This article explores the political and ethical implications of performance representing the ongoing realities of migration in contemporary Britain. Using Good Chance Theatre's The Jungle (2018) as its point of departure, the article problematizes the use of dramaturgies of proximity to confect simplistic notions of empathy as tantamount to political change. In a Brechtian vein, the article argues for modes of distanciation to foster critical engagement among audiences at the site of contemporary performance on migration. Focusing upon the production's West End transfer, its use of immersive strategies and its use of a comedic model to address ongoing issues in migration, this article finds that such strategies are not as politically transgressive as marketing and critical reception often contend them to be, with the onus of responsibility placed solely upon the individual spectator.

In the globalized twenty-first century, the relevance of intercultural performance is to forge supporting infrastructures between collaborators of divergent sociocultural backgrounds and disciplinary training. Fostering such infrastructures is vital for reconfiguring existing social relations and redistributing resources in the face of increasing sociocultural asymmetry. However, I argue that transforming collaborating ‘strangers’ into interdependent components of a sustainable symbiotic community necessitates the implementation of a collaborative ergonomics. It is an ergonomics concerned with the efficiency and efficacy of collaboration that actively seeks to traverse boundaries and borders. Linguistic translation, lexical translation and the transference and co-production of embodied knowledge are the crucial steps for effecting a collaborative ergonomics. Signs of an emerging symbiosis include the increasingly collaborative relationships between the collaborators and the transformation of embodied practices into highly reflexive and rigorous praxis.

Mei Lanfang's contact with Stanislavsky during his 1935 tour in the Soviet Union and the latter's often-cited ‘appraisal’ of the acting of traditional Chinese theatre have exerted a profound and lasting influence on the Chinese understanding and evaluation of the art of their traditional theatre. Through extensive research into the related archival material, as well as contemporary records, this article investigates the historical facts and circumstances that underlie this historic intercultural moment on the twentieth-century international stage. It unweaves the historical construction of this remarkable intercultural phenomenon and exposes its political and ideological underpinnings as well as its theatrical and artistic placements and displacements. It underscores the necessity of deconstructing the creation of such an intercultural myth for today's historical understanding of the art of traditional Chinese theatre and, by implication, in a larger context, of the global making of twentieth-century intercultural theatre.

This article intends to critique the spectres of authority which haunt theatrical interpretations of Rabindranath Tagore's (1861–1941) plays. As Tagore is a cultural icon, since even before his demise his plays have been made sites for exercising cultural and institutional authority. A consequent uneasy anticipation of denunciation or censorship has essentially deterred theatre directors from creatively interpreting and staging his plays. In terms of discourse also, there has been a spiral of silence regarding the presence of such authority. It is only since the beginning of the twenty-first century, after the termination of the copyright to Tagore's works, that the situation has lightened considerably. This article deals with the above phenomenon in two segments. While the second segment provides a close analysis of one of the first productions to radically subvert the status quo regarding the creative staging of Tagore's plays, the first provides a contextual, historical build-up to that moment. The article argues that in dramatic theatre authority is often validated on the basis of an ‘archival logic’ of thinking which requires systematic dismantling.

The theatre collection of Carl Niessen (1890–1969), professor of theatre studies in Cologne, contains a draft of a comprehensive research institution for theatre studies (Reichstheaterinstitut) from 1943. This draft consists of a blueprint of a museum of global theatre history and a written outline. In the blueprint, the objects and documents were presented in a sequential narrative so that visitors would be able to explore a global theatre history through the embodied practice of walking through a setting of interrelated theatre concepts. Drawing on Diana Taylor's distinction between the archive and the repertoire, I argue that, although never realized as planned, this blueprint conceptualized Niessen's ideas of how to think about, exhibit, present and experience theatre history through material traces, as an anthropological constant – a conditio humana varying in time and space.

