This article explores two plays, Khamsūn (Fifty/Bodies Hostages) and Yaḥia Yaïsh (Amnesia), by Jalila Baccar and Fadhel Jaïbi, and a street performance (‘Ben Ali Fled!’) by a Tunisian citizen who was filmed celebrating the defeat of Ben Ali. The article examines Khamsūn's expression of fear of Islamic fundamentalism. Yaḥia Yaïsh not only shows the figure of a government leader who abuses his power, but also foretells the imminent fall of this leader, followed by an attempt to run away from being brought to justice, remarkably predicting the real-life events that soon materialized during the Tunisian Revolution, with slight differences between the two falls. Finally, the article considers both plays as theatrical experiences that are not enclosed within a confined space, but were re-enacting events happening in the streets of Tunisia.

Documentation is often descriptive, yet Brecht's approach to the task was to unpack as much of the process as possible in order to share his method and to make it available to other theatre-makers. This article initially examines how such documentation functioned and goes on to consider how and why it gradually declined over time. By the mid-1960s, the Berliner Ensemble had entered a period of crisis, yet the development of post-Brechtian practices in the early 1970s did not lead to a resurgence of documentation. However, at certain points, interest in manufacturing the carefully taken Notate resurfaced. The article thus investigates the relationship between documenting and transmitting Brechtian practices. Documentation becomes a yardstick by which to measure the fêted company's self-understanding as Brecht's theatre.

This overview of theatre research in the Nordic countries presents some characteristic features that can be traced in recent scholarly publications. After explaining what ‘Nordic’ means in this context, the first section describes the marks that the general theoretical development in the field has made among notable Nordic scholars, especially in research on contemporary performances. ‘Artistic research’ is the Scandinavian equivalent to ‘practice as research’ and this branch of research has recently advanced very quickly and along various organizational lines. The writing of theatre history, especially on the controversial issues of the 1930s and 1940s, are investigated in the next section. Finally, the establishment of national theatre histories has proved to be highly political, especially in Sweden, where three histories of Swedish theatre have been published in four years. In conclusion, the author expresses his optimistic view of the future of theatre studies in the Nordic countries.

This article explores contemporary Iranian theatre festivals and their relation to the whole structure of theatrical playing in the country. It examines in particular the role of the most important decision-making centre for theatre and theatre festivals: the Dramatic Arts Centre (DAC), the theatrical branch of the Ministry of Culture. The main framework of the article is based on Willmar Sauter's model of the theatrical event. Two of his four elements have been selected to develop the concept of festivals as theatrical events. The section titled ‘Organization and cultural context’ will discuss the organizational structure of festivals; and the section ‘Contextual theatricality’ will analyse the framework of the festival culture. Some fifty festivals and mini-festivals are held annually throughout the whole country. They are categorized in the article according to their genre: international, national, regional and community.

This article provides a contextual analysis of Janakaraliya (‘Theatre of the People’), a theatre company acclaimed for its excellence in theatre for social justice and peace building in Sri Lanka. It discusses the governing conditions that enable its practice and evaluates its impact, whether this be the biopower of the state and non-state actors during periods of political violence, donor funding frameworks, or the Janakaraliya archive itself as an actant shaped by donor rationalities. Drawing on a recent research project entitled The Theatre of Reconciliation, the article builds an argument for changing the terms on which the arts in peace building are evaluated, and for a shift in the dominant narrative on Janakaraliya which collapses its sophisticated aesthetics to a binary of Sinhala–Tamil ethnic relations. The logic of this revision would be fuller acknowledgement of the troupe's aesthetic forms and styles as a more robust signifier of the pluralities that constitute Sri Lankan society today and therefore of post-war reconciliation itself.

Theatresports have been played for several decades now, and the form can claim international acceptance. This success is best viewed against the background of theatre's position in contemporary art and society. This form of theatre markedly takes advantage of the specificity of theatre, of its immediacy, of the fact that it is ‘live’ art. The improvisational matches thereby stress to what extent the ‘live’ aspect of theatrical performance has become distinctive in the domain of art. Moreover, theatresports highlight the social nature of theatre to such an extent that they probe the boundaries between the artistic and the social fields. By privileging the social event theatresports turn to advantage an aspect that allows theatre to buttress its position in competition with screen media.

Although current theories of diaspora argue for a break between an older irrevocable migration from one nation to another and a new transnational movement between host country and birthplace, research on nineteenth- as well as twentieth-century North America demonstrates that earlier migration also had a transnational dimension. The cultural consequences of this two-way traffic include syncretic performance forms, institutions, and audiences, whose legitimacy depended on engagement with but not total assimilation in local conventions and on the mobilization of touristic nostalgia in, say, Cantonese opera in California or Bavarian-American musicals in New York, to appeal to nativist and immigrant consumers. Today, syncretic theatre of diaspora is complicated on the one hand by a theatre of diasporic residence, in which immigrants dramatize inherited conflicts in the host country, such as Québécois separatism in Canada, along with problems of migrants, among them South Asians, and on the other by a theatre of non-residence, touring companies bringing theatre from the home country, say India, to ‘non-resident Indians’ and local audiences in the United States.

