One of the pleasures of editing Theatre Research International is the opportunity to engage with scholars from different parts of the world about their research. In the past year or so, I have visited several universities in South East Asia, finding out about the practices and ideas people are investigating, and how they are doing it. In the process, I have been struck by the alacrity with which ambitious universities in the fast-developing economies of the region – and, I suspect, elsewhere in the world – are embracing the metrics and other criteria required for success in global university rankings exercises. The legitimation, prestige and increased attractiveness to talented staff and students that a good showing in such exercises can bring is presumably an important reason why governments and university administrations see participation as an efficient use of limited resources. However, as anyone with direct experience of rankings-motivated institutional change will be aware, the practical results can be highly disruptive, and their cost can fall disproportionately upon arts and humanities researchers, so much of whose activity remains resistant to easy quantification.

This is my first issue as senior editor of Theatre Research International. That the journal and I are almost exactly the same age is at once thrilling and a little unsettling. One feels both the weight of tradition, and the sense of mission and possibility that contemporaries can share. Indeed, looking through back issues, I am struck by how integrally TRI has both reflected and driven changes in performance practice and scholarship that I recognize from my own intellectual development. I began my undergraduate studies at Bristol University Drama Department – publisher, from 1959 to 1974, of one of TRI's two precursors, New Theatre Magazine (the other being Theatre Research/Recherches théâtrales). That was in 1992, in the same year an editorial by Claude Schumacher highlighted a reorientation of the journal away from text-based drama towards ‘the theory of theatre practice’. I left the UK to make theatre (and a life) in Singapore in 1996, just as the journal began notably to expand its international scope. And I commenced my PhD on cosmopolitanism and performance in 2001, at the same time as Brian Singleton's overhaul of the journal's structure and focus set the internationalizing standard for the publication that exists today. That year, I made my first trip to Australia, to present on a panel for emerging scholars at a conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR, the organization with which this publication is affiliated), hosted by the University of New South Wales. Subsequent conference participation brought me into contact with TRI editors Christopher Balme, Freddie Rokem, Elaine Aston and Charlotte Canning, and, courtesy of the IFTR member's subscription, the material they were publishing.

In my previous editorial, I made reference to what Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry call ‘literacy brokering’ amongst non-native speakers of English who seek to publish in anglophone academic journals. The term ‘literacy’ makes sense in the context, and, as I noted, the practice is hardly exclusive to those whose first language is not English. However, as Aoife Monks of Contemporary Theatre Review and I planned a New Scholars session on academic publishing for this year's annual conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR, with which this journal is affiliated), a supplementary way of thinking about academic knowledge production came to mind: as conversation. And it is a conversational mode that wends its way through the articles presented in this issue of Theatre Research International.

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.

The theatre that developed in late nineteenth-century India, especially in the Bengal and Maharashtra regions, catered to an audience that was much wider than the new educated middle-class males who introduced the European stage form in Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. Driven by private capital, the new Indian theatre adopted the melodrama as its main dramatic form. When performance capital shifted to the more lucrative field of cinema in the middle of the twentieth century, the melodramatic form again became the chief narrative mode. Such is its power that it has become the principal rhetorical form of popular democracy in India. In the decades after independence, theatre was rescued from imminent death by the support provided by state agencies which sponsored the production of a national theatre canon and style, as opposed to the prevailing regional ones. However, with bureaucratization and political interference, theatre in India today must revert to its one inherent superiority over the cinema – the immediacy of its encounter with small audiences.

Focusing on the UK, where feminism is gaining momentum through multiple sites of activist dissent from a neoliberal hegemony, my primary concern in this article is to understand how, given this renewal of feminist energies, theatre might be able to play its part in agitating for change. Inspired by Chantal Mouffe's compelling description of a ‘network of resistance’, as a possible way forward I conceive of theatre politically as a series of heterogeneously formed sites of oppositional and affirmative activity, each linked into articulating dissent from neoliberalism and the desire for socially progressive change. This provides the critical framework for my engagement with three radically diverse performances ranging from new playwriting (Lucy Kirkwood's NSFW), through the flash mob (Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising campaign), to the West End musical Made in Dagenham.

In South Korea, workers’ theatre is often considered outdated and unsuited for the postmodern era of hybridity and diversity because of its crude, ideology-oriented slogans. Thus the success of Hamlet for Only Nine Days (2013), featuring workers laid off from the CortCortec factory in South Korea as actors, is highly exceptional. This article presents an analysis of the characteristics of Hamlet for Only Nine Days as documentary theatre where various experiences and representations of reality mix with fiction, and reviews its political significance.

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 the autumn of 2008, artists Chaw Ei Thein and Richard Streitmatter-Tran and collaborators laboured outside in the sweltering heat to create September Sweetness, an installation made of five and a half tons of sugar, for the second Singapore Biennale. September Sweetness was intended to honour the memory of those who perished in the 2007 uprisings known as the ‘Saffron Revolution’ in Myanmar, and to show the ‘erosion of hope’ for a better future. September Sweetness took place a number of years ago now, but the intentionally ephemeral nature of the art object itself – a sugar temple that gradually melted away – as well as its social reception, multiple meanings and collaborative construction process, and the ways in which the memory of the work continue to resonate with past and present politics, make the performative acts that radiated through this project important to recount.

