Unlike most Southeast Asian theatres, Vietnam has created a sizeable corpus of scripted spoken dramas that continue to be popular in performance with urban audiences. Initially influenced by French classicism and Ibsenist realism, the Vietnamese spoken drama, kich noi, very quickly adapted to local social realities and survives by readily incorporating topical subjects. While keeping abreast of current social issues, the theatre nonetheless makes use of its multi-cultural heritage, and in any given modern performance one can see the layers of influence – traditional Sino-Vietnamese hat boi/tuong; Vietnamese cheo theatre, Cham dance, French realism, Soviet constructivism and socialist realism, and most recently, western performance art. The Vietnamese playwrights, set designers, directors, and actors have combined aspects of the realistic theatre with the conventions of their suppositional traditional theatre to come up with a hybrid that is uniquely Vietnamese. It is argued that these manifold layers should be regarded as a kind of palimpsest rather than just as pastiche.

Combining critical analysis, personal accounts, and original photography, this essay discusses Theatre Square, Moscow's most prominent theatrical destination, and examines the dramatic changes it underwent in the Soviet era, as well as after the demise of the Soviet Union. In following Yury Lotman's notion of the ‘ensemble’, I argue that the recent reconstruction of the garden in front of the Bolshoi Theatre created a particular set of conditions under which the difference between the ‘diversely encoded’ landmarks of Theatre Square became less relevant. The article also looks into whether the new and newly reconstructed gardens and parks of post-Soviet Moscow detract from, as some critics have suggested, or on the contrary contribute to, the act of remembering the past.

According to the Australia Council, the 152 arts festivals held in that country during the season of 1993–4 had a combined operating expenditure of Australian $58.3 million and were attended by 2.2 million visitors. At the same time, these festivals provided 32,000 paid engagements for Australian artists. Considering this massive expansion of festivals in terms of artistic arena, national marketplace and international industry, the scholarly interest in this phenomenon has taken new directions. To study the productions seemed not to be enough, nor was it satisfactory to survey audience attendance or to investigate economic turnouts. Obviously festivals did something more than promote theatrical performances.

The Swedish Theatre Biennale is a peculiar festival in the sense that it lacks a public audience. More than a thousand theatre professionals gather for four days to present and watch the most exciting productions of the last two years in between lectures, debates, master classes and coffee breaks. There is hardly any room for local visitors to see a performance. Nevertheless, the hosting city sponsors the festival, newspapers report on it and the citizens look amazed at the crowd of known and unknown artists. What are the values of such a festival? Why is it held every two years and who benefits from it? These questions are pursued in this article according to a model of the theatrical event as presented in the introduction of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) book publication Theatrical Events –; Borders, Dynamics, Frames (2004). Politics, management, environment and experiences are juxtaposed as equally important elements of the festival as a theatrical event. The article is concluded by an expanded model pointing out some of the values at stake.

In recent years the construct of the festival form has shifted considerably, engaging with contemporary debates regarding issues of community and identity. One manifestation of this engagement is the model of the boutique festival, which focuses on a particular audience, and which positions that audience to substantially produce its own festival experience, in a manner far more rigorous than more conventional festival models.

The OUT OF THE BOX Festival of Early Childhood, produced by the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Australia, is a potent example of a boutique festival, in which key elements pertaining to the manner in which this model of festival production, including audience positioning, notions of excellence, consultation, philosophy, programming, and the use of space, are evinced.

The concept of festival can help to understand the framework within which political community building took place in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the methods employed in doing so. Political communities were established within different kinds of cultural performances such as gatherings, demonstrations, party conventions, and – most frequently – political celebrations, which obtained a festival-like structure. Referring to examples from the labour movement, this article examines different techniques of creating communities and discusses the impact of theatrical strategies and certain types of theatre in this crucial field of modern politics.

This article explores contemporary Iranian theatre festivals and their relation to the whole structure of theatrical playing in the country. It examines in particular the role of the most important decision-making centre for theatre and theatre festivals: the Dramatic Arts Centre (DAC), the theatrical branch of the Ministry of Culture. The main framework of the article is based on Willmar Sauter's model of the theatrical event. Two of his four elements have been selected to develop the concept of festivals as theatrical events. The section titled ‘Organization and cultural context’ will discuss the organizational structure of festivals; and the section ‘Contextual theatricality’ will analyse the framework of the festival culture. Some fifty festivals and mini-festivals are held annually throughout the whole country. They are categorized in the article according to their genre: international, national, regional and community.

This article focuses on the National Community Theatre in Israel in order to demonstrate what happens when co-communities (marginal communities) appropriate the concept and the rules of the game of festival to their own benefit. Community theatre in Israel is a means of self-representation within co-communities that usually exist on the geographical, social, political and artistic margins of the public sphere. The National Community Theatre Festival is thus a subversive tactic by which the powerless groups present their move from the margins to the centre and transform themselves to visible social agents. This Festival then celebrates the latent potential for social activism that these groups have when they are coming together and imagine themselves powerful, united and prestigious.