These four articles are very different in subject, geography, methodology and evidence. Despite these significant divergences, their presence in a single issue is fortuitous. What these articles offer as a single entity is an important reminder of how theatre is always concerned with and emerging from exchange and movement. Sometimes the movement is across global geopolitical boundaries; sometimes it is only across counties in a single nation. Sometimes the movement is the global circulation of ideas, and artists of very different cultures may be approaching similar subjects in similar ways although they have never met. Sometimes those routes may be traced on a map; sometimes they are roots only revealed as pathways through the transformative act of performance. Sometimes, of course, the movement is simply that of the body in representation. In all these essays the routes/roots involve challenges to collaboration and understanding, and results may come from achieving the goal of connection and/or from falling far short. Through comparing these articles with one another, we can enrich our own work as scholars and artists because they remind us to re-examine how we define even our most basic terms and assumptions.

This editorial is a bittersweet one for me. I am incredibly proud of the six articles in this issue. They are provocative and compelling, and offer new knowledge of performance. Taken together, along with the other articles in this year's volume, they offer us innovative and exciting understandings of how live performance travels and matters, and what it means. This issue also is perhaps one of the most global I have ever edited – the authors look at performance in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America – demonstrating that as a field we are increasingly aware of the limitations of the national study. Each article illustrates the pleasures, risks and rewards when different cultures intersect through the medium of live performance.

One of the most productive contributions to performance that scholars have made to theorizing globalization is to document how people understand global transformation as expressed through representation. An additional element of this contribution is the examination of reception – what understanding did audiences and critics glean from what they saw onstage. This issue of Theatre Research International brings together a diverse set of articles, ones that were not written with any of the others in mind. Despite this, however, read together these articles offer a primer on the effects, successes and failures of performance in the context of global movement currently and in the past. Some of these authors look at theatre that literally travels – around the world, around the nation – and others that travel more figuratively – as part of historical circuits of transmission like colonialism. In whatever sense travel is defined and explored in this issue of TRI, all of these articles remind us that live performance is always about the circulation of embodied ideas through time and space. Travel is built into the form itself.

Draped in a tatty woollen korowai (cloak), Ben Hana, aka ‘Blanket Man’, was an iconic, polarizing and mythical presence on the streets of central Wellington, New Zealand, until his death in January 2012. A critical character in contemporary urban folklore, Blanket Man captivated public attention as ‘Brother’, the leader of a band of fellow street-dwellers, a troubled anti-hero transformed into celebrity by the trend-setting hoi polloi as evidence of the capital's underlying quirk. This essay explores the unsettling representation of the puppet ‘The Blanket Man’ in the theatre production The Road That Wasn't There (2013) by the collective Trick of the Light. As a brave tribute or cross-cultural opportunism, the reanimation of the now ‘absent’ Brother as a performing object provokes questions about the representation of ‘real’ indigeneity – exploring notions of authenticity, exploitation and tokenism.

This essay seeks to reconsider and appropriate the cultural politics of Raymond Williams for the project of formulating a critique of current ideas about politics and theatre. The residual values of cultural materialism as theorized by Williams, based on a concept of culture as productive, processual and egalitarian, have become less influential under the pressures of post-structuralism and neo-liberalism. The current attraction to Rancière, for example, emphasizes dissensus over consensus and singularity over collectivity. Post-dramatic theatre rejects direct engagement with political discourse altogether. While recognizing that these emerging theoretical ideas continue the historical romance of avant-garde theatre with rupture and dissent, Williams can remind us of still-powerful strategies that are rooted in identifying shared experiences, relating cultural production to its sociopolitical context, and the value of collective struggles.

Bangkok, Singapore, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg – some thirty performers of the Boosra Mahin Siamese Theatrical Troupe toured the world in 1900. Daily newspapers enthusiastically reported on the unprecedented shows of the performers ‘from the land of the white elephant’. After they disappeared from the map of theatre history, in 2010 Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun ‘revives’ the troupe in his performance Nijinsky Siam. He follows their October 1900 St Petersburg show – the very performance attended by choreographer Mikhail Fokine and costume designer Léon Bakst, who later worked closely with Vaslav Nijinsky. In 1910, Nijinsky's La danse siamoise/Siamese Dance premiered at the Marinsky Theatre, St Petersburg. This article follows the routes of the Boosra Mahin Troupe on the basis of selected primary sources and from a global-historical perspective. In tracing the Boosra Mahin Troupe and their tours, the article not only maps their manifold routings and reroutings, but also advocates for the need for a global theatre historiography that puts past cultural entanglements and connected performance histories centre stage.

