Queer theorists from across a broad range of disciplines argue that we are in a ‘normalizing’ or ‘homonormative’ period, in which marginalized subjectivities strive to align themselves with hegemonic norms. In terms of LGBTQ rights and representation, it can be argued that this has resulted in an increased visibility of ‘desirable’ gays (monogamous – ideally civil-partnered, white, financially independent, able-bodied) and the decreased visibility of ‘undesirable’ gays (the sick, the poor, the non-white, the non-gender-conforming). Focusing specifically on the effects of this hierarchy on the contemporary theatrical representation of gay HIV/AIDS subjectivities, this article looks at two performances, Reza Abdoh's Bogeyman (1991) and Lachlan Philpott's Bison (2009–10). The article argues that HIV/AIDS performance is as urgently necessary today as in the early 1990s, and that a queer dramaturgy, unafraid to resist the lure of normativity or the ‘gaystreaming’ of LGBT representation, is a vital intervention strategy in contemporary (LGBT) theatre.

The present paper aims at illuminating the space that theatrical art occupies in the dynamics of rewriting and rethinking colonial historiography. My main thesis is that Arabic theatrical practices are construed within a liminal space that is thoroughly hybrid. It is a third space that is located between Self and Other, East and West, as well as tradition and modernity. These negotiations are informed by the postcolonial Arab condition of hybridity, a condition that is itself situated across diasporas and diaglossia. The result of this rewriting process is the production of a new kind of performance tradition that is irreducibly different. Western theatre was represented to the nineteenth-century Arabs with a strong aura of authority. The early reception of Shakespeare and Molière had been conditioned by the general shock of encounter with the Western Other since the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt – when Western plays were performed to an Arab audience for the first time. A whole apparatus of translation and theatrical reproduction of Western theatrical canons flourished in the Middle East, bringing about a difficult birth of what can now be called ‘Arab Theatre’, rather than a theatre written in Arabic language. However, The hybrid nature of Arab theatre soon emerged as a result of cultural negotiations that are not simply supplements which reproduce a palimpsest, rather they transform the conditions of the original texts, only to emerge as new and different kinds of performative agency. It is a postcolonial theatre that is located at the crossroads and a continuum of intersections, encounters, and negotiations; the outcome is a complex palimpsest that underlines the powers of impurity rather than a logocentric quest for the pure.

The boundaries of theatre as an academic discipline have never been particularly clear, and its relationship to other disciplines has been the focus of constant struggle and negotiation. This essay traces that negotiation, focusing upon its process in American universities. Competing with literature departments for the study of dramatic texts, American theatre departments drew their own new disciplinary model, based primarily on German Theaterwissenschaft, with emphasis upon the staging history and historical context of dramatic texts. More recently such emerging fields as performance studies and cultural studies have sought to transcend such traditional disciplinary boundaries. Despite some resistance from existing academic and publishing structures, the trend towards the breaking down of these traditional boundaries seems clear. Our academic culture seems headed towards a considerably more fluid organization of its materials of study than the traditional organization into fairly discrete disciplines could offer.

Lest We Forget, my current research project at Concordia University, critically analyses the history of queer theatre and performance as it intersects with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada. Stretching over three decades and taking the country's bilingualism into consideration, its objectives are to study the aesthetic variety and political complexity of plays and performances that attend to the epidemic and to identify the multiple challenges faced by theatre artists and activists. Furthermore, the project explores the methodological and historiographical challenges when studying HIV/AIDS theatre and performance in a Canadian context.

Two South African films, Oliver Schmitz's 1988 Mapantsula and Ramadan Suleman's 1997 Fools, drawing from the revolutionary fervour of Third Cinema, developed a radical consciousness against a backdrop of Anglo-Afrikaner cinema in South Africa. Set in Soweto during the 1980s, both films, in their representation of blackness, address issues of the body, identity and agency. With their anti-heroes at the centre, they explore questions of African identity by imaging the black body differently, and free it from the grip of the apartheid imaginary. Meanwhile, the white body in the films is ‘shot’ as a homogenized symbol of apartheid violence and oppression, thus ‘fixing’ white identity as a strategy for political truth claiming.

In this article Nicholas Ridout argues that the work of the animal in theatrical performance generates an affective response which has both cognitive and potential value. Using examples of the appearance of animals on stage in recent work by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Jan Fabre, it suggests that when animals are coerced into the making of meaning in theatre, the unease which their appearance provokes is not so much the result of an encounter with the irreducibly ‘other’ as a recognition of familiarity, proximity and a history of exploitation. That animals can readily be seen to be exploited on stage allows the possibility of the exploitation of humans being seen as part of the same economy and this same history.

The structuration and definition of disciplines – an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century project – gave way, in the second half of the twentieth century in the European and American academies, to their destructuration, although certainly not everywhere, nor to unanimous approval. For all the resistance that it has encountered, however, this movement towards the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries has taken root. It can be traced back to the 1960s, a period whose economic growth and economic optimism freed up mental space, allowing energies to focus on political and sociocultural injustices and inequalities and thereby fermenting that ‘cultural revolution’ for which the 1960s are now most remembered in the affluent ‘western’ world. ‘Cultural’ here embraces, as it did at the time, the anthropological notion of culture as belief, knowledge, morals, customs and, among others, symbolic representation, thus also theatre and performance.

This article examines the relationship among migration, performance and intercultural dialogue as social policy in the European Union since the late 2000s. Intercultural dialogue is currently enjoying a second wave of prominence with several recently published reports by the European Union explicitly highlighting the relationship between this strategy's transformational possibilities and the role of the arts. Crucially, in both European social policy and performance theory today, interculturalism is increasingly used to mean an embodied practice and site of encounter that strategically multiplies – rather than binarizing or reifying – cultural differences between individuals and within groups. This article compares the work of three European theatre companies who describe their work as theatrical interculturalism and use it as a means of practising and furthering intercultural dialogue: Kloppend Hert (Belgium), Terra Nova Productions (Northern Ireland) and Outlandish Theatre Platform (Republic of Ireland).

This article examines a spectacular example of Greek theatre-related vase iconography, the so-called ‘Cleveland Medea’, by studying the ways in which a painter appropriates iconography for his own narrative purposes. Of special interest are the interactions called for by the vessel from its prospective viewers in the symposium context. Throughout, the artefact is treated as an important document of the cultural history of Greek tragedy in the fourth century BCE.

100% Vancouver was created by Rimini Protokoll and produced in 2011 by Theatre Replacement as part of the PuSh Festival. One hundred Vancouver residents performed a statistical portrait of the city based on Canada's 2006 mandatory long-form census. In this article, I set out to understand how a show that felt so local is part of a global project and a transposable dramaturgy that is designed to be tented anywhere. I explore this seeming paradox in 100% Vancouver because it self-consciously shared the stage with a corporate sponsor connected to the globalizing force of finance capitalism. I propose that this transparent redistribution of artistic capital to corporations that deal in finance capital is not a capitulation to the market. Rather, it is a social relationship with the market. 100% Vancouver demonstrates how contemporary citizen-led performance is a battleground for declining and dominant visions of governmentality that range from welfare government to finance capitalism.

International aid has influenced and, in part, shaped the artistic sector in Africa's Great Lakes region (DRC, Rwanda, Burundi) since the 1990s, a period marked by numerous conflicts and mass violence. Due to NGOs’ programmatic foci, artists performing for social change are increasingly compelled to focus on reconciliation and conflict resolution, generating political awareness and bringing about social change, healing and peacemaking. Through a comparative analysis of European and local productions on the genocide this article asks, how and why does an ‘NGO-style theatre’ develop a specific audience in the region? How have themes such as mass violence, inter-ethnic conflict and social cohesion become the main concerns of the territory's theatre? How do performances made and/or sponsored by NGOs challenge not only theatre's form, its social stakes and functions, but also the conception of its audience and the relationships between actors and spectators?

The theatre that developed in late nineteenth-century India, especially in the Bengal and Maharashtra regions, catered to an audience that was much wider than the new educated middle-class males who introduced the European stage form in Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. Driven by private capital, the new Indian theatre adopted the melodrama as its main dramatic form. When performance capital shifted to the more lucrative field of cinema in the middle of the twentieth century, the melodramatic form again became the chief narrative mode. Such is its power that it has become the principal rhetorical form of popular democracy in India. In the decades after independence, theatre was rescued from imminent death by the support provided by state agencies which sponsored the production of a national theatre canon and style, as opposed to the prevailing regional ones. However, with bureaucratization and political interference, theatre in India today must revert to its one inherent superiority over the cinema – the immediacy of its encounter with small audiences.

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 paper examines Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2 as examples of unconventional solo performance, and argues that these personal narratives can be read as a type of embodied performance that might otherwise be denied Satrapi. The traditional novel is regarded as an outlet for women denied a public presence; the graphic novel goes a step further, allowing presence both vocally and physically through repeated self-portraiture, which deals frankly with distinctly corporeal issues of visibility, sexuality and identity. These are threaded through the narrative and dealt with frankly in both word and image. Drawing on comic and performance theory to discuss how Satrapi uses the interplay of visual and narrative languages to perform herself, I contend that graphic novels may best be understood as occupying a middle ground between the novel and the theatre, where their formal liminality frequently echoes the liminal states of their protagonists.

The avant-garde theatre director Anne Bogart has made her name in the U.S. theatre community through her deconstructions of modern classics such as the musical South Pacific (1984), Cinderella/Cendrillon (1988) after Massenet's opera, Büchner's Danton's Death (1986), Gorki's Summerfolk (1989), William Inge's Picnic (1992), as well as through her idiosyncratic and original dance/theatre ‘compositions’ developed collabortively with her company, the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI). Prominent among such compositions have been 1951 (1986) on art and politics during the McCarthy era, No Plays, No Poetry (1988) on Brecht's theoretical writings, American Vaudeville (1991), and The Medium (1993) on the writings of the Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. Bogart has been acclaimed for her astute directing of the work by contemporary playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, Charles Mee Jr. and Eduardo Machado.

In 1855, the first ‘coloured’ minstrel troupe, the Mocking Bird Minstrels, appeared on a Philadelphia stage. While this company did not stay together long, it heralded a change in the ‘face’ of minstrelsy in the United States. Many other black minstrel troupes would quickly follow, drawing attention away from the white minstrels who had until then dominated the scene. However, the white minstrel show had already iconized a particular representation of the ‘Negro’, which ultimately paved the way for black anti-minstrel attitudes at the end of the nineteenth century. The minstrel show existed in two guises: the white-in-blackface, and the black-in-blackface. The form and content of the minstrel shows changed over time, as well as audience perception of the two different types of performance. The black minstrel show has come to be regarded as a ‘reclaiming’ of slave dance and performance. It differs from white minstrelsy in that it gave theatrical form to ‘signifyin” on white minstrelsy in the manner in which slaves practised ‘signifyin” on whites in real life.

This article is about the power of cultural performances to shape and sometimes coerce public opinion and public behaviours. In the process, I intend to defend a concept which has few supporters these days: ‘political correctness’. So prevalent is this concept in our public discourse that its meanings have become habitual, thus ideologically invisible. Beginning with an examination of the term and its history, I situate it in relation to the arts through its relation to censorship, and frame it within the broad field of cultural performances to which it belongs. Concluding with a specific case study taken from theatre, I hope to perform a ‘correction’ of sorts – to reintroduce the term as a positive value and practice in an artistic milieu which has largely rejected its utility.

For at least thirty years, scholars have debated the centrality of physical and embodied presence as essential to the experience of theatre and performance. A debate that was perhaps largely academic suddenly became a shared reality when COVID-19 shuttered live venues, closed universities and moved artists of all kinds online. Suddenly, much of the theatre world began acting for the (web)camera. This article considers the changing attitudes toward notions of theatrical presence before and throughout the pandemic and what these changes might mean for the future of live arts. In particular, it posits the intersection of theatre, film and media history as key to understanding digitally enhanced contemporary experiences and expectations of post-pandemic performances.