Although many disciplines have helpfully (and a few less helpfully) interacted with theatre studies over the past decade, progress has been notably slow in the discovery of a dialogue with sociology. Indeed, such progress as has been made has too often, argues Maria Shevtsova. resulted in perceptions and emphases which are not always sympathetic (or seemingly even relevant) to the interests of theatre workers. In this, the first of a three-part introduction to the sociology of theatre, Maria Shevtsova combines an objective analysis of progress to date with a study of the problems and misconceptions encountered along the way, and also proposes a possible methodology for correcting the present imbalance. In future instalments, she will look in particular at the ways in which theatre anthropology and theatre semiotics have helped and hindered this problematic relationship. Now teaching in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney, Maria Shevtsova trained in Paris before spending three years at the University of Connecticut. She has previously contributed to Modern Drama, Theatre International, and Theatre Papers, as well as to the original Theatre Quarterly and other journals.

Why does the vocabulary of the theatre become pejorative as soon as it is applied to everyday experience? Why does the use of theatre as a metaphor for the world carry implications of the deceptive and the artificial? And why, more recently, have sociologists and psychologists used theatricality as a basis for explaining the nature of behaviour in ‘real life’ – at the same time as theatrical gurus have begun to seek a kind of transcendent theatricality in ‘real’ experience? Through an analysis of the ideas of writers such as Erving Goffman and Elizabeth Burns, and of theatre workers from Diderot through Stanislavski to Grotowski, David E. R. George concludes that the apparent contradictions and paradoxes become reconcilable if one replaces the traditional alternative models of theatricality – subjective identification between actor and role versus presentational objectivity – with a triadic approach, which recognizes the partial, overlapping, and multi-faceted nature of all ‘theatrical’ behaviour, on the stage or in the street. After the award of his Cambridge doctorate in 1964, David E. R. George taught in the Universities of California at Berkeley, Göttingen, Malaysia, and Peking, before taking up his present post as Chairman of Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He has published books on Ibsen and on German tragic theory, and his study of Indian ritual dance-drama will appear later this year in the ‘Theatre in Focus’ series.

The small and sparsely populated country of Laos is squeezed between Thailand and Vietnam, and receives information, financial investment, and cultural influence from both – arguably overwhelming the development of its own modern identity. While theatre has often been a popular and important means of disseminating cultural information and values in societies with low literacy levels, in today's Laos the mass media have become the most influential source of information and influence, with Thai television dominating the Lao airwaves – and Vietnamese-style socialist realism still the model for the live performing arts. Although the troupes disseminate didactic messages deemed important by the central government, they are supported primarily by foreign aid agencies that also dictate their content. In the following article, Catherine Diamond traces the history of the three major performing arts in Laos, describes their present state, and assesses the difficulties they face in developing along their own creative and artistic paths. Catherine Diamond teaches theatre and ecology in literature at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. She is a theatre reporter in Southeast Asia, and has previously written about theatre in Burma, Vietnam, Turkey, and the Czech Republic for NTQ.

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.

Twenty-five years after the landmark publication of Theatre of the Oppressed, there is no denying the continuing influence of Augusto Boal on theatre practitioners, community workers, and political activists worldwide. To judge by the number of recent publications by or about Boal (including five best-selling books from Routledge in little more than a decade), the ‘Boal Boom’ shows no evidence of decline. There is also, however, an emerging culture of critique around various aspects of the theory and practice of Theatre of the Oppressed; and in the following article, Paul Dwyer argues that a reflexive, critical approach to using Boal's techniques should begin with an acknowledgement that they are not based on a stable theoretical foundation. Rather, the underlying principles, articulated by Boal in the many anecdotes that fill his books, lectures, and workshops, appear to have shifted over the years to become more closely aligned with the expectations of his audience. The theory of Theatre of the Oppressed should thus be seen as a co-creation for which the readers and propagators of Boal's work share a significant responsibility. Paul Dwyer is a lecturer in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney.