This article examines a theatrical network, the Bandmann Circuit, managed by Maurice E. Bandmann in the first two decades of the twentieth century as a form of globalized theatre. It asks why this kind of transnational theatrical activity has received so little scholarly attention and proposes utilizing actor-network-theory as a means to make the complex connectivity of such enterprises visible. The first section of the article discusses the concept of early globalization, roughly the period from 1860 to 1914, as a period having many parallels with our own time. The second part discusses actor-network-theory as a theatre-historiographical method, which is then applied to selected nodes of the Bandmann Circuit, in particular repertoire, audiences and the use of local partners as examples of a much more multiaxial undertaking.

The performance installation Exhibit A and B by South African theatre artist Brett Bailey has been touring Europe since 2010. Its twelve tableaux vivants provide a selective survey of European racial histories interspersed with displays of contemporary African refugees. It has increasingly provoked opposition by antiracist activists who compare the show to a ‘human zoo’ that objectifies black performers, facilitates emotional release for white European audiences, and benefits only the white director. In London, protests led to the cancellation of the show. This article examines these charges and sets them in the context of Afro-German theatre and activism. It advances an alternative reading of Exhibit B as a two-pronged intervention in European discourses of security on the one side, and in the restructuring of European museums on the other.

Grounded on personal experience in Augusto Boal's workshop, this article explores his essential and radical concept of the spect-actor and its limitation. When he conceptualized the term, Boal seemed to ignore diversities and differences of subject in the grid of power relations such as class, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference and race. Furthermore, a silence that most of the workshop participants maintained needs to be examined critically, instead of unquestioningly, regarding their ‘democratic’ choices. In order to effectively discuss the limitations of the spect-actor concept, as well as the silence that was ignored in the workshop space, I speculate on similar relationships that occurr both in theatre workshop and classroom settings. Drawing the conclusion that both educators and theatre practitioners require self-reflexive attitudes, I expect a greater contribution of Theatre of the Oppressed to globalized societies.

This article considers the role of laughter at the early modern and reconstructed Globe Theatres. Recently, debate has emerged over the nature of laughter at the Globe, as some critics and scholars believe that the actors encourage the audience to laugh excessively at the reconstructed Globe Theatre on Bankside in London. This article explores these concerns by tracing the anxieties surrounding laughter during the early modern period, and analysing their views against the modern actor's perspective at the Globe. The article argues that the architecture and shared lighting of the theatre foster more comedic moments for the audience, and considers its implications.

This article is developed from a paper presented at IFTR as part of the Performance and Disability Working Group in summer 2013. The work considered is a practice-as-research contribution by Welsh dance theatre company Cyrff Ystwyth towards a large Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded enquiry into performance, place, dislocation and vulnerability. The article uses contrasting concepts drawn from the work of critical theorists and dance scholars André Lepecki and Carrie Noland to think about the implications of Cyrff Ystwyth's site-specific performance authored by choreographer Adrian Jones, who has a learning disability. The research question is interrogated through the lens of the practice and understandings of place, performance and vulnerability, and proposed in the light of theory and its application to practice. The practice's challenge to theory is then considered as it confronts the researcher's expected outcomes and posits new understandings.

This article uses critical practice to explore making an ‘ethical response’ to Yaël Farber's Nirbhaya (Fearless One), a play incited by the fatal gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi in December 2012. Requiring its audiences to witness testimonies of violence against women, Nirbhaya's strategies raise complex relationships of witnessing and trauma, while insisting on the cultural audibility of women's voices. Performing a shift from the testimonial to the persuasive, Nirbhaya can be seen as part of a global advocacy movement that asks audiences not only to bear witness, and the responsibilities this entails, but also to become fellow activists. By attending closely to the voices of Nirbhaya, and to the use of female testimony as a tactic of local and global movements and geopolitical motivations, this article argues that female voices are displaced, mediatized and co-opted through their role as advocates and agents of cultural change.

