This article is an adapted version of a text originally published in Turkish in the historical materialist journal PRAKSIS in 2016, and translated into English by the author.1 It focuses on performative protest acts and the role of the performing artist in Turkey in the context of the Gezi Park uprisings of 2013. The article examines how some of Gezi's performative protest actions evidence a larger cultural transformation, of which we can see a continuation in new theatre playtexts.

Actors used the hands much more in the eighteenth century than is customary today. In this part we present general rules which were designed to ensure that the hands were used both elegantly and expressively. Later sections will deal with the use of the hands to externalize a particular passion being represented, such as fear, love and so on.

This article examines what is at stake when performers and playwright critically transfigure oral histories when staging them theatrically. Representations of race and colonial history are integral to a nation's conception of its own cultural identity. These issues are at the forefront of many theatre productions in Cape Verde, an intensely creolized West African nation whose islands bear traces of the Europeans and Africans who have commingled there for centuries. The article examines two performances rooted in Cape Verdean history that challenge existing theoretical paradigms for the mimetic relationship between actors and the historical personae they portray onstage. Proposing the concept of the ‘historical imagination’, it explores how theatre artists self-consciously alter the local history they circulate to an international theatre festival stage and, concomitantly, how the theatre festival context and media coverage profoundly impact how national history is told within a global performance arena.

The theory of literature expounded by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren in 1942 embraces, if somewhat gingerly, the drama. The authors acknowledge – in the apparent afterthought of an endnote – that ‘the whole tendency of dramaturgic doctrine is against any judgment of a play divorced from … its stagecraftness or theaterness’. But in the body of their work, they treat drama as one form of narrative fiction, at one point approaching and then retreating from any substantial consideration of the ‘distinction between play and story’.

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.

A decade ago the analysis of the structure of the plays performed by the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline professional theatre companies, in order to discover patterns of doubling of the roles, seemed to hold considerable promise for further inquiry. D. M. Bevington's pioneering From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe and W. A. Ringler's article ‘The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays’ offered direct evidence and tools for structural analysis, and were followed by important studies by Scott McMillin, Irwin Smith, and others. Nevertheless, since then interest in this area – and particularly in doubling on the seventeenth-century stage – seems to have declined. The assumption made explicitly by Bevington and implied by most other commentators has been that as the professional acting companies expanded their resources, found patrons, and increased the number of their liveried personnel, the frenetic doubling of the Tudor era became unnecessary. Apart from some unhurried doubling of very minor characters and extras, they believe this practice virtually disappeared from the Jacobean stage, rendering further investigation unnecessary. The small amount of direct evidence to the contrary, first noted by W. J. Lawrence in 1927, has been analysed as an interesting but aberrant phenomenon; occasional atavistic survivals in a more opulent and refined age whose taste was turning towards ‘realism’ in acting and production methods.

Les œuvres des dramaturges contemporains canadiens-anglais, Margaret Hollingsworth, George F. Walker, Judith Thompson et Beverley Simons entre dans la catégorie de la «dramaturgie de la perversité». La «perversité» est, selon Knowles, un principe structurel dialogique qui remet en question les concepts aristotéliciens du renversement et de la reconnaissance, aussi bien que les notions modernistes de pureté, de clarté et de cohérence. Est pervers ce qui fait éclater les concepts traditionnels tels que la convergence et l'unité, et toutes les stratégies théâtrales mises en œuvre pour fragmenter la perception du spectateur, pour l'obliger à repenser sa position vis-à-vis de l'objet spectaculaire, c'est-à-dire, à se repenserr. Knowles se propose, done, d'analyser ici les pièces les plus représentatives de ce courant choisies parmi les œuvres des quatre auteurs cités.

The Über-Marions notebooks were written by Gordon Craig during 1905 and 1906. The main interest of these unpublished manuscripts lies in the rich information on the über-marionette which, oddly enough, Craig initially thought to ‘find’ or ‘collect’, and the project for a theatre in Dresden. Many entries give a new insight into these subjects while other notes emphasize the direct link between the über-marionette and Craig's theory as it was formulated in The Art of the Theatre (1905), and in ‘The Artists of the Theatre of the Future’ (1907) and ‘The Actor and the Über-marionette’ (1907).

In preparing this paper I wrote, among others, to David Lees, Edward Gordon Craig's photographer son. In reply to my request for help, he wrote: ‘EGG and his schoob:[the final consonant underlined in red] this plural leaves me a bit surprised, for I have always known of just one school, that being “The School for the Art of the Theatre” started at the Arena Goldoni in Florence, on March 1913.’ He goes on to refer to A Living Theatre which is primarily concerned with the School in Florence. He concludes the paragraph by writing: ‘As for the schools – in the plural – as I said in the beginning, I know of no other school beside this one’.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the orientation of buildings in ancient Greece received a great deal of scholarly attention; since that time, it has fallen from favour. In 1939, William Bell Dinsmoor made an ‘attempt to illustrate a method of obtaining more accurate information concerning the dates of Greek temples and certain details of religious practice through the application of an outmoded theory, that of “orientation”’. When this complex study, replete with trigonometric calculations of seasonal star positions met with little favour, orientation became a dead issue for several decades, only reviving in 1962 with the publication of Vincent Scully's The Earth, The Temple, and the Gods (New Haven: Yale University Press).

