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.

Now a decade old, Rimini Protokoll's 100% City continues to stage civilians as statistical samples. Considering the project as a series, this paper proposes that ‘seriality’ governs not just the project's touring model, but also its creation of individuals, populations and a homogeneous group of ‘diverse’ metropolises. These serializations are a foundational part of the project of statistical reason. Surveying the nineteenth-century origins of these practices and their early public articulations, and contrasting these practices with the newly emerging regime of ‘big data’, this paper argues that this serial logic is in fact a nostalgic one. 100% City’s celebration of statistics, however troubling, appears as a comforting articulation of a social model now dissolving in favour of algorithmic enumerations of peoples. The statistical project has long been tied to the theatre, while data analysis may articulate a limit to theatrical representation.

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.

This practice-based paper looks at the nature of dramaturgical development in the theatre, and at the role of the dramaturg. It has two objectives: to examine the meaning of key terms such as ‘play text’, ‘dramaturgy’ and ‘development’, and to look at how, and according to what values, dramaturgical interventions into particular play texts are best structured. The differences between production, generative dramaturgy and adaptive dramaturgy are detailed, and the analysis of play texts using simple categories such as plot, character and language is briefly explored. The conclusions clarify some of the predicates of dramaturgical development as they impact on the theatre-making process today and identify some of the fundamental problems and challenges thereby associated with the role of the dramaturg.

Since independence, theatre in India has been touted as a platform to foster a sense of national community and exhibit the ideal citizen. The new theatre, and official cultural-policy documents since independence, prescribed ways to become an ideal citizen–actor of a new nation's cultural manifestation. A conscious modification and disruption of the post-independence national canon, as I argue in this essay, came in the late 1980s from a group of teachers and directors with a gendered sensibility. The essay will focus on the unique performance and theatre-making processes of these women directors, with Anamika Haksar's Antar Yatra being the case study. The question it will raise is, how successful was Haksar in decentring the various hierarchies? Could her collaborative work engage her students as co-creators of knowledge rather than as citizens created out of hegemonic pedagogy, conditioned by the state's national identity politics?

Fire is one of the most magical elements in existence. It is everywhere: in the sky and on the ground, in hearts and in minds, inside and out, in water, in the air and in the soil … It is both divine and demonic. It is between light and dark. It is the source of both life and death. It is a clash. A clash that gave rise to our existence and, simultaneously, the creation of an error.

This article examines the relation between philosophy and theatre in the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou. First, it focuses on Badiou's central categories, such as event and character, that resonate with the theatre. Second, Badiou's own engagement with the theatre, the place theatre occupies in his philosophical world, is identified. Finally, the article argues that Badiou's thought must be understood as a return to Plato. Plato here is understood not as an enemy of theatre, but as a philosopher who invented philosophy through a constant, if often critical, engagement with the theatre. Dramatic Platonism is the name proposed for this tradition of philosophy of which Alain Badiou is the most significant current representative.

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.

Theatre studies and anthropology have much to say to each other. Both are disciplines which describe a culture's practices through its performances, whether on stage or in everday life. Both seek to explain the significance of performative choices in their reflection, refraction, and revision of cultural values. This essay participates in the conversations between theatre and anthropology through critical pedagogical theory. It looks at a theatrical performance—a production of Etta Jenks at the University Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in February 1992—in anthropological terms, to consider the relationships between theatre, the university, and the production of politicized, educated, emancipated spectators.

My first assumption is methodological—that theatre studies can greatly benefit from a consideration of anthropological tools like ethnography, and from anthropological habits like a vigilant articulation of the participant-observer stance which theatre criticism masks. My second assumption is theoretical—that theatre spectators are active producers of meaning, and that reception studies offers a significant and rich area for theatre studies. An anthropological perspective enables me to choose a local site—a university theatre—which theatre studies tends to relegate to a dismissable amateurism, and to work with the perceptions of introductory level students—which scholarly theatre studies all but ignores. My third assumption is pedagogical—that critical literacy must now move beyond print literacy.1

James Clifford reminds us that all ethnographic accounts are created by ‘powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric'.2 In my attempt, here, to fashion a persuasive text which invites the reader in, I knowingly rewrite the students’ responses to Etta Jenks in my analysis of their reception.

