Forkbeard Fantasy is one of Britain's oldest ‘alternative’ performance companies. Founded in 1974 by the brothers Tim and Chris Britton, who have continued to work with the company ever since, Forkbeard's practice may be identified with a peculiarly British variant on performance art, which dates from the mid-sixties. Influenced as much by elements of variety entertainment as by early twentieth-century avant-garde movements in the visual arts, it produced a unique form of integrated performance which was often daringly experimental yet refreshingly tongue-in-cheek. In the Spring of 1999, Nicolas Whybrow, then teaching at Lancaster University, observed the company's residency in Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast, over a period of three weeks. Here, he presents his impressions based on a consideration of Morecambe's identity as a place and the nature of Forkbeard's relationship to that place as residential visitors. His analysis takes into account the activities he observed – including his daily trips into Morecambe by train, media ‘takes’ on the town, informal conversations with contributors to the residency, and a formal interview with the company itself, represented here by interjections into the text. Nicolas Whybrow is now Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester.

In an earlier issue of New Theatre Quarterly, NTQ55 (August 1998), Marcia Blumberg examined the setting of the kitchen in performances by Bobby Baker and Jeanne Goosen, arguing for the ‘transitional and transgressive’ possibilities of this domesticcum-performance space. Here, Elaine Aston returns to the ‘kitchen’ in Bobby Baker's performances of ‘daily life’. The article examines Baker's ‘language’ of food which ‘speaks’ of domesticity, and her conjunction of comic playing and the hysterical marking of the body, to show how her performance work constitutes an angry, feminist protest at the lack of social transformation in women's lives. Elaine Aston has authored a number of studies on contemporary women's theatre, and is Chair of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies, Lancaster University.

In the first of two essays which use academic discourses of cultural exchange to examine the intra-cultural situation in contemporary British society, Barnaby King analyzes the relationship between Black arts and mainstream arts on both a professional and community level, focusing on particular examples of practice in the Leeds and Kirklees region in which he lives and works. This first essay looks specifically at the Asian situation, reviewing the history of Arts Council policy on ethnic minority arts, and analyzing how this has shaped – and is reflected in – current practice. In the context of professional theatre, he uses the examples of the Tara and Tamasha companies, then explores the work of CHOL Theatre in Huddersfield as exemplifying multi-cultural work in the community. He also looks at the provision made by Yorkshire and Humberside Arts for the cultural needs of their Asian populations. In the second essay, to appear in NTQ62, he will be taking a similar approach towards African-Caribbean theatre in Britain. Barnaby King is a theatre practitioner based in Leeds, who completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Leeds Workshop Theatre in 1998. He is now working with theatre companies and small-scale venues – currently the Blah Blah Blah company and the Studio Theatre at Leeds Metropolitan University – to develop community participation in theatre and drama-based activities.

The Notting Hill Carnival is now Europe's largest street festival, celebrating the music and popular arts of a variety of cultures. Not so long ago, the event – which sometimes culiminated in violence between the police and carnival goers – was widely perceived as both threatening and marginal. But more recently the size, success, and high media profile of the carnival have given it a ‘responsible’ image – and won sponsorship from a variety of commercial concerns. In this article Gavin Carver Explores these developments in the meditation and context of the carnival, and asks whether the sponsorrship has contributed towards the containment of the carnival, transforming a socio/cultural event into mere decorative spectacle. GAvin Carver is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent.

In October 1998 the Italian director Pino DiBuduo visited the Newark, New Jersey, campus of Rutgers University on the occasion of the major international conference, ‘Arts Transforming the Urban Environment’ For the occasion, he transformed a bleakly concrete teaching block on the Newark campus into a site for the latest of his Invisible Cities projects. These had originated in his Teatro Potlach company's residency in the Italian village of Fara Sabina in 1991, where DiBudo's intention – as in a number of site-specific variations on Invisible Cities since – was to render ‘visible’ aspects of the everyday urban environment which we no longer have the imagination or the patience to ‘see’. While Deborah Saivetz looks also at this original Italian project, and at a later version in Klagenfurt, Austria, she concentrates here on the Newark production, whose development she recorded – in this opening article in her own and DiBuduo's words, and in the following piece through the experiences and recollections of the participants. Deborah Saivetz holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Theater in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark campus of Rutgers University. Her directorial work includes productions for the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, the Drama League of New York's Directors’ Project, New York's Alchemy Courthouse Theater, and the Parallax Theater Company in Chicago. She has also worked with JoAnne Akalaitis as assistant director on John Ford's ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, and created original theatre pieces with Chicago's Industrial Theater and Oxygen Jukebox.

