This introduction outlines the ongoing research project (see title) jointly pursued by the theatre departments of Tel Aviv University and Freie Universität Berlin funded by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF). The project pivots around two critical questions. First, how can we investigate and conceptualize the future as a theoretical category and temporal dimension with regard to performances? Second, what themes and tools can articulate the various directions for developing and negotiating political and poetic questions of identity, artistic creation, cultural transference and conceptions of the ‘other’ in and through performance in and for the future? The introduction delineates certain theoretical reflections that serve as a scaffold for meaningful investigations into the first question. The theories are tested by the following fourteen articles that analyse and reference a variety of performances and in this way highlight their particular future-oriented (indeed future-generating) qualities.

This article examines the relation between the anticipating spectator and the transitoriness of theatre from an existentialist viewpoint. Referring to Heidegger's concept of ‘the anticipation of death’ (Vorlaufen), it is argued that any anticipation of the end of a performance is capable of reflecting temporality as a whole. In this regard, the performances of the English live art group Forced Entertainment exemplify how to bring the temporality of Dasein into the limelight.

Biblical theatre re/presents, images and imagines the future. This is because the ultimate future, the End of Days, is a part of its narrative. The paradigmatic example is medieval mystery plays that present the world ‘from creation to doom’, and which end in the futuristic episode of the Last Judgment. In this essay I examine theatrical and performative mechanisms of performing the future/End in what I term modern mysteries, which are contemporary avant-garde performances of the biblical texts. These performances simultaneously rely on and open up anew scriptural texts to create a powerful, modern experience. I identify three models of ‘the End’ in modern mysteries that are related to social and political issues: merger and utopia; descent, disappearance and apocalypse; and a cyclical, bi-directional movement towards both utopia and dystopia.

The following article examines the functions and the effects of the process of setting an ending. The performance To the Dogs by the English performance duo Lone Twin stages its end(ing) by interlinking two phenomena which have often been separated in theatre criticism: the theatrical event – seen as something happening in the present – and narrative – considered as something belonging to the past. In To the Dogs the event is narrativized by the performers as it goes along, providing it with endings on the level of rhetoric, content and time structure. In this process the performance is transformed into a myth, in which the event is anticipated as a closed story, even though it is still about to happen. This future-poetics of the end(ing), in which a collective event, paradoxically, is being charged in advance with nostalgia, illustrates the affective force of a (narrative) ending as performance. It does so not only in a negative, restrictive sense of closing the event as story, but also in a positive, enabling sense: To the Dogs raises the question of how far the discourse about an event regarded as unique and inaccessible implies a narrative quality. The process of setting a future ending is revealed as being more than a generator of narrative closure; this essay aims to perform the fact that it is also an enabling moment of opening the seemingly closed event as myth into a time afterwards.

This article borrows its methodology from physics in order to analyse time in the theatre as evolution of order. Two set designs (both designed by Roni Toren for the Khan Theatre in Jerusalem) are portrayed through this perspective, representing inverse examples. In Measure for Measure, directed by Gadi Roll, the temporal evolution of space is from order to disorder, obeying the second law of thermodynamics. On the other hand, in The Seagull, directed by Ofira Henig, the evolution contradicts that law. The problem of depicting disorder on stage, the possibility of such a contradiction, the implication of the two different perceptions and their ethical values are discussed to prove the effectiveness of a methodology adopted from physics.

Since the 1980s, a growing number of performances in Europe have created new forms of choric theatre in search of altered concepts of the political. In Germany, one of its pioneers was the GDR-born director Einar Schleef (1944–2001). The article explores his oeuvre, from his first choric production Mothers (1986), a classical drama project, to his last production, Betrayed People (2000), which focused on the problem of revolution in Germany. Schleef's genealogical project reintroduced the chorus as a repressed figure that develops a spectral potentiality. Through a detailed analysis of Schleef's approach to performing history, the article examines how choric theatre initiates theatrical processes of cultural remembrance and creates a relation to the past that becomes generative of the future.

This paper examines the different meanings of the monochromatic principle and the act of voiding in two productions of The Cherry Orchard – Georgio Strehler's renowned, predominantly white production (1974) and an Israeli production directed by Yevgeny Arye at the Gesher Theater in Tel Aviv (2006), in which a white canopy hung over the stage. In both cases, the perception of the space negates the independent reality of the place, shaping it rather as a potential space. The visual formation that realizes the principle of potentiality – in any production, in any variation – is used as a ground on which mental and imaginary projections are cast. Characters acting in such a space are, to use Bloch's terms, in a state of ‘not yet’ – expecting and hoping to realize their potential lives. In addition, the stage space is constructed in both productions, albeit in different ways, as an intermediate space – a potential space, in Winnicott's terms – that is filled up with transitional objects and games. Chekhov's characters exist in the gap between mergence with the object and separation of the subject, and thus also between past and future. Suspension of the reality principle and pseudo-liberation from its realization are a psychoanalytic version of utopia. Such an existence is utopian also by dint of being an ideological model based – contrary to our sociopolitical realities – on subject–object unity, radically expressed by means of the dominant white monochrome.

