New Zealand critics and audiences in 1903 hailed Tapu (by Alfred Hill and Arthur Adams) as the harbinger of a new ‘national drama’. They thought that the comic opera captured the national essence and would broadcast the nation's advantages to a global audience. Yet the production never made it beyond Sydney, and has since disappeared from the historical record. My analysis of the script and critical reception shows that Tapu faltered in its confused adoption of a wide array of techniques of racial mimicry (borrowed from metropolitan theatres) to represent indigenous Māori and white visitors, but not the native-born settler population. The story of Tapu's failure, I argue, reveals something about the transnational conditions for the constitution of a national public sphere, and the indispensability of race as a supplement to that nation. It attunes us to the force of performance genre and repertoire as vehicles of racial information and affect, pointing to the ways in which conformity, rather than invention, was the ticket to success in the emergent global culture industries. If popular performance, and specifically racial mimicry, operated as a public experiment with the racial properties of citizenship – as a generation of scholarship on race and performance has argued – to what extent was that experiment controlled by the conventions of the global commodity market? This essay reaches insights that will be of interest to scholars of (trans)national performance history, settler whiteness and global indigeneity, and is germane to disciplinary debates on minstrelsy, ethnological show business, and cultural appropriation.

Minnie Cunningham (1870–1954) was a British music hall star and actress whose career spanned nearly forty years. Today she is primarily remembered through paintings made of her by the prominent British artist Walter Sickert (1860–1942) in the early 1890s. Despite her popularity, Cunningham has mostly been overlooked in music hall and theatre histories. Instead, the limited information that is available about her today comes to us primarily through art-history scholarship on Sickert. To fill this gap, this paper offers the first scholarly account of Cunningham by drawing together press notices, published interviews, and other artefacts from her long career. This introduction to Cunningham is framed by a discussion of the unevenness of the cultural transactions taking place between these artists – between the ‘higher’ arts practice of modern painting and the perceived ‘lower’ music hall. I consider how this imbalance played out at the time these artists worked and the impact this has had in the preservation (or lack thereof) of their artistic practices.

Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt remained a rarely performed play throughout the author's lifetime. It was not until around the outbreak of the First World War that stage productions of the play began to proliferate. This article examines the pre-1945 production history of the play in the light of a concept that signifies a particular way of composing a repertoire, the repertory system. It was first and foremost prominent stages in Germany that paved the way for Peer Gynt to become incorporated into this system, leading to an exponential growth in the number of stage events. The production history illustrates how plays that are performed over a long period of time question the notion of production as a fixed mise en scène. Supporting Linda Hutcheon's argument about adaptation as a continuous process, the productions examined here demonstrate that there was no such thing as a standard way to adapt Peer Gynt for the stage.

Some recent performances have addressed events that created ‘human no-go zones’ such as Chernobyl (CEZ), Fukushima (FEZ) and the Korean DMZ. In the wake of the destruction that results in the absence of humans, non-human residents begin the process of recuperation, and the ‘no-go zones’ become inadvertent sanctuaries for wild and abandoned domestic animals. Each of the following productions takes a different view of what occurs when both the norms of nature and the practices of human societies and economies are profoundly disrupted. In addition, one play has depicted a community exercising a new restraint to establish an intentional ‘no-go zone’ to ensure its own survival. When confronted with catastrophes that threaten the existence of all life, as well as the surprising possibilities of renewal, dramatists employ heightened poetic diction and resort to mythical precedents in the attempt to capture the immensity of both the event and its aftermath.

This dossier opens up a set of questions about what theatre and performance can do and be in a climate-changed future. Through a series of practice snapshots the authors suggest a diversity of responses to decolonizing and environmental justice issues in and through theatre and performance. These practices include the climate-fiction film The Wandering Earth, which prompts questions about what decolonizing means for China and the impact of climate chaos on the mental well-being of young people; The Living Pavilion, an Australian Indigenous-led project that created a biodiverse event space showcasing Indigenous art making; Dancing Earth Indigenous dance company who use dance as a way to engage Indigenous ecological thinking and Indigenous futurity; water rituals in the Andes of Peru that problematize water policy and ethnic boundaries.