The popularity of Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit musical Hamilton has been unprecedented. Hamilton tells the story of the first United States Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, a founding father who, until recently, was often forgotten in American public memory. Miranda's unique musical, which fuses an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century story with contemporary music and text, features actors of various races and genders in order to tell the story of ‘America then’ by and for ‘America now’. Through a close textual analysis of the musical's script, cast recording, and sheet music, Valerie Lynn Schrader uses narrative theory to explore how Hamilton creates public memory of one of the lesserknown US founding fathers. She argues that, through the narrative paradigm, Hamilton creates what narrative theorist Walter Fisher refers to as ‘public moral argument’,1 through which audience members can discern life lessons, or ‘equipment for living’,2 for their own lives. Finally, the article suggests that the rhetorical theory of Burkean identification may play a role in how public memory of Hamilton's story is formed and how audience members learn life lessons from the musical. Valerie Lynn Schrader is Associate Professor of Communications Arts and Sciences at the Schuylkill Campus of the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on rhetorical messages in theatre works, especially musical theatre productions. She is herself a classically trained lyric soprano/soubrette.

Online role-playing games are a form of entertainment in which players create characters and improvisationally perform scenes together within a digital virtual world. It has many theatre-like aspects, which raises the question of whether it is in fact a form of theatre. To answer that question, however, one must first have a definition of theatre – an issue with disciplinary consequences – and in this article Tobin Nellhaus develops a definition founded on social ontology, suggesting that theatrical performance, unlike other social practices, replicates society's ontology. From that perspective, online role-playing meets the definition of theatre. But its digital environment raises another set of problems, since embodiment, space, and presence in online role-playing are necessarily unlike what we experience in traditional theatre. Here, Nellhaus brings these three aspects of performance together through the concept of embodied social presence, showing how they operate in both customary theatre and online role-playing. Tobin Nellhaus is an independent scholar who was Librarian for Performing Arts, Media, and Philosophy at Yale University. He has published mainly on the relationship between theatre and communication practices, and on critical realist theory in theatre historiography. He is the General Editor of the third edition of Theatre Histories (London: Routledge, 2016), and the author of Theater, Communication, Critical Realism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

In 2014 Indigenous theatre director Wesley Enoch announced in an interview that ‘the aim of Indigenous theatre is to write into the public record neglected or forgotten stories’. He also spoke about the aims of a new Australian play, Black Diggers, as ‘honouring and preserving’ these stories. For Enoch, Black Diggers (re)addresses a great silence in Australia’s history, that of the Aboriginal experience of war. Also in 2014, the memorial sculpture Yininmadyemi Thou Didst Let Fall, commissioned by the City of Sydney Council, aimed to place in memoriam the story of forgotten Aboriginal soldiers who served during international conflicts, notably the two world wars. Both Black Diggers and the Yininmadyemi memorial sculpture are counter-hegemonic artefacts and a powerful commentary of a time of pseudo-nationalist memorialization. Both challenge the validity of many of Australia’s socio-political and historical accounts of war, including the frontier wars that took place between Aboriginal people and European settlers. Both unsettle Australia’s fascination with a memorialized past constructed from a culture of silence and forgetfulness. Liza-Mare Syron is a descendant of the Birripi people of the mid-north coast of New South Wales in Australia. An actor, director, dramaturg, and founding member of Moogahlin Performing Arts, a Sydney-based Aboriginal company, she is currently the Indigenous Research Fellow at the Department of Media, Music, Communication, and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has published widely on actor training, indigenous theatre practice, inter-cultural performance, and theatre and community development.

What happens during a rehearsal? How are actors' expectations and achievements affected by different directorial approaches, and how do the various ‘systems’ of acting fit with the responses of an audience? From Diderot through Stanislavski. Brecht. and Artaud to the work of such modern experimental directors as Brook, Grotowski, Chaikin, and Schechner, the theory may or may not be adequately tested against the practice. The author of two earlier, complementary studies in empirical theatre research – ‘Feedback as a Subsystem’ and ‘Prompt–Copy as a Subsystem’, both published in Kodikas/Code: Ars Semeiotica (1984 and 1987) – Stratos E. Constantinidis here checks several normative fallacies which have influenced theatre practice by relating the findings of empirical research in theatre to the experimental work of theatre artists. The author, who has previously worked in the Universities of Iowa and Arizona, presently teaches theory and criticism in the Department of Theatre at Ohio State University.

