This is a reading into what someone can achieve as a theatre critic and a scholar when they have faith in change. Hazem Azmy was that someone.

Hazem's major international work in theatre was connected to his significant involvement with the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), the most important international organization of theatre scholars. In this organization, Hazem became one of the best-known and most respected younger members. He began regularly attending IFTR in 2005 and the following year he and I, along with Khalid Amine from Morocco, gathered the required fifty signatures from members of the organization to establish an ongoing working group dedicated to research in the theatre of the Arab/Islamic world. The Arabic Theatre Working Group was officially established by the organization in 2007 and Hazem served as co-convener of the group from that time onward. As such he was responsible for much of the organization and energy of the group, which became one of the most active in the organization, producing a variety of books and publications, regularly organizing major panels for the plenary sessions of the annual conventions, and establishing an online journal, Arab Stages, which appears twice a year and offers essays, interviews and translations from the Arab world and the Arab diaspora.

We, faculty members and students in the Ain Shams University Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, miss Hazem profoundly on both the personal and academic levels. Both have been well integrated in a way that recalls Hamlet's commendation of Horatio, whose ‘blood and judgement are so well commingled, that they are not a pipe for fortune's finger to sound what stop she please’. Hazem possessed this even-handed temper. No wonder, then, that his passion for the theatre coupled with his sound and carefully measured judgements will be remembered and rest firmly in our ‘heart's core, ay, in our heart of hearts’.

For me Hazem Azmy was not only a very close friend, despite the infrequency of our in-person meetings, but also the interlocutor who provoked some of my best work. His questions, his challenges, his invitations and the publications he edited have inspired and deepened almost everything I have written about Arab theatre over the past ten years. They provoke me still.

What does the #MeToo movement reveal about how acting is understood at the present time, both in practice and by the public at large? The claim of one convicted abuser, New Zealand acting coach Rene Naufahu, was that his sexual offending in the classroom was simply preparing his students for the ‘real world of acting’. Drawing from Elin Diamond's argument that dramatic realism does not simply reflect the real but in fact produces it, I examine how figures like Naufahu promulgate certain notions of acting in order to produce a reality that legitimates abusive behaviour. Furthermore, I suggest that this behaviour is often a performance of acting itself whereby the actor, director or coach, in a selectively self-reflexive manner, exploits their professional ‘role’ in order to exert power over their victim. I argue that one way of contesting real-world practices that rely on hegemonic assumptions of what acting is or should be is to redeploy the critical terminology of acting to analyse and expose such abuses for the acts that they are.

The article explores historically and theoretically the phenomenon of shen-ti wen-hua (culture of the body) in the context of Taiwan's experimental performance in the 1980s–1990s. By highlighting different corporeal discourses in various sociopolitical contexts across time, it addresses such critical issues as the relation between the individual and the collective in the history of Taiwanese modernity, the quests for identity in art and culture, the transformation of the role of the avant-garde in aesthetic and political pursuits, and the ultimate question of the relationship between art and society from the colonial era to a contemporary world dominated by consumer culture and global capitalism. The body, with its materiality and rich semiotic possibilities, has at certain historical moments served as a potent metaphor for questioning the sociopolitical status quo and envisioning new identities and alternative power relations in Taiwanese society: the period under consideration in the article was one of those moments.

Civil wars and internal armed conflicts are commonly followed by transitional justice processes known as Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration programmes. Focusing on the social reintegration of ex-combatants in Colombia, this article examines the role of embodiment and secondary care in conflict transformation, and outlines the process of incorporating creative and embodied practice as core elements of transitional justice mechanisms. It discusses the relational qualities of applied theatre, policy development and implementation to demonstrate how embodied practice enables peace-building practitioners and ex-combatants to develop a better understanding of how affective transactions and emotional states shape transitional societies. In so doing, this article discusses some of the challenges of devising sustainable arts-based interventions when working with communities that have been significantly affected by war.

This article examines the legacy of Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous through his early commitment to internationalism, with specific attention to his practice as a translator. It argues that to see Wannnous as an international playwright allows for an understudied dimension of the playwright's oeuvre to emerge and sheds light on an important era of post-colonial theatrical practice. By focusing on one of Wannous's most-staged plays, his adaptation of a little-known Peter Weiss play, the article places Wannous in his historical moment and sees how he was affected not just by international developments in theatre and performance, but also by a global geopolitics in which he was deeply invested.

This article asks how theatre shapes civic space by examining the emergence of racial divides in the city of Grahamstown, South Africa, during the annual National Arts Festival (NAF). I track how decision making by festival organizers has relied on economic research and implicit artistic preferences that have resulted in the steady exclusion of artists from local townships. I argue that the presence of the NAF in Grahamstown creates fault lines that are not physical, but aesthetic, in nature, creating invisible boundaries that reward stage performances at the expense of street performances. I track a history of street performance at the NAF, with particular attention to its local mime tradition, to demonstrate how this axis of festivity was integral to developing the NAF's cultural cachet, but was systematically managed, policed or appropriated to fit organizers’ image for Grahamstown at festival time. This work troubles aspirational narratives of creative and cultural industries that South Africa and other African countries have come to rely upon as inclusive and sustainable routes of economic development.