In this article Arya Madhavan examines the significance of the female protagonist Asti from the new Kathakali play, A Tale from Magadha (2015), in the four-hundred-year-old patriarchal history of Kathakali. The play is authored by Sadanam Harikumar, a Kathakali playwright and actor, whose contemporary retelling of Hindu myths and epics afford substantial agency to the female characters, compelling radical reimagining of Kathakali’s gender norms and a reconsideration of the significance of female characters, both on the stage and in the text. Asti unsettles the conventional norms of womanhood that have defined and structured the ‘Kathakali woman’ over the last five centuries. Although several new Kathakali plays have been created in recent decades, they seldom include strong female roles, so Harikumar’s plays, and his female characters in particular, deserve a historic place in the Kathakali tradition, whose slowly changing gender norms are here analyzed for the first time. Arya Madhavan is a senior lecturer in the University of Lincoln. She has been developing the research area of women in Asian performance since 2013 and edited Women in Asian Performance: Aesthetics and Politics (Routledge, 2017). She is a performer of Kutiyattam, the oldest Sanskrit theatre form from India, and serves as associate editor for the Indian Theatre Journal.

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.

In this article Pompila Burcică traces the work and legal conditions in which Hungarian theatre professionals – company directors and actors – operated as a national minority of middle-class status in Greater Romania after 1918. Their attempts at representing Hungarian culture in the public space, as revealed in their business correspondence with the Romanian state, placed theatre professionals not at the vanguard of a collective action on behalf of a minority and its cultural life, but at the forefront of civic engagement and individual private initiative that led to economic recovery and development, thus illustrating the array of civic choices and economic opportunities for minorities holding Romanian citizenship in a nation state. The article focuses on two issues: the work environment for minorities that helped them adjust professionally and negotiate and exert a civic identity in the new nation state; and the degree to which a cultural field such as theatre was actually treated as an economic entrerprise, free of political interference. These civic and economic concerns accounted for the success of these theatre entrepreneurs, operating their businesses under the control of a paternalistic state.

Circus in China until the 1760s was primarily regarded as an equestrian court performance to entertain nobles of the Qing Dynasty at the inauguration of the Chinese New Year, or to amuse foreign dignitaries bringing tributes. Since that time, circus has transformed into a popular entertainment art, featuring the integration of human, animal, dance, acrobatics, music, vocal, multi-media, and new technologies. In this article Susan Jia revisits the history of circus in China, and then focuses on its latest form of presentation in Shanghai Circus World (SCW), the premier circus establishment in China. The two core pieces in the SCW repertoire – ‘ERA: Intersection of Time’ and ‘Happy Circus’ – are examined to construct a representative miniature of modern Chinese circus, and from audiences’ perspective, the many comments written for online communities are analyzed to explore their understanding of modern circus. Susan Jia is an assistant professor in the School of Business and Management, Shanghai International Studies University. She researches means of developing the leisure and entertainment services industries.

Every year at the Golden Mask National Theatre Award and Festival in Moscow, the Russian Case has its special characteristics, and 2019 clearly reflected the selection made by the many critics who travel far and wide across Russia to choose shows for the Festival. In this overview Maria Shevtsova gives some idea of the work in the category generally described as ‘small forms’, which dominated the Russian Case, and breaks the category down into the different genres gathered under its name. She also refers to several productions that are ‘large forms’, notably those directed by Konstantin Bogomolov and Yury Butusov, who are major directors in the field acclaimed nationally and internationally. Shevtsova's The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2014, co-authored) is a landmark in research on European directors and her Rediscovering Stanislavsky is forthcoming (2019). She is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

In this article Maiya Murphy uses the enactive paradigm of cognition to take a fresh look at Edward Gordon Craig’s experiments in the theatre. By focusing on his obsession with movement, Maiya Murphy argues that an autopoietic conception of life can recategorize his problems with, ideas about, and experiments in the theatre as a coherent but multifaceted effort to create a very particular kind of cognitive engagement. She explores how enaction’s concept of the continuity of life and mind can map out a meaningful logic embedded in Craig’s intuitions about the connections between cognition, aesthetic experience, epistemology, and ontology. She also considers how the many media in which he worked and his interest in Asian arts – along with his major concepts such as the übermarionette and the kinetic stage – can be seen as attempts to think through theatre as an embodied and emergent event that is at once concrete, aesthetic, cognitive, and metaphysical. Finally, she traces the philosophical heritages that gave Craig his frameworks for understanding movement, arguing that his limitations and frustrations were fundamentally philosophical. Maiya Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Programme at the National University of Singapore and makes theatre with her movementbased collective, Autopoetics. She is author of Enacting Lecoq: Movement in Theatre, Cognition, and Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and of essays in Theatre Survey and The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq, among others.