All became data during the pandemic. Lockdowns made manifest what had developed for some time: that theatre has become inextricably entangled with digital cultures, the performing arts being increasingly encountered as a growing stock of multimodal fragments, textual discourses and networked communications. And, it is argued, it is precisely this appearance of theatre as (big) data that might prove to be the game-changer post-pandemic, and that this game-changer might be solely an epistemological one: what is known about theatre, how that knowledge is organized, and who is involved in organizing this knowledge, are rapidly changing. Based on an exemplary analysis of the discourses of legitimation that compensated for the loss of presence in German theatres, and the associated imperative to innovate production, this article estimates the epistemological consequences of theatre returns as data to advocate for a reconceptualization of theatre beyond performance.

For left cultural activism, ‘theatre’ forms an important ‘worksite of democracy’ which allows theatre activists to provide creative intervention within the existing ‘field of forces’. Cultural organizations and theatre groups of the Left – like the Delhi-based Jana Natya Manch (People's Theatre Forum) offer a critique of neo-liberalism through theatre. First performed in the year 2000, the street play Nahi Qubool (Unacceptable) was designed to expose neo-liberal policies undertaken by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government. The play continued to be performed even after a change of government with suitable modifications for changed circumstances. This genealogy of performance demonstrates the contours of politics and activist performances in contemporary India. It reveals that theatre as a ‘laboratory for democracy’ can also perform a diagnostic role to enhance the effectiveness of political strategy.

Since the early 2010s, the arts and culture in Sweden have taken a stand against the prevailing epistemic ignorance of the country's Indigenous Sámi people by confronting majoritarian society with the realities of settler colonialism. This article suggests that theatre and performance form part of this Sámi cultural activism and highlights the decolonial labour of Giron Sámi Teáhter, the oldest professionally driven touring company in the Swedish part of Sápmi. Taking one specific production as a springboard, the article demonstrates the larger, structural issues at stake. Giron Sámi Teáhter deploys the stage as a vibrant, decolonial forum where the history of settler colonialism and the Sámi people's struggle toward self-determination is performed, celebrated and encouraged. The company has long striven to gain official status as the national theatre for Sámi performing arts in Sweden and the article therefore also outlines the financial and political impediments encountered by Giron Sámi Teáhter.

This article examines two recent queer adaptations of Romeo and Juliet in Seoul, attending to their opposite receptions in relation to the gap between queer theory and gay reality. It focuses on LAS's Juliet and Juliet, hailed as ‘female queer theatre’ despite being conservative gay, while discussing briefly in comparison Yohangza's Romeo and Juliet, decried as ‘anti-queer’ for all its queerness. Although the dream of a happy married life in Juliet and Juliet appears similar to the much-critiqued homonormativity, I defend it as a ‘gay utopian fantasy’ rooted in the predicament of Korean queers under the ideology of familism. Questioning the adequacy of Western-centric queer theory to explain Korean gay reality, I call for the need to develop alternative concepts and positive vocabularies to give voice to the lived experience and aspiration of sexual minorities in countries like Korea, for whom the post-gay era has not yet arrived.

In 2002, I published an article in Theatre Research International called ‘Heiner Müller as the End of Brechtian Dramaturgy: Müller on Brecht in Two Lesser-Known Fragments’. I had written my doctoral dissertation on Müller, and, in the course of my studies, had come across two shorter pieces that, to my knowledge, had not been discussed by scholars. The first was Philoktet 1979 (Philoctetes 1979), a short, parodic and grotesque treatment of the Philoctetes myth, something very different from Müller's more sombre adaptation of the same material, published in 1965. I had heard Müller read the comic piece at the Berliner Ensemble in March 1995 and located the source in a copy of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, printed in December 1978. The second piece was also parodic and also appeared in a newspaper. Nachleben Brechts Beischlaf Auferstehung in Berlin (Brecht's Afterlife Intercourse Resurrection in Berlin) featured in the Volkszeitung in July 1990.1 The title suggested that Müller was ironically quoting his own back catalogue, echoing his play Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei (Gundling's Life Frederick of Prussia Lessings Sleep Dream Cry) (1977) and Germania Tod in Berlin (Germania Death in Berlin) (1978). Stylistically, it looked like a heightened version of the technique employed in Philoktet 1979, in that it drew on and collided more Brechtian intertexts, and referenced Müller's own work more extensively. My doctoral supervisor had found the short playlet in the Volkszeitung. It was one of five responses to Brecht from prominent German literary figures, including Peter Handke and Martin Walser, collected under the title ‘Brecht: Stimmen der Dichter’ (Brecht: The Writers Speak). In my article's fifth footnote, I observed that while Philoktet 1979 appeared in the only extant bibliography of the playwright at the time, Nachleben Brechts did not. It would be hard to conceal an amount of smugness in my observation. But such self-satisfaction is not a quality worth airing too publicly, as will become evident soon.

Alfonso Reyes's Ifigenia cruel has long been recognized as a personal hymn of liberation, which adapts Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris to the convulsed Mexican shore of the early twentieth century. The dramatic poem Ifigenia cruel by Alfonso Reyes was first performed in Mexico in 1934. The next documented performance, by the company Teatro de Ensayo Escena and directed by Aitor Goiricelaya, took place at the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica in April 1958 − during Franco's regime. The purpose of this article is to put the 1958 production on the map of performances of Reyes's dramatic poem, and thus to fulfil a research niche regarding the scholarly work on this poem, which has traditionally focused on its historical context and literary legacy. Drawing on the Spanish political history of the period, the article reveals a performance history of Ifigenia cruel, which is essential for its reception.