Theatre Research International is published in association with IFTR – the International Federation for Theatre Research – and renews its editorial team every three years. Therefore, before passing on the ‘torch’ to Elaine Aston, who will serve as the Senior Editor beginning with the next issue of TRI (35, 1), and to Charlotte Canning, the incoming Associate Editor, wishing them success, I want to thank Elaine for her cooperation and support as Associate Editor during my three-year term. I also want to thank the Assistant Editor during my term as editor, Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, for her help. The articles that have been published during these years have no doubt greatly profited from her comments and suggestions, as well as from those of the many anonymous reviewers whom I also want to thank for their invaluable assistance. I would also like to thank the book review editors, in particular Peter Boenisch, for keeping the readers of the journal up to date with the many developments of the field, as well as the staff at Cambridge University Press, in particular Ella Colvin, Sally Hoffman and James Carr for their professional navigation of the actual publication process. Finally – and no doubt most importantly – I want to thank the scholars who have contributed their research to the journal, as well as the readers. The contributions and the subscriptions are steadily growing and this is certainly an encouraging sign.

Late in 1999 the Commonwealth of Australia's Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts released Securing the Future, the final Report of the Major Performing Arts Enquiry chaired by Helen Nugent (commonly referred to as the Nugent Report). The operations of the committee and the findings of the Report occasioned considerable public debate in the Australian arts world in the late 1990s, as the Enquiry solicited and analysed information and opinion on the financial health and artistic practices of thirty-one national major performing arts companies producing opera, ballet, chamber and orchestral music as well as theatre. The Report saw the financial viability of Australian live performance as deeply affected by the impact of globalization, especially by what elsewhere has been called ‘Baumol's disease’ – escalating technical, administrative and wage costs but fixed revenue – which threaten the subsidized state theatre companies of Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth with their relatively small population bases. The structural implementation recommended a considerable financial commitment by Commonwealth and State Governments to undertake a defined period of stabilizing and repositioning of companies. Early in 2000 both levels of Government committed themselves to this funding – in fact increasing Nugent's requested $52 million to $70 million – and to the principle of a strengthened Australia Council dispensing arms-length subsidy. In an economically philistine political environment, these outcomes are a tribute to Nugent's astute use of economic rhetoric to gain at least a symbolic victory for the performing arts sector. In 2000 New Zealand arts gained a similar major injection of funding, while a commissioned Heart of the Nation report, advocating the dilution of the principle of arm's-length funding through the abolition of the national funding organization Creative New Zealand, was rejected by Prime Minister Helen Clark.

In any consideration of theatre in the French Caribbean, the name Césaire is bound to be mentioned. Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) is the most widely- known play in French by a black dramatist, and is now even in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, and his plays figure widely in checklists of ‘African’ theatre. A revealing contrast can be made between the epic dramas of Aimé Césaire, written for an international audience, especially the newly independent black nations of the 1960s, and the work of his daughter, Ina. He tackles from the standpoint of Négritude major themes of historical drama: the nature of sovereignty, the forging of nationhood; he storms the heights of tragic poetry in French. She is attentive, not to the lonely hero constructing his Haitian Citadel of rock, but to the Creole voices of the grassroots. She brings to the stage the lives of ordinary women, the lore and legends that sustained the slaves and their descendants. Her achievement should of course be assessed away from her father's shadow, but the ‘divergent orientation of the two generations’ also suggests the greater confidence today in the role of Creole language and oral literature, and in a serious theatre within Martinique.

The première of It Is Never Too Late to Mend at the Princess's Theatre on 4 October 1865 marked the appropriately tumultuous return of Charles Reade to the London stage after an absence of nine years. That night, one of the most memorable disturbances in the nineteenth-century theatre occurred when the drama critics in attendance, led by Frederick Guest Tomlins of the Morning Advertiser, demanded that the play be halted because of its offensive subject matter and one particularly shocking scene. The dispute became a cause celebre among critics, dramatists, and the general public and was recalled (with varying degrees of accuracy) years later by its participants, witnesses, and other interested parties.