Mundo Quinta is a documentary theatre creation programme for adolescents in Madrid, launched by Espacio Abierto Quinta de los Molinos and directed by the theatre company Cross Border Project. This publicly funded programme started in 2018 and is currently celebrating its sixth season. Each season takes place during the academic year and culminates in the premiere of a new play. This article combines empirical and ethnographical methods with theatre analysis to examine the foundations, artistic vision, and creative process of Mundo Quinta, and to analyze how artistic quality is ensured in the final productions. The research undertaken focuses on the fourth season, and identifies the techniques used to create the verbatim theatre play ¿Me quieres alfileres? (Multiformas de quereres) [Do You Love Me? (Multiforms of Love)] in 2022 with designated young participants.

The unprecedented suspension of cultural events across Europe in March 2020 had a profound impact on the performing arts. Alongside the proliferation of digital and hybrid modes of theatre-making, the Covid-19 pandemic has also precipitated a substantive shift in how theatres operate at both institutional and organizational levels in an attempt to respond to the volatile economic impact of the pandemic on the culture sector. This has provided a decisive moment for the reinterpretation of the theatre landscape, raising fundamental questions relating to institutional transformation that challenge precarious working models and entrenched hierarchical divides. Drawing on wider transnational research as part of the ‘Theatre after Covid’ project, this article examines the institutional effects of the pandemic on theatre and performance in the United Kingdom and the German-speaking countries. It details the findings of a wide-ranging survey conducted in 2022 with theatre workers and organizations that address how the industry is adapting and transforming in response to the crisis. Using this new data as a starting point, it analyzes how new forms of artistic innovation have emerged during Covid-19. By focusing on these institutional and aesthetic developments, the article argues that the pandemic has produced a paradigm shift that has crucially reinscribed how theatre is created, programmed, and understood.

This paper examines the Pahlavi Dynasty Museum, which was inaugurated in 1976 during the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of Pahlavi rule. Built inside the Marble Palace, the shah's former residence in the center of Tehran, the museum was intended to memorialize the achievements of the Pahlavis, presenting the official Pahlavi version of Iran's modern history. The museum was unique in many respects, not least because it was the only former Pahlavi palace that had been converted into a museum to honor the Pahlavis, but it shared the objectives of other museums constructed during this period. During the late Pahlavi era, a major aspect of the state's cultural policy was to sponsor initiatives that strengthened the official state narrative, which argued that the Pahlavis were the legitimate heirs of a 2500-year-old monarchical tradition. The article explores how the state attempted to express these narratives through the museum's design and exhibits.

The quarterly journal Faslnameh Teatr has been published in the Iranian capital of Tehran since 1977, although with some interruptions. In a country where, since the Islamic Revolution, systematic efforts have been made to erase any trace of past monarchies, the continued publication of this journal proves to be an extremely rare, if not unique, occurrence. Of course, the prominence of the Ta’zieh ritual gives imposing visibility to the current dominant ideology within Iranian society, and the journal is effective in propagating the desired vision of the ruling Shi’ite power. The journal, then, since its very inception, has been intertwined with the affairs of power and has been consistently used as a tool in the hands of the agents of cultural politics in Iran. It has become the mirror of the country’s highly ideological cultural policy and, as a result, studying it provides knowledge of the fluctuations of culture in general, and of the theatre in particular, in Iran. Fahimeh Najmi is the author of Le Théâtre, l’Iran, et l’Occident (L’Harmattan, 2018) and of articles in Alternatives théâtrales and Registres. Deprived of work in Iran after five years of teaching, including in the Faculty of Art and Architecture of Tarbiat Modares University (TMU) in Tehran, she now lectures and researches in France. She holds a doctorate in Theatre Studies from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.

This article explores the impact of Afrocubanismo on the development of Cuba’s arts during the 1940s and 1950s. The article follows the discursive output of artists, intellectuals, and cultural policymakers of different racial backgrounds over the deployment of lo negro to construct cubanidad. It argues that, if the 1920s and 1930s experienced a movement towards the construction of a homogeneous mestizo Cuba, the following decades reveal an effort by some artists to desyncretize lo cubano. While some intellectuals constructed notions of authenticity that circumscribed black art to black artists, many white Cuban artists in turn embraced elite Hispanic heritage as their main creative language while valorizing some Afro-Cuban artists’ recreations of lo negro. The article also demonstrates that the scholarly debates about cultural appropriation in recent decades have a long history within the Afro-Cuban community. It shows how Afro-Cuban artists and intellectuals pioneered arguments about the exploitative use of lo negro to make national art and the central role of culture in shaping racial inequality.

