In 2008, Singapore audiences were treated to two large-scale King Lear productions: the internationally acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company's production, directed by Trevor Nunn, with Ian McKellen in the lead role, and Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia's The King Lear Project: A Trilogy. The two productions are drastically different in that the former is a production of King Lear proper, while the latter is an experimental project that uses Lear as a frame to explore, discover and critique the nature of stagecraft and audience perception through a series of notable Lear essays. The King Lear Project is not an adaptation of Lear, but a three-night performance about the play. Ho and Borgia's work questions if it is possible to stage Lear, and if there is in fact a ‘right’ and ‘proper’ way to do so. For local audiences, these questions are immensely provocative for several reasons, especially since the Nunn–McKellen Lear has since been declared – by way of critical reviews – the definitive King Lear. The metatheatricality of the Lear Project implicates audience members and demands an understanding from them through active engagement that is otherwise not required in conventional productions. Ho and Borgia's assumptions of audience perception are strikingly accurate and telling, and they consider the complex negotiations between literary and theatrical experiences, or what Ho calls ‘Word and Flesh’. By turning to the history and the processes of staging what is believed to be Shakespeare's most ‘unstageable’ tragedy, the Lear Project also questions the future of Shakespeare's modern theatre. This dossier, which includes an in-depth review of the play, a commentary by an actor in the play, and an interview with the author/director of the Lear Project, hopes to construct a critical and insightful understanding of the making and reception of this original and ambitious piece of work.

JW: The King Lear Project shares some of the documentary aspects of works like Looking for Richard, The Lear Diaries, Richard II in New York, but it is unique, and very unusual in that it draws from a selection of key Lear essays. Why have you chosen this approach, and what draws you to these three particular essays?

This article examines how the future is expressed and experienced in the theatre. Referring to the performance Karl Marx: Capital, First Volume by the German artistic collective Rimini Protokoll, the article exemplifies the relation between the past, the present and the future, showing how the different layers of time are interrelated. The performers involved are not professional actors but so-called ‘experts’, whose lives are connected to Marx's Capital in different ways. Based on the experts’ biographies, the performance not only offers a rereading of Marx's ideology, but also shows similarities between Rimini Protokoll's artistic and Marx's scientific approach, between the conceptualization of one's life and watching a performance in theatre.

In this short article, the author, who was one of the performers in The King Lear Project, reflects on critical responses to the trilogy, and on what they reveal about the process of evaluating theatre. Having played the role of the Producer in the trilogy, Paul Rae notes that one of his functions was to deliver pre-emptive judgments on the performances as they developed, thereby challenging reviewers to be more than usually self-reflexive in delivering their own. In largely failing to meet this challenge, Rae asserts, the critics' response to the trilogy underscored the role of misrecognition, prescriptiveness and an implicit violence in the act of theatrical judgment.

This essay examines theatrical dimensions of the future in Signals, a performance by the Israeli vocalist Victoria Hanna. An examination of four scenes from this performance, I argue, shows that the sounds in Hanna's voice act in the symbolic dualities of female–male, human–technological, and embodied–disembodied figures. These dualities amplify the discrepancy between Hanna's staged identity (female, human, embodied figure) and an absent exterior other (male, technological, disembodied figure). The notion of ‘envoicement’ is developed in order to analyse these dualities and, in particular, to explore the body–voice relationship that they compose. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas's ethical theory in Time and the Other, I argue that the meaning attributed to the future is never conveyed in its presence but rather in its absence; that is, signifying practices that represent the absent exterior referent stage the future. Through this central claim, I thus assert that Hanna's disembodied voice ‘envoices’ the future.

This article examines the realization of the future in performance through aesthetic experience. Following the historian Reinhardt Koselleck, who introduces the category of ‘experience’ as the present past, and ‘expectation’ as the present future, in order to formulate a theory of possible histories, I examine the interconnection of different time layers and the potentiality of a performance. I argue that every performance constitutes a space of possibility, defined by a permeation of traces of the past and the future, emergent phenomena characteristic of performance, and a dimension of future inherent in the performative materiality. Hamlet by New York's Wooster Group serves as an example for an analysis focusing on the aesthetic experience of the future in performance. The Hamlet performance proves exceptionally suitable, since the staging is based on a theatrical repetition of the film document of a Hamlet performance long past, and unfolds a complex system of past and future bound time layers.

While modern rational thinking has developed complex methods for calculating and managing risk, the better forecast and prepare for the future, certain modern performance practices have embraced the element of risk. In this article I interrogate this phenomenon, offering a distinction between risk-taking in modernist and postmodernist performance. Whereas in the former risk serves to transcend the representational aspects of performance, in the later it is banalized, revealing its inevitability in both performance situations and everyday life.

For various reasons, there is a tension between drama therapy and the concept of performance. Whereas many notions of performance are deeply rooted in the here-and-now, theatrical types of therapy often include practices concerning the future and constructing future images of self, subjectivity and conflict. This paper argues that therapeutic theatre's high affinity with iconic structures and with the creation of ‘images’ can be explained by its specific problems with the contingency and risk inherent in performance.

The future as an event cannot be analysed solely through its simple relation to the known or recognized world, but through its unexpected dimensions: its being beyond history and the way it performs commandments and ethical obligations. Two visual interpretations of the biblical story of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, by Eugène Delacroix and Paul Gauguin, are at the centre of my discussion. The main theoretical tool for discussing the issues of time and the future is the philosophical writing of Emmanuel Levinas.

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.