The paper focuses on the methodological challenges of handling the material remains of banned theatre practices in Cold War Hungary. Focusing on the case of the collective Apartment Theatre (1972–6), it examines the relation of material remains, originally created by or for the socialist authorities in order to prove the danger caused by the collective, and the materials which were created by the group members as a countermovement to preserve their own memories and narratives. Consequently, archival practices of care as well as archival practices of suspicion together contribute to situating the collective in Hungarian and European cultural memory and theatre history.

Stage machinery enters the historical narrative often enough through mishaps and interruptions. This article takes as its starting point a report of the Paris opera director Véron in order to think about the role of materiality in the analysis of past performances. The occasion, depicted in the report, is the opening night of Robert le Diable, written by Eugène Scribe and composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer. The article discusses two key questions on the historiographic value of the report as a source for performance analysis. (1) How can we unfold the performativity of a past performance through archival documents? (2) What is the impact of the materiality of machinery, bodies and space in the theatrical interplay?

This paper discusses the use of a documentary film as source material for theatre history. The central case study analyses Theatre, directed by Jack Witikka in 1957. This film presents the making of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Finnish National Theatre, which premiered on 5 October 1954. The paper follows the process of an event turning into an object, and at the same time I explore how the film preserves and traces material conditions of the theatre production: the physicality of the actors, their moving bodies, their position on the stage and the sound of their voices.

This paper probes into the 1964 Israeli performance of Rolf Hochhuth's controversial drama The Representative. Staged by Habima National Theatre under the direction of Avraham Ninio, the majority of the cast engaged in this production comprised European-born Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors. In its cultural context, the theatrical image of Jewish refugees dressed in Nazi uniforms or, conversely, staging visual, gestural or aural markers of Auschwitz prisoners imbued the drama with political meanings, triggering a debate about agency and forms of social and material participation in the aftermath of calamity. Examining the subterranean world of artists and craftsmen and women whose labour is deliberately obscured from view, I argue that the work of theatre emerges as a creative and generative energy that filters from the staged fiction into the ‘real’ world.

This article focuses on the Indian feminist director Anuradha Kapur's unique approach to theatrical objects and practices as stimulating gendered behavior. Analysing her play Jeevit Ya Mrit (Alive or Dead), I show Kapur's deliberate emphasis on the surplus of material objects and the devising of props as related to the figuration of the women actors onstage wherein the attempt is to focus on the mise en scène rather than the character being portrayed. With a discerning and a percipient eye for detail and an assemblage of objects onstage, the paper will focus on how Kapur deals with the mediality of the event, the format in which it is structured for the performance and the effect on the audience.

Over the last years, the National Theatre, London (NT) has presented props and costumes in its restaurant, the Green Room, and in its bar, the Propstore, thereby shedding a different light on theatre objects. It also widely advertises the option of hiring costumes and props from its Hire department. These practices challenge theatre studies to reconsider the usage of theatre objects and their manifold stage lives not only as stories of (in)animation, but as what I call potentials of reusage. Presenting theatre objects in unusual locations like a restaurant emphasizes that these objects are built or manipulated in theatre workshops, thereby shedding light on the craftsmanship that is foundational to every production. The labour of the workshops, as well as different backstage operations, has been ignored by theatre historiography. Analysing the NT's different staging of props invites us to look into the hidden histories of theatre materiality.

