With the increasing familiarity of reception theory, deconstruction, collective creation and performance art, it seems as if performers have assumed they should pursue their craft unencumbered by textual dictates. Actors appear to be privileging their own interests over the interests of characters or literary personae. Even when actors turn from fictive characters to real life personalities in their presentations of one-person shows, oral histories and performance ethnographies, it seems less fashionable to discuss the people that serve as a basis for such performances than to focus upon the actors' personal preferences and individual visions. The question is no longer how performers might put flesh on the textual and human ‘skeletons’ they encounter but how they might pull a bone from here and another one from there in order to create their own figures. In short, ‘the other’ serves performers.

Two broad areas within Theatre Studies have been characterized as interdisciplinary. The first concerns approaches inspired by the human and social sciences, and, more recently, cultural studies. The second concerns artistic practices that may be described as interartistic, intermedial (since they involve different media and, thus, different technological developments), and intercultual. It is argued that the epistemological paradigm for theatre studies has changed over the last thirty years, and can be broken down roughly according to decades, each defined by its particular contribution to the interdisciplinary thrust of theatre studies. Most current theoretical debates no longer deal with epistemology or methodology, but almost exclusively with the extension of the field of performance. It is suggested that the theoretical and practical worlds must be connected more closely, ‘actor’ and ‘text’ here serving as examples.

This article provides an exposition of four key concepts emerging in the encounter between the philosophical man of the theatre, Antonin Artaud, and the theatrical philosopher, Gilles Deleuze: the body without organs, the theatre without organs, the destratified voice and differential presence. The article proposes that Artaud's 1947 censored radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God constitutes an instance of a theatre without organs that uses the destratified voice in a pursuit of differential presence – as a nonrepresentative encounter with difference that forces new thoughts upon us. Drawing from various works by Deleuze, including Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, A Thousand Plateaus and ‘One Less Manifesto’, I conceive differential presence as an encounter with difference, or perpetual variation, as that which exceeds the representational consciousness of a subject, forcing thought through rupture rather than communicating meanings through sameness. Contra the dismissal of Artaud's project as paradoxical or impossible, the article suggests that his nonrepresentational theatre seeks to affirm a new kind of presence as difference, rather than aiming to transcend difference in order to reach the self-identical presence of Western metaphysics.

The article consists of two interrelated arguments: First, all theoretical or everyday talk on theatre implies a certain scenic understanding, related to the phenomenon of human action and speech. Second, this understanding has been concealed by an anthropomorphic conception of the human phenomenon, based on the givenness of the human figure. The article tries to deconstruct this figure by analysing classical philosophical texts where the link between the human appearance and the theatrical mode of representation is theoretically established. By questioning this link, new ways to exercise the critique of theatrical anthropocentricism, both in theory and in practice, are established.

The spectatorial relationship between sporting events and theatrical performance, based on recent sociological studies, reveals much about the nature of any audience position, and raises issues of class, economic status, and gender. Despite the heavy commodification and internationalization of professional sport, fans retain a remarkable sense of psychological investment in home teams, centred around notions of civic pride and communal ownership. They ardently follow the fortunes of their sides in a manner rarely associated with any other form of entertainment, a devotion that can lead to notable violence. Sporting events also constitute one of the few remaining examples of live television broadcasts. Television extends the implications of the sports spectator enormously, and is the foundation of the globalization of sports, but it also affects live audiences through the mediatization of some events.

Although the concept of ‘intermediality’ recently has gained prominence within the discourse of Theatre Studies, still various contradictory definitions of that term circulate, none of which applies insight from the field of Media Theory to theatre. Rather than clinging to the banal formula ‘theatre + media = intermedial theatre’ and thus perpetuating the idea of medial specificity, an approach to intermediality informed by Media Theory stresses underlying strategies of processing all kinds of information, including the aesthetic, within a certain period. Consequently, theatre's genuine ‘mediality’ already implies its ‘intermediality’, which in fact can be traced back all the way to classical Greek drama. Within the present transformation from McLuhan's ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ into an ‘electrONic culture’, theatre now trains its spectators in cognitive strategies of that emerging cultural paradigm. The performance Circulation Module by the Japanese group NEST reflects these significant repercussions of electrONic culture on theatrical performance at the turn of the twenty-first century.

