This essay examines the US tours (2007–13) of Black Watch, a docudrama about the eponymous military unit, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). I argue that the production manifests a ‘banal theatrical nationalism’ when theatrical national signifiers meet quotidian acts of soldiering and the mundane labour required to remount the production at each tour venue. I focus attention on the regimental history recounted through ‘Fashion’, the play's central military uniform dressing sequence, and introduce into my analysis a New York City fashion show, Dressed to Kilt, to interrogate the stakes of fashion, cultural production and visibility. Black Watch materializes what I am calling a ‘Scottish operative’ that acts on behalf of the NTS in securing international attention and potential investment. In order to query the sociopolitical stakes of this production's US success, I identify political, cultural and military links between the US and Scotland.

This article focuses on German artist Tino Sehgal (born in 1976), whose works of art materialize only temporarily, while they fulfill, at the same time, all the requirements that any work of the visual arts must fulfill if it is to have a lasting existence. In this regard Sehgal's artistic approach not only takes a unique position within the history of art; it also departs fundamentally from the tradition of performance art. This article deals with the way Sehgal tries to save the future of the ephemeral situations his art puts forth, and shows, furthermore, how he thereby confronts questions and problems that performance art has neglected or even generated.

The so-called ‘theatrical revolution’ of the mid-eighteenth-century is generally hailed as the turning point in the history of English acting patterns, writing styles and playhouse management. As with any revolution, its origins and development have been described by leading participants from the viewpoint of the victor. It is a story of the pioneering labours of such figures as David Garrick and Charles Macklin rendering new performances, of old plays being reset and recast, of puffing up the pride and the prestige of the profession of actors and actresses. In true revolutionary manner, the accumulated weight of tradition which had borne down so heavily on individual talents, narrowing and stifling them, was cast aside. Under the banner of‘realism’ (in some accounts ‘naturalism’), a new generation of actors breathed life into dusty theatres and threw down the challenge of novelty: new styles, new acting manuals, new forms of expression, new representations on stage.

In 1947, Carlo Anti published Teatri Greci Arcaici da Minosse a Pericle. In this book, he formulated what one reviewer termed ‘the dogma of the originally rectangular orchestra’. This directly contradicted over a century of research which had concluded that Greek performance areas began with a completely circular dancing place and gradually changed to an arrangement which used a partial circle backed by a scene house. Over a hundred part-circular orchestras, lastingly embalmed in stone, attest to the accuracy of at least part of this curvilinear hypothesis. All of these stone remains, however, are from the mid-fourth century or later; nothing remains of the wooden theatres in which the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were first performed.

Edward Gordon Craig's 1935 visit to Russia coincided with Mei Lanfang's 1935 performance in Russia. While Mei Lanfang's performance and its impact on Brecht and Russian theatre artists have been well documented and studied in recent years, Craig's contacts with the Chinese actor and his interest in the Chinese theatre, however, have yet to be investigated. Drawing on previously unpublished archive materials and other rarely used sources, this article for the first time documents Craig's contacts with Mei Lanfang during his visit to Russia. It also investigates his interest in the Chinese theatre in the context of his theoretical construction of the art of the theatre and his overall interest in the traditions of Asian theatres.

Thirty-five years, the age of TRI, is roughly the length of time I have been involved in our discipline. I completed my Ph.D. in 1974 and entered the profession on the cusp of a generational shift. During my first decade in the academy, a number of new young scholars emerged and began to take the places of an older cohort who were primarily theatre historians and/or drama critics and interpreters. The theory explosion changed the way that both theatre history and dramatic criticism were carried out, and a whole new range of methods and objects of study began to appear in our journals and conferences. Post-structural and postmodernist ideas upset the reigning conventions of scholarship and also influenced creative artists who changed their practice to reflect these new ideas. Feminism transformed our field, as did new research on race, class and sexuality, while competing theories of the subject brought forward psychoanalysis and phenomenology as important tools for performance analysis. Cultural studies and the new historicism challenged positivist historiography and began to change the kind of theatre history (including subjects and documents) scholars researched and wrote about. Political critique was in the ascendency, after a battle to discredit what many of us perceived as a false objectivity in previous scholarship. This became, eventually, the new orthodoxy for many of us, and the senior scholars in our field today (for example Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Josette Féral, Erika Fisher-Lichte, Freddie Rokem, Joseph Roach) all participated in making these major changes happen as young scholars – while not necessarily agreeing with each other: the new generation was thoroughly heterodox in its approach to methods and topics.

