Theatre Research International is published in association with IFTR – the International Federation for Theatre Research – and renews its editorial team every three years. Therefore, before passing on the ‘torch’ to Elaine Aston, who will serve as the Senior Editor beginning with the next issue of TRI (35, 1), and to Charlotte Canning, the incoming Associate Editor, wishing them success, I want to thank Elaine for her cooperation and support as Associate Editor during my three-year term. I also want to thank the Assistant Editor during my term as editor, Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, for her help. The articles that have been published during these years have no doubt greatly profited from her comments and suggestions, as well as from those of the many anonymous reviewers whom I also want to thank for their invaluable assistance. I would also like to thank the book review editors, in particular Peter Boenisch, for keeping the readers of the journal up to date with the many developments of the field, as well as the staff at Cambridge University Press, in particular Ella Colvin, Sally Hoffman and James Carr for their professional navigation of the actual publication process. Finally – and no doubt most importantly – I want to thank the scholars who have contributed their research to the journal, as well as the readers. The contributions and the subscriptions are steadily growing and this is certainly an encouraging sign.

This introduction outlines the ongoing research project (see title) jointly pursued by the theatre departments of Tel Aviv University and Freie Universität Berlin funded by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF). The project pivots around two critical questions. First, how can we investigate and conceptualize the future as a theoretical category and temporal dimension with regard to performances? Second, what themes and tools can articulate the various directions for developing and negotiating political and poetic questions of identity, artistic creation, cultural transference and conceptions of the ‘other’ in and through performance in and for the future? The introduction delineates certain theoretical reflections that serve as a scaffold for meaningful investigations into the first question. The theories are tested by the following fourteen articles that analyse and reference a variety of performances and in this way highlight their particular future-oriented (indeed future-generating) qualities.

How do we account for a sense of centre and periphery when we think about and study theatre and performance from an international perspective? Is an ‘international’ perspective at all possible? Or is every performance irrevocably determined by its tangible ‘here’ and ‘now’, making everything else peripheral? And to what extent are questions of centrality determined by the dominant cultural or economic paradigms? Or is a multifocal international perspective consciously created in opposition to such hegemonic models?

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.

Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms (1924) has been adapted twice into traditional Chinese theatre (xiqu), or into Sichuan opera (chuanju) and Henan qu opera (henan quju) to be specific. A close reading of the adaptations reveals that the traditional theatre has been in a persistent search for intercultural perspectives, which at the same time also proves self-reflective. All through the two Desire adaptations there runs a significant indigenous vein, bringing to the American play a mixture of historical memories and contemporary experiences peculiar to China. Both scripts mirror the current spectacle of dramatic encounters between heterogeneous elements – native and foreign, traditional and modern – producing unceasing collisions and fragmentary images in the process. They nevertheless suggest the possibility of reaching a plateau where boundaries are crossed and seemingly incompatible elements merge. The kind of selective assimilation of modern Western thoughts and dramatic techniques evidenced here bring about a new turn in the traditional Chinese theatre.

This article examines the relation between the anticipating spectator and the transitoriness of theatre from an existentialist viewpoint. Referring to Heidegger's concept of ‘the anticipation of death’ (Vorlaufen), it is argued that any anticipation of the end of a performance is capable of reflecting temporality as a whole. In this regard, the performances of the English live art group Forced Entertainment exemplify how to bring the temporality of Dasein into the limelight.

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.

Biblical theatre re/presents, images and imagines the future. This is because the ultimate future, the End of Days, is a part of its narrative. The paradigmatic example is medieval mystery plays that present the world ‘from creation to doom’, and which end in the futuristic episode of the Last Judgment. In this essay I examine theatrical and performative mechanisms of performing the future/End in what I term modern mysteries, which are contemporary avant-garde performances of the biblical texts. These performances simultaneously rely on and open up anew scriptural texts to create a powerful, modern experience. I identify three models of ‘the End’ in modern mysteries that are related to social and political issues: merger and utopia; descent, disappearance and apocalypse; and a cyclical, bi-directional movement towards both utopia and dystopia.

This article analyses various approaches to the transposition of Chinese xiqu performance into moving-image media in terms of preserving xiqu's aesthetic aims. Pre- and post-Cultural Revolution filmic examples, as well as contemporary television serials, are discussed. I argue that within a ‘cinema of attractions’ rather than a realist line of inquiry, ‘filmed theatre’ continues as a viable and valued stream of access to xiqu performance for contemporary audiences.

This article examines the relation between philosophy and theatre in the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou. First, it focuses on Badiou's central categories, such as event and character, that resonate with the theatre. Second, Badiou's own engagement with the theatre, the place theatre occupies in his philosophical world, is identified. Finally, the article argues that Badiou's thought must be understood as a return to Plato. Plato here is understood not as an enemy of theatre, but as a philosopher who invented philosophy through a constant, if often critical, engagement with the theatre. Dramatic Platonism is the name proposed for this tradition of philosophy of which Alain Badiou is the most significant current representative.

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.