This article uses critical practice to explore making an ‘ethical response’ to Yaël Farber's Nirbhaya (Fearless One), a play incited by the fatal gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi in December 2012. Requiring its audiences to witness testimonies of violence against women, Nirbhaya's strategies raise complex relationships of witnessing and trauma, while insisting on the cultural audibility of women's voices. Performing a shift from the testimonial to the persuasive, Nirbhaya can be seen as part of a global advocacy movement that asks audiences not only to bear witness, and the responsibilities this entails, but also to become fellow activists. By attending closely to the voices of Nirbhaya, and to the use of female testimony as a tactic of local and global movements and geopolitical motivations, this article argues that female voices are displaced, mediatized and co-opted through their role as advocates and agents of cultural change.

Hélène Bouvier (HB): How did you first become interested in theatre?

James L. Peacock (JLP): Most interesting to me, though perhaps less interesting to anyone else, is the question, ‘Why should I, the son of an engineer (one feature shared with Victor Turner whose mother, however, was an actress), study theatre?’ I had no background in it, and I had hardly even seen a play before I went to Java. I think I know a source. It is during World War II, my father is preparing to invade Normandy, while my mother, my sister and I have moved in with her widowed mother in rural Alabama. My mother's sister, a concert pianist, and her sister's son had also moved in because the sister's husband, also a pianist, was also overseas. This boy and my sister play act. I don't. I make things. Every morning I put on my shorts (nothing else, no shoes, no shirt) at the crack of dawn and go outside to play in the yard, especially the ‘sand pile’ where I construct forts and tunnels. (The one dream I remember is of finding a soldier I lost in the sand: my absent father, perhaps?) While my cousin and sister play, sometimes I watch. We grow up. He goes to New York and becomes an actor and musician. I become an anthropologist.

I have never acted in a play (except a pornographic skit in my college fraternity, in which I was a great success among the ‘brothers'), but I have always stared at people (today, women, but when I was growing up, men), and I would draw them, not while looking at them but later, alone—as teenager cartoon fantasies, like the Phantom or Superman, except more human.

From mid-October to mid-November 2013, Australian performance artist Casey Jenkins sat for twenty-eight days in a gallery in Darwin, far North Australia, knitting a scarf from a ball of wool lodged in her vagina. Parts of the performance of Casting Off My Womb were filmed by the public broadcasting service SBS2, and aired in late November 2013 as a two-minute-and-forty-eight-second video clip re-titled Vaginal Knitting. The clip went viral on YouTube, with over seven million views as of March 2016, and received extensive media attention. Casting Off My Womb attracted global public interest because Jenkins continued to knit throughout the days of her period, weaving her menstrual blood into the artwork. The performance elicited strong responses from its global viewing public. While some people praised the work, many online spectators wrote vicious, derisive and personal attacks on Jenkins for displaying her menstrual blood in a public place. This article uses Matthew Goulish's methodology of ‘slow thinking’ as a counterresponse to the impulsive reactions of the online spectators and as a means to register the powerful and incremental energy and effects of Jenkins's feminist performance.

The history of the Theatre Historiography Working Group in IFTR/FIRT provides a case study of how and why the Federation has been transformed by its working groups during the last two decades. Founded in 1992, the historiography group has developed into one of the largest and most active in IFTR/FIRT. Over the last nineteen years, the members of the group, drawn from many of the countries in the Federation, have used the annual meetings to develop a diverse and often challenging scholarship on the history of theatre (broadly defined). By focusing on the basic issues in historiography, the participating scholars have refined their research and writing methods. Moreover, the essays and books, published in several languages, have contributed to major transformations in the methods and topics in performance history. The working group, besides serving as a transnational community for historical scholarship, has also contributed to revisionist methods in the teaching of theatre history in dozens of countries, especially during the last decade.

In 1772, William Kenrick published Love in the Suds, a direct attack on David Garrick. In 1776, Humphrey Nettle [William Jackson] published Sodom and Onan, a satire against Samuel Foote. Both of these texts make explicit charges of homosexuality against the two men. Why were these two actors singled out at this particular moment: serendipity or a new mechanism of power? An examination, thus, is required, of the representational practices operating within and without theatre, through which accepted sexual practices and new forms of personhood were normalized and put into discourse in late eighteenth-century London. The fact that this was to be achieved by placing actor's image and actor's body, occupying an ambiguous social position, under close scrutiny, points to a new economy in performing cultural and societal norms.

