This is my first issue as Senior Editor of Theatre Research International. As I have worked I have been conscious of the editors who have preceded me, first and foremost Elaine Aston. Her wit, insight and generosity have been models for me over the three years we worked together. Now, as she has ended her term and I have begun mine, I am more aware than ever of the precedent she has established. I will have to work very hard to match her editorial discernment, wisdom and creativity. But I am also aware of a legacy from previous editors – Freddie Rokem (with whom Elaine was privileged to work as Associate Editor), Christopher Balme (currently President of the International Federation for Theatre Research) and Brian Singleton (also a past IFTR President). What this means to me is that I am privileged to inherit a journal that has long been recognized as a leader across the globe for the best in original content and methodology. Joining me is the new Associate Editor, Paul Rae from the National University of Singapore. He has already proven to be an invaluable colleague, and I am happily anticipating our work together on TRI over the next three years.

Where do the limits of performance and everyday life intersect? How do performance and life make sense of one another? The articles in this issue focus on the most basic and definitive categories of live performance: music, dance, theatre, performer, director, choreographer and, of course, audience. Taken as a whole, the seemingly disparate articles of this issue offer provocative approaches to understanding how practitioners create performance out of their experiences, and where audiences can connect their own experiences to what they see onstage. In doing so the authors collectively redefine the active relationship of a performance with its audience, and the powerful potential of that relationship.

This essay examines the US tours (2007–13) of Black Watch, a docudrama about the eponymous military unit, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). I argue that the production manifests a ‘banal theatrical nationalism’ when theatrical national signifiers meet quotidian acts of soldiering and the mundane labour required to remount the production at each tour venue. I focus attention on the regimental history recounted through ‘Fashion’, the play's central military uniform dressing sequence, and introduce into my analysis a New York City fashion show, Dressed to Kilt, to interrogate the stakes of fashion, cultural production and visibility. Black Watch materializes what I am calling a ‘Scottish operative’ that acts on behalf of the NTS in securing international attention and potential investment. In order to query the sociopolitical stakes of this production's US success, I identify political, cultural and military links between the US and Scotland.

Although a rather recent convention, sitting in the dark looking at others in the light has become a standard element of going to see a theatrical performance. Before the introduction of powered lighting systems that focused light on the stage, however, audiences and actors alike were bathed in a shared illumination. As life outside the theatre becomes ever more exposed by light, what are the possibilities presented for and by a performance that takes place in darkness? In this article I discuss these possibilities as they were explored in Chris Goode's Who You Are, a performance commissioned by Tate Modern for Experiences of the Dark, a series of talks, presentations and other works inside Miroslaw Balka's giant installation How It Is.

This article examines the flash mob dance Glow by the Afro-Norwegian duo Madcon, which was performed at the Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo, Norway, in 2010. The dance was modelled on the format of popular Wii dance games, and coordinated black and white dancers, families, mass publics and prerecorded and live footage in order to choreograph European ‘unity in diversity’. The use of black dancers as avatars urging dancing crowds towards greater kinaesthetic sensitivity raises the questions of how race is figured in neo-liberal visions of cosmopolitan Europe, and what role gaming technology plays in facilitating cross-racial empathy and ethical responsiveness at a time when solidarity is fraying as a consequence of fiscal crises and austerity measures. Finally, the article considers Afro-European academic, activist and artistic practices as alternatives to neo-liberal regimes of race.

This article demonstrates the existence of a strong aesthetic kinship between the mise en scène of Robert Lepage and the representational mode of the classical Japanese rock garden. In order to elicit the creative participation of an active spectator, both use such Zen techniques as a radical reduction of scale, or shukukei (miniature landscape); minimalistic material metaphors, or mitate (metaphoric representation); and an asymmetrical, fragmented style, or fusuma-e (fragmented scene). Drawing on the theory and practice of Japanese rock gardening, this article introduces a new critical vocabulary for describing the representational logic, and enlightening effects, of Lepage's approach to ‘setting up stones’ on the stage in Seven Streams of the River Ota and other works.

The present paper will explore some of the re-enactments of the so called ‘Arab Spring’ in selected performances from Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, with their seamless connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among the concepts examined are Habermas's ‘public sphere’, Deleuze's ‘revolutionary-becoming’ and Rebecca Schneider's ‘re-enactment’. The remediation of revolution in performance reveals the material conditions and geographic locations of social unrest. Significantly enough, artistic re-enactments of the revolution have already been inflicted by ‘techno-imagination’, whereby most of us have become either spectators or citizen journalists of public dissidence, and yet we have been connected to the unprecedented upheaval by watching mediated images or implementing and re-editing them for distanced audiences.

In a short video documenting the occupation of a stage at the Théâtre de la Ville in France, a group of young Christian protesters are shown interrupting the scheduled theatre production of Romeo Castellucci's On the Concept of the Face of Christ (October 2011). A number of security personnel emerge onto the stage and a physical struggle erupts with the Christians; bodies push and pull against each other in an unscheduled theatre of religiously motivated protest. Finally, a group of police march purposefully onto the stage and close down the Christians’ protest. I will argue that the affirmative use of the police to shut down the Christians’ protest undermines a philosophy of the public sphere that positions the theatre stage as a possible site of dissensus. My intention is to problematize the police presence on the stage, with a view to restoring the vision of the theatre as a public sphere in which dissensus may be supported rather than policed.