In his extraordinary essay ‘The Metaphysical Studio’, Phillip Zarrilli advocated for the actor's psychophysical exploration of risky uncertainties and unknown possibilities in the ‘spatio-temporal realm between presence and absence, between “what is” and “what is not” – this liminal realm between’. It was typical of Zarrilli that when he received confirmation that his cancer had returned for the third and final time, he both responded pragmatically and perceived the experience as a philosophically interesting inhabitation of ‘that liminal place between’. Just as ‘The Metaphysical Studio’ emphasizes the actor's investigation of ‘the relationship between that “self” and “others” – the other “selves” that inhabit me; those I might wish to inhabit; the other as “Character”; the interpersonal you-as-other;’ it was also typical that Zarrilli sought to take care of many of the ‘others’ connected with him. These others included a sprawling global training community of students, practitioners and scholars. In a final video call alongside his life and work collaborator Kaite O'Reilly and with more than thirty-five students from around the world who had studied his intercultural performer training at the University of Exeter, Zarrilli stressed, ‘it's never about me, it's always about you’. This stress on ‘you’ was rooted in his emphasis on participants gaining ownership of the training and assimilating it into their own practice, along with a core focus on the other and the collective. During the call, Zarrilli signalled the importance of consistently working within the studio and performance space on strong interpersonal relationships, which ‘can arise when people are learning how to be generous with their energy, with what they can give, with how they can be present to each other. And again, we need more of that in the world’. It is unsurprising that those who participated in Zarrilli's training experienced how that focus on intersubjectivity developed a joyful international and intergenerational community, underpinned by politicized intentions around accessibility, generous group awareness, an ethics of care, and an ability to share the space, which could also be carried into the wider world.

As an undergraduate student in Birmingham in the early 1990s, I spent a lot of time in the stacks in the library where I had discovered, through back issues of TDR for the most part, something called ‘performance studies’. It didn't really figure on our curriculum, but having become duly exposed to Richard Foreman scripts, photographs of Annie Sprinkle shows and various essays on ritual, I wished like hell that it did. It was this that led me to a book, By Means of Performance, edited by Richard Schechner and Willa Appel. One chapter in particular floored me completely. Entitled ‘What Does It Mean to “Become the Character”: Power, Presence and Transcendence in Asian In-Body Disciplines of Practice’, it combined a deep knowledge of the practices it discussed that could only have come from doing them in depth, with a level of philosophical and ethnographic detail that made tangible, material sense of the apparently esoteric premise of its title. The chapter was Phillip's, and his great gift as both teacher and scholar was always that ability to place the relationship between ‘the doer and the thing done’ at the heart of things. This is, of course, a key tenet of the American pragmatist tradition (the phrase is John Dewey's, I believe, although I often heard Phillip make use of it) and I don't think he would object to me aligning him with it.

There are recurring themes in Zarrilli's long career of writing about the processes of performance, and his most recent book (Toward) A Phenomenology of Acting (2020) brings together these concerns in what could be seen as a culmination of his life's work – dissolving the boundaries between the studio, the stage and the theorization of these processes. We could look briefly over the entirety of his written contribution to theatre research – from his meticulous studies of kalaripayattu and kathakali dance drama, to his groundbreaking edited collection Acting (Re)considered and the innovative co-authored Theatre Histories to his monograph Psychophysical Acting (which won the ATHE Outstanding Book of the Year Award), as well as numerous other reflections on training and performance.

When I last heard from Phillip Zarrilli in August 2019, he was going through the page proofs of what would be his final monograph, (Toward) A Phenomenology of Acting. He and I had been in regular contact with each other while writing books about theatre phenomenology; he from the performer and director's point of view, and I from the spectator's. As it turned out, his book came out a year after mine did, and by the time I was able to read it I had lost the chance to tell him how good I thought it was.

It is going to take some time for me to fully accept that Phillip Zarrilli is no more. Phillip, as I knew him as a friend, continues to live in my mind's eye with memories of ceaseless conversations, exchanges of letters and interactions in different parts of the world. Just three months before his death on 28 April 2020, we had met in Kerala, his second home, in the town of Kunnamkulam, where we had watched a high-voltage, virtuoso performance of the Kathakali play Duryodhanavadham (The Killing of Duryodhana) by the Kerala Kalamandalam troupe, which we thoroughly relished. I have rarely seen Phillip more relaxed and happy as I remember him in Kunnamkulam. While he was, in all probability, aware that this was going to be his last trip to Kerala, he was making the most of it, reminding us that he had come full circle by returning to the state which had nurtured his initiation into the martial arts tradition of kalarippayyattu.