Scottish vaudevillian Harry Lauder epitomized Scottishness in the Anglo-American cultural imaginary for much of the twentieth century. Yet Lauder's Scottishness was a carefully crafted performance, a collaborative effort between Lauder and his American agent, William Morris, centred on Lauder's embodiment of the ‘canny Scot’ stereotype. The article argues that this performance served two primary objectives within the context of early twentieth-century vaudeville. First, stories of Lauder's ‘characteristic’ Scottish thrift worked to deflect commentary about the star's status as a highly paid foreign commodity. By planting stories and arranging interviews that represented Lauder as a skilled and cunning Scot, Morris addressed growing anxieties that men, as well as women, were becoming mere cogs in the machine of corporate Broadway capital. Second, Morris's representation of Lauder as the epitome of all things Scottish guaranteed the loyal patronage of the Scottish diaspora and supported expressions of nationalist pride that were not antithetical to Scottish membership within the Union.

What might the contemporary performing body look like when it seeks to communicate and to cultivate the need to live well within the natural environment, whether the context of that living well is framed and set upon either by long-standing cultural traditions or by diverse modernizing forces over time? The Singapore performance and visual artist Tang Da Wu has engaged with a present and a region fractured by the predations of unacceptable cultural norms – the consequences of colonial modernity or the modern nation state taking on imperial pretensions – and the subsumption of Singapore society under capitalist modernization. Tang's performing body both refuses the diminution of time to the present, as is the wont of the forces he engages with, and undertakes interventions by sometimes elusive and ironic means – unlike some overdetermined contemporary performance art – that reject the image of the modernist ‘artist as hero’. Part of the cause for this distinctive art committed to historicity and a deliberate ordinariness is that artistic communication to him means provoking self-reflexive thought rather than immediate action. Over the years this has resulted in collaborative artistic workshops, in which he has imaginatively transferred art making from his body to the realm of ordinary people. These workshops become his particular extension of the neo-avant-garde's breaching of art's infrastructures.

The article discusses a non-event as evidence for history writing, as well as the role of historians as constructors of histories, especially those historians who have taken part in the events they are writing about. These historiographical questions are intertwined in a case study of the Finnish National Theatre's intended visit to Berlin in May 1943. Although the visit was carefully planned, it never happened, due to a change in the political situation between Finland and Germany during the Second World War. This journey, which never took place, and its absence in the history of the Finnish National Theatre, are an indication of the complex bonding between theatre, history and politics.

It is difficult to deal with all the ideas and concepts of a man whose writings span a period of some forty years and which are contained within some twenty-one essays. But the time spent on even a cursory exploration into some of the most important ideas presented in Zeami's later essays is most rewarding to anyone interested in theatre, for they are unique in pointing to the nucleus of his concepts on acting and performance based on his own experience and deep insights as a thinker, actor, director and playwright.

All artistic conventions of each theatrical era have two intertwining aspects: the aesthetic goals, and the technical crafts for achieving them. In some cases, a particular combination or development of skills results in a refinement of the art or the discovery of a newly desirable aesthetic; in others, the demand for new artistic effects leads to the invention of appropriate techniques. Thus, when painterly standards and drafting methods of central perspective spread rapidly over Northern Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, illusionistic spectacle became an indispensable element of theatrical performance. It was eagerly supplied by architects in whom the printing of Vitruvius's De Architectura (1486) awakened both the responsibility for and the challenge embodied in designing theatrical scenery. Conversely, as Elizabethan playwrights conceived of plots dependent on avoidance of meetings between certain exiting and entering characters, second and third entrances were provided—either by cutting into the tiring house wall, or by hanging a curtain with several slits in front of it, to accommodate stage traffic.

Roman Ingarden's publication of ‘The Functions of Language in the Theater’ (1958) was a landmark in the development of theatre theory in the twentieth century. Since its appearance several methods of research have radically influenced our understanding of the functions of language within this art, particularly semiotics, pragmatics and philosophy of language. More than thirty years after publication of Ingarden's work, it is sensible to address the same question once again and to suggest a theory that reflects the state of the art today.

Hone Kouka's historical plays Nga Tangata Toa and Waiora, created and produced in Aotearoa/New Zealand, one set in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and the other during the great Māori urban migrations of the 1960s, provide fresh insights into the way in which individual Māori responded to the tremendous social disruptions they experienced during the twentieth century. Much like the Māori orator who prefaces his formal interactions with a statement of his whakapapa (genealogy), Kouka reassembles the bones of both his ancestors, and those of other Māori, by demonstrating how the present is constructed by the past, offering a view of contemporary Māori identity that is traditional and modern, rural and urban, respectful of the past and open to the future.