This article treats the Egyptian 25 January revolution as a struggle over the right to produce signs within an Egyptian cultural landscape long plagued by the state's attempted monopoly over meaning. Like an actor onstage who acquires a new sense of agency through performance, the individual citizen in revolt performs an existential act aiming to reclaim the uninhibited, free body from the regime and its cognitive hold. The revolution thus lends itself to analysis via the tools of theatre and performance studies. This theatrical mode of knowledge can be achieved in at least two strategic ways. First, by regarding the revolution as a battle between two distinct powers, each deploying its own discursive and cognitive weaponry – the revolution, qua conflict of wills, can be analysed as an event with discernible dramatic dimensions. Second, by viewing the revolution which took place in a specific time and place as a theatrical event capable of transforming mundane bodies into creative ones, while also reconfiguring place into a theatrical space and thereby subverting oppressive state power.

This paper is about my experience in the ‘Church of Hampshire’ and the ‘Cosmopolitan Church of Hampshire’ (anonymous names) in Hampshire, England, where I wanted to play the dùndún and gángan (see Fig. 1), the two Yorùbá talking drums. For this I shall be adopting the stance of a reflective practitioner. I have played the dùndún in churches in Nigeria and Hungary. It was this experience that encouraged me to attempt to introduce it to the two churches, hoping that they would welcome new possibilities. This paper will analyse how such expectations were unfulfilled. The extracts in italics are taken from my personal journal. The names of the people in this paper are anonymized. I will start by thoroughly describing the position of music within the Yorùbá culture, and the nature of indigenous Yorùbá spiritual practice.

This essay discusses Stanislavski's rehearsal use of images derived from everyday life. This discussion focuses on a relatively obscure chapter of Stanislavski's career, his 1932–3 work on Artists and Admirers, the rehearsal notes of which are unavailable in English translation. The essay contends that everyday images not only facilitated communication between rehearsal participants, but also projected outwards to the highly regulatory political scene of the time. More specifically, the ephemeral nature of everyday images will be identified as a ploy that eluded the Communist Party's appropriation of Stanislavski's work. Michel de Certeau's theories on everyday life, particularly his elaboration on strategies and tactics, will serve as a theoretical framework for such a discussion.

In November 2011, on the brink of a new wave of conflict over Egypt's future, an obviously energized audience crowded into Cairo's Rawabet Theatre for The Tahrir Monologues, a documentary play celebrating the Eighteen Days leading to Hosni Mubarak's ouster. Apparently a premature celebration, the show turned out instead to be a self-conscious nostalgia exercise meant to register the decay of revolutionary ideals. This essay analyses The Tahrir Monologues and several other theatrical responses to the unfolding – not to say unravelling – situation in post-Mubarak Egypt. Amid the grotesque improvisations of power, I ask, what can scripted theatre still say? For an answer I turn to an American University in Cairo production of Sa'adallāh Wannūs's 1994 masterpiece Rituals of Signs and Transformations – one of three productions of this play worldwide in 2012–13. Why this play now? The answer lies in its ingenuity, its passion and, ultimately, I argue, its prophetic pessimism.

Roysten Abel's The Manganiyar Seduction is perhaps the most popular performance of Indian folk music on the global festival market today. This performance of Rajasthani folk music is an apt exemplification of an auto-exoticism framed as cultural commodity. Its mise en scène of musicians framed, literally, by illuminated red square boxes ‘theatricalizes’ Rajasthan's folk culture of orality and gives the performance a quality of strangeness that borders on theatre and music, contemporary and traditional. The ‘dazzling’ union of the Manganiyars' music and the scenography of Amsterdam's red-light district engendered an exotic seduction that garnered rave reviews on its global tour. This paper examines the production's performative interstices: the in-betweenness of sound and sight where aural tradition is ‘spectacularized’. It will also analyse the shifting convergences of tradition and cultural consumption and further interrogates the role of reception in the construction of such ‘exotic’ spectacles.

Kaguyahime is one of Kylián's rare narrative ballets. This paper deals with the way in which Kylián reduces the narrative content of the literary tale on which the ballet is based to an abstract form, to adapt the ballet to his narrative–abstract style of choreography. The focus of the discussion is on his method of space composition: first, his practice of arranging and moving dancers around the stage; second, his design of the space, which takes into account the areas beyond the stage. The paper analyses each scene of Kaguyahime and seeks to show that the space is structured on the basis of perpendicular lines across the width and depth of the stage. The contrasting heavenly and earthly worlds which constitute the axes of the original story correspond to the axes of space – this being a device of Kylián's to formulate the narrative by using the space.

Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat, one of the last major plays by the Syrian Sa'dallah Wannus, published in 1994, is one of the most innovative plays from the Arab world in the twentieth century. Based on a historical incident, it dramatizes the story of the fall of the Naqib of Damascus when he is arrested with his mistress Warda. The Naqib's enemy, the Mufti, saves him from disgrace by substituting the Naqib's wife, Mu'mina, for Warda, although Mu'mina leaves the Naqib and becomes a notorious prostitute. The play also overtly treats male homosexuality. Previous analyses of Wannus's plays have focused on the influence of Brecht and the Thousand and One Nights, and criticism of this play's feminist theme. This article argues that much of the play's novelty and aesthetic power derive from aspects of Shakespeare, principally Measure for Measure, and from motifs, lexicon and ritual theatricality derived from Sufism as aesthetic form and religious practice.

Ahmed and Mohammad Malas, two Syrian actors who have made themselves the unofficial clowns of the revolution, have emerged from a vibrant culture of cyber-activism. They have made use of Facebook and YouTube to circulate work that simultaneously reflects on the possibilities for, and failures of, social media and satellite television to forge a new idea of Syrian identity – one that prominently features active participation in the public sphere. I argue that unlike earlier Syrian plays that employed similar tropes (the interrogation scene as emblematic of the state–citizen relation, the failed actor as symbol of the disheartened citizen), the Malas twins use these tropes to demonstrate the necessity of resistance. Their plays assert that Syrians will persist in resistance because new technologies have provided new options and have transformed Syrian identity.