The academic conference is an important feature of our professional lives. It constitutes a meeting ground, a forum, in which key topics in a field can begin to emerge; where cognate ideas and approaches get debated, affirmed or contested; where, in short, ideas can move (on) through academics being in contact with each other's ideas. Any journal editor is drawn inevitably to the conference ‘season’ as fertile, ‘hunting’ ground; trawls for papers that will yield article publications (if others do not get there first!). And so it is that my second issue of TRI since becoming editor is sourced from the 2008 Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas conference, hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles and co-sponsored by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. As this event is expertly introduced and the issue framed by co-organizers Sue-Ellen Case and Diana Taylor, this editorial note needs only to be brief. Indeed, I hesitated long at the computer keyboard thinking that perhaps no note at all was necessary. Except that two observations or headlines felt editorially important to me to express: the significance of Actions of Transfer for thinking generally about the nature of the conference event in relation to TRI's international, theatre research remit, and the mix of articles and the performance dossier brought together in the issue.

Our co-authored article provides an introduction to the UCLA-based conference Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas (2008), a sister event to the opening of the new cultural and performance space with FOMMA – Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (Fortress of the Mayan Woman) – supported by the Hemispheric Institute and the Ford Foundation. Introducing the articles and contributions to the performance dossier arising out of the event and brought together for this special issue, we reflect critically on our conference set-up. Detailing our multi-sited project as a dialogic, hemispheric practice, we offer our reflections with the hope that this will lead to new possibilities and paradigms for international performance research and practice.

This article introduces hemispheric performance studies to suggest that performance in the Americas – and the very idea of the ‘hemispheric’ – may be usefully engaged as a set of connected practices in deep time rather than as a continental mass in uniform space. The argument is illustrated in relation to three contemporary artists: the Los Angeles-based photographer and multimedia artist Bruce Yonemoto, and the visual and performance artists Susana Torres from Lima, Peru, and Liliana Angulo from Bogotá, Colombia.

Eugenio Hernández Espinosa's María Antonia (1967) is regarded as one of the most important theatrical works to be produced during the first decade of the Cuban Revolution. Although most readings of the play tend to emphasize its investment in possession ceremonies (the use of santería rituals and symbols provoked a strong reaction from both audiences and critics), Hernández Espinosa's conflicted presentation of gender roles is what claims my attention in this article. By showing how María Antonia is unable to alter the strictures of machismo or successfully challenge hegemonic discourses of race and class, I argue that the play suggests that santería supports a social context in which female agency is seriously restricted, and may even be reduced to a utopian and self-destructive fantasy.

This article considers Native American/indigenous (women's) theatre from the perspective of performing indigeneities/embodied spiritualities, in relation to ceremonial and ‘cotidian’ ri(gh)t(e)s, and the practice of personal and collective autonomy as a ri(gh)t(e). I situate my discussion within particular sites of the performance of indigeneity and the embodiment of spirituality in Chiapas, Mexico, where my research has taken me, within my own work with a performance course I created at the University of California, Davis, and within critical perspectives offered in Native American studies. I also provide some commentary on the two related gatherings that took place at the Centro Hemisférico/FOMMA, in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, August 2008, and the Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas conference at UCLA, November 2008. Both events were co-sponsored by the Hemispheric Institute on Performance and Politics of NYU and they were announced on the UCLA website as ‘sister’ events. In August 2008, FOMMA officially became a ‘branch’ centre of the Hemispheric Institute.

This article analyses Maxine Bailey and Sharon M. Lewis's play Sistahs (1994) as an instance of African diaspora feminism in the Americas. The drama's focus on five women in a Canadian kitchen displaces the hegemony enjoyed by African Americans as signifiers of blacknesss, challenging spectators as well as readers to remember instead the long history of blacks in Canada and the existence of multiple African diasporas in the Americas. Further, its rewriting of a 1970s cultural feminism dramatizes the labour of fostering an African diasporic sensibility and subverts that paradigm's conventional emphasis on heteronormativity.

This dossier offers a collective mapping of a selection of six performances from the Actions of Transfer event. The practitioners detailed here come, for the most part, from areas in the Americas that are not immediately accessible to TRI readers, and perform in languages and traditions native to their communities. What they share in their very different ways is a commitment to socially and culturally interventionist practices. Mirroring the practice of the conference in its mix of scholarship, performance and activism, the dossier creates a critical space for thinking through practice. Key issues and questions opened up in the performances, such as those relating to gender, indigeneity, ethnicities or nationhood, are addressed and analysed by each contributor.

This dossier contribution focuses on Alutiiq performer Tanya Lukin Linklater's Woman and Water. It examines how the piece creates the opportunity for an experience of a way of being in the world, in intimate interconnection with one another, the land and other animals, and the experiences of time that this intimacy compels, that differs from the models of affiliation presumed in understandings of ‘nation states’ generally referenced by contemporary academic discussions of nationalism and transnationalism.

Examining a programme of four solos by Los Angeles experimental dance artists Taisha Paggett, Rebecca Pappas, Christine Suarez and Hana van der Kolk, this short article argues how the choreographed subject-in-motion can be deployed as a political tactic to critique identity as a static category by capitalizing on the flux of moving bodies.

This contribution to the performance dossier situates this 2003 play within the larger body of FOMMA's work and within the sociopolitical context of neoliberalism within Mexico, which has disproportionately affected indigenous communities in general, and indigenous women in particular.

‘Casting Shadows in Global Land’ explores how Luisa Calcumil, a Mapuche actress from Patagonia, Argentina, works through parody and comedy to engage with activist discussions about the relationship between contemporary aboriginal identity and cultural roots in the face of marginalization and national indifference.

‘Ruptures Within and Without’ analyses Pageantry, performed by Asian women local to the Actions of Transfer conference site, for the ways in which the performance insists on opening up and interrogating the place (or displacement) of Asians in the Americas.

The female body both as the locus for interrogating ideological, economical, political and social discourses, and for the transference of ideas, histories, myths, traditions and, ultimately, actions, is considered here in an analysis of Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe's El Maíz.