In this article Adrienne Scullion reviews the citizenship debate in education policy within contemporary – and specifically post-devolution – Scotland. She identifies something of the impact that this debate has had on theatre-making for children and young people, with a particular focus on projects that are participatory in nature. Her key examples are drawn from TAG Theatre Company's ‘Making the Nation’ project, a major three-year initiative that sought to engage children and young people throughout Scotland in ideas around democracy, politics, and government. Revisiting a classic cultural policy stand-off between instrumental and aesthetic outcomes, she asks whether a policy-sanctioned emphasis on process, transferable skills, and capacity building limits the potential for theatre projects to develop other kinds of theatre skills, such as critical reading and/or spectatorship. With its emphasis on participatory projects rather than plays for children and young people, the article complements her earlier essay, ‘“And So This Is What Happened”: War Stories in New Drama for Children’, in NTQ 84 (November 2005). Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow.

Modern Turkish theatre, benefiting from the support of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, has had a secular bent throughout its history. However, after the elections of 1994 and 1995, when Refah (Welfare) Party candidates espousing a distinctly religious agenda swept into power, dramatists have found themselves in an uneasy position, caught between corrupt secular politicians and a censorship-inclined military on the one hand, and Islamists hostile to theatre both in principle and as an unnecessary luxury on the other. Besides swiftly changing demographics and competition from alternative entertainments, shifts in political policy in Istanbul are eroding the city's strong theatre tradition. Yet the theatre of this nation which straddles Europe and Asia maintains an impressive vitality and variety, with state and municipal companies mounting regular seasons of foreign and Turkish works, and experimental troupes challenging established theatre forms as well as daring to broach some of the sensitive ideological conflicts in Istanbul. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan, is author of Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about dancers in South-East Asia and the Middle East.

The relationship between live theatre and the rapidly developing multimedia technologies has been ambiguous and uneasy, both in the practical and the academic arena. Many have argued that such technologies put the theatre and other live arts at risk, while others have seen them as a means of preserving the elusive traces of live performance, making current work accessible to future generations of artists and scholars. A few performance and production teams have entered the fray, deliberately pushing the technology to its limits to see how useful it may (or may not) be in dealing with the theatre. One such team – comprising Lizbeth Goodman, Tony Coe, and Huw Williams – forms the Open University BBC's Multimedia Shakespeare Research Project, and on 4 September 1997 they presented their work as the annual BFI Lecture at the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank. What follows is an edited and updated transcript of the lecture – which was itself a ‘multimedia performance’ – intended to spark debate about the possibilities and limitations of using multimedia in creating and preserving ‘live’ theatre. Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, where she chairs both the Shakespeare Multimedia Research Project and the new ‘Shakespeare: Text and Performance’ course. Tony Coe is Senior Producer at the OU/BBC, where Huw Williams was formerly attached to the Interactive Media Centre, before becoming Director of Createc for the National Film School, and subsequently Director of Broadcast Solutions, London. Together the team has created a range of multimedia CD-ROMs designed to test the limits and possibilities of new technologies for theatre and other live art forms – beginning with Shakespeare