Increasingly, the administration of Mainland Chinese performing troupes, including xiqu, is focusing on audiences. Xiqu troupes are undergoing systemic reform (tizhi gaige), during which troupes are increasingly expected to adopt a commercial model (zhuanqi gaizhi). This requires a paying audience. Yet for decades, urban establishment xiqu troupes, as state entities, depended on governmental support and approval, not on self-selecting audiences or independent criticism. One new national initiative, intended to identify and protect core repertoire and broaden audiences nationwide, has been the Grand Prize for Outstanding Repertory Piece (youxiu baoliu jumu dajiang). Drawing on field research conducted during the tour of such a work, this study suggests that there is an institutional will to change performance models, as well as a paying audience for xiqu, even outside their immediate cultural areas. The emergence of a small, traditional-minded, highbrow, affluent, national theatre-going audience is noteworthy; what scope of performances it might sustain without government support is open to debate.

This study explores the theme of carnivalesque homoeroticism in medieval decadent Cairo as portrayed by oculist and littérateur Ibn Dāniyāl in his third shadow play The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion. The playwright's satirical response to Sultan Baybars's campaign against vice in Egypt in the thirteenth century falls within the irreverent burlesque tradition. The article analyses the playwright's carnivalesque and satirical shadow play in light of Bakhtin's theory of carnival. He related the carnivalesque – a burlesque dramatic genre aiming to secretively challenge and sabotage the social and political hierarchy of an autocratic regime through satirical obscenity and rhetoric – to the medieval carnivals and feasts of fools throughout Europe. Bawdy burlesque comedies were intended to provoke hilarious laughter by mockingly satirizing the despotic government's absurd subjugation of its citizens. The study shows how carnivalesque dialogic, long thought to be limited to medieval literature in Europe, found fertile soil in medieval Cairo. Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy Ṭayf al-Khayāl, which consists of The Shadow Spirit, The Amazing Preacher and the Stranger, and The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion, can unquestionably be studied in the context of Bakhtin's plebeian popular culture of laughter and the carnivalesque tradition.

The first authorized productions in Japan of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado took place in the early years of the post-war American occupation. A group of Japanese theatre-makers whose international engagement had been circumscribed by the war were involved in these productions – first a 1946 American-led version for occupation personnel, and then an ‘all-Japanese’ version in 1947 and 1948. For these artists, The Mikado, a foreign operetta that was simultaneously ‘about Japan’ and not, offered a way of rebuilding post-war Japanese theatre, and, in doing so, imagining new possibilities for the nation. Through The Mikado they performed a ‘cosmopolitanism at home’, a mode of engagement with the international from within the borders of one's own nation.

This article presents the way in which both torture and the disappearance of individuals were staged in Chilean theatre from 1985 to 2011. The diachronic approach of this study is set to determine the ways in which the state's official reports on humans rights violations during dictatorship – the Rettig Report (1991) and the Valech Report (2004, 2011) – made an impact on theatrical production in terms of its political function. The study also analyses deployed theatrical devices to address extreme political violence onstage.

The Queer Futures working group had its first formal meeting at the International Federation for Theatre Research's annual conference at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2010. That year those gathered decided on our group's name, mindful of queer theory's temporal turn, but more fundamentally hoping it would signal a commitment to fostering queer research within IFTR for years to come. While some of us working on queer theatre and performance projects had found supportive homes in other working groups in the past, there was a sense among the founding members that a working group specifically dedicated to queer research was long overdue, in order to adequately respond to the range and complexity of queer practices, theories and methods that we found ourselves grappling with. Although we were aware of a sense within certain sectors of the academy that queer theory's moment had passed, this was not entirely consistent with our personal and political beliefs, or scholarly pursuits. This conviction has since been vindicated by the growth and activity of the group.

In 2013, Siona O'Connell, Nadia Davids and I were awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) grant to support our Sequins, Self & Struggle: Performing and Archiving Sex, Place and Class in Pageant Competitions in Cape Town project, the aims of which are to research, document and disseminate archives of the Spring Queen and Miss Gay Western Cape (MGWC) pageants performed by disparate coloured communities in the Western Cape. Important to these performance events is the figure of the ‘moffie’, a queer male, often a transsexual, who has traditionally choreographed and designed the Spring Queen pageant, but who is forbidden from competing in it. Alternatively, MGWC is a platform for queers of colour to perform in a secure environment without exploitation. My individual work in this collaboration focuses on the MGWC pageant and the attendant methodological questions that have arisen in our attempt to forge bridges between Western queer theory and local articulations of gender identity and alternative sexualities, considering the current preoccupations in scholarship around (South) Africa that cut across geography, politics, economics and history. I will briefly outline the research questions that have arisen from my particular focus on the project aims: the relationship between post-apartheid South African national identity and gay rights, new postcolonial directions in queer theory and the sexual geographies of Cape Town that are bounded by race and economic privilege.