This editorial is a bittersweet one for me. I am incredibly proud of the six articles in this issue. They are provocative and compelling, and offer new knowledge of performance. Taken together, along with the other articles in this year's volume, they offer us innovative and exciting understandings of how live performance travels and matters, and what it means. This issue also is perhaps one of the most global I have ever edited – the authors look at performance in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America – demonstrating that as a field we are increasingly aware of the limitations of the national study. Each article illustrates the pleasures, risks and rewards when different cultures intersect through the medium of live performance.

This essay seeks to reconsider and appropriate the cultural politics of Raymond Williams for the project of formulating a critique of current ideas about politics and theatre. The residual values of cultural materialism as theorized by Williams, based on a concept of culture as productive, processual and egalitarian, have become less influential under the pressures of post-structuralism and neo-liberalism. The current attraction to Rancière, for example, emphasizes dissensus over consensus and singularity over collectivity. Post-dramatic theatre rejects direct engagement with political discourse altogether. While recognizing that these emerging theoretical ideas continue the historical romance of avant-garde theatre with rupture and dissent, Williams can remind us of still-powerful strategies that are rooted in identifying shared experiences, relating cultural production to its sociopolitical context, and the value of collective struggles.

The performance installation Exhibit A and B by South African theatre artist Brett Bailey has been touring Europe since 2010. Its twelve tableaux vivants provide a selective survey of European racial histories interspersed with displays of contemporary African refugees. It has increasingly provoked opposition by antiracist activists who compare the show to a ‘human zoo’ that objectifies black performers, facilitates emotional release for white European audiences, and benefits only the white director. In London, protests led to the cancellation of the show. This article examines these charges and sets them in the context of Afro-German theatre and activism. It advances an alternative reading of Exhibit B as a two-pronged intervention in European discourses of security on the one side, and in the restructuring of European museums on the other.

This article uses critical practice to explore making an ‘ethical response’ to Yaël Farber's Nirbhaya (Fearless One), a play incited by the fatal gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi in December 2012. Requiring its audiences to witness testimonies of violence against women, Nirbhaya's strategies raise complex relationships of witnessing and trauma, while insisting on the cultural audibility of women's voices. Performing a shift from the testimonial to the persuasive, Nirbhaya can be seen as part of a global advocacy movement that asks audiences not only to bear witness, and the responsibilities this entails, but also to become fellow activists. By attending closely to the voices of Nirbhaya, and to the use of female testimony as a tactic of local and global movements and geopolitical motivations, this article argues that female voices are displaced, mediatized and co-opted through their role as advocates and agents of cultural change.

The first authorized productions in Japan of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado took place in the early years of the post-war American occupation. A group of Japanese theatre-makers whose international engagement had been circumscribed by the war were involved in these productions – first a 1946 American-led version for occupation personnel, and then an ‘all-Japanese’ version in 1947 and 1948. For these artists, The Mikado, a foreign operetta that was simultaneously ‘about Japan’ and not, offered a way of rebuilding post-war Japanese theatre, and, in doing so, imagining new possibilities for the nation. Through The Mikado they performed a ‘cosmopolitanism at home’, a mode of engagement with the international from within the borders of one's own nation.

This article presents the way in which both torture and the disappearance of individuals were staged in Chilean theatre from 1985 to 2011. The diachronic approach of this study is set to determine the ways in which the state's official reports on humans rights violations during dictatorship – the Rettig Report (1991) and the Valech Report (2004, 2011) – made an impact on theatrical production in terms of its political function. The study also analyses deployed theatrical devices to address extreme political violence onstage.

This article compares the two major figures of Chilean and South African theatre, in particular two intimate realist dramas onstage and onscreen in the 1970s and 1980s, when both countries were ruled by tyrannies tolerated by governments in the so-called free world. In Boesman and Lena and Hechos consumados the depiction of solidarity against the dispossession caused by ‘capitalist revolution’ in Pinochet's Chile or Afrikaner capitalism in apartheid South Africa still resonates today when the rhetoric of struggle appears compromised by the culture of consumption and when post-apartheid and post-dictatorship governments retreat from ‘suspended revolution’ in a world shaped not only in the global South but also in the affluent North by neo-liberal axioms of shrunken government and free markets for the rich against austerity for the poor.