In this article Stephe Harrop combines theatre history and performance analysis with contemporary agonistic theory to re-conceptualize Greek tragedy's contested spaces as key to the political potentials of the form. She focuses on Athenian tragedy's competitive and conflictual negotiation of performance space, understood in relation to the cultural trope of the agon. Drawing on David Wiles's structuralist analysis of Greek drama, which envisages tragedy's spatial confrontations as a theatrical correlative of democratic politics, performed tragedy is here re-framed as a site of embodied contest and struggle – as agonistic spatial practice. This historical model is then applied to a recent case study, Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women as co-produced by Actors Touring Company and the Lyceum, Edinburgh, in 2016–17, proposing that the frictious effects, encounters, and confrontations generated by this production (re-staged and re-articulated across multiple venues and contexts) exemplify some of the potentials of agonistic spatial practice in contemporary re-performance of Greek tragedy. It is contended that re-imagining tragic theatre, both ancient and modern, as (in Chantal Mouffe's terms) ‘agonistic public space’ represents an important new approach to interpreting and creatively re-imagining, interactions between Athenian tragedy and democratic politics. Stephe Harrop is a Lecturer in Drama at Liverpool Hope University, where her research focuses primarily on performances and texts adapted from, or responding to, ancient tragedy and epic. She is co-author of Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

This article is based on the author's production of Aimé Césaire's A Tempest in India. Guided by the concept of transculturation, a key concern of Kamaluddin Nilu in the working process was to develop positions that could be considered parallel to those of Césaire. The topographical condition of present-day India is interpreted as ‘internal colonialism’, locked in differences within, and presented through a double-framed vision. The parallel to ‘black subjectivity’ was found to be the Dalits, who suffer from systematic discrimination and are segregated from the main social body. Further, when adjusting the text to ‘India's world’, the notion of a ‘third space’, benefiting from the performance matrix of the traditional ritualistic performance Ram Lila as well as a heterotopian space concept, was crucial. The intention to make a theatre production that could give the audience an opportunity to engage in a political debate on the hierarchical nature of Indian society was fulfilled. Breaking the established postcolonial political myth meant that the audience was faced with the unexpected. In such cases an indirect or parabolic performance mode of communication rather than a synergetic one becomes likely. Kamaluddin Nilu is an independent theatre director and researcher affiliated with the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. He is currently a Research Fellow at the International Research Centre ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ at the Freie University, Berlin. He was Chair Professor of the Theatre Department at Hyderabad University in India, and Artistic Director of the Centre for Asian Theatre (CAT) in Dhaka.

In this article Gabrielle Houle examines the dramaturgical process that actor Marcello Moretti applied to his creation of Arlecchino's body in Giorgio Strehler's globally acclaimed productions of The Servant of Two Masters at the Piccolo Teatro of Milan between 1947 and 1960. She provides a critical analysis of Moretti's interdisciplinary and trans-historical research and creative process, including his study of iconographic representations of the commedia dell’arte, his observation of farmers in Padua in the mid-twentieth century, and the connections he made between his life experiences and his understanding of Arlecchino. She then examines Moretti's acting style, signature postures, and footwork, both as the international press described them and as she observed them in a video recording and in photographs of the productions. The article, based on extensive archival research at the Piccolo Teatro and on interviews with artists who knew both Moretti and Strehler, concludes with a discussion of Moretti's legacy within and beyond Italy. Gabrielle Houle is a theatre scholar, educator, and artist specializing in the recent staging history of the commedia dell’arte, contemporary mask-making practices, and masked performance. She has taught in several Canadian universities, and is a member of the Centre for Oral History and Tradition at the University of Lethbridge, where she is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor.

