It is with deep regret that we record the death following a stroke of our friend and colleague Clive Barker on 17 March 2005.

Whilst Stanislavsky spent much of his energy trying to simplify the processes of acting and avoiding a (pseudo-) scientific terminology for his acting system, he was nevertheless caught up in Stalin's appropriation of hard science after the Russian Revolution, to be paired with other ‘founding fathers’ of Soviet materialism, including Ivan Pavlov, in the creation of a powerful political orthodoxy. Here, Jonathan Pitches focuses on two of Stanislavsky's key contemporaries, Meyerhold and Michael Chekhov, both of whom had worked with the founder of the System at different periods in their career, to pinpoint a significant shift, or turning point, in the development of twentieth-century Russian actor training. Drawing on Fritjof Capra's history of systemic thinking, the article argues that a radical shift of thinking took place in actor training in the 1920s and 1930s, which prefigures the global paradigm crisis Capra has identified at the turn of the last century. Jonathan Pitches is a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of Vsevolod Meyerhold (Routledge, 2003). This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the IFTR 2004 Conference in St Petersburg. Its argument derives from his forthcoming book Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition (Routledge, 2005).

In this article, Katie Normington outlines the increasing interest in Meyerhold's work and assesses previous applications of his methods to contemporary production work. She goes on to consider how working as movement director for Red Shift Theatre Company's adaptation of Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby, enabled research into the application of Meyerhold's system of Biomechanics. Rehearsals for Bartleby combined actor-training and text rehearsals so that the Stanislavskian-trained actors gained ownership of biomechanical principles and could apply aspects to their independent exploration. This article analyzes the results of the work, and concludes that Meyerholdian techniques developed a physical architecture for the performance which, even during an arduous tour, maintained the clear shape and rhythm of the production. The use of principles such as rakurs, often neglected within present-day experimentation, proved to be essential in providing actors with a sense of composition and an awareness of their bodies in space. However, aspects such as facial expression and emotional excitability require further investigation. Katie Normington is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London.

If performance rituals are memories in action, what happens to them when a people no longer need to remember – or it is deemed politically undesirable for them to do so? In the following article, Syed Jamil Ahmed explores the annual performance in the Sikkimese monastery of Pemayangtse, in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, of the ritual of Pang Lhabsol (‘Worship of the Witness Deity’), and specifically of the Pangtoed 'Cham, performed on the final, eighth day in homage and gratitude to the mountain. He examines the complex web of political changes over many centuries which have affected the purpose and enactment of the ritual, and finally offers a detailed account of a single day's performance, in 1999, when the ritual was losing some of its dignity and many of its former trappings. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. In 2001–2 he was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He wrote on ‘Decoding Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jatra’ in NTQ74, and on ‘The Ritual of Devol Medua: Problematizing Dharma in the Ethnic Conflicts of Sri Lanka’ in NTQ76. His full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh.

In 2003, Graeme Miller was commissioned by the Museum of London to produce a sitespecific artwork for its oral history collection. Miller responded by creating Linked, a performance which bears witness to the disastrous impact the M11 link road has had on his local neighbourhood since its construction in the 1990s. Helped by a team of researchers, Miller interviewed local citizens and road protesters and broadcast their testimonies from twenty transmitters that line the route of the link road. In order to activate the work, the participant borrows a headset from a local library and is invited to follow the link road from Hackney to Wanstead, a distance of roughly four miles. This article explores the politics of Linked from a number of different theoretical perspectives: contemporary ethnography, everyday life studies, urban theory, and Situationism. The objective is to show that Linked offers an alternative paradigm for political performance – a paradigm which also necessitates an idiosyncratic and subjective form of writing. The article is followed by an interview in which Miller speaks about the processes involved in making Linked. Carl Lavery teaches performance and theatre at Loughborough University.

The following interview is intended is a companion piece to the preceding article by Carl Lavery, ‘The Pepys of E11: Graeme Miller and the Politics of Linked’. The interview took place in East London in late August 2004.

The community dance movement in the United Kingdom has been very active in organizing and delivering dance projects for disenfranchised communities and individuals for several decades. But initiatives have gained momentum following a shift in policy for arts funding after the 1997 General Election. This article examines how dance social-inclusion projects seek not only to allow those excluded from mainstream opportunities to participate in dance, but also to empower them. The aim of the paper is critically to examine these aims while acknowledging the work that the dance community has done in welcoming participation from groups traditionally not associated with the art form. Sara Houston firstly sets the political and social context that welcomes notions of empowerment to take root within arts projects, then goes on to debate what practitioners mean by the term within the context of championing a social inclusion policy, and discusses how examples of claims manifest themselves in practice, if they do at all. She examines one three-year initiative for residents of a sheltered housing unit and an eighteen-month project in an adult male maximum security prison, outlining what the projects offered and considering the limits of recording evidence of empowerment. Sara Houston lectures in the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey. Her work on social inclusion initiatives in dance has been published by Animated, Primary Health Care, and has also been utilized in a Government White Paper.

A momentary glimpse of Janet Jackson's breast on American television precipitated an earnest debate on the overstepping of marks (and recording-breaking TiVo replays) – while in many states, most notably Nevada, explicitly sexual performance is a respected contributor to the local economy. In this paper, Jeffrey D. Mason finds a way through the maze of state legislation and Supreme Court decision-making on the subject, exploring the interpretations of a constitutional right to self-exposure in conflict with the perceived need for protection against it; and he assesses the performance of Crazy Girls, a typical Las Vegas revue of the more ‘acceptable’ kind. He argues that the law, ‘constituting a text analogous to a playscript in its delineation of roles, actions, interactions, and even costume choices, attempts to impose taste with a special precision by addressing display, intent, and effect; and serves as both an expression of disapprobation and an instrument to censor performance’. Jeffrey D. Mason is Professor of Theatre Arts and Head of the Department of Theatre Arts in the University of Oregon. A shorter version of this article was delivered as a plenary session paper at the annual conference of the American Society for Theatre Research at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, on 20 November 2004.