The community-based popular theatre movement began in Cuba about ten years after the triumph of the revolution, but its main pioneers, the founders of the Cabildo de Santiago and Teatro Escambray, were professionals with considerable experience in virtually every style and experimental form of theatre. This article concentrates on the most dynamic period of the Cuban ‘nuevo teatro’, the 1970s, when the Cabildo and Teatro Escambray emerged as internationally recognized models of popular theatre and as valuable sources for research into Cuban cultural tradition and revolutionary transformation.

This article discusses the functions of African community theatre in general, and its preventive capacity in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in particular. By delineating the parallel developments of community theatre and HIV prevention, the reciprocal needs of the practices are assessed in light of certain cases in Tanzania. This country has taken a leading position in the implementation of sustainable and locally owned theatre projects, but the challenges of the AIDS epidemic have proven so vast that the previously assumed purposes of community theatre must be called into question. Rather than being viewed as a means in itself, or a means for rapid change, community theatre is viewed as a relational means in coordinated programmes against AIDS. However, in spite of functioning as an exceptional relational agency for the most exposed cohort in the epidemic (women aged between fifteen and twenty-four), the social, gender and epidemic predicaments will persist as long as policy-makers do not fully recognize the status of young people and the capacity of community theatre.

This essay examines the politics of the disturbances and riots that rocked Philip Astley's Dublin Amphitheatre, the site of Ireland's first circus, during the 1790s. Astley received the first legal recognition for his circus from a colonial administration in Ireland because of the loyalism of his entertainments and, throughout the 1790s, his Dublin Amphitheatre worked to mobilize the Irish masses in the interest of the crown and the empire. But, as this essay shows, these loyalist entertainments were also repeatedly disrupted by the counter-theatre of the Jacobin-inspired group, the United Irishmen, who used this site to rally support not only for the Irish nationalist revolution but also for the broader democratic revolution then being staged all around the Atlantic rim.

Between 1999 and 2008, Zimbabwe was in political and economic crisis. A number of theatre-makers responded by creating several different kinds of protest theatre. They did this to compensate for a media monopoly by the state, to promote active citizen engagement in politics, and to promote political change. This article first surveys developments in protest theatre at this time. It then draws attention to a brand of protest theatre that emerged after the crisis in Zimbabwe, after the formation of a Government of National Unity. Reconciliatory protest theatre, I explain, was concerned with issues of national healing and reconciliation which dominated the post-crisis situation in Zimbabwe. Whilst both the state and protest artists concurred on the fact that the nation ought to be healed and that reconciliation was needed, tensions emerged as to how the processes of healing and reconciliation were to unfold. By looking at two examples in detail, I explain how Zimbabwe's theatre artists viewed this issue, and how the state reacted.

In her landmark book, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, the great historian Margarete Bieber stated simply and elegantly, ‘The development of the theater building always follows the development of dramatic literature.’ While historians, of course, have always attempted to explain the drama in terms of known architectural, scenographic, and technological practices, the effect of one upon the other has been less fully or successfully explored. Why, for instance, is the reverse of Bieber's statement not true? And in the rapidly changing technology of the contemporary world, is it possible that technology has become a causal factor in the development of drama?

This article is developed from a paper presented at IFTR as part of the Performance and Disability Working Group in summer 2013. The work considered is a practice-as-research contribution by Welsh dance theatre company Cyrff Ystwyth towards a large Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded enquiry into performance, place, dislocation and vulnerability. The article uses contrasting concepts drawn from the work of critical theorists and dance scholars André Lepecki and Carrie Noland to think about the implications of Cyrff Ystwyth's site-specific performance authored by choreographer Adrian Jones, who has a learning disability. The research question is interrogated through the lens of the practice and understandings of place, performance and vulnerability, and proposed in the light of theory and its application to practice. The practice's challenge to theory is then considered as it confronts the researcher's expected outcomes and posits new understandings.

