Rock ’n’ Roll Circus promotes an expectation of performance that is energetic, challenging, irreverent, and sexual. Their 1998 production in Brisbane of Sweetmeats follows the company's earlier work, such as The Dark, which established its reputation in Australia for idiosyncratic physical theatre with an acute awareness of its erotic potential and appeal. A close analysis of the construction of (sexual) desires and erotic energies in Sweetmeats illustrates how the study of sexuality is also the study of what may appear to be non-sexual. Interactions are a key to an appreciation of this form of physical theatre, whether they are between body and body, human and apparatus, sexual and non-sexual, desires and anxieties, and straight and queer. Lines of demarcation are blurred and superfluous. This analysis of Sweetmeats in performance makes use of Peta Tait's investigation of sexed bodies in physical theatre, and Elizabeth Grosz's (re)conceptualization of lesbian desire and its generation through contact between surfaces. Grosz's approach is particularly applicable to a form of theatre which relies on the energy of physical contact between performers, and between performer and apparatus. The latter is exploited effectively in Sweetmeats such that a circulation of multifarious, strange desires (and anxieties) permeates the production, in some sense ‘queering’ it.

Before the rise of the political and theoretical project of ‘queer’ (which, in my estimation, is a second-wave millennial project begun in the 1990s), scholarly and performative lesbian practices were situated within and against feminist scholarship. Early on, the agenda was to establish lesbian visibility and, in consequence, to reveal and deconstruct the structures of representation, on the stage and on the page. Indeed, the context for lesbian work was intentionally composed of women, misunderstood as separatism, while actually creating a fully gendered notion of surrogation. By this I mean to gesture to Joseph Roach's notion of surrogation as ‘improvized narratives of authenticity and priority’ that can ‘congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin’. In situating lesbian visibility strictly within the gendered category of women, a genealogy and authenticity were invoked for its representation that were removed from the violence of binary logics of gender.

In this short article, the author, who was one of the performers in The King Lear Project, reflects on critical responses to the trilogy, and on what they reveal about the process of evaluating theatre. Having played the role of the Producer in the trilogy, Paul Rae notes that one of his functions was to deliver pre-emptive judgments on the performances as they developed, thereby challenging reviewers to be more than usually self-reflexive in delivering their own. In largely failing to meet this challenge, Rae asserts, the critics' response to the trilogy underscored the role of misrecognition, prescriptiveness and an implicit violence in the act of theatrical judgment.

Theatre Research International is published in association with IFTR – the International Federation for Theatre Research – and renews its editorial team every three years. Therefore, before passing on the ‘torch’ to Elaine Aston, who will serve as the Senior Editor beginning with the next issue of TRI (35, 1), and to Charlotte Canning, the incoming Associate Editor, wishing them success, I want to thank Elaine for her cooperation and support as Associate Editor during my three-year term. I also want to thank the Assistant Editor during my term as editor, Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, for her help. The articles that have been published during these years have no doubt greatly profited from her comments and suggestions, as well as from those of the many anonymous reviewers whom I also want to thank for their invaluable assistance. I would also like to thank the book review editors, in particular Peter Boenisch, for keeping the readers of the journal up to date with the many developments of the field, as well as the staff at Cambridge University Press, in particular Ella Colvin, Sally Hoffman and James Carr for their professional navigation of the actual publication process. Finally – and no doubt most importantly – I want to thank the scholars who have contributed their research to the journal, as well as the readers. The contributions and the subscriptions are steadily growing and this is certainly an encouraging sign.

In short, the drama is in ours, and in most civilized countries, an engine possessing the most powerful effect on the manners of society.

Thus the idea of theatre is political … it must make possible the enactment of an actual political world in the midst of painful and complex transformations within and between politics.

The purpose of this article is to examine theatre in Quebec as the site of transformation of its collective images as they have evolved through theatrical texts over the past twenty years. Quebec society, in a constant state of mutation as it searches for its national identity, has been particularly receptive to forms of theatre that emphasize the theme of the family. For example, the first important work of this ‘new theatre’ which dared to liberate the language from its French model was Tremblay's Les Belles-Sœurs, a play where all the action is located in a kitchen and whose characters are all women. In the development of Tremblay's work, we see how the discourses of women are taken over by masculine characters, mediated through the transvestite within a homosexual theme and finally liberated from the feminine model by the affirmation of the homosexual couple. In other more recent works, playwrights such as Normand Chaurette and Michel Marc Bouchard, have incorporated the search for a patrilinear descent into the very heart of the family conflict where the mother is put to death in a ritual killing, presented either as a ceremony (Chaurette), or as the unfolding of a myth (Bouchard).

In all these cases, the evolution of the fictive family structure is the projection of social transformations taking place in Quebec where the maternal heritage, represented historically by France, is necessarily damaged and eventually eliminated in order to lay claim to a political structure which confirms the rights of the father.

How can indigeneity be understood through training actors in a colonial context? Do ‘Western’ acting schools misrepresent and exploit indigenous practices and cultural traditions towards reinforcing the settler state? Or does a given school's integration of such praxis and customs demonstrate inclusivity, equity and progressivism? At what point does incorporating indigeneity in actor training become a tokenistic appropriation of marginalized cultures? Drawn from fieldwork as a 2019 Fulbright scholar at Toi Whakaari, New Zealand's National Drama School, I intersect training with culture and society. Using the Acting Program as a case study, I deploy an ethnographic methodology to address the aforementioned questions by investigating Toi Whakaari's bicultural pedagogy while positioning it as a reflection of New Zealand's national identity. I especially explore the school's implementation of Tikanga Māori, the practices and beliefs of the country's indigenous peoples. I argue that while some questions remain, Toi Whakaari integrates Māori forms in a manner that is culturally responsible and pedagogically effective, thereby providing a model from which other drama schools can learn.

