‘Radical bodies’, to borrow from Diana Looser's title, emerge as a central concern in this general issue of TRI, where five articles explore the policitizing possibilities of theatre in relation to multifaceted questions of gender, cultural hybridity, identity and social democracy, in a rich and diverse range of performances and geographical locations.

This article explores women's practice and theatrical presentation of jujutsu and judo in the early years of the twentieth century in the United States, Britain and New Zealand. My discussion treats three figures in particular: Fude Yamashita, who tutored upper-class Washington socialites and performed judo demonstrations on the American stage; the English militant vote-seeker, playwright and jujutsu practitioner Edith Garrud, proponent of jujutsu as a political activist performance and coordinator of the ‘fighting suffragettes’; and New Zealander Florence Le Mar, vaudeville performer and ‘the World's Famous Ju-Jitsu Girl’, who enthralled audiences with her spectacular show designed as an educational enterprise to empower women through transferable self-defence skills. A historical survey of these women's activities contributes to our understanding of the varied ways that women during this period used performance to resist patriarchal institutions and definitions, while offering insights into some of the ways that the Japanese martial arts were reinvented following their introduction to the West.

Founded in 1993, the Golden Bough Performance Society is one of Taiwan's foremost contemporary theatre companies, dedicated to decolonizing and localizing the theatre scene. Taking one of the company's most significant works to date, The Lady Knight-Errant of Taiwan – Peh-sio-lan, this article examines how cultural hybridity has come to inform the company's aesthetics, philosophy and practice in ways that serve to create an effective enunciatory site for the purposes of decolonization and empowerment.

Jingju (‘Beijing opera’) is China's most iconic traditional theatre, marketed as a global signifier of Chinese theatre and national identity. Although troupes from mainland China regularly tour Europe, audiences in the UK have also had access to Jingju via two indigenous organizations: the UK Beijing Opera Society (now defunct) and the London Jing Kun Opera Association (now in its ninth year). These organizations consist of Chinese, overseas Chinese and Western performers performing both Jingju and Kunju (‘Kun opera’). Where there is a mix of ethnicity, can ‘traditional Chinese theatre’ still be conceived of as ‘traditional’? How is Jingju mapped onto non-Chinese bodies? Can Jingju performances by ethnically white performers reflect diasporic identities? Drawing on the theories of Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, this article argues that by highlighting the performativity of identity, the performance of Jingju by non-Chinese performers challenges the notion of Jingju as a global signifier of ‘authentic traditional Chinese theatre’.

This article considers the uncanny action by three Slovenian artists in 2007 to rename themselves Janez Janša, the name of the right-wing prime minister of Slovenia. It assesses specific performances by the artists, including the Slovene National Theatre, a postdramatic verbatim piece about a Roma family evicted from their homes by Janša's government in response to the mob action of Slovenian villagers. It also interrogates their performance event for the Transmediale Festival at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin in 2008, first banned and then reinstated by the festival organizers, where they created a virtual signature of their new name on the memorial. Theoretically, the importance of naming and renaming as practised by the artists is examined in relation to concepts of subversive affirmation, the author-function in society and postdramatic theatre.

This article analyses Sistren Theatre Collective's theatrical and organizational collective model by contextualizing the company's commitment to collectivity in terms of political and social shifts in Jamaica during the 1980s. Despite the importance of collective organizing as an important form of resistance to neo-liberalism, the article examines how race- and class-based divisions within Jamaican society were reproduced within Sistren. I argue that this was because collectivity masked the differences between the members of the group, rather than allowing for discussions on how these differences could be negotiated and the divides crossed.