This chapter describes an innovative collaborative teaching model developed by colleagues Paul Prescott (Warwick), Fiona Gregory (Monash) and Gabriel García Ochoa (Monash) using what is known as ‘the international portal space’, a state-of-the-art teleconferencing system developed by the University of Warwick, England and Monash University, Australia. This technology is fundamentally different to platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, the use of which became widespread during the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020. Unlike Zoom, portal pedagogy is predicated on in-person learning that it combines with digital technology to allow students from different institutions to work together in real time (in our case, early morning in the United Kingdom and evening in Australia) and in real spaces on a shared syllabus. In the unit ‘Local and Global Shakespeares’, offered in 2016 and 2017, students on opposite sides of the globe were able to engage with Shakespeare, building their own and a shared knowledge of Shakespearean performance in local and global frameworks. Working alongside students from a different cultural context also forced students to reconsider their understanding of the ‘natural’ and ‘given’ in relation to Shakespeare, and thus, in relation to their understanding of culture more broadly. This chapter examines the application of portal pedagogy and other strategies that we employed to show how this unit sought to reimagine the possibilities of internationally collaborative Shakespearean teaching and learning.

The Introduction begins with a vignette illustrating the productive tension between a festival’s stated goals and the cultural work performed by its constituent parts. It introduces the book's main problematic: the ways and degrees to which international theatre and multi-arts festivals stage, represent, exchange, market, and negotiate cultural difference, broadly understood to include ethnic, national, Indigenous, queer, disability, and other cultures. It proceeds to outline the book’s major definitional fields (festivals and interculturalism) and scholarly debates around the key characteristics of festivals (their liminality, transformational qualities, and cosmopolitan aspirations). It then outlines the contexts (festivalization, eventification, creative city theory, globalized neoliberalism) within which festivals operate, the scope, methods, and theoretical frames within which the book operates, and the chapter breakdown and festival taxonomy that gives the book its shape.

This article examines Bertolt Brecht’s impact on contemporary transcultural theater worldwide.Globalization and migration have increased the importance and impact of transcultural theater in recent decades, leading to new forms of theatrical creation and experience. In the context of aggressive anti-globalization reactions characterized by xenophobia and racism, transcultural theater, as influenced and initiated by Brecht, celebrates hybridity and the fragment, focusing above all on processes of estrangement (Verfremdung) that reject the fantasy of a complete, self-identical, separate cultural sphere.Transcultural theater embraces multiperspectivalism and views the supposedly well-known and obvious self as strange and foreign, while at the same time it invites the self into a process of dialog with other cultures and identities that are equally strange and foreign. It rejects the notion of holistic identities and instead embraces the fragmentary, basing itself on repetition, historicization, and the citability of gestures. Transcultural theater seeks to create theatrical experiences that are adequate to, and also respond in a meaningful way to, the complex and changing world of migration and mobility in which both theater practitioners and theater audiences actually live.

It is widely acknowledged that Ibsen was one of the most influential foreign authors in China in the twentieth century. His plays were initially introduced by Lu Xun and Hu Shi and then used as a model for the Spoken Drama. In the 1920s, there emerged a group of one-act modern plays composed in vernacular language and featuring heroines following in Nora’s footsteps, later called the ‘departure play’. Cao Yu and Tian Han were among the most prominent Chinese playwrights to consciously learn from Ibsen, especially in the early period of their dramatic careers. Ibsen was also an important source of inspiration for modern Chinese fiction in terms of characterization and theme. In addition, a neologism, ‘Noraism’, was invented to signify the huge impact that Nora once had on the liberation and independence of Chinese women. After the reform and opening-up in the late 1970s, Ibsen experienced another revival in China as his plays began to be widely discussed by new generations of scholars and actively adapted into different theatrical genres. Today, Ibsen still plays an important role in the cross-cultural encounters between China, Norway and the rest of the world.

This chapter surveys recent Irish works by migrant artists including theatre company Outlandish Theatre (OT) Platform, novelists Ifedinma Dimbo and Ebun Joseph, filmmaker Jijo Sebastian, poet/activist Christiana Obaro, and visual artist Vukasin Nedeljkovic. As an ensemble, these artists thematically rehearse similar terrain: the hyper in/visibility of racialized female migrants, the abuses experienced by those seeking asylum, gendered inequality and violence against and within migrant communities. This chapter focuses attention not only on the works themselves but on a few recurring contexts through which significant migrant arts practice has emerged. These include collaborative arts practices that pair professional and nonprofessional collaborators, self-publishing, and activist work – all contexts that present challenges for the work gaining critical traction due to the work’s perceived lack of professionalism.

This chapter’s analysis of Aluna Theatre’s RUTAS and CAMINOS festivals in Toronto, Canada, examines the ways in which these grassroots festivals harness the power of an interactional, mass gathering to generate a ‘theatrical commons’ grounded in a heterogeneous, intercultural Americas. Since their inauguration in 2012, the festivals feature and foster co-productions with Latin American, Latinx, Indigenous, and Afro-Caribbean artists from across the Americas as a way of generating alternative producing structures to foster hemispheric work and, in turn, alternative genealogies of Canadian performance history. The ‘theatrical commons’ generated by the alternating biennials of RUTAS and CAMINOS produces new social relations grounded in interculturalization rather than internationalization, offering a model of how festivals might advance forms of interculturalization as an ‘inter-epistemology’ with the potential to unravel colonial thinking and domination. These festivals play a critical role in reshaping the Canadian performance landscape and demonstrating how festivals can redirect transnational flows of knowledge and artistic production towards more inclusive practices.

Using a historical institutionalist approach, I demonstrate how institutionalized norms stemming from the liberal tradition in America have informed its language regime by tracing the path dependency of language policy and the critical junctures when changing norms lead to policy shifts. In the early republic, liberal norms enshrined in the Constitution informed a minimalist language regime. At the turn of the 19th century, norms shifted to reflect rapid industrialization and mass immigration, informing attempts at restrictive language policies. At the critical juncture of the civil rights movement, the monolingual language regime was challenged by new norms of what constituted a liberal democratic society. Neoliberal norms of the Reagan presidency facilitated the success of the English-only movement in changing language policies at the state-level. Neoliberal cosmopolitanism of the new millennium re-introduced minimal multilingual policy initiatives. I conclude by suggesting that Trump’s election represents a shift to nationalist, albeit possibly illiberal, norms.

The political theorizing of language is unavoidably reliant on at least certain basic assumptions concerning the nature of language and linguistic agency. In multilingual and multicultural societies such as Canada, the task of identifying, articulating, and ultimately evaluating such assumptions is more complex, given their more heterogeneous linguistic landscape, and the (sometimes conflicting) clusters of beliefs, attitudes, anxieties, hopes, and expectations attached by speakers to particular languages as well as to the broader repertoire. The chapter focuses its attention on the debate over multiculturalism/interculturalism in the Canadian context. It explores and defends the argument that this debate can be seen in fact as a debate between two distinct conceptions of language and linguistic agency, namely the designative (“Lockean”, i.e., language as detached from a partial and intersubjective human experience) and the constitutive (“Herderian”, i.e., language as inextricably linked to a contextualized social epistemology), respectively. The distinctive logic and reasoning of both models, the chapter argues, can only be defended by embracing a non-holistic “in-betweenness” experience (and conception) of language as an underlying constitutive commonality.