This special issue is unique in that it is the first time that this journal has collaborated with another to share the same set of questions ramified through the two journals’ different missions. Editor Esther Kim Lee and I proposed to link Theatre Research International and Theatre Survey in order to explore how the ‘2008 worldwide economic crisis brought scholars of theatre and performance to re-examine how neoliberalism, economic nomadism, and transnationalism affect artistic practices’, as we wrote in the call for papers. The response was impressive and demonstrated that performance scholars around the globe are thinking about these pressing issues in contiguous and contradictory ways.

The four articles in this first issue of 2014 could not have, at first glance, less in common. The first piece, ‘Zooësis and “Becoming with” in India: The “Figure” of Elephant in Sahyande Makan: The Elephant Project’ by Ameet Parameswaran, examines the theatrical adaptation of a 1944 Malayalam poem by the company Theatre Roots and Wings. In ‘The Dynamics of Space and Resistance in Muhammad ‘Azīz's Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place’, Salwa Rashad Amin discusses the importance of ‘Azīz's play in the context of Egypt's recent and historical revolutions. Ketu Katrak takes up the performance of affect and its implication for social justice in ‘“Stripping Women of Their Wombs”: Active Witnessing of Performances of Violence’. Finally, Katia Arfara explores the work of a performance artist in terms of early twentieth-century precedents for European performance art, ‘Denaturalizing Time: On Kris Verdonck's Performative Installation End’. Theatre Research International readers will find much of value in each article, and they represent the kind of broad international focus our journal endeavours to provide.

As I read these articles over, I am struck yet again at how many connections I find among them. I have come to think of this issue of Theatre Research International as the unintended special issue. But special issue on what? Overall, I think that taken together the articles are a primer on the challenges, possibilities and imperatives of representing globalization in live performance. But there are other connections as well. The economics and geopolitics of neoliberalism undergird all four explorations, especially as they provoke human migration and upend traditional arts-funding paradigms. What exactly constitutes ‘local’ is also very much an open question for all the authors. Whether it is because the performances are perceived as ‘from here’ or ‘from away’, or because the audiences and the artists do not share a common nation, local is revealed as a very unstable concept.

This article analyses Stories of Love & Hate, a headphone verbatim play produced in the aftermath of the Cronulla Riots in Sydney, Australia. While verbatim theatre typically invites audiences to listen therapeutically, Stories of Love & Hate enacts and enables two alternative forms of listening. First, it enacts the paradoxical mode of ‘ethical eavesdropping’; second, it enables the metatheatrical mode of ‘mediatized listening’. In doing so, the play asks spectators to reconsider whom they listen to and how. It also asks scholars to reconsider claims that verbatim theatre gives voice to those who go unheard by the media. Instead, the article argues that in the case of Stories of Love & Hate, headphone verbatim theatre enables the audience to listen to how the media listen.

I analyse Sahyande Makan: The Elephant Project (2008), a cross-cultural theatrical production in Malayalam and Japanese by the Kerala-based group Theatre Roots and Wings, as an instance of ‘zooësis’. The performance presents the state of an elephant in the space of a Kerala temple festival ritual, pooram. The elephant moves into a fantasy of the wild as it is under the physiological condition of musth. Approaching the question of the performing animal as intersectional, this performance challenges anthropocentrism and its assumed binary of human/animal, and draws a possible relation between domestic and wild, or the world of norms and freedom, both for elephants and for humans. I argue that by taking embodiment as the site of exploring discipline as well as imagining a freeing, and by positing an alternate way of ‘being worldly’ through affect and senses, the performance articulates what Donna Haraway has posited as the process of ‘becoming with’.

Because South Korea's national sovereignty is a matter of cultural production, Seoul boasts an energetic programme of world-class performances that educate both foreigners and Koreans about the nation's struggle to assert its subjectivity throughout centuries of invasion, colonization and displacement. Three musicals re-present episodes from Korea's mythical past in ways that demonstrate a ‘primordial’ uniqueness of Korean global presence. The Celestial Clock addresses a Korean audience, unfolding outdoors against the backdrop of Gyeonghuigung Palace. Miso: The Original Korean Musical – Love Songs from Chunhyang, a showcase for traditional performing arts, uses pantomime and subtitles to guide an international audience through a popular legend; and Miso II: Land of the Gods stages Korean mythical history in breathtaking spectacle. The musicals, by arguing for the ‘always already’ global viability of Korean national sovereignty, also work to destabilize current ‘mythologies’ of what it means for a state to achieve ‘global’ status.

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.

Maritime performance inherently links to economies of commerce. Its history and practices reorient theatre within broad frames of transnationalism. Maritime performances – theatre, music and dance activities on ships, along shipping routes or within port environments – immerse participants in interactive cultural play. This article uses the lens of the cruise industry as a microcosmic study of identity formation through maritime performance praxis. Performances at sea enable roleplaying of passengers and crewmembers, activating all sectors of the ship. Collectively sea acts pass time, provide a forum for recognition of talent, and allow for cultural exchanges across social boundaries. The maritime subject considers the port as a temporary layover point before the next long journey. For maritime performers, notions of voyage and destination invert. Knowledge travels in circles when performers ride ocean currents and old histories resurface within contemporary practices. Megaships support performance economies where the voyage dominates even as economies of power persist.

Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place (February 2011) by Muhammad ‘Azīz (1955–) documents how Egyptian youth played a leading role in coordinating and organizing the 25 January 2011 revolution through social media networking and how the battle fought at Tahrir Square exemplifies genuine human networking. ‘Azīz's play constructs its social and historical grounding as a fabulous mix between the real, the fictional and the virtual. It reimagines the possibilities of political theatre in the context of postmodern virtuality. This study explores how realism can incorporate other worlds as a way of rethinking theatre and politics in a richly multicultural, post-revolutionary Egypt. It illuminates Egyptians’ complexities, where individualities are reinforced against an oppressive regime. This analysis focuses on the dynamics of space and resistance, as multiple selves move from individualistic, alienated spaces towards connection through the space of resistance and shared political activity.

Since its 2003 Broadway debut, Wicked's international audiences have embraced productions of the musical in a variety of countries. Wicked has thus conquered the world with its ideological framework of American values, as much as with its story of friendship between two young women. In transcending national borders, Wicked becomes a transnational commodity. We interview Dutch actress Willemijn Verkaik, who discusses her multiple, multilingual and transnational performances as Elphaba in Wicked, and analyse Dutch–American relations and the Netherlands’ lasting role as cultural middleman, suggesting that Verkaik's multinational Elphabas, constructed through a Dutch filter, make her a cultural diplomat, one consistent with the Netherlands’ larger role since the Pilgrims migrated there prior to crossing the Atlantic. The pilgrimages made by the actress, as well as by her international fan base, offer insight into Wicked's powerful position in constructing identities and communities that may no longer be bound by borders.

This article focuses on the practice of translating Brazilian playwright Samir Yazbek's play The Ritual for the Royal National Theatre, as part of its 2012 Connections season. The article charts the course of the translation through its different stages, and through the different drafts of the play as they emerged, and examines the way in which translation itself can become a mediator for dramaturgical support, development, enquiry and critique. Through an interrogation not only of what is retained by the playwright, but also of what ultimately falls by the wayside, what is lost, I examine the peculiarly British notion of ‘workshopping’ new writing, in its linguistic mediated form of translation, and the role of the translator as cultural mediator. Ultimately, the article points towards an international economy of playwriting products where translation becomes a means of mediating cultures through particular and specific frames that remain largely unchallenged.

This essay creates a theoretical frame interweaving Jill Dolan's concept of ‘finding hope at the theatre’ with Michel Foucault's concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ to argue that spectators’ affective responses to performed violence in live theatre include hope and imagining social change. I draw upon my own active witnessing of theatrical performances of two works – Ruined by Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American Lynn Nottage, and Encounter by the Indian-American Navarasa Dance Theater Company. Along with Dolan and Foucault, I draw upon affect scholarship by James Thompson and Patricia T. Clough, and upon theorist Saidiya V. Hartman's discussion of slavery that makes the human into an abject ‘non-human’. Continuing forms of female enslavement and resistances to domination are evident in the representations of sexual slavery in the two works.

I examine the art labour of three Japanese women butoh artists living and working internationally. They are foreign at home and abroad: when these artists return to Japan, they are erased from the current arts scene or they are cast as outsiders in a separate category from ‘Japanese artists’; they are also compelled to keep their butoh designation in foreign places because it lends an exotic, economically viable Japanese-ness to their art labour. The artists complicate any simple outsider/resident status or national/cultural representation. They also take on an in-transit-ness, in which they are always on the move and always ‘at work’. I argue that their art-labour-under-duress amplifies their physical intensity, arising from interrelated pressures such as economic conditions and relationships with butoh and Japanese art labour practices. This art labour intensity sustains creativity and initiates a ‘stranger community’ that is a vital part of their radical art labour and survival.

Originating from the avant-garde's attempt to supplant the structural limitations of perspective which ‘bound the spectator to a single point of view’, installation art emerged during the 1960s and the 1970s as a critique of the pure, self-referential work of art. Belgian artist Kris Verdonck integrates that modernist debate into his hybrid practice of performative installation. Trained in visual arts, architecture and theatre, Verdonck uses sophisticated technological devices in order to blur binary distinctions such as time- and space-art, inanimate and animate figures, and immateriality and materiality. This study focuses on End (Brussels 2008), which shows the possible final stages of a human society in ten scenes. I analyse End as an echo of the Futurists’ performance tactics, which prefigured a broadening of the formal aesthetic boundaries of performance art under the major influence of Henri Bergson's theory of time.

Profound demographic shifts in Australia's population are raising fundamental questions about how we reimagine the practices of our mainstream cultural institutions. The ability and the willingness of these institutions to reconceptualize their work in ways that encompass a diversity of traditions and tastes are critical. The paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notions of distinctions and taste to examine the influence of cultural identification on the choices that young people make about attending live theatre. The paper includes findings from a large Australian study, TheatreSpace, which examined why young people chose to engage or not to engage with theatre. In New South Wales nearly 40 per cent of the 726 young participants spoke a language other than English at home. Most were attending with their schools, many with no history of family attendance. This paper highlights significant issues about cultural relevance, accessibility and the often unintended challenges and confrontations that theatre can present to young first-generation Australians.