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Focusing on a series of YouTube creators, this essay interrogates the persistence of the hegemonic power of the white male hardbody, arguing that digital facial replacements – in particular those of 1980s action stars – produce a mode of white, masculine identity that is essentially exchangeable and transactional. These bodies are capitalist commodities, fundamentally interchangable and asserting the same bundle of ideological traits. The technology of digital facial replacement allows creators to visualize this exchange value. As opposed to the pornographic, invasive, and misogynistic face swap videos originally posted on reddit.com by user ‘deepfakes’ in 2017, the facial replacement videos found on YouTube are more playful in nature, imagining alternate histories and using face swapping as a mode of comedy. This case study of 1980s action stars opens up to a broader examination of issues of identity in digital facial replacement. In the videos under analysis, gender swaps are relatively common, but ethnic swaps are scarce. The reluctance of the YouTubers to ‘blindcast’ their revisionist videos reveals a subtle critique of the fantasy of a post-racial world. Racial difference – and, perhaps, cultural specificity – remains intact, and the creators take a seemingly apolitical, comical, ‘safe’ approach to identity rather than an explicitly critical stance. By denuding the more threatening and destructive aspects of deepfakes, these YouTube videos produce a more palatable version of facial replacement. This version, however, is no less ideologically complex than its more explicitly political and misogynistic counterparts. These contemporary facial substitutions not only continue to ‘reboot’ white male hegemony, but they also function as an ideological reclamation of masculine power in the present through modified images of the (revisionist) past.

As contemporary theatre and new production models are now being evaluated with more regard to community empowerment, the importance of proper tools for evaluation of the process has increased. The article explored the community youth theatre practices of the Community Youth Cultural Centre (CYCC) of the National Commission on Culture (NCC) in Ghana. We examined the role of the youth theatre at CYCC in the light of community empowerment. Using the qualitative case study design, six artists with a minimum of five years and a maximum of thirty years of work experience with the CYCC were interviewed. Performance activities and documents of the CYCC were also observed and analysed. The findings revealed four themes: Objectives of the centre; Youth theatre practices; Abibigoro/puppetry theatre models; and non-formal and cultural education. It was found that staff and artists at the CYCC employed diverse theatrical modes to facilitate community empowerment processes. The study recommends that cultural and creative centres in Ghana should harness the potentials of the community youth theatre, develop community-specific and context-driven performance models to support artistic- aesthetic-cultural and non-formal education processes to enhance our collective strive for community empowerment in Ghana.

Cultural appropriation, as both concept and practice, is a hugely controversial issue. It is of particular importance to the arts because creativity is often found at the intersection of cultural boundaries. Much of the popular discourse on cultural appropriation focusses on the commercial use of indigenous or marginalized cultures by mainstream or dominant cultures. There is, however, growing awareness that cultural appropriation is a complicated issue encompassing cultural exchange in all its forms. Creativity emerging from cultural interdependence is far from a reciprocal exchange. This insight indicates that ethical and political implications are at stake. Consequently, the arts are being examined with greater attention in order to assess these implications. This article will focus on appropriation in literature, and examine the way appropriative strategies are being used to resist dominant cultural standards. These strategies and their implications will be analyzed through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature.

This article presents and discusses solo dance practices developed by Katrín Gunnarsdóttir during the years 2014–2020. She started to develop her practices with the solo work Saving History (2014), a chronological charting of her relationship with borrowing movement. As a consequence of that process she became interested in exploring the virtuosity of slowly morphing one movement into another, and that research developed into another solo work, Shades of History (2016). The act of warming up and getting ready for a performance formed the basis of the third solo, Dancing (to) (2020). Through this series of solo performances, Katrín has realized her ongoing interest in dancing labour, performing the archive and a focus on the dancing rather than the dancer.

Okada is one of the most internationally produced contemporary Japanese playwrights. American directors approach his work both as uniquely Japanese and as a synecdoche for the world. The story of Okada’s web of institutional, professional, and personal relationships is an object lesson in the foreign assembly of international works.

