H Art Chaos stands out from other Japanese performance troupes as it performs against traditions. The troupe is a all-woman ensemble directed by a woman whose aim is to wage war on the culturally constructed Japanese female body. Oshima Sakiko, the director, and Shirakawa Naoko, the main solo performer, combine their visions of violence to extract the most precise gesture, exact timing, flawless shape, and perfect prop to project those images to rigorous excess. They focus on a kind of distortion and extreme manipulation of the female body which evokes painful kinaesthetic sensations. Their choreography produces discomfort, strain, and anguish through frantic, wrenching movement which aims at stressing the performer's body to the point of explosion or dismemberment. While their movement is based in modern, jazz, and ballet dance idioms, they push the stereotyped and classic vocabulary beyond pretty lines and feel-good sensations. They take technique to the point of excess in order to undo its forms They play with the overt meanings of props and costumes and destabilize those readings, like metaphors in a waking dream where their daily meaning drops out.

St James's Palace, which was perhaps planned by Henry VIII to be the court of the heir to the throne, came into far more regular use under the prolific Stuarts than it had enjoyed under the Tudors. Under James, the various members of the royal family were assigned particular palaces and royal residences for their own households, and St James's became the London court of the Prince of Wales.

The purpose of this article is to examine theatre in Quebec as the site of transformation of its collective images as they have evolved through theatrical texts over the past twenty years. Quebec society, in a constant state of mutation as it searches for its national identity, has been particularly receptive to forms of theatre that emphasize the theme of the family. For example, the first important work of this ‘new theatre’ which dared to liberate the language from its French model was Tremblay's Les Belles-Sœurs, a play where all the action is located in a kitchen and whose characters are all women. In the development of Tremblay's work, we see how the discourses of women are taken over by masculine characters, mediated through the transvestite within a homosexual theme and finally liberated from the feminine model by the affirmation of the homosexual couple. In other more recent works, playwrights such as Normand Chaurette and Michel Marc Bouchard, have incorporated the search for a patrilinear descent into the very heart of the family conflict where the mother is put to death in a ritual killing, presented either as a ceremony (Chaurette), or as the unfolding of a myth (Bouchard).

In all these cases, the evolution of the fictive family structure is the projection of social transformations taking place in Quebec where the maternal heritage, represented historically by France, is necessarily damaged and eventually eliminated in order to lay claim to a political structure which confirms the rights of the father.

Stage speech, like the other techniques of acting, such as gesture, movement, and the interpretation of character, has always been subject to the theatrical conventions of an age. The conventions, while superficially based on current fads and fashions are on a more profound level the result of an underlying creative method reflecting commonly held views about the correct or ‘natural’ methods of imitating nature on the stage. Nothing demonstrates the enormous changes in stage speech over the last hundred years more vividly than the few existing recordings made by actors who had most of their training and their careers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Rock ’n’ Roll Circus promotes an expectation of performance that is energetic, challenging, irreverent, and sexual. Their 1998 production in Brisbane of Sweetmeats follows the company's earlier work, such as The Dark, which established its reputation in Australia for idiosyncratic physical theatre with an acute awareness of its erotic potential and appeal. A close analysis of the construction of (sexual) desires and erotic energies in Sweetmeats illustrates how the study of sexuality is also the study of what may appear to be non-sexual. Interactions are a key to an appreciation of this form of physical theatre, whether they are between body and body, human and apparatus, sexual and non-sexual, desires and anxieties, and straight and queer. Lines of demarcation are blurred and superfluous. This analysis of Sweetmeats in performance makes use of Peta Tait's investigation of sexed bodies in physical theatre, and Elizabeth Grosz's (re)conceptualization of lesbian desire and its generation through contact between surfaces. Grosz's approach is particularly applicable to a form of theatre which relies on the energy of physical contact between performers, and between performer and apparatus. The latter is exploited effectively in Sweetmeats such that a circulation of multifarious, strange desires (and anxieties) permeates the production, in some sense ‘queering’ it.

Looking to the future, it is my view that Japanese theatre research needs to concentrate its efforts on scholarly exchanges with research communities in other Asian countries or cities.