It has long been the received wisdom that television drama has become increasingly ‘filmic’ in orientation, moving away from the ‘theatrical’ as its point of aesthetic reference. This development, which is associated with the rejection of the studio in favour of location shooting – made possible by the increased use of new technology in the 1960s – and with the adoption of cinematic as opposed to theatrical genres, is generally regarded as a sign that the medium has come into its own. By examining a key ‘moment of change’ in the history of television drama, the BBC ‘Wednesday Play’ series of 1964 to 1970, this article asks what was lost in the movement out of the studio and into the streets, and questions the notion that the transition from ‘theatre’ to ‘film’, in the wake of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett's experiments in all-film production, was without tension or contradiction. The discussion explores issues of dramatic space as well as of socio-cultural context, expectation, and audience, and incorporates detailed analyses of Nell Dunn's Up the Junction (1965) and David Mercer's Let's Murder Vivaldi (1968). Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh is the Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the HEFCE-funded project, ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’, now in its third year at the University of Reading. Her publications include Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (Macmillan, 1998), and papers in Screen, The British Journal of Canadian Studies, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Media, Culture, and Society. Stephen Lacey is a lecturer in Film and Drama at the University of Reading, where he is co-director of the ‘BBC Wednesday Plays’ project. His publications include British Realist Theatre: the New Wave and its Contexts (Routledge, 1995) and articles in New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre Production.

Circus training can benefit children diagnosed on the autistic spectrum and their families. In 2010, as Head Trainer at Flipside Circus in Brisbane, Kristy Seymour developed a method for using circus as a therapeutic tool for children with autism. In this article, she and Patricia Wise work between experiential and theoretical positions to explore how circus can open up a new world to such children, enabling them to take risks physically and emotionally, and to stretch the capacities of their bodies in an environment that enriches their social development. Seymour and Wise deploy the idea of ‘chaosmos’ from Deleuze and Guattari, Pope, and others to argue that, counter-intuitively, children with autism benefit from the environment of creative chaos that attends circus. Through Agamben's work on being and singularity they discuss how circus values difference and inclusivity, building community in ways also captured by Probyn's notion of ‘outside belonging’. Kristy Seymour has worked for over sixteen years in contemporary circus as an aerialist, trainer, artistic director, creative producer, and choreographer. She has a significant profile in the youth circus sector, and is completing doctoral research on Australian contemporary circus in Griffith University's School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science. An Associate Professor in the same School, Patricia Wise is a cultural theorist whose publications range over cultural policy and urban studies, inflected by interests in spatiality, materiality and gender. This article reflects a parallel concern with cultural practices in communities of difference, as does a recent co-publication on the value of participatory music for the welbeing of detained asylum seekers.

Site-specific performance relies on the terms space and place as markers for discussing a performance's engagement with a site. However, practitioners and researchers are often disgruntled by the limitations such terms impose upon site-specific performance – as was Melanie Kloetzel, in the creation of The Sanitastics, a site-specific dance film created in the Calgary Walkway System. In this article, Kloetzel examines how theorists have struggled with space and place in the last four decades and how bringing in the perspective of the body allows us to reassess our assumptions about these terms. As she analyzes her creative process, she discovers the restrictions as well as possibilities in space and place, but she also notes the need for Marc Augé's idea of non-place to clarify her site-specific efforts in the homogenized, corporate landscape of the Walkway System. Kloetzel is an associate professor at the University of Calgary and the artistic director of kloetzel&co, a dance company founded in New York City in 1997 that has presented work across North America. Her site-specific films have been shown in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, and her anthology with Carolyn Pavlik, Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2009.

This article explores the conflict between the constructions of childhood and their political/legal implications in the context of the entertainment business, as related to the demands imposed upon children by parents and theatre managers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once children could move freely both within and between countries, these conflicts and concerns assumed a global dimension. Through a number of case studies, the authors offer some fresh observations about how legal and social imperatives affected the transmission of values about children employed as entertainers between Britain and Australasia during the period from 1870 to the start of the First World War – from the Education Acts of the 1870s to the legislation of 1910–1913 restricting the export of child entertainers. Gillian Arrighi is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has recently published articles in Theatre Journal (Dec 2008), Australasian Drama Studies (April 2009 and Oct 2010), and in Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s (Sydney, 2008). She is associate editor of the e-journal Popular Entertainment Studies. Victor Emeljanow is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and General Editor of the e-journal Popular Entertainment Studies. He has published widely on subjects ranging from the reception of Chekhov in Britain and the career of Theodore Kommisarjevsky, to Victorian popular dramatists. He co-wrote with Jim Davis the award-winning Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880 in 2001, and his chapter on staging the pirate in the nineteenth century was included in Swashbucklers and Swindlers: Pirates and Mutineers in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, edited by Grace Moore (2011).