The picture of the group of scholars on the steps of the University of Helsinki in 1993 is typical of Thomas Postlewait and depicts at the same time an important moment in the history of the International Federation for Theatre Research (Fig. 1). Tom keeps in the background, furthest back in the top row, next to Selma Jeanne Cohen and Martine de Rougemont, then the vice president of IFTR. This position was in a way typical of Tom. He remained in the background and at the same time he supported and pushed those around him. This characterized his role as the editor of the University of Iowa Press series called Studies in Theatre History and Culture. During twenty years he published forty books by authors from many countries. Some of them can be seen assembled around him on the photograph. Anyone who was lucky to be coached by Editor Tom will easily confirm the strong directions that were given with a soft hand, preserving the particularities of the author within the overall framework of the series.

The aim of this paper is to analyse Laetitia Dosch's play Hate, first performed in Lausanne in 2018, in light of recent theories on female nudity, interspecies sexuality and non-human animal subjectivity. Featuring a completely naked woman and a white stallion, the show revolves around the possibility of interspecies communication and the need to re-evaluate the meaning of humankind and animality through theatrical performance. I begin by drawing on Derrida's writings on the subject of shame and nakedness as a means to explore interspecies identification. I then turn to recent ecofeminist theories in order to discuss Dosch's performative criticism of industrial exploitation of non-androcentric ‘others’, as well as the implications behind her dramatization of interspecies sexual intercourse. Finally, I examine how her ‘ventriloquist’ techniques to provide the horse with a voice invite considerations regarding Levinas's concept of ‘the face’ and how that affects animal subjecthood and subjectivity.

The large-scale theatre exhibitions in Vienna (1892), Berlin (1910) and Magdeburg (1927) contained extensive displays on the history of German-language theatre. This article analyses the pedagogical and epistemological discussions about different ways of mediating theatre history that formed part of the context of the three exhibitions. Curators and scholars used the German term Anschauung to measure the transfer of knowledge in historical exhibitions, reconstruction models and historiography books. This article contributes to the recent scholarship on forms of exhibiting, collecting and archiving theatre, dance and performance. It shows that theatre became an area of focus within the culture of national and international large-scale exhibitions around 1900. This was accompanied by discussions about the appropriate medium to present the history of theatre. Informed by museum pedagogy and humanities hermeneutics, curators and scholars conceived of divergent concepts of theatre history Anschauung.

This article introduces and theorizes ‘decadence’ as a key feature of Lauren Barri Holstein's performance Notorious (2017). The decadence of Holstein's work is approached in light of two main considerations: the spectacular presentation of witchcraft as an occult practice, and what Holstein ‘does’ with the staging of witches and witchcraft. Situated in light of performances associated with the neo-occult revival (Ivy Monteiro and Jex Blackmore), and a recent strand of feminist performance that revels in an aesthetics of trash, mess and excess (Ann Liv Young and Lucy McCormick), the article offers a close critical analysis of Notorious as a work that addresses and seeks to subvert gendered inequalities and forms of productivity in twenty-first-century capitalism. I argue that Holstein's overidentification with exertion and exhaustion as much as the subversive potentialities of witchcraft results in a decadent aesthetic, that her staging of the witch as a persecuted but powerful emblem of the occult sheds valuable light on the aesthetics and politics of decadence in performance, and that the subversive qualities of decadence emerge particularly strongly in its ‘doing’ as an embodied and enacted practice.

Let Down (2018) is a practice-as-research (PaR) dance performance that communicates women's experiences of breastfeeding in Northern Ireland, a jurisdiction with one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, due, in part, to the social stigma attached to breastfeeding in public. Choreographed in collaboration with a composer and social scientists, Let Down is a duet for two lactating women who dance alongside a digitally transposed and augmented soundscape of sonic aspects of maternal experience, and improvise to the live sounds produced by infants in the audience. The work responds to a ‘quietening’ of maternal corporeality in some Western societies through a feminist dramaturgy of sonic disruption that refigures intermedial relations between sound and movement in performance to make unheard experience sensible. Attending to the complex sociopolitical and affective terrain that informed the work's creation, I discuss how a methodology of ‘quietening’ developed during the choreographic process generated space for a dialogue between private and public spheres of experience. I propose that the methodological concept of quietening offers both an alternative approach to choreographies of affect, and a critical framework for questioning representations of socially ‘quietened’ corporealities.

This conversation paper examines the visual, sonic and corporeal entanglements that inform the work of the Vietnamese-American-Japanese artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. It explores the corporeal and aural qualities that are central to an understanding and sensorial experience of the artist's installations and visual practice. In paying attention to breath, sound and motion in visual art production, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's works reveal how corporeality and sonicity can dismantle the ocular-centrism of visual art. The discussions between Jun and Prarthana map the varied traumatic histories of racial colonialism, war and forced migration that haunt Vietnam's present, and bring to the surface the artist's aesthetic and political concerns around art, performance and cultural memory.

The focus of this article is a critical evaluation of the impact of international development and conflict-resolution funding on theatre in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The article complicates the predominant narrative of theatre as ‘cultural resistance’ in conflict zones by historicizing the Ford Foundation's role in the institutionalization of Palestinian drama; delineating the effects of neo-liberal state building and development on Palestinian modes of performance; and subsequently, analysing the Freedom Theatre's imbrication in a normative, humanitarian logic. Aid, while ensuring the material conditions for the growth of the Palestinian performing arts, promoted a structural dependency that emptied the language of anti-colonial resistance of emancipatory potential, generating a soft, phantom sovereignty for the audience of the international community. By reimagining ‘freedom’ as liberation from a backward, conservative society, the language of the human rights industry and its attendant cultural economy spawns a spectral ‘cultural resistance’ where freedom and nationhood appear real and unreal – visions refracting, but not existing in, reality.