Ivan Medenica here analyzes the cultural shift that the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) experienced after 1989. From its beginnings in the late 1960s until the end of the1980s, BITEF was a representation of the dominant multicultural, modernist, and progressive paradigm of Yugoslavia’s cultural policy. This was not an unambiguous position. On the one hand, modernist values were imposed by Tito’s authoritarian regime and, on the other, they were confronted with the conservative tendencies both in politics and the arts. As a multicultural and progressive platform, BITEF was one of the biggest victims in the field of the arts of Slobodan Milošević’s nationalist regime in the 1990s and the wars in former Yugoslavia. After the fall of Milošević in 2000, a complex period of tension started between the ‘reborn’ urge for democratization and internationalization, on the one hand, and persistent nationalism and conservatism, on the other. Due to its tradition, reinforced artistic ambitions, and international reputation, BITEF regained its fame. Its position today, however, is quite paradoxical. It is an anti-traditionalist and multicultural festival – within a culture and society that are becoming traditional and rather claustrophobic. Ivan Medenica is a Professor of Theatre at the University of the Arts in Belgrade in Serbia and has received the national award for theatre criticism six times. His publications include The Tragedy of Initiation, or the Inconstant Prince: The Classics and Their Masks. Medenica is also the artistic director of BITEF.

This article deals with the question of whether regional cultural competence centers foster the diversity of cultural expressions and how the objectives of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Convention on Cultural Diversity are implemented. By introducing the Convention on Cultural Diversity, the conditions of regional cultural policy governance, and the idea of regional cultural competence centers, a framework for evaluation is outlined. The evaluation of four regional cultural competence centers in the Swiss Central Region shows that fostering cultural diversity is complex and has many different approaches and effects. The final discussion concludes that principles such as “interculturality,” “freedom,” and “access for all” under the Convention on Cultural Diversity can promote a diversity of cultural expressions but that these criteria have to be set from outside—for example, by public funding institutions—so that regional actors implement them.

This article uses an “urban landscapes” perspective to examine the urban sculpture scene and its production system in Shanghai. It reviews both the national urban sculpture discourse and urban sculpture planning practices since 1949, and then focuses on Shanghai specifically. It examines three major stakeholders in urban sculpture development and their interactions. The main argument is that Shanghai's urban sculpture scene has evolved due to the proliferation of aesthetic and symbolic sculptures as opposed to traditional monuments; however, urban entrepreneurialism and globalization have been shaped by the continuity of the Chinese ideological framework, which has transformed urban sculptures from explicit into veiled political didacticism under the guise of caring for the people.

In the 1960s, the initial decade of the Cuban Revolution, policies of proletarianization of culture intersected an economic model built upon the heroic labor of the New Man—the ideal revolutionary and communist worker. Adapting the practice of ballet to this Marxist context, ballet dancers took their art to the working classes through popular performances and outreach events in farms and factories. Given the centrality of manual work to the revolution's ideology, dancers drew upon their own physical labor both in ballet and agriculture to establish an even stronger association with the working classes and embody the New Man's morality. Known for their strict work ethic, Alicia Alonso and other ballet dancers became public examples of hard work for the nation—one way of fulfilling the politico-pedagogical role that the state expected from artists. At the same time, media representations of female dancers’ labor enabled formulations of the New Man's gendered counterpart: the New Woman.

Since the mid-twentieth century, urban cultural policies have tended to broaden citizens’ access to cultural and arts facilities in most European cities. Italy saw its theatre infrastructure being enhanced by the teatri stabili which have emerged since the late 1940s, in developed urban contexts, and the decentralization of theatre activities during the 1970s, in the suburbs of cities as well as in small regional towns. This changed the distribution of theatregoing accessibility, but not sufficiently to make opportunities equal across the country's different geographical areas. In the present article Marco Serino discusses the decentralization of theatre in Italy, in particular as it has affected the southern Campania region, basing his argument on his own census of the venues in existence in southern Campania in 2008. Social, economic, and political issues are involved in the discussion since these always influence theatre policy and practice. Marco Serino was awarded his PhD in Sociology, Social Analysis, and Public Policies in 2010 at the University of Salerno, Italy. His research focuses on cultural and communication processes, particularly on theatre organizations and audiences.

This article seeks to explain why such a wide range of Cuban cultural producers have opted to remain on the island and work ‘within the revolution’, despite all the notorious problems caused by state censorship, political persecution and material shortages. It accounts for the importance of culture to the legitimacy of the revolutionary government; suggests that the regime has drawn effectively on the long-established significance of culture in Cuba's radical tradition; and illustrates the extent to which the government has backed up its rhetoric of commitment to culture for all with a sustained policy of support for institutions, organisations and events across the island. The main argument is that culture has been a key element – perhaps the only successful element – in the revolution's attempt to implement an alternative model of modernity that was distinctive not only from the Western capitalist version but also from that promoted by the Soviet Union.