technology to elucidate her mutually dependent investments in gender and nation and the urgent personal and political stakes of the ongoing Israeli occupation for the performer and her American audience alike.

Social practice and dematerialization are often cited as the most radical innovations in Euro-American contemporary art since the late 1960s, but rarely have historians acknowledged the crucial role of experimental pedagogy in this shift of art towards performance, conceptualism, and activism. The practice of Los Angeles–based performance artist Suzanne Lacy radically extended the ideas of her teachers and mentors Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago into revised structures of artmaking towards activist social practice performances driven by conceptual, political, and embodied concerns.

The banana protest, a mass reenactment of Consumer Art (1972), a series of photographs by Natalia LL that was removed from the National Museum in April 2019, was staged as a grassroots protest against this act of censorship and the Polish conservative government’s “decency” policy as well as the underrepresentation of women’s art in museums and galleries.

The Chilean police keep firing pellets and tear gas bombs in the streets, blinding and injuring people by the hundreds. The people keep demonstrating. Two months before the protests of October 2019, a problematic documentary play, Animales invisibles, while distorting the genre, prophesied what was to come precisely in the way it departed from the documentary.

A war of history and memory over the Great Patriotic War (WWII) between the Soviet Union and Germany has been raging in Vladimir Putin’s Russia for almost two decades. Putin’s Kremlin deploys all of the mythmaking machinery at its disposal to correct narratives that demonize the Soviet Union and reflect badly on post-Soviet Russia. Victory Day, celebrated annually on 9 May with parades, concerts, films, theatre, art, and music, plays a crucial role in disseminating the Kremlin’s counter narratives.

From the opening of treaty ports in 1843, the modern history of performing arts in Shanghai traces more than 170 years of development. This history not only summarizes the modern development of Chinese performing arts; it is also representative of the historical development of Chinese urban space and city culture. Theatre arts, culture, and urban development intertwine, as they are refracted through the rise and fall of theatre buildings, yielding a fascinating legacy of cosmopolitan Shanghai.