Late in 1999 the Commonwealth of Australia's Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts released Securing the Future, the final Report of the Major Performing Arts Enquiry chaired by Helen Nugent (commonly referred to as the Nugent Report). The operations of the committee and the findings of the Report occasioned considerable public debate in the Australian arts world in the late 1990s, as the Enquiry solicited and analysed information and opinion on the financial health and artistic practices of thirty-one national major performing arts companies producing opera, ballet, chamber and orchestral music as well as theatre. The Report saw the financial viability of Australian live performance as deeply affected by the impact of globalization, especially by what elsewhere has been called ‘Baumol's disease’ – escalating technical, administrative and wage costs but fixed revenue – which threaten the subsidized state theatre companies of Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth with their relatively small population bases. The structural implementation recommended a considerable financial commitment by Commonwealth and State Governments to undertake a defined period of stabilizing and repositioning of companies. Early in 2000 both levels of Government committed themselves to this funding – in fact increasing Nugent's requested $52 million to $70 million – and to the principle of a strengthened Australia Council dispensing arms-length subsidy. In an economically philistine political environment, these outcomes are a tribute to Nugent's astute use of economic rhetoric to gain at least a symbolic victory for the performing arts sector. In 2000 New Zealand arts gained a similar major injection of funding, while a commissioned Heart of the Nation report, advocating the dilution of the principle of arm's-length funding through the abolition of the national funding organization Creative New Zealand, was rejected by Prime Minister Helen Clark.

The structuration and definition of disciplines – an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century project – gave way, in the second half of the twentieth century in the European and American academies, to their destructuration, although certainly not everywhere, nor to unanimous approval. For all the resistance that it has encountered, however, this movement towards the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries has taken root. It can be traced back to the 1960s, a period whose economic growth and economic optimism freed up mental space, allowing energies to focus on political and sociocultural injustices and inequalities and thereby fermenting that ‘cultural revolution’ for which the 1960s are now most remembered in the affluent ‘western’ world. ‘Cultural’ here embraces, as it did at the time, the anthropological notion of culture as belief, knowledge, morals, customs and, among others, symbolic representation, thus also theatre and performance.

The prefaces to two collections of essays by feminist scholars, Gerda Lerner and Joan Kelly, reveal a fusion of historical scholarship and feminism. These texts of feminist history are read through the theories of the performative as a way of exploring the intersections of the performances which gave rise to the written texts and the texts themselves, as well as how the texts demonstrate the theatricality of feminist discovery and change. The declaration of their status as feminist scholars, positioning their work within the relationship of the personal and the political, constitutes a performative act of performing their community. The ‘doing’ of history foregrounds and reveals the ‘history done’, as the performative of feminist history constructs a once erased feminist past. Understanding history as performance serves feminism as an active political movement.

The boundaries of theatre as an academic discipline have never been particularly clear, and its relationship to other disciplines has been the focus of constant struggle and negotiation. This essay traces that negotiation, focusing upon its process in American universities. Competing with literature departments for the study of dramatic texts, American theatre departments drew their own new disciplinary model, based primarily on German Theaterwissenschaft, with emphasis upon the staging history and historical context of dramatic texts. More recently such emerging fields as performance studies and cultural studies have sought to transcend such traditional disciplinary boundaries. Despite some resistance from existing academic and publishing structures, the trend towards the breaking down of these traditional boundaries seems clear. Our academic culture seems headed towards a considerably more fluid organization of its materials of study than the traditional organization into fairly discrete disciplines could offer.

Amateur theatre constitutes a largely unexplored narrative within the dominant histories of British theatre that traditionally foreground professional practice. A consequence of advanced capitalism has been an increasing emphasis on professionalism in all sectors of society that constructs the amateur as incompetent and expects guaranteed rewards for professional expertise. Statistically, however, amateur theatre has represented a major experience of performance for a significant proportion of the population especially those of the small nations that have been subsumed within the British nation-state. Much of today's state-funded theatre that ostracizes the amateur, has its roots in early twentieth-century amateur/professional collaborations and grassroots activity in the inter-war years. An examination of the ideological basis of aesthetic value judgements which are, in fact, socially constructed judgements of taste, raises issues about both the cultural value of performance and the responsibility of the historian to the experience of the past.