In 2017, a group of African women migrants and I devised Uncomfortable Conversations for FORWARD, a London NGO, to speak publicly about FGM and gendered marginalization. This article, braiding theories from Tompkins, Rancière and Kershaw, explores the effects on participating actors.

The concept of festival can help to understand the framework within which political community building took place in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the methods employed in doing so. Political communities were established within different kinds of cultural performances such as gatherings, demonstrations, party conventions, and – most frequently – political celebrations, which obtained a festival-like structure. Referring to examples from the labour movement, this article examines different techniques of creating communities and discusses the impact of theatrical strategies and certain types of theatre in this crucial field of modern politics.

This article looks at the relationship between Haitian vodou, sound recording, and migration. I argue that Haitian vodou has a special relationship with technologies of sound, understood in Jonathan Sterne's sense of media as embodiments of social desire. There is a parallel between vodou possession and the practice of pwen (throwing verbal insults), on the one hand, and, on the other, the tape recorder's ability to manifest a person through the sound of his or her voice, making him or her present both in Haiti for the Haitian vodou congregation and in the diasporic land, thus bridging the separation across oceans and time. This transnational character underscores how Haitian vodou, which has been much maligned and often misunderstood, is an incredibly flexible and adaptive religion, necessary as a means of cultural survival for citizens of one of most economically disadvantaged nations, harshly subject to insertion in global neo-liberal labour markets.

A remembered piece of student theatre returns the writer to an examination of what was staged: a play centring on survival of the Shoah; the actor himself, a survivor; or an old man's self-discovery in the theatre. A shocking gestus in this production broke the boundaries of theatre and (while the fourth wall remained intact) transformed the audience into witnesses, and theatre into testimony. The article theorizes traumatic memory and its manifestations in the body, trauma's staging and the shape of narrative, and the difference between history, its performance and its mark.

Late in 1999 the Commonwealth of Australia's Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts released Securing the Future, the final Report of the Major Performing Arts Enquiry chaired by Helen Nugent (commonly referred to as the Nugent Report). The operations of the committee and the findings of the Report occasioned considerable public debate in the Australian arts world in the late 1990s, as the Enquiry solicited and analysed information and opinion on the financial health and artistic practices of thirty-one national major performing arts companies producing opera, ballet, chamber and orchestral music as well as theatre. The Report saw the financial viability of Australian live performance as deeply affected by the impact of globalization, especially by what elsewhere has been called ‘Baumol's disease’ – escalating technical, administrative and wage costs but fixed revenue – which threaten the subsidized state theatre companies of Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth with their relatively small population bases. The structural implementation recommended a considerable financial commitment by Commonwealth and State Governments to undertake a defined period of stabilizing and repositioning of companies. Early in 2000 both levels of Government committed themselves to this funding – in fact increasing Nugent's requested $52 million to $70 million – and to the principle of a strengthened Australia Council dispensing arms-length subsidy. In an economically philistine political environment, these outcomes are a tribute to Nugent's astute use of economic rhetoric to gain at least a symbolic victory for the performing arts sector. In 2000 New Zealand arts gained a similar major injection of funding, while a commissioned Heart of the Nation report, advocating the dilution of the principle of arm's-length funding through the abolition of the national funding organization Creative New Zealand, was rejected by Prime Minister Helen Clark.

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 times of crises and existential disorientation, the arts often lean on gestures of radical doubt, the articulation of which demands the art of masquerade, deception, diversion and dissimulation, and simultaneously includes characteristic constellations of pathos and melancholy. The authors of this article analyse different artistic projects in Slovenia, Germany, Russia and elsewhere, which were created in the breakthrough period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and connect these projects to the wider social events of the previous two decades. In their treatment of the contemporary ‘art of doubt’ they focus especially on the perspective of the political and existential and in addition point out the fundamental historical concepts of doubt which have influenced the development of theatre and experimental knowledge in Europe from the beginnings of the early modern era until today.

This article examines the relation between philosophy and theatre in the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou. First, it focuses on Badiou's central categories, such as event and character, that resonate with the theatre. Second, Badiou's own engagement with the theatre, the place theatre occupies in his philosophical world, is identified. Finally, the article argues that Badiou's thought must be understood as a return to Plato. Plato here is understood not as an enemy of theatre, but as a philosopher who invented philosophy through a constant, if often critical, engagement with the theatre. Dramatic Platonism is the name proposed for this tradition of philosophy of which Alain Badiou is the most significant current representative.

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.

This article uncovers the connections between the legal and scientific art of searching for human remains and theatrical performances. NAKA Dance Theater, a performance group based in Mexico City and Oakland, California, is at the centre of this intersection of art and forensics. Founded by José Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, NAKA creates theatrical events to configure a claim for social justice where the official legal–scientific terrain has failed to protect victims of state repression. These artists advance a commitment to what I call forensic performances, and their investigative practices revitalize theatrical experience in a time of debilitated democracies. Forensic performances give theatre a role in violent societies where mass graves are woven into life: they carry out some of the work of investigative journalism, without its dangers. Theatre opens up a space to do a forensics that is orthogonal to a state forensics claiming a certain kind of reality and truth that is dangerous for democratic politics.

Fire is one of the most magical elements in existence. It is everywhere: in the sky and on the ground, in hearts and in minds, inside and out, in water, in the air and in the soil … It is both divine and demonic. It is between light and dark. It is the source of both life and death. It is a clash. A clash that gave rise to our existence and, simultaneously, the creation of an error.