Postdramatic approaches to performance and Stanislavsky's methodology seemingly occupy divergent performance traditions. Nonetheless, both traditions often require performers to mine their own lives (albeit to different ends) and operate in an experiential realm that demands responsiveness to and within the live moment of performing. Tracy Crossley explores this realm through an analysis of Quarantine Theatre's Wallflower (2015), an example of postdramatic practice that blends a poetics of failure with a psycho - physical dramaturgical approach that can be aligned with Stanislavsky's concepts of affective memory and active analysis.Wallflower provides a useful case study of practice that challenges the binary opposition between the dramatic and postdramatic prevalent in theatre and performance studies scholarship. Aspects of Stanislavsky's system, nuanced by cognitive neuroscience, can expand the theorization of postdramatic theatre, which in turn generates techniques that can prove valuable in the rehearsal of dramatic theatre itself. Tracy Crossley is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Salford, Manchester. She is currently developing a practical handbook, Making Postdramatic Theatre, for Digital Theatre Plus.

In this article Naphtaly Shem-Tov examines three Mizrahi autobiographical performances in Israel, exploring how they construct Mizrahi identity in different ways. The term ‘Mizrahi’ or ‘Mizrahim’ refers to Jews and their descendants originating in the Muslim and Arab countries. Although Mizrahim make up approximately half the Israeli population, their ethnic identity and culture are considered outside the dominant Israeli Western cultural orientation. The three autobiographical performances discussed here challenge these preconceptions and present an alternative, assertive identity for the Mizrahi community. The performers incorporate real elements – physical virtuosity, the preparation and serving of food, and the use of official documentation and personal records – to blur the lines between fiction and reality, and to draw attention to the different forms of oppression exerted on the Mizrahi identity. Naphtaly Shem-Tov is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts at the Open University of Israel. His publications include Acco Festival: Between Celebration and Confrontation (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016).

In this article, George P. Pefanis discusses two major aspects of the ‘event’, as formed and developed in late Derridean philosophy – namely, the ‘possibility of the impossible’ and the ‘experience of perhaps’. These aspects are examined in order to reveal the potential for precariousness and uncertainty engendered by performance art, as in the case of the animal-event. With its increased degree of indeterminacy and its projected singular, here-and-now character, performance art could leave open the way to the ‘other’, the unpredictable, and the unexpected that is the ‘animal-event’, since an animal can never be fully controlled or have its behaviour predicted by the theatre mechanism. Two performances are taken as case studies to demonstrate this: the emblematic I Like America and America Likes Me by Joseph Beuys (René Block Gallery, New York, 1974), and Dragon Heads by Marina Abramović (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1990). It is argued that both cases pose certain moral issues around the presence of animals on the stage. George P. Pefanis is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistreian University of Athens, and also teaches theatre and cinema history at the Open University of Greece and Cyprus. His publications include Adventures of Representation: Scenes of Theory II, Spectres of Theatre: Scenes of Theory III (both 2013) and Theatre Adherents and Philosophers (Athens, 2016). In 2006, he received the award for best book in the study of theatre for The Kingdom of Eugena (2005).

The story of Romeo and Juliet has been reinvented in a number of musical adaptations. One of the boldest and most sophisticated attempts is Giulietta e Romeo (2007), a two-act Italian production with the music of the French-Italian singer and composer Riccardo Cocciante and with a libretto by the poet Pasquale Panella. As Cristina Paravano argues in this article, the work offers a unique opportunity to rethink Shakespeare and Italy from a suggestive contemporary Italian perspective. What distinguished this production from other musical adaptations was its strong intertextuality on a musical and textual level. By embracing forms of re-creation and re -vision, it created a profoundly and intrinsically Italian version of the story, drawing on and combining Italian musical, literary, and cultural traditions. The result was a combination of Cocciante's pop-rock background, contemporary pop-electronic music, operatic conventions and techniques, and Italian musical tradition, all filtered through the memory of Nino Rota's tunes written for Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. On the other hand, Panella's libretto taps into Shakespeare's Italian sources: while keeping to the Shakespearean plot line, the author adds interpolations from Luigi da Porto's Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (1530) and Matteo Bandello's novella (1554, 2: IX). The present paper evaluates how this innovative rendition enacts a further exchange between England and Italy so that metaphorically Italy ‘reappropriates'’ its own story.