This article examines the work of the Situationists and their leading member, Guy Debord, as it relates to theatre history and the history of the manifesto. The Situationists privileged the writing of manifestos over the production of art works in order to avoid the fate of the historical avant-garde, whose provocative art had been co-opted by the cultural establishment. Despite this pro-manifesto and anti-art stance, the Situationists drew on the theatre, envisioning the construction of theatrical ‘situations’ influenced by the emerging New York happening as well as modern theatre artists such as Brecht and Artaud. This theatrical inheritance prompted a recent theatrical representation of their activities based on Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces. What this theatrical rendering demonstrated, however, is that the theatricality of the ‘situation’ is different from that produced on a stage, reminding us that the strategies of the neo-avant-garde cannot be easily transferred to a traditional theatrical form.

The importance of the actor benefit in the eighteenth-century London theatre is manifest. An actor's benefit was a key part of his or her contract, and the income it produced was a crucial supplement to the performer's ordinary salary. A benefit for a single performer could easily yield more than £50 (after expenses) early in the century – a. sum which might double the annual income of a second or third rank member of a company. The long string of benefits at both Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn.Fields each spring soon after 1700 (visible as soon as daily newspaper advertisements become customary) often total twenty or more at each house, and the actor benefit was to remain a basic feature of financial arrangements in London theatres throughout the eighteenth century.

Although a rather recent convention, sitting in the dark looking at others in the light has become a standard element of going to see a theatrical performance. Before the introduction of powered lighting systems that focused light on the stage, however, audiences and actors alike were bathed in a shared illumination. As life outside the theatre becomes ever more exposed by light, what are the possibilities presented for and by a performance that takes place in darkness? In this article I discuss these possibilities as they were explored in Chris Goode's Who You Are, a performance commissioned by Tate Modern for Experiences of the Dark, a series of talks, presentations and other works inside Miroslaw Balka's giant installation How It Is.

Among the cultural forms of the Indian diaspora in the West, the radical obscurity of drama and theatre in comparison with fiction, non-fiction, and poetry suggests a complicated relation between genre, location, language, and experience. As a collaborative public medium theatre depends on material resources, institutional networks, and specific cultural contexts which place it at several removes from the privacy and relative self-sufficiency of print genres. Moreover, while novelists often employ diaspora as the enabling condition but not the subject of narrative, immigrant playwrights can create original theatre only when they distance themselves from their cultures of origin and embrace the experience of residence in the host culture, with all its attendant problems of acculturation and identity. In Canada, where the Indian immigrant communities are older, often visibly underprivileged, and entangled in post/colonial histories, an emergent culture of original playwriting and performance has offered a critique of the home-nation as well as of conditions in the diaspora. In the United States, in contrast, where large-scale immigration from India is relatively recent, socially privileged, and unencumbered by colonial baggage, original drama is virtually absent, and various forms of ‘travelling’ theatre dominate the culture of performance, reinforcing a powerful synonymy between ‘diaspora’ and ‘nation’. These two North American locations are paradigmatic examples, therefore, of the historically grounded interconnections between diaspora, nation, and theatre in the modern Indian context.

Observation of the rehearsal process provides vivid insights into the dynamically shifting and contingent nature of theatrical meaning-making. Drawing on my experience as an observer of the work process involved in the 2004 production by Brink Productions of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, I provide a detailed description of a single work session and an overview of the set design process. Influenced by Clifford Geertz's concept of ‘thick description’, I use these two differently structured aspects of the work process to provide insights into the nature of creative agency in theatre-making process and to argue for the value of ethnographic theory and practice in the emerging field of rehearsal studies.

Feminist studies resulted from activist challenges to the very institutionalization of knowledge. Feminist studies, like studies of performance imagine their ground in embodied actions performed, somehow, socially, breaking down disciplinary boundaries to create a ‘field’ of study regarded as ‘interdisciplinary’. However, the term ‘post-disciplinary’, now in current usage, announces a different relationship to fields of study than the earlier term ‘interdisciplinary’ might connote. ‘Interdisciplinary’ is a term that signals a sense of a unified field, produced through the historical convergence of subcultures, social structures, and training practices. ‘Post-disciplinary’ retains nothing of the notion that a shared consciousness, or a shared objective, brings together a broad range of discrete studies. Instead, it suggests that the organizing structures of disciplines themselves will not hold. Only conditional conjunctions of social and intellectual forces exist, at which scholarship and performance may be produced.

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.

This article argues that the theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio constructs a meta-affective practice of spectatorship that engages with an ethics and politics of contemporary cultural memory. The promise of theatrical meta-affect can be found in the ontological surprise or rupture that enables feelings, if we understand them as the embodied archival trace of an affect, to be re-felt. In crafting an inversion of the mechanics of representation, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio generate a particular affective dimension that remediates the function of affect as it works to empathically bind spectator subjectivities through relations of power to images of suffering others. This generates a form of spectatorship that hurts: morally, emotionally and physically.