In the foregoing article Deborah Saivetz described the background to the creation of Pino DiBuduo's Invisible Cities on the Newark, New Jersey, campus of Rutgers University in October 1998, and the development, limitations and strengths of that production. Its ‘audience’ – for the most part members of the university community and attendees at the concurrently scheduted ‘Arts Transforming the Urban Environment’ conference – were impressed by DiBuduo's artistic vision and the conviction of the actors, though a few expressed disappointment that, despite the project's urban setting and conference tie-in, Invisible Cities seemed to have little to do with the historically and culturally rich city of Newark itself. Most, however, were fascinated by, and perhaps even grateful to, the visiting Italian director who, with his band of student artists, transformed an ordinary campus building into an at times baffling, frequently delighful, and always provocative sequence of worlds – as if, as one witness put it, ‘watching a dream in real life’. The actors and technicians who participated in Invisible Cities confronted challenges from all angles: the English–Italian language barrier, the University bureaucracy, the physical limitations of the performance space, inclement weather, and the shortage of finances, human resources – and, most of all, time. Yet, despite the constant ‘changes of direction’ that were part of the Invisible Cities process, the actors were inspired by DiBuduo's willingness to allow them complete artistic licence in the conception and execution of their cities, and they came to understand that even artistic tensions can strengthen the bonds within an ensemble, infusing its members with a fighting spirit that refuses to let the project die. In the following interview, the student artists reflect upon the unique process of creating Invisible Cities, the actor–director relationship, the role of the audience, and the effect of the project upon the Rutgers–Newark community.

Few studies of African ritual and festival performance have been written from a theatrical perspective, and Sam Ukala believes that the richness of such events has yet to be fully explored by African dramatists – while most of the western paratheatrical experiments derived from them have been influenced more by anthroplogical models than aesthetic principles. In pursuit of a dramaturgical approach to the study of African rituals and festivals, he focuses on the role and nature of impersonation in these events, and examines the relationship between the forms, objectives, and contexts of the performances and the kinds of impersonation to be found in them. Distinguishing between the western actor and the African role-player, and between ‘intense impersonation’ and possession, he suggests also some generic parallels between western theatre and African performance. Sam Ukala is a Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Edo State University, Ekpoma, Nigeria. A theatre director and playwright, his published plays include The Slave Wife, The Log in Your Eye, Akpakaland, The Trails of Obiamaka Elema, Break a Boil, and Two Plays: The Placenta of Death and The Last Heroes. In 1998–99 he was resident writer and director at Horse and Bamboo Theatre in the United Kingdom, where, with Bob Frith, he wrote and directed Harvest of Ghosts, a first experiment with wordless visual theatre, an extension of his preoccupation with ‘folkism’, a dramaturgy based on folk compositional and performance aesthetics formulated in his article in NTQ47 (August 1996).

With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into the auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. The first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’. Rachel Fensham is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, and Denise Varney is Lecturer in the School of Studies in Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

The premiere of The Carrier Frequency took place in 1984, the result of a collaboration between Leeds-based Impact Theatre Cooperative and the novelist Russell Hoban. Impact was founded in 1978 by Claire MacDonald, Pete Brooks, Steve Schill, Graeme Miller, Tyrone Huggins, and Richard Hawley, with Nikki Johnson and Heather Ackroyd joining in subsequent years. Many companies since have cited Impact as a major inspiration, with The Carrier Frequency in particular achieving almost mythic status. Today, Impact has long since disbanded, and little documentation of their work remains to enable their legacy to be passed on. In April 1999, the theatre company Stan's Cafe (none of whom had seen the original show) decided to restage The Carrier Frequency as part of Birmingham's ‘Towards the Millennium’ festival; in association with this project, a symposium was held on the subject of ‘Archaeology, Repertory, and Theatre Inheritance’. What follows is a personal response to the experience of attending the symposium and performance, and records a variety of attitudes towards myth-making, re-creation, and the potential and problems of documentation. Frances Babbage lectures in Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds.