Decades before the rise of the international megamusical, Franz Lehár's operetta Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) traveled the world, becoming a franchise surrounded by a constellation of commodities. Within two years of its opening in Vienna on 30 December 1905, the romantic tale of Hanna Glawari's second chance at love was playing in theatres across Europe and in “virtually every city in the German-speaking world,” including colonial communities in Africa and Asia. In Argentina, as many as five versions of the operetta opened simultaneously in Buenos Aires, each in a different language. By 1908, three Merry Widow road companies were touring the United States, and numerous burlesques of the piece were vying for the attention of theatregoers.

In 1962, Polish director Jerzy Grotowski mounted an adaptation of playwright Stanisław Wyspiański's 1904 play Akropolis. When James MacTaggart filmed it in 1968, the production gained immediate cult status among American theatre critics, scholars, and practitioners. Although Grotowski's production had already been seen internationally (though by a very limited audience), the film made it available to those outside major theatre centers. Notwithstanding the buzz that surrounded the film's release, most of the interest was focused on the acting and the set design; the fact that the show was based on an obscure modernist drama evoked little critical comment. Although the film's voice-over translated some lines of the play, the dialogue was not the main focus of commentary about the film or criticism of the play after the film was released. In 1974, Harold Clurman wrote that “the lines [of Grotowski's adaptation] spoken at incredible speed are not dialogue; they are tortured exclamations projected in the direction of another being, but with no shape as personal address. (It has been said that a knowledge of Polish does not make the lines readily intelligible… ” Clurman sidestepped discussing the text altogether, arguing that one does not need to understand it in order to understand the production.

The New Negro, Indigenist, and Négritude movements of the 1920s and 1930s constitute the grounded base of contemporary Afro-American, Caribbean, and African literary scholarship. Critics return repeatedly to this textual field as if to embrace a heralded center, familiar and stable. Skepticism regarding presentations of the era as a coherent whole has inspired redefinitions of the period's demarcations, classic works as well as national and transnational intertextualities. Bearing in mind the discontinuities, one must acknowledge, however, that among other achievements, the new letters movements provided an epistemological break away from the predominance of Euro-American influences on black texts, the discursive agendas previously defining textual production particularly in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Caribbean writing. New letters works became communal property to be read and revised across national boundaries. Antilleans and some Hispanics, for instance, embraced texts by Langston Hughes and Claude McKay and were challenged by the Afro-American example to respond in stylistic kind. Unlike any other epoch of African-American expression, new letters shared a common ideology: writing regional, ethnic, and peasant experiences into existence. Their very articulation signified protest directed against cultural repression on the one hand and racial self-hatred on the other. The paradox of such a posture is suggested by Jean Price-Mars's use of the term collective bovaryism to describe in retrospect his generation's capitulation during the American Marine Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). From the Haitian contradictions emerged defensive political, cultural, and textual agendas as of 1927, which paralleled the black revolts of Harlem and Paris but were determined by the particular circumstances provoking their enunciation.

On 14 December 2007, on what would have been VèVè A. Clark's sixty-third birthday, hundreds of people gathered for her memorial service at UC Berkeley. In the week leading up to the celebration, people from all over the country, including friends, family, colleagues, and students, contributed memories celebrating her life. Poems and testimonies chronicled emotions ranging from triumphant to despairing, yet all affirmed the ase, or energy, she so graciously shared with those around her. As I recall the whirl of activities, one particular element of preparing the program stands out: the accents on proper names and the musical and dance selections had to be properly placed. Drafts were edited, printed, and corrected in order to ensure accuracy. In an Anglophone context, this preoccupation may seem trivial. Yet as her colleagues and former students, we knew that Clark's insistence upon precision was critical to her entire scholarly enterprise; the visual effect of a bodily gesture in a staged or ritual context or the pinpointing of the exact timing of a historical event had tremendous meaning and importance to her. Her precision was a formative aspect of her conceptualization of diaspora literacy, a hallmark of a research methodology and teaching pedagogy grounded in multilingualism, historical contextualization, and respect for the specificity of other cultures. This attention to detail endowed her work as an interdisciplinary scholar of the literature and performance traditions of the African diaspora in the Americas with nuance and complexity.

One of the things that strikes one most forcibly in surviving images of early commedia dell'arte is its enigmatic physicality, the manner in which its actors everywhere adopt postures and make gestures that seem not merely emphatic and exaggerated but almost hieroglyphic, full of some additional implication, laden with a figural and emblematic resonance that we sense but no longer see. In general terms, this quality is easily understood, as the body clearly served in commedia as a complex and polyvalent instrument of expression. Its gestures and movements were, as in all theatre, indexically linked to dramatic action, and they also served, as in much masked drama, as surrogates for the facial expression of affect, in that the movements and aspects of the whole body were enlisted to articulate the motions and mien of a veiled face and to overcome or play upon the sensation of estranged speech produced by the half-mask's bifurcation of the visage. Moreover, in a manner less familiar but illustrated well in Fig. 1, these movements and aspects also functioned as expressions in their own right, not articulating the affect or expression attendant upon immediate speech or situation or delineating the lines of external action but signaling the many impulses and various appetites of the world, the varied aspects of all persons and of the body itself, and invoking at times as their implicatory context human nature, common character, and identity rather than situation, attitude, or emotion.

Anyone who has staged a show has an idea of the numberless odd things that can go wrong. We expect, of course, that they will go right. From experience and knowledge, we can conceive the contingencies in categories; they range from the personal to the institutional and the natural (as in a force of nature). Contingencies of performance are the many variables that could impact performance in any number of ways, mostly unforeseen, and even if foreseen, mostly unpredictable in effect. Of course, contingency factors are time and space dependent, as what is contingent in one context or time may be completely under control in another context or time. We need to conceive of performance as fundamentally “a changing function of multiple variables,” as Barbara H. Smith once said of value. This changing function is a concept we need to hold tightly as we navigate common challenges of performance: What is our purpose or goal? What should we perform? What are the mechanics of the performance? Where should we perform? When? And for whom? These challenges are theoretically of indeterminate and indeterminable chronological sequence, and beginning from and working diligently through any one of them is bound to lead us into the others.

In 1996, R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols edited a remarkable volume of essays called Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, in which seventeen scholars pondered, through detailed philological analysis and imaginative cultural-studies approaches, the legacy of the Middle Ages and its relevance to modern times. “WORD'S OUT,” they began, “There's something exciting going on in medieval studies, and maybe in the Renaissance too. The study of medieval literature and culture has never been more alive or at a more interesting, innovative stage.” Bloch and Nichols understood, as few others, the pertinent critical stages of the interdiscipline of medieval studies. But, critically speaking, where was the stage? With the exception of Seth Lerer's terrific piece on Eric Auerbach's gender-biased editorial establishment of the text of the twelfth-century Play of Adam, theatre was nowhere to be found.

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR), which is housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin, and partners the historical society with the University of Wisconsin's Department of Communication Arts, was formed in 1960. It maintains a diverse collection of entertainment media, including collections of papers, audio and/or visual materials, and other creative documents such as scripts and designs. The majority of the WCFTR's collections feature film, radio, and television productions and various photographs and promotional material. The smaller theatre collections include papers related to notable actors and playwrights such as Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Moss Hart, Langston Hughes, and George S. Kaufman; lyricists and composers such as Marc Blitzstein and Stephen Sondheim; and designers for film and theatre. This article examines the WCFTR collections of three twentieth-century theatrical designers: Wolfgang Roth, Jean Rosenthal, and Gilbert Hemsley.

This is a tale of two directors. The setting is the Republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony and a tiny archipelago nestled off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Framing the story is Cape Verde's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which since 1997 has invited Lusophone theatre artists from three continents to perform a wide array of theatre genres on a mainstage program alongside Cape Verdean troupes. João Branco, a Portuguese director who moved to the islands in the early 1990s, is the artistic director of both the Mindelact Festival and the veteran Cape Verdean theatre troupe GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo/Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese Cultural Center). For Mindelact 2003, GTCCPM performed an abridged version of King Lear rendered in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a mix of Portuguese and several West African languages. Beyond bolstering Branco's cherished goal of creolizing Shakespeare's plays by transporting them to Cape Verde's Afro-European cultural milieu, Rei Lear worked in concert with the festival's media blitz to extol local spectators in Mindelact's host city, Mindelo, for their good taste. Two years later, Herlandson Duarte, a young Cape Verdean director and Branco's former theatre student, staged a Crioulo-language Midsummer Night's Dream at Mindelact with his new theatre company, Solaris. Duarte's production transformed Bottom's play-within-a-play into a searing critique of Mindelense audiences and the structures of authority that prop up the festival itself.

The plays and performances of French Caribbean women, which have mostly been examined in the French language and in the field of French literary studies, require a new theorization of postcolonial theatre. Highly influenced by what I call French universalism, French Caribbean women's theatre moves continuously between evoking Caribbean and gender difference and mobilizing the concept of the human universal. Their work enacts a restorative postcolonial women's agenda that is specific to the cultural context of the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

It's Easter and, two years out of three, that means it is also the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, this time at the appropriately named Renaissance Hotel (in the absence of a chain of Early Modern Hotels) in Washington, D.C. Never mind about the plenaries and panels and seminars, many of which were outstanding; all conferencegoers, whether Shakespeareans or not, know that the real excitement is to be found at the book display. Was this what King Lear was talking about when he suggested to Cordelia they would spend time in prison talking about “Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out”? And the unseemly scenes on the last morning, when many publishers reduce their prices rather than ship the books back to the warehouse, are remarkably reminiscent of Harrods's china department on the first day of the sales.

On 30 June 2006 at the annual National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, two giants of South African protest theatre, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, performed as the original cast of the landmark struggle drama Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972). The revival marked the first production of the play in over twenty-five years. After its brief stint at the National Arts Festival (30 June–5 July 2006), the play transferred to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town (11 July–5 August) and then entertained a monthlong run at the State Theatre in Pretoria (17 August–17 September). After its turn at the State, the production stopped shortly at the Hilton College Theatre in KwaZulu Natal (19–23 September) before settling into an extended engagement at Johannesburg's Market Theatre (28 September to 22 October). In March 2007, the original cast revival of Sizwe traveled to the British National Theatre before finally ending its tour at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April 2008.

When a group comprised primarily of African-derived “people”—yes, the scare quotes matter—gather at the intersection of performance and subjectivity, the result is often not a renewed commitment to practice or an explicit ensemble of questions, but rather a palpable structure of feeling, a shared sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture. This structure of feeling is palpable even in the place-names “Africa” and “the Caribbean,” names whose articulation (grammar) and memory (ghosts) would not be names at all were it not for the trade in human cargo. The promise of sense and meaning, when these place-names are spoken, is imbricated in the syntax and morphology of structural violence. Isolation of its performative and episodic instances (the violent event) often robs us of our ability to see it as a grammar of emergence and being: the Maafa, or African Holocaust, as the condition for the emergence of African being, just as grammar conditions the emergence of speech. We know the apparitions: ghosts of lost ancestors whom Ghanaians mourn each year at the sea when they mark the Maafa on their side of the Atlantic; the strange surnames on this side, haunted by the memory of names unknown; that empty space between children and their grandparents where the scourge of AIDS walks in silence; civil wars and famines induced by “natural” disasters like World Bank policies and U.S. intervention—one need not name each and every ghost to remind oneself of their omnipresence.

The fact that live performance is unrepeatable is both its greatest attribute and a constant worry to theatre historians. How is it possible to study an art form that is fleeting, short-lived, ephemeral? Nowhere is the challenge more acute than with Carnival, a popular art form that comes from the grassroots and is acknowledged as an art of resistance. Initiated by newly emancipated Africans in British colonies in 1834, Caribbean-derived Carnival struggled against endless confrontations with governmental authorities for its survival. In 1962, when Trinidad and Tobago achieved independence from Britain, the country's first prime minister, Eric Eustace Williams, recognized Carnival as the national art form. Despite this recognition, Carnival artists continue to struggle because of lack of funding, misrepresentation in the press, and lack of appropriate credit for their role as artists. So it is particularly gratifying to find the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago leading the way by making the work of Carnival artists available digitally on its Web site. This essay examines this new online resource and considers issues related to studying and researching Carnival.