While modern rational thinking has developed complex methods for calculating and managing risk, the better forecast and prepare for the future, certain modern performance practices have embraced the element of risk. In this article I interrogate this phenomenon, offering a distinction between risk-taking in modernist and postmodernist performance. Whereas in the former risk serves to transcend the representational aspects of performance, in the later it is banalized, revealing its inevitability in both performance situations and everyday life.

This article analyses various approaches to the transposition of Chinese xiqu performance into moving-image media in terms of preserving xiqu's aesthetic aims. Pre- and post-Cultural Revolution filmic examples, as well as contemporary television serials, are discussed. I argue that within a ‘cinema of attractions’ rather than a realist line of inquiry, ‘filmed theatre’ continues as a viable and valued stream of access to xiqu performance for contemporary audiences.

In this essay, I argue that human performers and technological media can work together as equal partners rather than as rivals competing for the audience's attention. Understanding presence in the ‘strong’ sense of the word – namely the actor's ability to draw the spectators’ undivided attention as opposed to the ‘weak’ sense of simply being present – I substantiate this claim with a model of intermedial presence in The Marionette, a popular Korean b-boy show that combines live dancing with video and black light. The show's central motif of puppetry puts the live dancers and the media elements in a highly integrated relationship while their distinct ontological identities are maintained. Understanding the show's intermedial dynamics in terms of collaboration and hypermediacy challenges the conventional binary between the live and the mediatized, as well as the assimilationist position that regards the two as fused in intermedial performance.

The myth of Korean-ness is reconstructed via the figures of minorities in a documentary/performance, An Eternal Parting, performed by the South Korean performance group Movement Dang-Dang in 2011 and 2013. It showcases the phenomena of Korean diaspora, starting with the deportations of Korean exiles from Siberia under Stalin during the 1930s, and hinges on the presence of the descendants of exiled Korean ethnic populations in contemporary South Korea, including how they are both accepted and excluded by their countrymen. However, although An Eternal Parting tries to redefine the myth of Korean-ness from a marginal viewpoint, its fundamental ambivalence does not escape hegemonic Korean ideologies of nationalism, bloodline, family and home.

This paper is an exploration of the 2004 Arabic adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which premiered in Casino du Liban in Beirut. The Last Day was created by Oussama al-Rahbani, who also composed the musical scores. The play shows how local Shakespeares resonate with the wider global field of study, which in turn echo East–West cultural interactions. The Last Day challenges our perception of the Other in Arabic drama as it questions intraculturalism within the conflict-ravaged Middle East. It prompts us to ask how we should address local Shakespeares in a global context, and how local knowledge illuminates our understanding of Shakespeare's reception. This paper emphasizes the fluidity of the field of Shakespearean studies and the instability of East–West cultural divides.

The field of contemporary youth-specific theatre in Australia is one of change and, in some cases, anxiety. While Drama Studies continue to grow in popularity in schools, previously conventional developmental paradigms have become less mandatory for theatre for, by, and about young people outside the school context. Instead, ‘new generation’ approaches in youth-specific performance are placing greater value on young people's own preferences in cultural activity. Yet this development is being tempered and further complicated by a cultural ‘generationalism’, particularly in larger arts organizations as the youth sector becomes a more integral part of marketing strategies for the future. The resulting ambiguity in the representation, value, and positioning of young people and youth-specific arts in Australia's theatre industry is considered by focusing on Magpie2, a former youth-specific company attached to the State Theatre Company of South Australia. Magpie2 ceased operation in 1998 after experimenting with a ‘new generation’ approach to theatre for young people in the State Theatre realm. Both the artistic policy of Magpie2 Director, Benedict Andrews, and the critical reception of his two productions in 1997, Future Tense and Features of Blown Youth, demonstrate how competing systems of cultural value characterize the field of youth-specific theatre in Australia.

The emergence of the director is usually seen as a crucial moment in late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century theatre history. Traditionally, the narrative of that emergence has focused on the director as a sole heroic individual, usually male. This article questions how that figure and those practices have been historicized. That historicization process has been (and continues to be) a disciplinary demonstration of power marked by the concomitant political operations of personal, geographical, and institutional identifications and affiliations. The specific political operation explored here is that of gender as the primary identification of the figures, institutions, and arguments. The thirty-year collaboration of Edith Isaacs and Rosamond Gilder on Theatre Arts, the primary voice in the United States for the reform of the theatre during the era that saw both the emergence of the director and the celebration of that emergence as the pinnacle of theatrical achievement is the example on which the article focuses. Gilder was Isaacs's assistant and successor, and she was also the author of Enter the Actress, the first book to create a history for women in the theatre. In three parts the article demonstrates how focusing on the journal, the collaboration, and the book offer a new conception of the director's history.

Ho-Jin Yoon's production The Last Empress (1995) was the first Korean-brand, Broadway-style musical to travel to Western venues. This article explores how the play was influenced by its producer's commitment to South Korea's cultural development in light of the country's intensive globalization during the mid-1990s. My analysis concludes that the production's development and the musical itself comprise a set of interactions between the global and the national; in turn, these interactions indicate a mode of alienation in which the concept of ‘global’ becomes meaningless, a fetish, or an empty signifier used in the service of national glory. My analysis also shows how elements of The Last Empress magnify the national and how its esoteric, exclusivist idea of Korean-ness is visualized via gendered nationalism.