Teaching theatre and drama in primary and secondary schools is a very difficult task worldwide. In China, there is a huge demand for drama teachers who also know practical theatre. Taking on this mission, the Shanghai Theatre Academy started a program of “drama etudes.” This pedagogical experiment stimulated debate about opposing concepts in theatre education: imitation vs. improvisation.

Mairi McFadyen and Raghnaid Sandilands offer an account of various collaborative contributions and activities relating to creative cultural activism in the context of the Ceist an Fhearainn or the ‘Land Question’ in the Gàidhealtachd. They introduce the metaphor of ‘cultural darning and mending’ to describe a playful yet questioning creative approach that invites people to take agency in their own place, entering into an ethical and reciprocal relationship with the land, its past, people and their stories. They argue that the act of ‘taking cultural ownership’ is a vital step in consciousness-raising for land reform, a creative process that allows us to make imaginative connections that cut across time. By drawing on our pasts to assemble environmentally and socially just futures, they suggest that creative, cultural and convivial activism holds the potential to create the circumstances necessary for transformation and change.

Theatre has been associated with contagion and contagious emotions since Plato and Aristotle. In the twentieth century, Antonin Artaud proposed that theatre or performance should be like the plague that takes control of actors’ and spectators’ bodies and infects them with an affective energy. For these infections to happen, however, audiences and actors must be in the same room. In times of the corona pandemic, this spatial proximity has been substituted by theatre mostly performed and/or streamed online. This article offers some preliminary thoughts on this development: it considers what we descriptively call “viral theatre.” We argue that we currently witness a form of viral theatre that manifests itself through an interplay of three aspects: first, the fact that both performers and spectators are in a state of disruption, second, the willingness/expectations on the part of spectators to participate in the event, and, finally, the use of communication technologies such as Zoom. The framework of the pandemic, therefore, enhances and modifies what viral theatre can be and what kind of effect it can have, oscillating between more Platonic notions of dangerous contagion when plays force us to explore questions of complicity and the Aristotelian ideal of cathartic emotions when plays/performers reach out to us for moral support.

This essay is part of a wider research project that has introduced puppets into the drawing studio. Puppets are odd operators, and this is an unorthodox approach to drawing research. In this case, eccentricity is appropriate given that orthodoxies of skilfulness and good drawing are the subject of investigation. Unlike other contemporary practices that utilize puppetry as subject matter, motif and narrative device, this project invites draughtspuppets to make drawings. These draughtspuppets are distinct from automata and other drawing machines, and these distinctions are outlined. The paper focuses on the virtue and value of dexterity. In drawing and in puppet manipulation, dexterity brings scrutiny to the hands as the primary site of action and queries the relationship between ‘good hands’ and ‘good drawing’. The text begins by connecting traditions of dexterity, manipulation, drawing and puppetry before delving into the essence of puppets – their animism and (semi-)autonomy – and the tacit implications of dextrous hands. This article asks the question: can puppet ontologies expose the value of dexterity as a procedural component of (good) drawing? Connecting a range of puppet scholarship, the author’s interactions with the draughtspuppets and over 25 years of teaching experience, this article finally argues for the productive capacity of draughtspuppets to transform orthodox beliefs about the tenets of dexterity and good drawing. In the final passage, the motifs present in the draughtspuppets’ recent drawings are briefly analysed and correlated with this examination.

This article is a very short guide to navigating institutional racism within universities. Focal points of this piece are how institutional racism works, how it can be diagnosed, and how one can invent ways to survive it. The first section of this article is an overall analysis of how institutional racism is set up, particularly in the humanities and arts departments of North American universities. The second section is a step-by-step guide to surviving institutional racism in the university, and particularly in graduate programs. This article is distilled through and explained by first-hand experiences and observations and is written both to archive the structure and affect of the current atmosphere of institutional racism and to document and propose some strategies of awareness and resistance.