Hone Kouka's historical plays Nga Tangata Toa and Waiora, created and produced in Aotearoa/New Zealand, one set in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and the other during the great Māori urban migrations of the 1960s, provide fresh insights into the way in which individual Māori responded to the tremendous social disruptions they experienced during the twentieth century. Much like the Māori orator who prefaces his formal interactions with a statement of his whakapapa (genealogy), Kouka reassembles the bones of both his ancestors, and those of other Māori, by demonstrating how the present is constructed by the past, offering a view of contemporary Māori identity that is traditional and modern, rural and urban, respectful of the past and open to the future.

Since 1980, the term ‘marae theatre’ has been used to account for attempts within the Māori cultural renaissance to produce new plays which draw on the protocols of the marae, the traditional physical centre of the tribe. The marae, however, has been seen as an arena of performative interaction, quite independent of any element of play production. The 1998 revival for marae performance of Songs to the Judges by white playwright Mervyn Thompson, dealing with issues of Māori sovereignty and land rights, eighteen years after its first performance for a liberal urban audience, addressed a totally different audience in a radically altered mode of address. Marae communication is symmetrical, with local people and visitors following strict protocols, and actors performing to the authority and approval of the host marae. There arise familiar issues of cultural constraints, property and appropriation, mobilized with a special intensity here in the use of actual utterances of historical Māori resistance leaders, transposed into other mouths. The Western concept of performance itself is brought into a state of crisis, as are the foundations of a ‘postcolonial drama’.

Feminist studies resulted from activist challenges to the very institutionalization of knowledge. Feminist studies, like studies of performance imagine their ground in embodied actions performed, somehow, socially, breaking down disciplinary boundaries to create a ‘field’ of study regarded as ‘interdisciplinary’. However, the term ‘post-disciplinary’, now in current usage, announces a different relationship to fields of study than the earlier term ‘interdisciplinary’ might connote. ‘Interdisciplinary’ is a term that signals a sense of a unified field, produced through the historical convergence of subcultures, social structures, and training practices. ‘Post-disciplinary’ retains nothing of the notion that a shared consciousness, or a shared objective, brings together a broad range of discrete studies. Instead, it suggests that the organizing structures of disciplines themselves will not hold. Only conditional conjunctions of social and intellectual forces exist, at which scholarship and performance may be produced.

Comic actors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as John Liston and Joseph Munden, were familiar not only on stage but also iconographically. Critical writing on both performers indicates their strong visual impact. Some critics accused them of caricature, but references to Hogarth in accounts of these actors by Lamb and Hazlitt imply that they followed Hogarth's own emphasis on observation rather than caricature. Indeed, illustrations of comic actors or inspired by comic actors often hover on the borders of caricature, but ultimately avoid it. In performance the live body of the actor often counters or uses gestically the degradation implicit in caricature, although iconography sometimes fixes the actor in poses and expressions where caricature predominates.

Theatre created by Pacific Islanders is perhaps the most recent significant development in New Zealand theatre of the 1990s. Exploring this new phenomenon within a concept of diaspora, productions, producers and themes are linked to notions of displacement, home, and disruption on several levels. Three recent plays and productions are examined: Think of a Garden by the Samoan-American John Kneubuhl, which explores memory as the basis of diasporic identity; Home Fires, a collaborative production between Pacific Island and Ma°ori artists in which a new kind of syncretic theatrical style transcending specific cultural codes was developed; and Tatau – Rites of Passage, a performance created by the Christchurch-based group Pacific Underground and the Australian community theatre group Zeal Theatre which explores the notion of ritual reincorporation – involving actual tattooing on stage – as a means of transcending diaspora and repairing the ruptures caused by it.

Two broad areas within Theatre Studies have been characterized as interdisciplinary. The first concerns approaches inspired by the human and social sciences, and, more recently, cultural studies. The second concerns artistic practices that may be described as interartistic, intermedial (since they involve different media and, thus, different technological developments), and intercultual. It is argued that the epistemological paradigm for theatre studies has changed over the last thirty years, and can be broken down roughly according to decades, each defined by its particular contribution to the interdisciplinary thrust of theatre studies. Most current theoretical debates no longer deal with epistemology or methodology, but almost exclusively with the extension of the field of performance. It is suggested that the theoretical and practical worlds must be connected more closely, ‘actor’ and ‘text’ here serving as examples.

