Maintaining and nurturing an ensemble theatre have been Anne Bogart’s foremost concerns in these past near-thirty years since she and Tadashi Suzuki founded the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI) in 1992. Suzuki had established the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) in 1976, making a secluded mountainous landscape of Japan its home to this day. Bogart’s venture in the United States, although inspired by Suzuki’s model of a production-based troupe of high artistic standards that, at the same time, developed its unique training methods, by no means merely duplicates its predecessor. In this Covid Conversation, Bogart briefly maps a segment of SITI’s history, reflecting on the company’s inter-arts endeavours with differing dance idioms and its engagement with Greek tragedy. She discusses the effects of the Covid pandemic on her troupe, also interrupting its performances of The Bacchae at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Her most recent opera production, Tristan and Isolde, was closed for the same reason at the Croatian National Theatre – a key work in her portfolio of nineteenth-century grand opera as well as contemporary avant-garde opera. An acclaimed theatre director, Anne Bogart runs and teaches the Graduate Directing Programme at Columbia University in New York. At the SITI summer school in Saratoga, she and the company have workshopped the Viewpoints method that she has elaborated from Mary Overlie’s six principles for theatre and dance training. Bogart’s international workshops have further developed her method. She is the author of A Director Prepares (Routledge, 2001) and of many influential books that include (with Tina Landau) The Viewpoints Book (Theatre Communications Group, 2004). The Art of Resonance is forthcoming (2021, Bloomsbury). Maria Shevtsova is the Editor of New Theatre Quarterly whose most recent book is Rediscovering Stanislavsky (Cambridge University Press, 2020). The following conversation took place on 27 August 2020, was transcribed by Kunsang Kelden, and was edited by Maria Shevtsova. It is followed by a short coda announcing the transition of SITI into a resource centre.

As today’s catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates ongoing crises, including systemic racism, rising ethno-nationalism, and fossil-fuelled climate change, the neoliberal world that we inhabit is becoming increasingly hostile, particularly for the most vulnerable. Even in the United States, as armed white-supremacist, pro-Trump forces face off against protesters seeking justice for African Americans, the hostility is increasingly palpable, and often frightening. Yet as millions of Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrated after the brutal police killing of George Floyd, the current, intersecting crises – worsened by Trump’s criminalization of anti-racism protesters and his dismissal of science – demand a serious, engaged, response from activists as well as artists. The title of this article is meant to evoke not only the state of the unusually cruel moment through which we are living, but also the very different approaches to performance of both Brecht and Artaud, whose ideas, along with those of others – including Benjamin, Butler, Latour, Mbembe, and Césaire – inform the radical, open-ended, post-pandemic theatre practice proposed in this essay. A critically acclaimed dramatist as well as Professor of English and Playwriting at California State University, Northridge, Mitchell’s published volumes of plays include Disaster Capitalism; or Money Can’t Buy You Love: Three Plays; Brecht in L.A.; and Ventriloquist: Two Plays and Ventriloquial Miscellany. He is the editor of Experimental O’Neill, and is currently at work on a series of post-pandemic plays.

Michael Walling here looks back over the first twenty-five years of Border Crossings, the company he founded in 1995. The article explores the company’s intercultural remit, placing it within the wider context of multicultural and intercultural performance and policy, and the relationship between intercultural theory and practice. Structural questions around finance and organization are juxtaposed with an assessment of the dynamics of cross-cultural devising and the ethics of these collaborations. This article also explores Border Crossings’ text-based work, its curation of the ORIGINS Festival of First Nations and related ceremonies, and the company’s direct engagement with policy in the European Union. It is accompanied by a comprehensive chronology of the company’s productions. Michael Walling is Artistic Director of Border Crossings and Visiting Professor at Rose Bruford College. He has directed numerous productions across four continents, including opera as well as theatre.

Throughout the history of western theatre, animals onstage have invariably been read in relation to human concerns. The reviews of Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016) at the Royal Court followed in this tradition, interpreting the play’s central animal players as symbolic stand-ins for humans. By examining the particularity of the non-human animals at the centre of Human Animals’ urban eco-crisis, this article aims to rectify previous anthropocentric readings and acknowledge the agency and autonomy of the play’s non-human animals, namely pigeons and foxes. Building on Una Chaudhuri’s ‘Theatre of Species’, this article demonstrates Human Animals’ deep engagement with animal alterity, subverting conventional socio-zoological classifications of ‘pest’ animals and popular preconceptions of pigeons and foxes in British culture. While Smith’s play uses the dystopian mode to dramatize a small-scale, localized eco-crisis, this article highlights how its focus on urban animal encounters and zoonotic disease holds broader implications for re-imagining inter-species relations and planetary health. An award-winning playwright, Isla Cowan is also a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. Her current research investigates ideas of ecological consciousness in contemporary Scottish theatre and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (SGSAH).

The years 2014 to 2018 witnessed the centenary of the First World War, commemorated around different cities and other locations around the world. In the United Kingdom, public centenary commemorations were funded by the Tory government, Heritage Lottery Fund, and private and corporate donors with an overall budget of over fifty million pounds, including the cultural programme 14–18 NOW that encompassed television documentaries, educational programmes, art exhibitions, theatre, and dance performances. 2016 was also the year of the divisive Brexit referendum, when Leave voters won by a small margin to end Britain’s membership of the European Union. As Britain sought to redefine its global political role, artists devised a set of suggestive transcultural acts of remembrance to spur public debate about the colonial past and current resurging nationalism. This article discusses three important theatrical events commissioned by 14–18 NOW: Paul Cummins and Tom Piper’s Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red (2014), Akram Khan’s XENOS (2018), and William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load (2018). Each theatrical event refocused awareness regarding long-standing crises of identity conflicts at the heart of Britain’s contemporary politics, pointing towards an uncertain national future. Sabine Sörgel was Senior Lecturer in Dance and Theatre at the University of Surrey (2013–2019) and is now an independent scholar, writer, and dramaturge. Her most recent book is African Contemporary Dance Theatre: Phenomenology, Whiteness, and the Gaze (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

This article examines the production and promotion of popular entertainments by the German Sarrasani Circus during the interwar period and how they were used to establish specific national narratives in Germany and Latin America. Focusing particularly on its engagement of Lakota performers, it argues that the Circus acted as an active negotiator of national concerns within and beyond Germany’s borders, and presented the group as ‘familiar natives’ in order to appeal to local and national ideas of Germanness. At the same time, it shows that the performers pursued their own interests in becoming international and cosmopolitan performers, thereby challenging the assimilation forced upon their traditions and culture by institutions in the United States. Finally, it demonstrates how foreign propaganda built on the Circus’s national image in Latin America to restore Germany’s international relations after the First World War. Sabine Hanke is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Duisberg-Essen. Her research examines the German and British interwar circus. She was recently awarded her PhD in cultural history, from which this article has evolved, at the University of Sheffield. A chapter based on her research is scheduled for publication in Circus Histories and Theories, ed. Nisha P.R. and Melon Dilip (Oxford University Press).