In July 2010 at the IFTR World Congress held in Munich, I sat listening to Helen Gilbert's keynote address: ‘Making Modernity: Indigenous Theatre and Salvage Ethnography’. Aside from the insightful specificities of Gilbert's topic, I was taken immediately by her methodological approach, which involved sifting back through reflections gained from postcolonial cultural studies, sharing the impulse of this work to look at cultures through a transversal lens and to posit their folding together through space and time, this with a view, for example, to challenging received ideas of indigenous cultures as traditional, the West as modern, and so forth. Broadly speaking, both the paper and the Q & A that followed it offered a timely and salutary reminder of how knowledge generation is often a sedimentary process: over time certain ideas get deposited and are endlessly mined; others get washed away or eroded. Moreover, this also means that we can find ourselves digging the same old theoretical spaces without looking at the local sites of theatre, performance or culture in ways that might persuade us to excavate elsewhere with different tools and methods. In brief, critical strategies, such as Gilbert's, that variously encourage us to revisit, rethink, rearrange, reconceptualize or recover are important strategies to keep in mind as means to renew and progress our contributions to bodies of theatre and performance knowledge.

In my book Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (Stanford University Press, 2010) I analysed four encounters between philosophers and theatre people – the thespians in the title – as a point of departure for presenting a typology based on the exploration of the complex border landscapes between the discursive practices of philosophy and performance/theatre. In this article, I take a closer look at one of these encounters, exploring the narrative strategies of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, as well as Franz Kafka, suggesting that they can be analysed on the basis of the games of chess and go. The differences between the rules of these two board games serve as the basis for a dramaturgical analysis where different aspects of performance/theatre and philosophy (practice and theory) are brought together. This hermeneutic ‘approach’ also reflects the basic pedagogic situation of studying and researching theatre and performance as well as many of the ethical concerns raised by our involvement with these artistic practices, along with those of philosophy.

This article begins from the premise that a ‘critical turning point’ has been reached in terms of the relationship between performance and philosophy. Theatre and performance scholars are becoming increasingly engaged in philosophical discourse and there are growing amounts of work that take philosophy – from the work of Plato to Heidegger and Deleuze – as their guiding methodology for performance analysis. However, this article argues that we need to go further in questioning how we use philosophy in relation to performance, and that theatre and performance scholarship should attempt to go beyond merely applying philosophical concepts to performance ‘examples’. One way to do this, the article suggests, is by questioning the very distinction between performance and philosophy, for instance by exploring the idea of performance as philosophy. The article concludes by drawing from the work of figures such as Allan Kaprow, Henri Bergson, François Laruelle and John Mullarkey to argue that philosophers and performance scholars alike might extend their conception of what counts as thinking to include not only activities like performance, but embodied experiences and material processes of all kinds.

This article considers the proposition that performance as research is a series of embodied repetitions in time, on both micro (bodies, movements, sounds, improvisations, moments) and macro (events, productions, projects, installations) levels, in search of a series of differences. It investigates the proposition in terms of Bergson's notion of ‘creative evolution’ and Deleuze's engagement with it, and is concerned with questions such as: what nature of differences does performance as research give rise to? Where do the differences lie, in the repetitions or in the spaces in between? And is there a point at which the unleashing of differences is exhausted, a point at which, perhaps, the evolution becomes an involution, either a shrinkage of difference, an inverted return to the same, or, in the Deleuzian sense, a new production no longer dependent on differentiation but on transversal modes of becoming?

This article re-examines the legacy of modernist aesthetics, with special focus on Samuel Beckett and his radical critique of subjectivity, language and ontology. The problem of language as a fundamental agent of difference pervades both the content and form of literary modernism. Beyond conventional semantic and aesthetic function, language acts in Beckett's works to construct a subject that is at once multiple in expression and voided at its core. Drawing on performance and philosophy to explore an ethical dimension of Beckett's praxis already sensed by Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou, this study recalls the political implications of what are sometimes dismissed as ‘mere’ aesthetic questions, by looking deeper into the modernist attitude toward language, subjectivity, and void. This research suggests that the full radicality of the Beckettian subject has yet to be fully absorbed in philosophy and culture, devastating as it is to the postmodern focus on identity and difference.

This article addresses the relative absence of class-based analysis in theatre and performance studies, and suggests the reconfiguration of class as performance rather than as it is traditionally conceived as an identity predicated solely on economic stratification. It engages with the occlusion of class by the ascendancy of identity politics based on race, gender and sexuality and its attendant theoretical counterparts in deconstruction and post-structuralism, which became axiomatic as they displaced earlier methodologies to become hegemonic in the arts and humanities. The article proceeds to an assessment of the development of sociological approaches to theatre, particularly the legacy of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. The argument concludes with the application of an approach which reconfigures class as performance to the production of Declan Hughes's play Shiver of 2003, which dramatizes the consequences of the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s for ambitious members of the Irish middle class.

