As first senior editor of Theatre Research International when it moved to Cambridge Journals in 2001, I had the privilege of being involved from the outset in the reconfiguration of its aims and objectives, moving the subject from essentialist notions of theatre towards a much broader conception of what constitutes performance in differing world contexts. It was a move that mirrored the shift in the discipline since the beginning of the 1990s that saw the rise of performance studies and the influence of the concept of performativity on our reading strategies of all types of performance, but particularly of performance with intended social agency.