This article offers an historical analysis of the emergence and development of Asian magicians on the British stage. Sarah Dadswell charts the trajectory of this phenomenon from the arrival of the first recorded Indian magicians in the UK in the early nineteenth century to the internationally renowned figure of P. C. Sorcar in the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, she illustrates the dialogue that took place between East and West, recording the ways in which both sides recognized and adopted the other's modes of performance and marketing strategies to suit their needs and satisfy public demand. Sarah Dadswell is Research Fellow to the AHRC-funded project ‘British Asian Theatre’ at the University of Exeter. This article forms part of the project's investigation into the history and development of modes of performance by Asian theatre practitioners in the UK.

In this article, Ioana Szeman makes a case for combining micro- and macro-analyses of power relations in Theatre of the Oppressed and other community theatre work, and for borrowing methods from anthropology and performance studies – including fieldwork – in both the planning and implementation stages. It focuses on Alternative, a project carried out in a Romanian orphanage in 1997, which illustrated the dangers of treating Theatre of the Oppressed as a technique to be passed down to the marginalized. Contrary to Augusto Boal's belief that, in Theatre of the Oppressed, ‘it is more important to achieve a good debate than a good solution’, in Alternative the organizers emphasized the end-product to the detriment of the process, envisioning ‘oppression’ as a static concept and the ‘oppressed’ as lacking agency. Ioana Szeman offers a sobering reminder that community theatre work sometimes may be more about the organizers' needs to find solutions than about the concerns of people in the community. In order to avoid that, she suggests that the oppressed need to be envisioned as people with agency, and local perspectives have to go hand in hand with concerns about larger power networks in a culturally sensitive application of the methods. The binary of the oppressed and oppressor becomes especially irrelevant, she argues, where totalitarianism, as in Romania, has left a legacy of nested hierarchies of power, and where a wider critique of systemic power is therefore necessary. Having gained her PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University with a dissertation on performance, marginality, ethnicity, and nationalism in Romania, Ioana Szeman has recently taken up a lecturing post at Roehampton University. She has also published in Theatre Research International.

Ingemar Lindh's work on the principles of collective improvisation has crucial implications for the history of twentieth-century laboratory theatre. His early work with Étienne Decroux and Jerzy Grotowski contributed to the development of a unique practice that resists directorial montage, fixed scores, and choreography; and the ethical dimension that accompanies Lindh's research on collective improvisation is illuminating for a more holistic understanding of the technical and aesthetic considerations in theatre. In this article, Frank Camilleri discusses some of the key aspects of this dimension, notably the dynamics of hospitality and encounter that inform Lindh's approach and the question of responsibility in the actor's work. Frank Camilleri is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Kent. From 2004 to 2008 he was Academic Coordinator of Theatre Studies at the University of Malta. He is also Artistic Director of Icarus Performance Project – an ongoing research laboratory that investigates the intermediary space between training and performance processes. Camilleri's work with Lindh in the mid-1990s was instrumental for the development of this research practice.

In this article Rebecca Loukes explores the practice of German psychophysical awareness practitioner Elsa Gindler (1885–1961), whose work influenced twentieth-century performance in a range of ways, but has not previously been documented in this context. Loukes situates Gindler's training and early work amongst key early twentieth-century Gymnastik practitioners before tracing developments in her life and work, drawing from Gindler's 1926 article, her unpublished class notes, and her students' memories. She discusses what Gindler meant by cultivating a state of ‘concentration’, and how this related to breathing, tension, and relaxation, both in the studio and daily life. She then indicates how this can usefully be applied to contemporary pre-performance training or work on the ‘beginning state of the actor’. Rebecca Loukes is a practitioner, performer, and researcher in the area of actor training and psychophysical awareness. She has been training in practices derived from Gindler's work for over ten years. Her recent writing includes ‘Body Awareness in Performer Training: the Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-Heller (1891–1984)’ for Dance Research Journal (in press). She is Lecturer in Performance Practice at the University of Exeter.