Introduced, compiled and edited by Elin Diamond, this forum brings together feminist theatre/performance scholars to revisit the question of identity politics. Does it still have currency? Does it still matter for feminists today? In what theatre and performance contexts do we still discuss identity politics? Following an overview (from a US perspective) of past and present concerns by Elin Diamond, the forum voices a range of international views as contributors consider identity politics, theatre and performance in their countries of origin: Nobuko Anan (Japan), Denise Varney (Australia), Katrin Sieg (Germany), Bishnupriya Dutt (India) and Tiina Rosenberg (Sweden).

Identity politics, or collective activism based on embodied experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity or nationality, existed before the late twentieth century, but the term was coined in the 1970s and widely circulated in the 1980s as a response to social injustice, widespread prejudice and even assault borne by members of specific minority groups. For lesbians, gays and transsexuals, for ethnic minorities like Native Americans in the US or First Nations in Canada, for women in many Western countries, identity politics has meant working proactively for full legal and social recognition. Feminism often flies under the banner of identity politics with the argument that gender equality is still far from the norm in Western societies and even less so in many Asian and African societies, and in those of the Arab world.

In Japan, it was in the mid-1970s when women artists started to create their own professional theatre companies. This period also saw the development of the women's liberation movement in Japan, but there was no exchange between women theatre artists and activists. While the women artists explored a variety of issues in their work, with some few exceptions feminism was not their primary concern. This trend continues to this day, and accounts for why Tadashi Uchino argues that there has been no feminist theatre in Japan.

Identity mobilises feminist politics in Australia and shapes discursive and theatrical practices. Energised by the affirmative politics of hope, celebration and unity, Australian feminism is also motivated by injustice, prejudice and loss, particularly among Indigenous women and minorities. During the 1970s, when feminist theatre opened up creative spaces on the margins of Australian theatre, women identified with each other on the basis of an unproblematized gender identity, a commitment to socialist collectivism and theatre as a mode of self-representation. The emphasis on shared experience, collectivism and gender unity gave way in the 1980s to a more nuanced critical awareness of inequalities and divisions among women based on sexuality, class, race and ethnicity. My discussion spans broadly the period from the 1970s to the present and concludes with some commentary on recent twists and turns in identity politics.

Identity politics, understood as the analysis of the ways in which social roles are inscribed on the body, affects and behaviour, and in which collective experiences of oppression also produce resistant practices, informed German feminisms and performances during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, major feminist playwrights have shifted into literary production, or abandoned gender as their central critical concern in view of other urgent issues that arose after reunification, including historical revisionism, economic restructuring, rising racism and xenophobia, and globalization fears. Younger white artists playfully unbundled gender and sex and supported the postfeminist consensus that feminist identity politics had become obsolete. The work of Bridge Markland, which can be found on YouTube, emblematizes a burgeoning transgender and drag culture that was transnationalized through film, video, photography exhibitions and workshops. In this critical vacuum, immigrant and minority women were saddled with intensifying, ever more essentialist discourses of gender and ethnic difference, and continued to grapple with them through deconstructive and historicizing, as well as essentializing, deployments of identity.

In April 2011, after thirty-five years in power, the left-oriented progressive rule in Bengal, India, was brought down. Masterminding the overthrow was Mamata Banerjee. Banerjee has enjoyed a political career spanning over twenty years, during which time she has succeeded in maintaining a high public profile in the media and public sphere to become Bengal's first ‘woman’ chief minister. Surprisingly, during her campaign Banerjee neither asserted her identity as a woman nor as the non-feminine, monstrous presence of the public woman (à la Indira Ghandi's media presence in the 1970s), but rather performed a non-threatening, gender-neutral didi (elder sister in Bengali). I attribute this ‘smooth’ identity construction to a comfortable entente between a Western globalized visual culture, indigenous images commodified and circulating on the periphery, and the sudden expansion of electronic media. The convergence of all these factors served to create a non-dialectical identity construction which stood against all feminist politics or, as I would call it, feminism with a political imagination.

The concept of identity has undergone such a major revision that it is difficult to know where one might begin discussing it. Generally, with movement across borders of all kinds, especially the geopolitical, identities are now considered problematic. Earlier views of individuals as self-determined and integrated human beings have been replaced by more complex notions that people comprise multiple subjectivities, sometimes described as fractured or split. This notion also relates to a political function in devaluing shared experience and shared identities. In recent decades, European political culture has increasingly emphasized neo-liberal economic gain and fast turnover, with the result that historical ties and collective identities come to mean less and less. Collectivity has been transformed into a plethora of individual confusion disguised as ‘choice’. Is there anything left to rebel against when everything is said to be open to all?