This article examines the haptic politics of the Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–2004) ‘theatre museum’ composed by Indian performance artist Pushpamala N. and British photographer Clare Arni. Through a transnational collaboration, Native Women re-creates a visual genealogy of ‘popular’ Indian women images, reckoning with legacies of colonial and photographic studio photography. The article focuses on the engagements of Native Women with colonial representations of ‘the native’ (woman) in particular and asks: How does a transnational project resituating colonial ethnographic practices inform feminist performance methodologies? How does this photo-performance develop a haptic attempt at transnational solidarity? In what ways do haptic entanglements with photo-performance constitute new imaginations for collaborative practices? The article repositions Native Women as a performance work that reflects collaboration as a process of political intimacy.

Throughout the British Empire, visiting and immigrating professional actors ‘from the old country’ realized and reinforced for settler cultures a dominant imperial identity. In Australia, Alfred Dampier (1843–1908) and his company exploited the opportunities that this cultural milieu offered by staging austere, ‘reverential’, well-elocuted Shakespearean productions which raised their artistic status and asserted their respectability while enabling Dampier to offer as well, without censorship or public condemnation, dramatizations of sensational and controversial bushranger and convict narratives.

This article discusses Sophie Tucker's racialized performance in the context of early twentieth-century American vaudeville and black–Jewish interracial relations. Tucker's vaudeville musical acts involved mixed racial referents: ‘black-style’ music and dance, Jewish themes, Yiddish language and the collaboration of both African American and Jewish artists. I show how these racial combinations were a studied tactic to succeed in white vaudeville, a corporate entertainment industry that capitalized on racialized images and fast changes in characters. From historical records it is clear that Tucker's black signifiers also fostered connections with the African American artists who inspired her work or were employed by her. How these interracial relations contended with Tucker's brand of racialized performance is the focus of the latter part of the article. Here I analyse Tucker's autobiography as a performative act, in order to reveal a reparative effort toward some of her exploitative approaches to black labour and creativity.

Zha Mingzhe's 1997 production of Sartre's Morts sans sépulture takes bold creative license in the form of retooled dialogues; hard-edged stage design; moody, ironic music; and the brutal acoustic ‘facsimile’ of torture to reimagine the play for Chinese audiences. Zha's production is neither an exuberant celebration of ‘heroism’ as the term is conventionally understood, nor a parable-like play given to ‘philosophizing’ the core tenets of Sartre's existentialism. Rather, it is a full-scale, in-your-face presentation of ‘total heroism’: heroism that is flawed, falling far short of the kind of heroism idealized in the annals or mythologies of the so-called ‘red classics’, but it is heroism nonetheless. It is an interrogation, in the fullest sense of the term, of the ‘essence’ of being tested in the crucible of ferocious tortures, and a ‘cruel’ antidote much needed to shock the numbed nerves of the body politic.

This series of provocations on the changing work of theatre historians opens with a contribution by David Wiles, who recounts a meeting of IFTR's Theatre Historiography Working Group in London in 2018. Wiles's reflection is followed by responses from scholars working in or on different regions, including perspectives by Oscar Tantoco Serquiña, Jr (Philippines), Lorena Verzero (Latin America) and Promona Sengupta (India).

The writing of theatre history has been a challenging intellectual commitment in the Philippines. This mode of inquiry and inscription largely manifests more as a strand of general historiography than as a systematized and specialized critical practice in Philippine academe. No wonder, then, that Philippine theatre histories primarily come from academics whose disciplinary backgrounds are not solely in theatre arts per se but in a range of different but intersecting disciplines, such as film, literature, dance, anthropology, history and music. These historians have accounted for the medium's forms, geographies of production and performance, material aspects, lead practitioners, groups or organizations, and historical periods. They have thus far yielded a congeries of print materials: from the encyclopedia to the anthology or reader, the survey, up to the full-length book manuscript. More recently, theatre histories have also appeared in online catalogues or digital repositories.

David Wiles discusses the state of theatre history and the status of the theatre historian according to the voices of academics working on and in the Western tradition. In this article I intend to briefly contribute to those debates with reflections on how we make theatre history, and what we are working on, in the Latin American academy today.