On 22 May 1938, Stanislavsky gathered his group of eleven assistant-pedagogues at the Opera-Dramatic Studio for a last collective class. The Studio was already free for the summer vacation after the tumultuous first show of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, opened only to a small number of guests a week before. Mikhail Kedrov had rehearsed the performance with the students for the preceding three years, and it was doomed to become the first public presentation of the so-called ‘method of physical actions’. Nevertheless, the presentation brought nothing more than doubts about the work done, and Stanislavsky felt compelled to call upon the pedagogues to understand what had happened. After briefly presenting his opinion of the work that had been shown, he started to elaborate on the technical and artistic achievements of the Studio. Stanislavsky began his talk in its stenographic transcript (File No. 21179 in the Stanislavsky Fund of the Moscow Art Theatre Museum Archives) with: ‘Everything now is lost. The technique and all the rest. I don’t see any foundation … any more. You should now start by the critique of the method I have been experimenting on.’ This article analyzes Stanislavsky’s documented talk, showing that he was not convinced that he had a new methodology, let alone one that synthesized his life-long theatre experiments. It seeks to present evidence that both the Physical Action and Active Analysis methodologies derived from Stanislavsky’s thought post mortem were developed only as two possible paths from his experiments, but were not the telos of his thought.

This article attempts to outline the most important assumptions of the work of Kokyu Studio led by Przemysław Błaszczak and Joanna Kurzyńska and based at the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław in Poland. The Studio’s educational and artistic programme is founded on the idea of a ‘place of practice’, which captures the philosophical, practical, aesthetic, and ethical horizon of the activities common to all members of the Studio. The regularity of practice, exposure to long working processes, and the improvement of the quality of movement, which are rooted in several traditions and methods of work, allow practitioners to study their own development and integrate various sources of knowledge. Reflections here also ask questions about the place and application of such a model of work in the context of contemporary challenges for actor-performer training.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1923–1975) fashioned poetry, prose, cinema, and theatrical works, and how he conceived of the sacred is more thoroughly understood in relation to his working biography. Two films, The Gospel According to St Matthew and La Ricotta, together with his tragedies, overwritten on the Greek plays The Eumenides and Medea are here in focus, indicating why Pasolini drew on Mircea Eliade’s method of integrating historical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical approaches. Declaring himself a Marxist, Pasolini did not accept Eliade’s theory in full, while the two concepts that most link him to Eliade are the latter’s ‘eternal return’ and ‘hierophanies’. Pasolini had grown up immersed in the natural world of Friuli, Northern Italy, and he considered hierophanies as an immanent manifestation of the sacred in nature. In doing this, he discovered both the immensity of the archaic peasant world and the cosmogonic matrix of his religion. Pasolini’s ontological vision of being led him to define the eternal return as the cyclical time of nature, the movement of life in respect of the inscrutable laws of the cosmos and the transcendent supernatural. Cyclical time meant death and resurrection and thus the possibility of regeneration, like a seed that dies to become a plant.

This article focuses on the last moments of Le Sacre du printemps, which opened in Paris on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Concentrating on the discourse of the creative practice that brought these moments into being, it seeks to add to our understanding of Le Sacre from the evidence of those most intimately involved with this first production. Analysis of Le Sacre demonstrates the equal viability of a great variety of readings of the work. Such readings are enabled by analysis, which regards any aspect of a creative work and its best interpretation as happily unfixed and unstable. It has sometimes been accepted that the job of critics and theorists is to fix interpretations of creative works and to demonstrate conveniently closed theses about them. Creative artists are not always willing to join their critical colleagues. This was certainly the case with Le Sacre. By reading the final seven seconds of its Danse sacrale through the accounts of the work’s primary creators – composer Igor Stravinsky, designer Nicholas Roerich, and their creative intimates – this article highlights an engrossing instability of intention and interpretation. It questions the idea that Le Sacre is a sacrificial ritual in the light of how Stravinsky himself considered his work in terms of coronation and consecration.

In the winter of 2020, the Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theatre Front), a political performance group and street-theatre pioneer in India, created a new kind of performance in response to current events. The Hindu-nationalist government was then implementing discriminatory laws targeting Muslims. The very constitution of India, a ‘sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic’ (Constitution Preamble) was under threat. Instead of a conventional street play, the Jana Natya Manch set up a participatory ‘game’ or ‘interactive presentation’ that brought together random and diverse audiences to act, or play, as a united people. The group put into place an inclusive experiment, rather than a didactic one, to counter exclusionary rules and address democratic deficits. Thus this Indian ‘people’s theatre’ produced ‘democratic performances’ that questioned both artistic and political representations. This article, based on fieldwork with the Jana Natya Manch, offers a script translation and an analysis of a new kind of performance developed in active circumstances.

The SoloSIRENs Collective’s production Cessair, staged in South Dublin in the summer of 2021, represents the second production of this burgeoning company. The Collective is a community-based theatre group comprised of an all-female ensemble that has been creating together since 2019. For this production, it used the Irish myth of Cessair as a starting point to consider the female experience, and invited women from across the world to share their stories and lived experiences. Drawing on close observation of the devising process, analysis of the final production, and conversations with members of the Collective, this article argues that the production should be considered as an example of feminist performed ethnography.

In a post-#Me-Too/Black Lives Matter landscape, the gender- and race-politics of the Golden Age of rock have increasingly come under interrogation. Hip-hop challenging rock’s long-standing hegemony constitutes a sociological as well as a musical shift, with a production such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School of Rock (2015) perhaps seeming hopelessly old-fashioned in comparison with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton from the same year. This article’s close and contextualized readings of four post-Hamilton jukebox rock musicals debate two principal issues. First, the extent to which the jukebox musical is fit for purpose: creative enough to repurpose rock’s cultural patrimony for an enriching night in the theatre. Second, how and why the curation practices of the rock musical reproduce or challenge the intersectional vectors of gendered and racial oppression, which render the genre problematic.