Since the Sunflower Movement of 2014, when thousands of Taiwanese students protested against a trade deal the Nationalist government had made with China, the issue of Taiwan's sovereignty has again been brought to the political fore. Home to twenty-three million people, not only is Taiwan beset by threats from China and isolated by international organizations, but in its rapid push to industrialize it also has incurred severe environmental degradation. Two contemporary theatre troupes incorporated the Sunflower demonstration's ‘pro-Taiwanese homeland’ agenda into their works about the environment. Addressing both the pollution of the countryside and the demise of rural communities, they idealized pastoral life and emphasized Taiwan's roots in agrarian culture. Sun Son's Mulian Rescues Mother Earth imagined a perfectly organized small agricultural community trying to sustain its success, and San Que Yi's Earth Project portrayed two examples of rural communities engaged in David-and-Goliath struggles against industrial pollution.

During the period of the Khmer Rouge (1975–9) culture was turned back to ‘Year Zero’ through the murder and destruction of about 90 per cent of the country's artists and intellectuals. These art forms are now being remembered, revised and reinvented in order to articulate a contemporary Cambodian identity. In the spring of 2013, New York City hosted a month-long festival of Cambodian arts called the Season of Cambodia. The festival, which sought to celebrate and reaffirm Cambodian identity through the arts, set the stage for other post-conflict nations seeking renewal through artistic expression. A performance of sbeik thom, or large shadow puppets, was staged at the site of the former World Financial Center, seeking to create a dialogue between New York and Cambodia themed around healing and renewal.

The myth of Korean-ness is reconstructed via the figures of minorities in a documentary/performance, An Eternal Parting, performed by the South Korean performance group Movement Dang-Dang in 2011 and 2013. It showcases the phenomena of Korean diaspora, starting with the deportations of Korean exiles from Siberia under Stalin during the 1930s, and hinges on the presence of the descendants of exiled Korean ethnic populations in contemporary South Korea, including how they are both accepted and excluded by their countrymen. However, although An Eternal Parting tries to redefine the myth of Korean-ness from a marginal viewpoint, its fundamental ambivalence does not escape hegemonic Korean ideologies of nationalism, bloodline, family and home.

Javanese actor, puppeteer and musician Slamet Gundono (1966–2014) created performances with everyday objects and materials (mud, dried grass, cooking utensils, condoms and food) in combination with conventions from wayang kulit puppetry. His performances were based on personal, often controversial, interpretations of well-known stories, from the Mahabharata epic to the nineteenth-century literary work Serat Centhini. By analysing three of his performances, I argue that Slamet Gundono's objects become temporarily endowed with the status of heirlooms (pusaka). Each of his performing objects is a non-spiritual pusaka that is used to take attention away from the spiritual quests that dominate traditional wayang. Gundono invokes everyday objects to focus on the more mundane, though urgent, questions of gender inequality, religious intolerance and environmental destruction.

This article is about audiences’ reactions to plays at the 2013–14 Roverman Festival of Plays at the Ghana National Theatre. Using a modified version of Willmar Sauter's ‘Theatre Talks’, questionnaires and participant observation, I sought to ascertain what audiences at this festival made of two of the plays presented to them: What's My Name? and The Day Dad Came. Audiences identified and discussed endemic corruption and domestic violence in ways that showed their keen engagement with and interpretation of the plays and their eagerness to take what was presented to them and make it their own. The discussion also reveals the audiences’ interest in the aesthetic qualities of the plays, which they shared in surprising detail. I argue that the personality of the director–playwright, Ebo Whyte, frames the audiences’ appreciation of the plays.

In the verbatim theatre performance The Disappearances Project (2011–13), Australian company Version 1.0 explored the state of unresolved loss felt by those left behind by missing persons. Rather than relying on verbatim testimony to simply ‘tell’ the stories of the left-behind, directors Yana Taylor and David Williams sought to immerse the audience in an indeterminate world, characterized by pathologies of endless searching and waiting, and a sense of paralysing loss. In this article, I argue that the performance hinged on dramaturgical practices of stillness, slowed movement and friction to produce the disturbing sense of ‘sticky’ indeterminacy characteristic of the experience of the left-behind. To develop this interpretation, I turn to the post-disciplinary field of mobility studies, which highlights the movement (or otherwise) of people, objects, information and capital, as well as embodied experience and sensory and kinesthetic environments. This provides ways to identify and analyse mobility-as-dramaturgy as well as the co-production of affective atmospheres within Disappearances and the wider field of performance.

Recent years have seen an increase in extraterrestrial exploration projects. What was once a series of competing displays of Cold War political and military might between the US and the USSR has now re-emerged with international collaborations and fresh contestants that range from newly developed, government-based Space programmes to a growing list of private and corporate investors and entrepreneurs. Historically, performances and performative actions and utterances have been important instruments for the representation and politicization of outer-Space discovery and exploration. An inevitable corollary of the recent developments of Space exploration, therefore, is that diverse performances and performatives in and about Space are also flourishing. Their multiplicity reflects the complexity of contemporary geopolitics as well as the forms that these performances may take, including extreme sports, theatre, music videos, social-media interactions and experimental performance. The increase in expressive possibilities calls for a mode of critical attention that addresses them in their scientific, geopolitical and formal particularity.

This paper examines the complex questions that arise around the appearance of children in contemporary performance. Drawing on performances by Nottingham-based theatre company Zoo Indigo and by Tim Etchells and the Flemish theatre company Victoria, I consider the extent to which Hannah Arendt's theorization of natality as ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’ that gives rise to the political potential to ‘begin something anew’ can help us to understand the ethico-political dimensions of children's appearance as natal, biological and relational beings in contemporary performance. In particular, I draw on feminist interpretations of Arendt's work to articulate the significance of the embodied aspects and ethical quality of children's relation to adult spectators and performers. I argue that these performances prompt a rethinking of the child's potential to generate political intervention, which moves beyond Arendt's gendered account of political agency in a public sphere from which children are excluded.

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.