A primary theme of twentieth-century theatre has been the actor's body. Numerous directors from Stanislavsky to Anne Bogart have evolved stage theories and related training methods to promote a more expressive body on stage. In her 1995 article ‘Developing a Physical Vocabulary for the Contemporary Actor’, Lea Logic provides an overview of many of these approaches. While acknowledging the contributions of these director-teachers, she suggests, ‘If body shape and movement are to retain and increase their power as the central focus of theatre, actors must learn to maximize the expressive potential of their bodies.’ Quoting Copeau, Chekhov, Stanislavsky or Barba, she maintains the primary problem is an actor's tendency consistently to return to physical choices related to their personality and not necessarily to the role they are playing. She quotes Copeau's description of actors: ‘I always know, in advance what they are going to do. They reduce everything to the level of their habits, their clichés, their affectations. They do not invent anything.’ While Copeau's complaint is not directed at actor teachers, but actors, his words define one of the primary challenges for them, to teach actors to expand their expressive abilities beyond their self image.

When sexuality is a formally censored topic on the stage, how can one represent this fundamental human desire? For centuries, Western playwrights have used sex in highly coded language so that it is simultaneously acceptable and titillating. But Nehad Gad, one of Egypt's most prominent writers in the late twentieth century, and the only Egyptian woman to have her plays translated into English for publication, devised her own method to mention that taboo subject. She filled her plays with the desire for commercial goods—an important topic in this increasingly materialistic country. But for her characters, men and women alike, the desire to acquire and exchange commercial items is also a means of expressing sexual desire.

In her landmark book, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, the great historian Margarete Bieber stated simply and elegantly, ‘The development of the theater building always follows the development of dramatic literature.’ While historians, of course, have always attempted to explain the drama in terms of known architectural, scenographic, and technological practices, the effect of one upon the other has been less fully or successfully explored. Why, for instance, is the reverse of Bieber's statement not true? And in the rapidly changing technology of the contemporary world, is it possible that technology has become a causal factor in the development of drama?

Space, as Einstein has taught us, has no limits, and time is relative to where you are moving and the speed of light. Our millenium, then, is only a speck in eternal space. It is, nevertheless, a point relative to which we are positioned and on which we place a limit—a date—so that our actions may be chronicled, measured, and brought to some sort of completion, thus releasing us from living forever in the present. Yet, notwithstanding our ability to construct, contain and count time, somewhere someone has made a slip, for there is a ‘glitch’ in the system that still prevents millions of computers from recognizing the year 2000, by which devilry we are sent back to less than zero, to zero twice, 00. This error may well have disastrous consequences, although it would be preferable not have any of them happen—hospital operations failing, aeroplanes losing their bearings and going down in apocalyptic spectacles that are considered appropriate for a millenial ending. is as if this error might be interpreted as a token of what Jean Baudrillard, in a different context that has nothing to do with computers, sardonically suggests may be our desire to wipe out history, even, perhaps, to start again from scratch. Baudrillard's is, of course, one of multiple theses on the ‘end of history’ and millenial nothingness that have emerged, not least via the theatre, with the approach of the twenty-first century.

H Art Chaos stands out from other Japanese performance troupes as it performs against traditions. The troupe is a all-woman ensemble directed by a woman whose aim is to wage war on the culturally constructed Japanese female body. Oshima Sakiko, the director, and Shirakawa Naoko, the main solo performer, combine their visions of violence to extract the most precise gesture, exact timing, flawless shape, and perfect prop to project those images to rigorous excess. They focus on a kind of distortion and extreme manipulation of the female body which evokes painful kinaesthetic sensations. Their choreography produces discomfort, strain, and anguish through frantic, wrenching movement which aims at stressing the performer's body to the point of explosion or dismemberment. While their movement is based in modern, jazz, and ballet dance idioms, they push the stereotyped and classic vocabulary beyond pretty lines and feel-good sensations. They take technique to the point of excess in order to undo its forms They play with the overt meanings of props and costumes and destabilize those readings, like metaphors in a waking dream where their daily meaning drops out.

In recent years, it has been widely suggested that the bodily presence of the actor (and actress) on stage marks the limits and limitations of the semiotic approach to theatre and determines the need for a more complex methodology of research.

Transculturation refers to an intercultural body associated with hybrid encounters and with a system that resists and contests the powers of domination. The term transculturation was coined by the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940. He formulated this neologism as a way to counteract and subvert the homogenizing grammars implicit in the term ‘acculturation’, which Anglo anthropologists had coined in the late 1930s. Mary Louise Pratt suggested that as a function of the ‘contact zone’, transculturation dramatizes dialectical bodies ready to be reconstrued, re-embodied, and re-visioned. Specifically, Pratt refers to the ‘contact zone’ as the space of colonial encounters. While the contact zone can be materialized at any point in time and space, interculturalism in the study of Latina performance not only shapes the heterogeneous character of the term Latin American and its hybrid variants, but also influences diverse modes of representation. Within the specificity of US Latina performance, I propose to expand the idea of transculturation as it opens possibilities for understanding the intercultural body—the hybrid that can redefine notions of mestizaje itself. In this study, the concepts of transculturation and performance suggest a framework in which cultural norms and practices must be rooted in the materiality of human agency. Therefore, before discussing transculturation and performance, it is necessary to clarify the term Latina as an identity marker, which displaces hegemonic representation across linguistic and cultural borders.