This article examines how the future is expressed and experienced in the theatre. Referring to the performance Karl Marx: Capital, First Volume by the German artistic collective Rimini Protokoll, the article exemplifies the relation between the past, the present and the future, showing how the different layers of time are interrelated. The performers involved are not professional actors but so-called ‘experts’, whose lives are connected to Marx's Capital in different ways. Based on the experts’ biographies, the performance not only offers a rereading of Marx's ideology, but also shows similarities between Rimini Protokoll's artistic and Marx's scientific approach, between the conceptualization of one's life and watching a performance in theatre.

This essay examines theatrical dimensions of the future in Signals, a performance by the Israeli vocalist Victoria Hanna. An examination of four scenes from this performance, I argue, shows that the sounds in Hanna's voice act in the symbolic dualities of female–male, human–technological, and embodied–disembodied figures. These dualities amplify the discrepancy between Hanna's staged identity (female, human, embodied figure) and an absent exterior other (male, technological, disembodied figure). The notion of ‘envoicement’ is developed in order to analyse these dualities and, in particular, to explore the body–voice relationship that they compose. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas's ethical theory in Time and the Other, I argue that the meaning attributed to the future is never conveyed in its presence but rather in its absence; that is, signifying practices that represent the absent exterior referent stage the future. Through this central claim, I thus assert that Hanna's disembodied voice ‘envoices’ the future.

This article examines the realization of the future in performance through aesthetic experience. Following the historian Reinhardt Koselleck, who introduces the category of ‘experience’ as the present past, and ‘expectation’ as the present future, in order to formulate a theory of possible histories, I examine the interconnection of different time layers and the potentiality of a performance. I argue that every performance constitutes a space of possibility, defined by a permeation of traces of the past and the future, emergent phenomena characteristic of performance, and a dimension of future inherent in the performative materiality. Hamlet by New York's Wooster Group serves as an example for an analysis focusing on the aesthetic experience of the future in performance. The Hamlet performance proves exceptionally suitable, since the staging is based on a theatrical repetition of the film document of a Hamlet performance long past, and unfolds a complex system of past and future bound time layers.

While modern rational thinking has developed complex methods for calculating and managing risk, the better forecast and prepare for the future, certain modern performance practices have embraced the element of risk. In this article I interrogate this phenomenon, offering a distinction between risk-taking in modernist and postmodernist performance. Whereas in the former risk serves to transcend the representational aspects of performance, in the later it is banalized, revealing its inevitability in both performance situations and everyday life.

For various reasons, there is a tension between drama therapy and the concept of performance. Whereas many notions of performance are deeply rooted in the here-and-now, theatrical types of therapy often include practices concerning the future and constructing future images of self, subjectivity and conflict. This paper argues that therapeutic theatre's high affinity with iconic structures and with the creation of ‘images’ can be explained by its specific problems with the contingency and risk inherent in performance.

The future as an event cannot be analysed solely through its simple relation to the known or recognized world, but through its unexpected dimensions: its being beyond history and the way it performs commandments and ethical obligations. Two visual interpretations of the biblical story of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, by Eugène Delacroix and Paul Gauguin, are at the centre of my discussion. The main theoretical tool for discussing the issues of time and the future is the philosophical writing of Emmanuel Levinas.

This article focuses on German artist Tino Sehgal (born in 1976), whose works of art materialize only temporarily, while they fulfill, at the same time, all the requirements that any work of the visual arts must fulfill if it is to have a lasting existence. In this regard Sehgal's artistic approach not only takes a unique position within the history of art; it also departs fundamentally from the tradition of performance art. This article deals with the way Sehgal tries to save the future of the ephemeral situations his art puts forth, and shows, furthermore, how he thereby confronts questions and problems that performance art has neglected or even generated.

This paper presents two methods of architectural conception and articulation based on the idea of type. One method conceives of architecture as a predetermined entity, claiming that architecture has a plan, a programme that determines its emergence based on a specific type prior to its coming into being. The other method, based on digital design processes and genetic algorithms, focuses on the procedures of architectural becoming. The essay claims that while the latter method attempts to release the emergence of the architectural entity from predetermined formal or functional typological definitions, it in fact suggests new ways of defining the historical idea of architectural types. Based on genotypic and phenotypic procedures, the latter method bases the evolution of the architectural type on predetermined typological information, yet at the same time it allows the emergence of the architectural entity as part of undetermined flows. As such, it proposes a new temporal structure in architecture – one that is based on flows and motions.

As the editor of TRI, as well as one of the participants in the collective research project presented here, I want to add a few words in closing this issue of the journal rather than writing an editorial. In thinking about the future we are not only addressing the notions of emergence and futurity as they are constructed, configured and established within the aesthetic fields of theatre, performance and the arts. We are also – and not only implicitly – thinking about the future of the humanistic disciplines within our societies and our academic institutions, and in particular about the future possibilities of the younger generation of scholars who have decided to devote their own future to the study and research of these fields, developing their individual talents and creativity. It is unnecessary to reiterate that we are in the middle (and I hope this is not just the beginning) of an extremely severe crisis of these fields resulting from economic constraints as well as inherent suspicions towards the arts in particular. And without the necessary institutional and governmental support the humanities as well as our cultures will become impoverished beyond recognition.