In this short article, the author, who was one of the performers in The King Lear Project, reflects on critical responses to the trilogy, and on what they reveal about the process of evaluating theatre. Having played the role of the Producer in the trilogy, Paul Rae notes that one of his functions was to deliver pre-emptive judgments on the performances as they developed, thereby challenging reviewers to be more than usually self-reflexive in delivering their own. In largely failing to meet this challenge, Rae asserts, the critics' response to the trilogy underscored the role of misrecognition, prescriptiveness and an implicit violence in the act of theatrical judgment.

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.

Before the rise of the political and theoretical project of ‘queer’ (which, in my estimation, is a second-wave millennial project begun in the 1990s), scholarly and performative lesbian practices were situated within and against feminist scholarship. Early on, the agenda was to establish lesbian visibility and, in consequence, to reveal and deconstruct the structures of representation, on the stage and on the page. Indeed, the context for lesbian work was intentionally composed of women, misunderstood as separatism, while actually creating a fully gendered notion of surrogation. By this I mean to gesture to Joseph Roach's notion of surrogation as ‘improvized narratives of authenticity and priority’ that can ‘congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin’. In situating lesbian visibility strictly within the gendered category of women, a genealogy and authenticity were invoked for its representation that were removed from the violence of binary logics of gender.

This article looks at the relationship between Haitian vodou, sound recording, and migration. I argue that Haitian vodou has a special relationship with technologies of sound, understood in Jonathan Sterne's sense of media as embodiments of social desire. There is a parallel between vodou possession and the practice of pwen (throwing verbal insults), on the one hand, and, on the other, the tape recorder's ability to manifest a person through the sound of his or her voice, making him or her present both in Haiti for the Haitian vodou congregation and in the diasporic land, thus bridging the separation across oceans and time. This transnational character underscores how Haitian vodou, which has been much maligned and often misunderstood, is an incredibly flexible and adaptive religion, necessary as a means of cultural survival for citizens of one of most economically disadvantaged nations, harshly subject to insertion in global neo-liberal labour markets.

This article uncovers the connections between the legal and scientific art of searching for human remains and theatrical performances. NAKA Dance Theater, a performance group based in Mexico City and Oakland, California, is at the centre of this intersection of art and forensics. Founded by José Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, NAKA creates theatrical events to configure a claim for social justice where the official legal–scientific terrain has failed to protect victims of state repression. These artists advance a commitment to what I call forensic performances, and their investigative practices revitalize theatrical experience in a time of debilitated democracies. Forensic performances give theatre a role in violent societies where mass graves are woven into life: they carry out some of the work of investigative journalism, without its dangers. Theatre opens up a space to do a forensics that is orthogonal to a state forensics claiming a certain kind of reality and truth that is dangerous for democratic politics.

In French, the term reprise (revival) is polysemous to a high degree. Starting with a short redefinition of the term, our present concern is to make clear its historical evolution and to analyse the contexts in which theatre directors are using it today. Whether the motives for a revival be economic, emotional or aesthetical, the phenomenon becomes more and more important in the perspective of a globalization of the major theatrical productions. From Giorgio Strehler's seven revivals of Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters to the several versions in different languages of one performance by Robert Wilson or Robert Lepage, what is at stake in a revival has changed considerably: this is what this article will attempt to clarify.

‘The Théâtre de l'Épée de Bois offers Free Training in Actor's Workshop’, reads the announcement each year in Libération. The response is minimal. Of the four thousand actors in Paris at any one time, few will apply. The workshop offers on-site training for ‘theatre apprentices’ and most students and experienced actors decline. Of those who attend, few will have the constitution necessary to withstand the mental and physical demands required of those subsequently engaged for production, let alone be prepared for a ten-month rehearsal period, twelve hours a day, unpaid. The Épée de Bois is more than just a theatre company, it is also a school, and a way of life.

After the triumph of its première in Prague in November 1787, Don Giovanni enjoyed little immediate success in the theatres of central Europe. It was received with indifference in Vienna, with unease, even outright hostility elsewhere. Mozart's music on its own aroused almost universal admiration, but as a dramatic medium it unsettled audiences. This was best expressed by a correspondent for the Chronik von Berlin, who saw the first performance at the Berlin National Theatre in December 1790. In his review he granted readily that ‘Mozart is an excellent, a great composer’ but in Don Giovanni he felt that greatness to have been betrayed.

In short, the drama is in ours, and in most civilized countries, an engine possessing the most powerful effect on the manners of society.

Thus the idea of theatre is political … it must make possible the enactment of an actual political world in the midst of painful and complex transformations within and between politics.