This issue celebrates thirty-five years of TRI (New Series) publication, from the first issue in October 1975 through to this October 2010 edition. Last year, Cambridge Journals launched the digitized TRI archive, housing all of the volumes from the inaugural 1975 issue through to Volume 25 in 2000. During those first twenty-five years of now digitized publication, Oxford University Press served as the journal's home under the editorship of Claude Schumacher. It was in 2001 that the journal moved across to Cambridge with Brian Singleton as its Senior Editor.

As first senior editor of Theatre Research International when it moved to Cambridge Journals in 2001, I had the privilege of being involved from the outset in the reconfiguration of its aims and objectives, moving the subject from essentialist notions of theatre towards a much broader conception of what constitutes performance in differing world contexts. It was a move that mirrored the shift in the discipline since the beginning of the 1990s that saw the rise of performance studies and the influence of the concept of performativity on our reading strategies of all types of performance, but particularly of performance with intended social agency.

The history of the Theatre Historiography Working Group in IFTR/FIRT provides a case study of how and why the Federation has been transformed by its working groups during the last two decades. Founded in 1992, the historiography group has developed into one of the largest and most active in IFTR/FIRT. Over the last nineteen years, the members of the group, drawn from many of the countries in the Federation, have used the annual meetings to develop a diverse and often challenging scholarship on the history of theatre (broadly defined). By focusing on the basic issues in historiography, the participating scholars have refined their research and writing methods. Moreover, the essays and books, published in several languages, have contributed to major transformations in the methods and topics in performance history. The working group, besides serving as a transnational community for historical scholarship, has also contributed to revisionist methods in the teaching of theatre history in dozens of countries, especially during the last decade.

This article examines the sonic elements of Antonin Artaud's 1935 production of Les Cenci, Artaud's infamous attempt to realize his proposed ‘theatre of cruelty’. The aim is to qualify the critical opinion that Artaud was a failed theatre practitioner by analysing the conceptual complexity and potential effectiveness of the sound design for this production. Artaud utilized new sonic technologies and an aesthetic arguably derived in part from Balinese gamelan music to affect audience members on a physiological level, prefiguring the vibrational force and ultrasonic ambitions of modern sonic warfare. This analysis engages a range of primary and secondary materials, including an extant recording of music and sound effects used for the production, and is situated with reference to an estimated acoustic ‘horizon of expectations’ of Artaud's audiences and to neuroscientific conceptions of how the brain processes auditory input.

This collaborative article looks at the establishment in 2006 of an IFTR/FIRT working group in Arabic theatre, and the significance of this in terms of breaking the twentieth-century, hegemonic hold of European and North American subjects in theatre research. We trace the development of the working group from preliminary conferences and gatherings outside IFTR to its set-up and organization within the Federation. Surveying our methodologies, key issues, research areas and future directions, we argue the significance of the group's work in creating a research forum for Arab theatre scholarship.

This article considers five tipping points or phases in the development of modern theatre studies in South Africa. It begins with the period from 1925 to 1935, a time when the first major theatre history appeared, a fully fledged (Western) theatre system was established and the African theatre tradition was recognized. It details 1945 to 1962 for the establishment of a coherent professional theatre system, the first state-funded theatre company and the first drama departments. Thereafter, 1970 to 1985 is identified as the most significant period in relation to the political struggle for liberation in South Africa, while the last two phases (1988–94 and 1997–9) under consideration are characterized by an increase in research output and by the need for practitioners and commentators to seek reconciliation and healing through theatre and performance.

Thirty-five years, the age of TRI, is roughly the length of time I have been involved in our discipline. I completed my Ph.D. in 1974 and entered the profession on the cusp of a generational shift. During my first decade in the academy, a number of new young scholars emerged and began to take the places of an older cohort who were primarily theatre historians and/or drama critics and interpreters. The theory explosion changed the way that both theatre history and dramatic criticism were carried out, and a whole new range of methods and objects of study began to appear in our journals and conferences. Post-structural and postmodernist ideas upset the reigning conventions of scholarship and also influenced creative artists who changed their practice to reflect these new ideas. Feminism transformed our field, as did new research on race, class and sexuality, while competing theories of the subject brought forward psychoanalysis and phenomenology as important tools for performance analysis. Cultural studies and the new historicism challenged positivist historiography and began to change the kind of theatre history (including subjects and documents) scholars researched and wrote about. Political critique was in the ascendency, after a battle to discredit what many of us perceived as a false objectivity in previous scholarship. This became, eventually, the new orthodoxy for many of us, and the senior scholars in our field today (for example Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Josette Féral, Erika Fisher-Lichte, Freddie Rokem, Joseph Roach) all participated in making these major changes happen as young scholars – while not necessarily agreeing with each other: the new generation was thoroughly heterodox in its approach to methods and topics.

Modern academic training for theatre in India has a history of just over fifty years (since independence). The National School of Drama (NSD) was set up in 1957, but the prime objective of the institution at that time was to generate professionals to develop children's theatre and rural theatre. Although India possessed a wide range of traditional performance cultures throughout the country, from rituals to folk performances and classical performances, the NSD was modelled on the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) since the new institution was led by a graduate of RADA, Professor Ebrahim Alkazi, who put the institution on a functional track. Thus the toolkit used during the initial days was primarily based on Western models conducive to realism rather than growing organically out of the actual practices of the different forms of Indian performance. This early orientation remains today, emphasizing the creation of referential meanings on the stage through conventional methods and devices, taken as the unshakable organizing principle of theatre practice.

One of the most urgent issues facing theatre research today is the question of how theatre is affected by the rapid processes of globalization.

Looking to the future, it is my view that Japanese theatre research needs to concentrate its efforts on scholarly exchanges with research communities in other Asian countries or cities.

In this special issue, Theatre Research International marks its thirty-five years of existence. This time span equals the approximate length of an academic career or, at least in my case, it happens to coincide with my participation in the activities of the International Federation for Theatre Research. In order to locate the present position and the future direction of theatre studies, I begin with a brief retrospective overview of the decades that I have experienced with IFTR/FIRT.

Now that the affects of the technologies of the virtual have spilled out across the topography of the real to such an impossible degree one can safely argue that the age of the virtual is now past, and that presently contemporary technologized and digital cultures are post-virtual (i.e. supersaturated with virtuality). Further, now that the biological is intimately folded within the technologies of the virtual in manners haptic, somatic and psychic, these contemporary technologized cultures can be modelled as bio-virtual, which means that life itself, through a strategy of bio-power, is contained and distributed through the ubiquitous digital modes of communication.