Much critical engagement with the work of Hélène Cixous has tended to foreground her early writings and the discourses of écriture féminine, whilst overlooking the importance of theatre to the development of her aesthetics. This continued focus has contributed to a perception of her work as divided into distinct, chronologically or generically defined sets and has consequently hampered the exploration of common threads and evolving representations of issues central to her work. This study aims to identify a consistent concern behind Cixous's strategic use of the theatrical form: the desire to construct and project representations of poetic identity, a theme which I will argue has become increasingly explicit in her work in the theatre, and which is essential to a reading of Cixous's writings as a coherent body of work. After a brief contextualization of the representation of the poet figure in her early theatre, I will focus on her most recent plays: Voile noire voile blanche (Black sail white sail, 1988), La Ville par jure ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City or the Awakening of the Erinyes) and L'Histoire (qu'on ne connaîtra jamais) (The Story (which we will never know)), both published in 1994. This play constitutes an explicit staging of the scène de l'écriture.

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 Stolpersteine (‘stumbling stones’) memorial project commemorates victims of Nazi violence and the Holocaust through an individual marker installed outside the last willing residence before deportation and execution. The Stolpersteine project has spread throughout Europe, providing an urban topography of sites where traumatic events occurred. Because Stolpersteine are placed in public streets, they create performance possibilities, inviting passing pedestrians to engage in past history and trauma. As the project grows throughout Europe, however, the universality of the stones abuts with the specificity of local history and memory. This article considers the Stolpersteine installed in the Catalan city of Manresa. These stones, representing twenty-eight Spanish Republicans who were interned at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, are framed by a Catalan-language audio guide that directly points to the collaboration of the Francisco Franco dictatorship with Nazi Germany. In so doing, the stones in Spain also stand for violence meted out during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.

The Palestinian National Theatre's production of Roses and Jasmine presents an uncommon occurrence: Palestinians performing a Jewish-majority story on Palestinian and world stages. The play opened to divergent audience reactions in East Jerusalem, igniting controversy, and leading to the expression of opinions that ranged from absolute support to clear opposition. This article discusses the play's intervention into an orientalist rhetorical context, showing how reversing traditional orientalist ventriloquisms can be employed as a key strategy of cultural resistance. An analysis of the production's choices and the critical responses it generated suggests that by consciously representing Jewish characters who struggle with their own religious and national identities through Palestinian performers, the play opens up the possibility of breaking the perception of balance between the occupier and the occupied. Extended to a larger context, a resistant ventriloquism can reveal systemic oppression, rendering injustices visible in cases where systemic racism prevents the colonizer from seeing the condition of the colonized.

Originating from the avant-garde's attempt to supplant the structural limitations of perspective which ‘bound the spectator to a single point of view’, installation art emerged during the 1960s and the 1970s as a critique of the pure, self-referential work of art. Belgian artist Kris Verdonck integrates that modernist debate into his hybrid practice of performative installation. Trained in visual arts, architecture and theatre, Verdonck uses sophisticated technological devices in order to blur binary distinctions such as time- and space-art, inanimate and animate figures, and immateriality and materiality. This study focuses on End (Brussels 2008), which shows the possible final stages of a human society in ten scenes. I analyse End as an echo of the Futurists’ performance tactics, which prefigured a broadening of the formal aesthetic boundaries of performance art under the major influence of Henri Bergson's theory of time.

This dossier contribution focuses on Alutiiq performer Tanya Lukin Linklater's Woman and Water. It examines how the piece creates the opportunity for an experience of a way of being in the world, in intimate interconnection with one another, the land and other animals, and the experiences of time that this intimacy compels, that differs from the models of affiliation presumed in understandings of ‘nation states’ generally referenced by contemporary academic discussions of nationalism and transnationalism.

My approach to textual analysis is that of a practising director and actor although I am usually fairly familiar with the main streams of commentary on a particular play or playwright. Thus, when preparing a production I do not often engage in exhaustive examination of the literature. Such reading can actually be harmful, since it may interfere with the direct and intimate contact with the material that can sometimes lead to a fresh insight or approach.

The following article examines the functions and the effects of the process of setting an ending. The performance To the Dogs by the English performance duo Lone Twin stages its end(ing) by interlinking two phenomena which have often been separated in theatre criticism: the theatrical event – seen as something happening in the present – and narrative – considered as something belonging to the past. In To the Dogs the event is narrativized by the performers as it goes along, providing it with endings on the level of rhetoric, content and time structure. In this process the performance is transformed into a myth, in which the event is anticipated as a closed story, even though it is still about to happen. This future-poetics of the end(ing), in which a collective event, paradoxically, is being charged in advance with nostalgia, illustrates the affective force of a (narrative) ending as performance. It does so not only in a negative, restrictive sense of closing the event as story, but also in a positive, enabling sense: To the Dogs raises the question of how far the discourse about an event regarded as unique and inaccessible implies a narrative quality. The process of setting a future ending is revealed as being more than a generator of narrative closure; this essay aims to perform the fact that it is also an enabling moment of opening the seemingly closed event as myth into a time afterwards.