Building on the early European experiments with animated shadow figures, American dalang Larry Reed – narrator and puppet manipulator – has enlarged Balinese shadow puppetry to cinema-sized dimensions and combined it with live actors and dancers. In conjunction with Balinese puppet masters, Reed has created several pieces which explore the interaction between puppets and human shadow figures as well as performers in front of the screen. Moreover, Reed's productions are bilingual and bi-cultural, mixing Balinese and American humour and mythology so that the hybrid creations find favour with audiences in both locations. As his technique increasingly becomes refined in the process, each new production expands more subtly on the theme of melding shadow with flesh and the blurring of illusion and reality.

After a brief examination of the roots of interdisciplinary elements in classical theatre, the practice of this tradition in selected forms of modern folk and tribal theatre is discussed. The featured example is a prominent folk theatre form belonging to Central India, Pandwāni, which was not widely known even two decades ago, but which, today, has come to the forefront of attention. Increasingly it is attracting performers who work in such metropolises as Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta, and serves to point out the tradition of interdiscplinarity which has long been a major characteristic of Indian theatre.

The spectatorial relationship between sporting events and theatrical performance, based on recent sociological studies, reveals much about the nature of any audience position, and raises issues of class, economic status, and gender. Despite the heavy commodification and internationalization of professional sport, fans retain a remarkable sense of psychological investment in home teams, centred around notions of civic pride and communal ownership. They ardently follow the fortunes of their sides in a manner rarely associated with any other form of entertainment, a devotion that can lead to notable violence. Sporting events also constitute one of the few remaining examples of live television broadcasts. Television extends the implications of the sports spectator enormously, and is the foundation of the globalization of sports, but it also affects live audiences through the mediatization of some events.

A consideration of identity formation in contemporary Australian multicultural theatre is offered through a re-assessment of the unsettled (and unsettling) constructions of Australia as ‘home’ in the work of three playwrights. William Yang's Sadness disrupts a localized perception of home, space, and cultural communities to amalgamate two disparate communities (the queer/homosexual community in Sydney and the Asian-Australian, or ‘Austasian’ community) into a reconfigured Australian identity. Janis Balodis's The Ghosts Trilogy uses many actors who play across the unsettled lines of history, amid numerous voices, homes, and homelands that indicate the enormity of what ‘Australia’ comes to signify. Noëlle Janaczewska's The History of Water constructs a way of locating the self by means of a metaphoric home as each character establishes herself on a psychic plane rather than choosing the strictly physical locations to which she has access. In their interrogations of home and homeland, these plays challenge assumptions regarding identity, disrupt notions of the ultimate ownership of land/culture by anyone, and problematize the idea of settlement as it is currently articulated in Australia.

Rita, Sue and Bob Too by Andrea Dunbar and A State Affair, by Robin Soans. Co-production Out of Joint, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, and Soho Theatre Company. Double bill first performed at Liverpool Everyman on 19 October 2000 and Soho Theatre, London on 5 December 2000.

Hailed as an ‘unruly masterpiece’, John Romeril's The Floating World is one of the few ‘new wave’ Australian plays representing Australians and their Asian ‘others’ to be restaged periodically since its première in 1974. Paying particular attention to productions of the play that have used Japanese theatre forms such as kabuki and bunraku, this article focuses primarily on the ways in which the spectacle of race has been coded performatively by different directorial approaches, and how various significations of race have been interpreted by the critical establishment. The fascinating stage history of The Floating World is treated as a barometer of Australian theatre's response to the challenge of representing cultural conflict, during a period marked by public debate about the desirability, and inevitability, of Australia's political, economic and cultural ‘enmeshment’ with Asia.

Each year local amateur actors in small, rural communities all over Norway stage a large number of open-air performances. Most of them are performed annually, and indeed some have been performed for almost fifty years. The interdisciplinary nature of these performances is founded on the principle of dugnad (community cooperation and participation) which brings to the performances local knowledges and skills. These productions thus attract large audiences because of their fusion of elements from theatre, music, dance, sport and crafts performed by skilled professionals turned amateur actors from the community. These interdisciplinary rituals are repeated annually by rural communities as the expression of local cultural disciplines harnessed together in performance.

This exploration of theatre as a ‘political poetics’ is based on a methodology developed through the study of theatre in Chile in the period of the Pinochet regime (1973–1989), and uses this as a way of reading the theatre of the transition and return to democracy. The understanding of a series of spaces that theatre negotiates, manipulates and occupies is seen to allow access to the fissures between these spaces. The essay explores the way these gaps might give access to a range of presences and absences in the dominant discourse, especially the national narrative around the historical present of the regime and the return to democracy. It is an exploration that leads to an unexpected insight into a central absence in the poetics of the stage during the dictatorship.