On 28 April 2013, ninety-five years after Finland's civil war (27 January–15 May 1918), artist Kaisa Salmi created a performance called Fellman Field: A Living Monument to 22,000 People. It was a site-specific event organized at Fellman Park in Lahti. There, for almost a week in 1918, thousands of civil war prisoners were held to await transport to a prison camp. In 2013, an impressive number of people (close to 10,000) gathered at this site to participate in a commemoration of the civil war, which is still one of the most repressed traumas in the national consciousness of the Finns. This article discusses Fellman Field as an artwork in terms of its utilization of embodied empathy: the sympathetic understanding of the other through physical and emotional experience. The case of Fellman Field demonstrates the challenges and successes of a site-specific participatory performance that aims to promote understanding and constructively handle the complexity of a national tragedy.

This essay examines the polarizing politics of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. I analyse the function of soft-power diplomacy in the design of the opening ceremony in relation to the international controversy around these games over the repression of civil and human rights. The Sochi Olympics became a lightning rod inciting pro-Western democratic protests against and Russian neo-national support for President Vladimir V. Putin's cultural reform programme. I argue that the Sochi stage was the opening scene of a much larger cultural propaganda campaign reflecting the government's move to boost a conservative world view. Sochi's spectacle mediated a reform strategy designed to reinvent Russian identity and restore Russia's global status. For contrast, I look back to the opening ceremony of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics and its vision of Soviet society in order to highlight the changing contexts in which soft power underscores broader objectives in geocultural politics.

Doomsayers and traditionalists prognosticate that the dominance of digital media spells the end of traditional arts in Java, Indonesia. Wayang kulit (shadow puppet theatre), while still highly regarded as theatrical heritage, is said to be under particular threat due to the long duration of its plays, complexity of language and the need for prior knowledge of characters and situations. Such features are at odds with the short attention spans and need for instant comprehension and gratification of Gen Z – the youth referred to in Indonesian media as inhabiting jaman now (literally the ‘era of now’). While digital social media, including Facebook and YouTube, definitely offer up alternative forms of entertainment and amusement, they are also being used by traditional puppet practitioners to reinforce and expand communities of practice. Facebook provides platforms for comparative discussion and critical debate, while YouTube potentiates the inclusion of a geographically dispersed audience, including overseas workers.

This article looks at the relationship between Haitian vodou, sound recording, and migration. I argue that Haitian vodou has a special relationship with technologies of sound, understood in Jonathan Sterne's sense of media as embodiments of social desire. There is a parallel between vodou possession and the practice of pwen (throwing verbal insults), on the one hand, and, on the other, the tape recorder's ability to manifest a person through the sound of his or her voice, making him or her present both in Haiti for the Haitian vodou congregation and in the diasporic land, thus bridging the separation across oceans and time. This transnational character underscores how Haitian vodou, which has been much maligned and often misunderstood, is an incredibly flexible and adaptive religion, necessary as a means of cultural survival for citizens of one of most economically disadvantaged nations, harshly subject to insertion in global neo-liberal labour markets.

This essay discusses how maritime migrations contribute to movements of ideas across transnational ethnic communities. It focuses on actors from the African Grove, a New York City-based African American theatre company. Actors in this company worked as stewards on transatlantic packet ships where the architecture of the ship supported intercultural exchanges.

This article discusses the Hijra community from South Asia, and examines their rituals and performance culture to argue that there is a multiplicity of expressions for gender identities in South Asia, and they have been performed in a variety of ways, in a variety of spaces beyond the political rhetoric of the West. The paper also tries to discuss questions and difficulties around situating these cultures within an already established concept and the possible negotiations that would be needed for such an effort to even be imagined.

In 2017, a group of African women migrants and I devised Uncomfortable Conversations for FORWARD, a London NGO, to speak publicly about FGM and gendered marginalization. This article, braiding theories from Tompkins, Rancière and Kershaw, explores the effects on participating actors.

This submission by IFTR's Performance and Disability working group features responses by six participants – voices projected from Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Wales, England and Australia – to Per.Art's production Dis_Sylphide, which was presented on 7 July 2018 at the Cultural Institution Vuk Karadžić as part of IFTR's conference in Belgrade at the invitation of the Performance and Disability working group. Per.Art is an independent theatre company founded in 1999 in Novi Sad, Serbia, by the internationally recognized choreographer and performer Saša Asentić, the company's artistic director. The company brings together people with learning disabilities, artists (theatre, dance and visual arts), special educators, representatives of cultural institutions, philosophers, architects and students to make work. This co-authored submission examines how the production responds to three important dance works of the twentieth century – Mary Wigman's Hexentanz (1928), Pina Bausch's Kontakthof (1978) and Xavier Le Roy's Self Unfinished (1998) – to explore normalizing and normative body concepts in dance theatre and in society, and how they have been migrating over the course of dance histories. The shared experience of witnessing the performance provoked discussion on the migration of dance forms across time and cultures, as well issues of access and (im)mobility, which are especially pertinent to a disability studies context.