Both actor and translator, and by extension translation and performance suffer the plight of second hand art. Disloyal to their original masters they commit adultery. Thus, translation and performance become the unfortunate bastards of literature. If translation is meant to overcome the difference between itself and its other, performance is accused of playing it out and playing up. Such is the attitude which both have shared in each of their respective literary histories. The emphasis here is on literary history, for it assumes the tyranny of the text, the sacredness of the word. The quest for the origin, the reconstruction of the original greatness will always follow the linear path to the bastardized version, towards its own inferiorization. Precisely because translation and performance share this secondary status, this paper will adopt the metaphor of translation and adapt it to describe the relationship between text and performance. Translation here will be taken as that process which underlies any meaning production; it will not be reduced to a merely linguistic motion, nor seen in the form of an obvious reduplication, but as a complex interrelation between two elements. We will thus examine the translatory processes between text and performance before exposing the most illegitimate member in this affair: the translated dramatic text.

The group of actors from whom the Gelosi company arose are thought to have first come together in 1568, with the amalgamation of two troupes led by the prima donnas Vincenza and Flaminia. They were already known by the name Gelosi when they toured France in 1571; by 1572 they were popular enough to be able to complain that the stanze in Genoa could only hold an audience of 150; in 1574 their performance, and that of their leading lady, Vittoria Piisimi, were the highlight of Henri III's visit to Venice, and their reputation as the foremost com-media dell'arte troupe was fully established. Por-cacchi's pamphlet of 1574 notes some of the Gelosi actors of the time as Simon of Bologna, who played a facchino Bergamasco, Giulio Pas-quati as the Magnifico and Rinaldo. A Mantuan decree of 5 May 1579 names as Gelosi actors Simon the Bergamasco, Orazio and Adriano the innamorati, and Gabriele their friend.

A reviewer of a production of Edward Young's tragedy, The Revenge, in 1815, wrote:

Sound morality and good manners demand that this Play should either be greatly altered, or banished from the Stage. No character of Kotzebue is either so unnatural or so dangerous as Zanga. We may pronounce him a despicable coward by the surest test of cowardice – a vindictive spirit that knows not how to pardon…. Zanga is described as brave, heroic, and noble, yet forgiveness is not in his nature. He is more contemptibly mean – more desperately wicked than Iago. He is made more an object of esteem and pity than Othello…. Why did not the author make him the victim of his own contrivances? Why did he not exemplify in the disappointment of Zanga, the sure punishment of an indiscriminate revenge? … He is a fiend that gains our respect by forcing our admiration, and he does this when the real nature of his actions qualify him rather for the gibbit than for the honourable termination of his life.

This submission by IFTR's Performance and Disability working group features responses by six participants – voices projected from Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Wales, England and Australia – to Per.Art's production Dis_Sylphide, which was presented on 7 July 2018 at the Cultural Institution Vuk Karadžić as part of IFTR's conference in Belgrade at the invitation of the Performance and Disability working group. Per.Art is an independent theatre company founded in 1999 in Novi Sad, Serbia, by the internationally recognized choreographer and performer Saša Asentić, the company's artistic director. The company brings together people with learning disabilities, artists (theatre, dance and visual arts), special educators, representatives of cultural institutions, philosophers, architects and students to make work. This co-authored submission examines how the production responds to three important dance works of the twentieth century – Mary Wigman's Hexentanz (1928), Pina Bausch's Kontakthof (1978) and Xavier Le Roy's Self Unfinished (1998) – to explore normalizing and normative body concepts in dance theatre and in society, and how they have been migrating over the course of dance histories. The shared experience of witnessing the performance provoked discussion on the migration of dance forms across time and cultures, as well issues of access and (im)mobility, which are especially pertinent to a disability studies context.