National Collection was a participatory tour performance presented at Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2015 by Public Movement, a group that investigates public choreographies and forms of social order. This article discusses the work's examination of the interdependency between the state and its cultural institutions, both as a paradigmatic form and as historical narrative. By following the different stages of the performance score – the group's arrival at the museum's original building where Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence ceremony took place, a march in public space to the current museum and the tour held inside – the article explores the ways in which National Collection ‘restates’ the aesthetic political scene of foundation and the museum's central role. Along with the embodiment of institutional authority, the performance formulates a significant critical dimension, conveying doubt and a constant sense of crisis embedded in establishing a state and prominent by displaying or reforming museum order.

Samuel Beckett's monodrama, Krapp's Last Tape, presents great challenges to the actor. A short piece, it is complex, many-layered and laconic. As always, Beckett never uses even one word, where silence will do. I rehearsed and performed the play some years ago and have continued to reflect on the play and the role of Krapp.

Few people deny the intimate inter-relationship in new China of culture on the one hand, and the stage of the revolution on the other. Yet I do not think it has always been made clear why it is theatre that has been the main art for expressing that relationship.

In both the play and the film of Marguerite Duras's India Song no verbal exchange is seen to take place on stage or in camera shot and all the dialogue emanates from disembodied voices which reverberate across the filmic or theatrical imagery. The verbal text is woven into a complex, orchestrated soundscape of instrumental music, songs, non-verbal cries and utterances, screams of pain and wretchedness, sound of street shouting, and screeches of exotic birds and animals. These elements together become a score functioning alongside the visual text. In this essay, I want to focus on the composition and the ‘enactment’ of the sound script of India Song and consider the way in which it functions as a stratum of eloquent signifying systems in the performance of this rich and poetic text. My concern will be with the ‘composite’ text of novel/play/ film and the way in which sound is evoked across the spectrum of reader, spectator and auditor, though my intention is not to suggest that the written text, the film and the play performance are interchangeable. I shall refer to the published text, Duras's own 1974 film version, and Theatr Clwyd's performance directed by Annie Castledine and Anabel Arden in 1993.

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) is the fulcrum upon which Irish drama and theatre studies is balanced. Synge's nodal position is predicated upon the dramatist's rock ‘n’ roll recalcitrance towards the dramaturgical praxis of his contemporaries; his subject matter was as shocking as the Anglo-Irish idiom in which it was articulated. After Synge's premature death in 1909, W. B. Yeats's fundamental concern was that Synge scholars would attempt ‘to mould . . . some simple image of the man’. However, W. J. McCormack's concentric biography of Synge, The Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge, and Ann Saddlemyer's The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, have demonstrated that Synge's life was complex, multifaceted and in deep dialogue with Irish culture. But with respect to Synge's drama a simple image has surrounded critical discourse: the politics of Irish nationalism.

German director Frank Castorf and his designer Bert Neumann have created a series of productions that have altered the dramaturgy of visual space. Their scenography integrates stage space with other spaces mediated by technology and interlocks taped and/or live mediated images with live performance. Castorf exposes spaces hidden from the audience's direct view to address the question of what ‘truth’ inheres in an image. The philosopher Boris Groys has called this spatial dramaturgy ‘submedial space’. I flesh out Groy's concept with reference to the writings of Walter Benjamin and analyse how Castorf and Neumann create such spaces through performance strategies that blend live and mediated elements. Using Castorf's productions of Final Destination America (2000) and Forever Young (2003) at the Volksbühne Berlin as examples, I argue that the multilayered images and complex spatial configurations thereby created effectively serve Castorf's purposes of political critique.

Javanese actor, puppeteer and musician Slamet Gundono (1966–2014) created performances with everyday objects and materials (mud, dried grass, cooking utensils, condoms and food) in combination with conventions from wayang kulit puppetry. His performances were based on personal, often controversial, interpretations of well-known stories, from the Mahabharata epic to the nineteenth-century literary work Serat Centhini. By analysing three of his performances, I argue that Slamet Gundono's objects become temporarily endowed with the status of heirlooms (pusaka). Each of his performing objects is a non-spiritual pusaka that is used to take attention away from the spiritual quests that dominate traditional wayang. Gundono invokes everyday objects to focus on the more mundane, though urgent, questions of gender inequality, religious intolerance and environmental destruction.

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.