In NTQ40 (November 1994), in the first of two pieces on modern directorial approaches to the staging of opera as music theatre, Maria Shevtsova discussed Peter Brook's production of Impressions de Pelléas, complementing her own analysis with an interview with one of the leading actor-singers, Vincent Le Texier. Pursuing a similar dual-faceted approach, here she provides a detailed explication of Robert Wilson's production of Madame Butterfly, seen at the Opéra de Paris Bastille in 1993, exploring the ways in which Puccini's original orientalisms are translated and transmuted into a version of intercultural theatre appropriate to our own fin de siècle. Again setting her own views against those of a leading actor-singer – here, Diana Soviero, who played Butterfly – she explores how Wilson's coolly aesthetic, even ascetic style ‘incarnates the century's tentacular, monopolistic tendencies (of which interculturalism in its many guises in the arts are a sign), as well as its polyvalencies (of which the blurring of genres – hybrid genres – is a sign)’. Maria Shevtsova, who teaches in the Department of French Studies in the University of Sydney, earlier contributed a three-part survey of ‘The Sociology of the Theatre’ to NTQ17–19 (1989), and recently published a major collection of essays, Theatre and Cultural Interaction. Her present article forms part of research supported by the Australian Research Council Large Grants Scheme.

We rehearsed here at the Bastille for eight weeks, very slowly. Every finger, every movement was specific because of the lighting. The lighting is one of the most important things in the show. He has about four hundred and fifty lights on the sides and above. We could not, for instance, be parallel to each other. We always had to be on a diagonal, because the lights from the side would shadow. My hands are very important in the production because they are lit at every angle. They are made up very much. My whole body's made up. Every gesture, every point of every finger, is at the character; and every movement reflects the light. If my fingers are open, the light comes through. If I close them, that means I'm angry and I let no light in. It's really incredible. He's a genius, the man, he's a genius.

In NTQ38 (May 1994) Mick Wallis explored some of the characteristics of the phenomenon of working-class political pageantry which reached its peak between the two world wars, looking in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. Here, he explores earlier and later forms of modern pageantry, from the bourgeois civic style (of which Louis Napoleon Parker was virtually inventor and remained the presiding genius) to the attempts of working-class organizations to create a people's form of pageantry, whether in the interests of Communist Party recruitment or – following in the footsteps of the Victorian monarchy and provincial city fathers – of creating its own, alternative memorializing traditions. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.

Peter Brook's work has always figured in debates over ‘intercultural’ projects in the contemporary theatre. However, the controversy has most often centred on his engagement with Asian theatrical traditions, and in particular on his production of The Mahabharata. David Moody here examines Peter Brook's writings on Africa, as theatrical ‘discourse’ with its own theoretical half-life quite distinct from actual productions. This discourse, it is argued, can be described as ‘primitivist’, in that it constructs the African audience as, in Barthes's term, ‘degree zero’ – a ‘limit-text’ to universal theatrical communication. In doing so it presents a limiting version of African theatrical traditions themselves, and, as a result, reinforces a broader, more destructive global discourse of cultural primitivism concerning African and so-called ‘indigenous’ art and performance. David Moody, who currently lectures in Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, is a playwright, actor, and director who has written extensively on African, post-colonial, and popular theatre, and is now engaged in his own problematic intercultural projects.

Ian Watson and Susana Epstein went to Chile and Argentina in the summer of 1992 in order to interview several leading theatre artists about the differences the political changes in their countries had made to their own work and the work of their colleagues. Although, as the authors stress, they made no attempt to conduct a systematic study of the theatrical implications of the shift from authoritarianism to democracy, their findings suggest some parallels with the situation in Eastern Europe. Ian Watson, who heads the Theatre Division in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers University, Newark, is a theatre scholar whose main interests include contemporary Latin American theatre. Susana Epstein, an expatriate Argentine, is a Contributing Editor of The Drama Review.

This article and the two following were prepared as complementary contributions to a panel of the American Association for Higher Education conference on ‘Theatre and Cultural Pluralism’, held in Atlanta, Georgia, in August 1992. In the first, Kim F. Hall, from the Department of English at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, describes her experiences as an African American feminist teaching Shakespeare – often against the expectations of students who expect either an affirmation of his supposed universality, a simplistic condemnation of his politically incorrect positions on race and gender – or his appropriation, on behalf of those wishing to stake their own claim to the ‘culture of power’ he is taken to represent. Instead, Kim F. Hall proposes that feminism offers ‘one way of helping students look at Shakespeare ‘multiculturally’, since gender is one area of inquiry that both crosses cultures and forces one to think about the differences between cultures’.

This second paper contributed to the ATHE Conference in Atlanta takes the form of a dialogue between its authors, who argue for the use of African American scripts in a multicultural classroomnot as the usual tokenist leavening of a ‘traditional’ dramatic canon but as one way of questioning and redefining the concept of the canon itself, thus encouraging a positive awareness of cultural identities within one's society. Ways in which non-traditional casting methods can reinforce this process are also explored and illustrated, as means of moving from acting in the classroom to action in building a truly multicultural community.

In this, the third paper originally presented at the ATHE conference in Atlanta in 1992, Caleen Sinnette Jennings, Assistant Professor of Theatre in the American University, Washington, DC, discusses the problems and rewards of introducing American theatre, film, and television studies to a class of sixty students from a wide variety of nations and social backgrounds. Outlining the ideas and intentions behind a wide-ranging syllabus, she quotes from group presentations and individual responses to illustrate how works deeply rooted in American culture and assumptions can stimulate the recognition and discussion of social and cultural similarities and differences among responsive students.

John Cage (1912–1993) is widely regarded as one of the most pervasively influential figures in the arts in the latter half of the twentieth-century. Although best known as a composer, Cage expanded perceptions of what could constitute theatrical performance, and in this essay Natalie Crohn Schmitt assesses the nature and significance of Cage's intermedia performances and their immediate influence on other such work. Natalie Crohn Schmitt's Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature (Northwestern UP, 1990) is an analysis of contemporary theatre based on Cage's aesthetics, and essays of hers on Cage have appeared in other journals and in anthologies devoted to the artist. She has previously written in NTQ on Stanislavski (NTQ 8) and on performance theory in its historic moment (NTQ 23). Schmitt is Professor of Performing Arts and Professor of English the University of Illinois at Chicago. This essay was originally published in a slightly different form in Japanese in a Cage commemorative issue of the Japanese journal Music Today.

IN THE SEASON of 1893–94, theatregoers in New York would hardly have realized that ‘Broadway’, as a theatre centre, had just come into being. In fact, 1900 would seem a more appropriate date, but business in the commercial theatre in recent seasons has been so hazardous that the League of American Theatres decided to jump-start the past season with a putative centenary salute, ‘Celebrate Broadway: 100 Years in Times Square’. It was a brave attempt and resulted at least in some interesting historical exhibits. Unfortunately, these only served to remind the viewers of Broadway's glory-days years ago.