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.

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.

This article investigates live performance in the broad geo-historical context of the Anthropocene, a contested term in recent scholarship, but one that offers a breadth of focus on human relations with its coexistent non-human other. These interrelations are examined through a range of theatrical and non-theatrical genres and sites from the Australian parliament's coal theatrics to exemplary performances by Indigenous companies Bangarra Dance Theatre and Marrugeku. It sets the scene with a visit to the Curtain Tree in the rainforests of north Queensland, Australia, arguing that the vitality and display of its root system models a special kind of reciprocity between the performative elements of the environment and the environmental elements of theatre and performance. This is traced through recent short-run immersive works, Hanna Cormick's Mermaid (2020) and Melinda Hetzel and Company's Conservatory (2020), and a rereading of a canonical Australian drama, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

The Western tours of the Mei Lanfang and Tsutsui troupes in 1930 illustrated how to (re)construct the theatrical nationality of China and Japan through the manifestation and manipulation of the performance of Peking opera and kabuki. Through the ‘purification’ of Peking opera's stage presentation system, the Mei Lanfang troupe forged a ‘pure’ theatrical Chineseness that boosted the Americans’ fascination with the ‘(a)historicality’ of Chinese theatrical tradition. By presenting Westerners with a ‘hybridized’ kabuki, which embodied a ‘historically authentic’ theatrical Japaneseness, the Tsutsui troupe deconstructed Westerners’ psychological expectations of a culturally imagined ‘pure’ and ‘classical’ Japanese theatre. As two sides of the same coin, the two troupes’ (re)construction of theatrical Chineseness and Japaneseness together challenged the West's essentialist views of cultural ‘Others’, which forcibly endowed Eastern theatre with a pure and unchanged ‘otherness’.

This study explores the relationships of El año en que nací (The Year I Was Born) (2012) by the Argentine Lola Arias, within the social context of post-dictatorship Chile. Chile was characterized by a repressed and traumatized population whose governments aimed to depoliticize society in an effort to avoid the presumed cause of Augusto Pinochet's seventeen-year authoritarian government – the extreme polarization of politics and the population reflected in media, documents and political rhetoric. By showing the play's strategy of collapsing the binaries that define Chile's polarization, the author posits that El año en que nací not only provides a model that questions what Diana Taylor and others have called the ‘archive’ or stable retainer of memory, but also models an alternative of the social, creating an opening for personal agency on the part of the actors and audience that offers an alternative to the official narrative of polarization.

Since the eruption of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the arrival of refugees in Turkey has been unprecedented in the country's history. Theatre practitioners have been slow to address this migratory moment, but an exception has been Istanbul-based Dostlar Tiyatrosu's 2017 production Göçmenleeeer, a translation of Romanian–French playwright Matéi Visniec's Migraaaants. Developed in the context of Europe's own migratory ‘crisis’, Migraaaants is composed of a series of vignettes that critique European refugee policy and the deadly economies that it has prompted in the continent's borderlands. What happens when Migraaaants is produced in a national context where the binary of European ‘hosts’ and non-European ‘refugees’ gives way to another set of political identities? How do we assess the emergence of a shared paradigm of ‘crisis’? And finally, where does crisis stand in relation to our ability to imagine a transnational aesthetics of political resistance to anti-immigration policies?

This article uncovers the connections between the legal and scientific art of searching for human remains and theatrical performances. NAKA Dance Theater, a performance group based in Mexico City and Oakland, California, is at the centre of this intersection of art and forensics. Founded by José Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, NAKA creates theatrical events to configure a claim for social justice where the official legal–scientific terrain has failed to protect victims of state repression. These artists advance a commitment to what I call forensic performances, and their investigative practices revitalize theatrical experience in a time of debilitated democracies. Forensic performances give theatre a role in violent societies where mass graves are woven into life: they carry out some of the work of investigative journalism, without its dangers. Theatre opens up a space to do a forensics that is orthogonal to a state forensics claiming a certain kind of reality and truth that is dangerous for democratic politics.

This article examines the status of counterhegemonic knowledge in art institutions – such as the theatre and the gallery – by analysing Forensic Architecture's investigation into the murder of Halit Yozgat in Germany. We argue for paying close attention to claims about art institutions’ inherent counterhegemonic potential. As evidence, we present a critical experiential account of our visit to Forensic Architecture's gallery exhibition Counter Investigation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Following this, we discuss how the investigation was presented at the civic tribunal Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen, whose organizers took over and reassembled the municipal theatre Schauspiel Köln in Germany (2017). Drawing on an expert interview, we explore how the tribunal actively positioned itself against the potentially violent structure of the theatre space. Ultimately, our discussion considers the requirements for supportive and effective political alliances by art institutions and thus contributes to the debate in performance studies on institutional critique.

The aim of this article is an interpretation of Eimuntas Nekrošius's performances staged in the National Theatre Warsaw in the last years of his life. In the context of complex political and cultural relationships between Poland and Lithuania, the aesthetics of the theatre of sensual metaphors invented by Nekrošius might be perceived from an uncommon perspective – not as a type of universal art presenting crucial issues of mankind, but as a transnational reinterpretation of Polish classic plays – first of all, the nineteenth-century Forefathers’ Eve by Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish poet born near Vilnius in Lithuania. From this point of view, the theatre of Nekrošius reveals his political potential to create a transnational bridge between neighbour states. The author tries to apply notions of ‘subaltern agency’ (Gayatri Spivak) and the ‘cosmopolitan subject’ (Yana Meerzon) to present the complex issue of empowerment of Polish and Lithunanian subjects – from rejection of the false messianic consciousness to transnational rapprochement.

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.

Held in December 1955, the Baling talks represented a unique attempt to end the Malayan emergency through a negotiated peace between the British colonial government and the Malayan Communist Party, but it also marked the beginning of the Cold War in Asia. This paper focuses on Mark Teh's long-term investigations, as a researcher and theatre director for the Five Arts Centre in Kuala Lumpur, into this historically significant Cold War event and its representation. Teh's performance Baling is examined as an exemplary collaborative project that expands Western definitions of the documentary theatre, while highlighting the continuing efforts of South East Asian artists to contest cultural regionalism and colonial knowledge systems. Drawing on Brechtian aesthetics and postcolonial theory, Teh appropriates diverse forms of politically engaged art in order to question the role of history and the archive in the solidification of nationalist ideologies and identity binaries in the post-war era.

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.

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.

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 offers a critically reflective discussion of and suggestions towards the role of embodied cognitive science within theatre and performance discourse. Through a critical analysis of literature that takes its lead from within the framework of embodied cognition, this article argues that theatre and performance discourse may need to re-examine how embodiment is conceptualized within practical and interdisciplinary accounts of cognition. By exploring specific foundations and driving premises of embodied and classic cognition respectively, this article suggests that if researchers are going to use scientific accounts of embodiment to better understand embodied cognition in theatre and performance, then they must, by their own estimations, accept that all research, and not just practice, is an embodied act.