Within the context of canonization processes, the career course of the British television dramatist Dennis Potter presents a unique case. Potter's career illustrates an instance of a dramatist also acting as a multifunctional media figure, who superseded the ‘typical’ primary makers of reputation (e.g. critics and academics) in shaping the perceptions of his work and in promoting his dramatic standing. Potter's authoritative power was facilitated by the infancy of television reviewing and television drama in the early 1960s. Given the innovative nature of his dramas, often extremely controversial, the reputation he achieved was largely the effect of his acquired fame as a media figure and, particularly, the evaluative criteria he himself established as a pioneering television critic: an expertise he further exploited as major commentator on his own work, all of which not only conditioned the reception of his works, but also influenced their eventual critical acclaim.

This article borrows its methodology from physics in order to analyse time in the theatre as evolution of order. Two set designs (both designed by Roni Toren for the Khan Theatre in Jerusalem) are portrayed through this perspective, representing inverse examples. In Measure for Measure, directed by Gadi Roll, the temporal evolution of space is from order to disorder, obeying the second law of thermodynamics. On the other hand, in The Seagull, directed by Ofira Henig, the evolution contradicts that law. The problem of depicting disorder on stage, the possibility of such a contradiction, the implication of the two different perceptions and their ethical values are discussed to prove the effectiveness of a methodology adopted from physics.

This article examines how the Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco reframes Cuban exile politics through her negation of the policing of movement within and across the island nation's borders. Fusco's rejection of the nationalist politics that have traditionally limited the discourse of the Cuban exile community enables her to explore previously disarticulated dimensions of the exile experience. Drawing on Jacques Rancière's notion of dissensus as the performance of a wrong, I discuss Fusco's stagings of the exclusions of exile in two clandestine performances, executed in Havana in 1997 and 2000, in which she examines the exile's impossible desire for repatriation. Employing an uncanny blurring of fantasy and reality in her re-enactment of a wake and staging of a burial, Fusco, in her site-specific performances, offers new possibilities for imagining Cuban identity and exilic mobility in the neoliberal era.

The Italian theatre company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, led by Romeo Castellucci, began its passionate incursion into Italian theatre in the 1980s. Through an analysis of their most challenging critical texts and manifestos, as yet unpublished in English, this paper will examine the theoretical foundations of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's oeuvre and the profound implications of the iconoclasm of their performances, and propose new means of deciphering their work. During the 1980s the company forged new linguistic and visual theatrical techniques, which were further developed through the 2002–2004 project, Tragedia Endogonidia. I argue that the relevance of their early work lies in their theoretical and practical widening of the parameters of representation. Excerpts from manifestos and texts written by Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, along with critical texts related to their work, are unless otherwise indicated translated into English by the present author.

In times of crises and existential disorientation, the arts often lean on gestures of radical doubt, the articulation of which demands the art of masquerade, deception, diversion and dissimulation, and simultaneously includes characteristic constellations of pathos and melancholy. The authors of this article analyse different artistic projects in Slovenia, Germany, Russia and elsewhere, which were created in the breakthrough period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and connect these projects to the wider social events of the previous two decades. In their treatment of the contemporary ‘art of doubt’ they focus especially on the perspective of the political and existential and in addition point out the fundamental historical concepts of doubt which have influenced the development of theatre and experimental knowledge in Europe from the beginnings of the early modern era until today.

Since the 1980s, a growing number of performances in Europe have created new forms of choric theatre in search of altered concepts of the political. In Germany, one of its pioneers was the GDR-born director Einar Schleef (1944–2001). The article explores his oeuvre, from his first choric production Mothers (1986), a classical drama project, to his last production, Betrayed People (2000), which focused on the problem of revolution in Germany. Schleef's genealogical project reintroduced the chorus as a repressed figure that develops a spectral potentiality. Through a detailed analysis of Schleef's approach to performing history, the article examines how choric theatre initiates theatrical processes of cultural remembrance and creates a relation to the past that becomes generative of the future.

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 paper examines the different meanings of the monochromatic principle and the act of voiding in two productions of The Cherry Orchard – Georgio Strehler's renowned, predominantly white production (1974) and an Israeli production directed by Yevgeny Arye at the Gesher Theater in Tel Aviv (2006), in which a white canopy hung over the stage. In both cases, the perception of the space negates the independent reality of the place, shaping it rather as a potential space. The visual formation that realizes the principle of potentiality – in any production, in any variation – is used as a ground on which mental and imaginary projections are cast. Characters acting in such a space are, to use Bloch's terms, in a state of ‘not yet’ – expecting and hoping to realize their potential lives. In addition, the stage space is constructed in both productions, albeit in different ways, as an intermediate space – a potential space, in Winnicott's terms – that is filled up with transitional objects and games. Chekhov's characters exist in the gap between mergence with the object and separation of the subject, and thus also between past and future. Suspension of the reality principle and pseudo-liberation from its realization are a psychoanalytic version of utopia. Such an existence is utopian also by dint of being an ideological model based – contrary to our sociopolitical realities – on subject–object unity, radically expressed by means of the dominant white monochrome.