Joann Kealiinohomoku's Silhougraphs®, traces of the silhouettes of dancers, were her attempt to operationalize her cultural relativist commitments and create a new method of dance analysis. Silhougraphs illuminate underexamined scholarly presumptions, methods, and tools that both contributed to and paralleled the emergence of dance studies as a discipline. Silhougraphs are also a cautionary tale demonstrating the ways culturally sensitive research commitments and methods can unintentionally yet decisively reiterate tools and logics of racist typologies.

Dance theorists and legal scholars argue that choreography is by nature ill-suited to the conceptual framework provided by copyright, even as there is widespread agreement that works of dance deserve the legal protection and cultural endorsement that its inclusion represents. I reexamine the factors that are often cited as barriers to choreography's suitability for copyright. I argue that choreography is better suited to the copyright regime than it appears, so long as we recognize that the artistic standard for substantial similarity should be different from the legal standard.

Focusing on Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s 2010 play Aftermath to conceptualize verbatim theatre more broadly, this essay explores problems of mediation among refugees, which mostly stem from their linguistic exchanges. While scholarship on verbatim theatre about refugees has tended to analyze encounters between refugees and dramatists (and through the dramatists, audiences), I demonstrate that power relations inherent in the language of hospitality can also be observed between refugees belonging to the same nation. I turn to Derrida’s philosophy of hospitality and gift-giving to provide a theoretical framework for my inquiry. Especially when some refugees operate as mediators or translators who collaborate with dramatists, the reactions and opinions of other refugees can disclose the frictions among them and can foreground historical and cultural specificity within broader concerns about intercultural understanding. By challenging homogeneous depictions of refugees, this account offers an alternative to binary approaches to verbatim theatre.

Nancy Stark Smith passed away due to ovarian cancer on 1 May 2020. Her dedication to contact improvisation for nearly half a century—as a dancer, teacher, writer, and editor—contributed to its development and will continue to inform its ongoing vitality. But much remains uncertain for the future of contact improvisation. Complicated by the challenges of Covid-19, what sort of bodies will result from the practice going forward, and how might the form itself change?

This article examines the tensions and possibilities of audio drama in applied theatre and qualitative inquiry. Drawing on our experiences of making participatory audio drama, we argue that applied...

My aim is to consider how anarchy reads and resists punitive regimes in performance, particularly in ‘immersive performance’. Punk troupe Pussy Riot forms a starting point, via Riot Days in 2017‐18, with a sustained consideration on Inside Pussy Riot at the Saatchi Gallery in 2017, produced by Les Enfants Terrible. I concentrate on claims for authenticity that seem to lend theatre and performance legitimacy in relation to social change, to critique theatrical work with claims to producing agency, legitimizing hope for social transformation that is predicated on an ‘empowered’ spectator-participant. In the wake of these concerns, questions that bleed through this material relate to the limits of participation in performance and how and whether representations serve to dismantle state institutions. I consider whether the force of replications of cells, yards or gulags enables or disintegrates any activist, anarchist potential in performance. I take a wide-ranging view of anarchism beyond political theory to consider anarchism modelled in performance terms. Building from the example of Pussy Riot, the article defines performance critique through desire and anarchism, ‘manifesting desire’ or ‘anarchy as method’.

This article considers research as inquiry and social intervention through the lens of building theatre audiences. Detailing a research and creative collaboration with a Toronto-based theatre compa...

This article shares the playscript of an ethnodrama by and about people from religious backgrounds who identify as LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual/Aromantic; “+” refers to the multitude of other identities included within Queerness and/or Transness) that was devised and performed at Utah State University. The applied theater project sought to understand, value, and share these peoples’ experiences, including the myriad roles religion played in their lives. Applied theater works to inspire social change through the performance of live productions. This project strove to help amplify the participants’ voices as they explored topics and issues that they uniquely face. The central research question for this project was “How do people from religious backgrounds who identify as LGBTQIA+ understand, process, and interact with individuals and institutions they encounter on a regular basis?” Specific themes and topics included familial responses to participants’ queer and religious identities, how participants sought to find and create community, how they experienced acceptance and rejection, and ways religious belief intersected with their queer identities.

This paper presents a conversation between Lucia Gayotto and Marcio Meirelles curated by Pedro de Senna. In it, Gayotto and Meirelles discuss their experiences, respectively, at the Escola Livre de...

Greece owns one of the most extensive and best organized coastal and open sea lighting systems across the world. Some of the most breathtaking and historic lighthouses and beacons of the Hellenic Lighthouse Network have been characterized as "Monuments of Modern Cultural Heritage" and are available to visitors under certain circumstances. Greek lighthouses are austere albeit multi symbolic structures that enchant people seeking refined and reclusive experiences beyond the mass tourism spectrum. This paper aims at succinctly presenting the history of Greek lighthouses and examining the perspective of their valorization in cultural tourism, taking into account their legal framework, ownership status and inherent worthiness. Lighthouses represent tangible and intangible cultural values, which deserve to be rediscovered and communicated in ways that ensure sustainability and protection for lighthouse buildings and surrounding areas.

The case study presented in this article refers to the connection of drama-in-education and critical thinking in history, in order to highlight the importance of drama for the teaching of history in primary schools in Greece. The research plan adopted is quantitative and qualitative, and the research strategy applied is that of case study. For the purposes of this study, four scenarios based on drama-in-education techniques were designed and applied on a sample of forty-three primary students. The analysis of the findings show that the students’ understanding of historical contexts and objectives of historically active subjects was encouraged by drama-based instruction.

This article unpacks the notion of ‘carrying’ as an embodied set of influences that bear upon our research practices and journeys. It is widely recognised that we acquire and carry a body of books as intellectual companionship. It is not however readily acknowledged how we as researchers carry sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions, which stay with us and take time to appear before us, as methodological projects within our grasp. Researchers are carriers embarked on exchanges in a double sense. Firstly, we are embodied and affected by our life trajectories. There is a temporality to our research which is entwined with the very knots of our lives. Secondly, we are carriers through the specific ways in which we activate our research materials and relationships. In this article, the two elements of carrying are underlined as being intimately related.

This article considers feminist performance practices in relation to reproductive rights campaigns in an Irish context. Following the successful campaign to Repeal the 8th Amendment in 2018 and the decriminalization of abortion in Northern Ireland in 2019, I explore the significance of feminist performance practices in developing discourses concerning reproductive autonomy and challenging the idealizing of motherhood. Through a discussion of key works by Áine Phillips, Amanda Coogan and myself, I outline how in deploying their bodies in their work live artists make visible the impact of oppressive gendered constructs and resist the policing and shaming of reproductive bodies in an Irish context. I demonstrate how through performing transgressive acts, live artists have ruptured the silencing surrounding both abortion and maternal experience. My article further critically reflects on the performances of the London-based direct-action performance group Speaking of IMELDA, drawing on my first-hand knowledge gained through my participation in the group’s successive performative interventions between 2013 and 2018. I discuss the group’s collective public vocalizations and, sometimes brazen, use of performance to unapologetically advocate for reproductive rights within an Irish context in a variety of social and geographical settings. I situate the performance activist aesthetics of IMELDA in voicing the intergenerational perspectives and solidarities of the London-Irish feminist diaspora as contributing to broadening understandings of Irishness. In outlining how the various performance practices discussed within this article have operated against cultural constructs of femininity and unashamedly advocated for reproductive autonomy, I locate performance as contributing to the development of feminist discourses.