The question of whether the director has been faithful to the author or whether the production conforms to the text of the play resurfaces in many different shapes. Three recent theories are given as examples of this dogma of necessary fidelity. But this dualism is itself historically relativistic. Examples of recent productions show that the text–performance ‘couple’ must constantly be reconsidered.

It is well known that theatre semiotics follows the metamorphoses of theories of semiotics in general and, like them, draws on Charles Peirce and American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics and the linguistics of the Prague Circle, Russian formalism and French structuralism. These currents converge in the theatre semiotics of the 70s, producing a methodology that is highly scientist, technical, self-reflexive and abstract. This type of theatre semiotics may no longer be an up-markettopic, nor is it stone-dead. Its fundamental principle of ‘abstract objectivism’, as Bakhtin/Voloshinov describe it, survives despite the greater flexibility provided by its attention to such areas as reception theory and theories of cultural systems. Its inclusion of reception theory acknowledged of the fact that spectators exist in the construction of semiosis. Ideas concerning cultural systems and, thus, primarily those concerning codes were used to indicate the importance of cultural contexts in the processes of signification.

This short piece highlights a current spurt in queer researcher–practitioners doing practice as research (PaR) in higher education and explores potential reasons why PaR is so vital, appealing, useful and strategic for queer research. As a starting point, we offer the idea of messiness and messing things up as a way of describing the methods of PaR. Queer mess is to do with asserting the value and pleasure of formations of knowledge that sit outside long-standing institutional hierarchies of research. The latter places what Robin Nelson calls ‘hard knowledge’ above tacit, quotidian, haptic and embodied knowledge. The methodological and philosophical impulses of PaR make space for a range of research methods inherently bound up with the researcher as an individual and the materiality of lived experience within research. Yet, in our experience, although each PaR project is individual, PaR projects follow certain shared modes evolving largely from embodied and heuristic research methods adapted from social sciences, such as (auto)ethnography, participant observation, phenomenology and action research. PaR methodology in theatre and performance is composed of a bricolage of these openly embodied methods, which makes PaR, as an embodied resistance to sanitary boundaries, somewhat queer in academic terms already. It is unsurprising, then, that PaR is so attractive to queer practitioner–researchers bent on queering normative hierarchies of knowledge.

The rhetoric of censorship is increasingly invoked in the West in response to the curtailment of civil liberties, often as a result of new repressive legislation arising from efforts to fight terrorism. However, while agreeing that serious issues concerning censorship are arising for artists with more frequency, this essay argues that caution needs to be exercised concerning the charge of ‘censorship’, and that theatre artists and scholars need sustained and nuanced analyses of what constitutes censorship and what extenuating circumstances may accompany events that at first glance bear the marks of the censor.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the dominance of language, so typical of Western culture since the Renaissance, was increasingly challenged. As early as 1876, Nietzsche wrote on Richard Wagner in Thoughts Out of Season:

He was the first to recognize an evil which is as widespread as civilization itself among men; language is everywhere diseased, and the burden of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole of man's development. Inasmuch as language has retreated ever more and more from its true province— the expression of strong feelings, which it was once able to convey in all their simplicity—and has always had to strain after the practically impossible achievement of communicating the reverse of feeling, that is to say, thought, its strength has become so exhausted by this excessive confusion of its duties during the comparatively short period of modern civilization, that it is no longer able to perform even that function which justifies its existence, to wit, the assisting of those who suffer in communicating with each other concerning the sorrows of existence. Man can no longer make this misery known unto others by means of language; hence he cannot really express himself any longer. And under these conditions, which are only vaguely felt at present, language has gradually become a force in itself which with spectral arms coerces and drives humanity where it least wants to go.

The disease of language which Nietzsche here diagnoses, can be described as a degeneration of language from the state of being a polyfunctional, ambiguous, flexible semiotic system that allows people to express their feelings, constitute their selves and communicate with each other, into a restrictive technical language.

It has long been believed that the style of comedy depicted on southern Italian vases of the fourth century BC was a local Italiote form called phylax. A. D. Trendall, the leading authority on the vases, has consistently taken the view that the plays were ‘impromptu’ performances, ‘in which light, movable sets could be used to indicate the required background’. It is not surprising that this has become accepted history: the vases, it is believed, represent improvised farce performed on makeshift stages by strolling actors, also called phlyakes.