This article engages with the issue of the factors determining theatrical prominence, endorsing the “institutional approach.” In discussing the major mediating role played by theater reviewers in the canonization of individual playwrights, the article focuses particularly on two essential factors that contribute to and affect the processes of their canonization: a convergence of the mediating agents concerning the prominent theatrical contribution of the playwright in question; and the formulation of the playwright’s critical construct (an aggregation of traits recurring in the works seen as typifying the playwright in terms of influences and innovations). The careers of four British playwrights, Harold Pinter, John Arden, Sarah Kane, and Martin McDonagh, serve as the case studies. Three of these — Pinter, Arden, and Kane — demonstrate three differing trajectories that represent two distinctive possibilities, whereby either both factors are at play and canonization follows, or neither is at play and canonization fails. McDonagh represents an intriguing, different possibility in which one factor is at play while the other is absent. Thus, while the careers of three of the playwrights demonstrate the effectivity and consequent implications of the two factors, McDonagh’s trajectory illustrates the consequent effectivity of each factor separately and the relevant implications of such effectivity.

This article examines Eleo Pomare's concept of vitality in his pieceBlues for the Jungle(1966) as a black aesthetic approach to choreography. Vitality seeks to connect with black audiences in Harlem by referencing and affirming shared cultural knowledge, conveying an embodied epistemology of the US political economy defined by the lived experiences of Harlem: “Harlem knows.” Using a lens of diaspora citation, I argue that Pomare's choreographic citations of “vital” ways of moving and knowing in Harlem critique the terms for “proper” national belonging, while articulating diasporic belonging in motion.

This article approaches the concept musical as a form defined by epistemological self-critique. Inviting spectators to affectively engage with its thematic concerns precisely by problematizing the spectators’ pleasurable consumption of musical theatre conventions, the concept musical deploys this reflection for potentially political purposes. Through a close reading of Love Life, the 1948 musical often understood as the first concept musical, I argue that the show’s unique structure cultivates the sense that capitalism, as embodied in the conventions of popular entertainment, has intervened in the life and happiness of the musical’s central family. By critiquing popular culture, Love Life – itself an element of popular culture – questions whether its own materials, the popular songs that make up its score and the vaudeville show on which its form is based, are fragmenting and dangerous illusions. I show how Cabaret pursues a similar epistemological experiment, implicating spectators in the passive sensual pleasures that the show frames as having facilitated fascism – just as Company pursues a formal structure that implicates spectators in the issues of “observing the action” that plague its central character, Bobby.

Somatic dance practice is a much needed accompaniment to any dance training, with many benefits to the students. However, breaking through to a sceptical novice student can be a challenge. And for those who fall willingly into the practice, becoming overly internalized and disconnected to the external can be equally problematic. In response to these issues, the author advocates that costume could be the answer. This visual essay will reflect on the absence of costume in dance education and examine its somatic nature through the analysis of relevant performance works. Evidencing costume’s haptic nature and impact on the performing body, its comparison with somatic dance practice principles will be discussed. Finally, the author suggests a definition of the somatic nature of costume and its recommendation as a tool to support the teaching of somatic practice in dance education.

Today's challenges and developments − migration flows, globalization, diversification of educational pathways – clearly indicate that language teaching can no longer only take place within the framework of school and vocational training. Outside the context of schools, approaches which combine language learning with other goals of development or that are linked to concrete objectives appear most promising. A particularly challenging field is teaching languages to adult refugees, since language courses can seldom address the learning culture, the different learning speeds and key competencies adequately. In the wake of the current Corona crisis, the problem is becoming more pressing. By digitalization of language courses, there is the danger that people with better prerequisites benefit more from the offered courses than those more in need, and the gap between people with higher or lower learning success will widen further. The article uses the practical example JobAct Sprachkultur, which is a German programme for job placement, based on a combination of theatre methods, language learning and social work, to investigate the extent to which theatre methods can contribute to reducing educational inequality in the language acquisition of adult refugees/migrants. Based on a document analysis and qualitative spotlight surveys with the trainers of the program, the potentials and limitations of the theatre approach and its digital implementation can be shown.

This article considers ways in which solidarity across social locations might play a role in fostering resistance to vulnerability. My case study consists of the interplay between writer George Ryga’s 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, and Okanagan Syilx writer and scholar Jeannette Armstrong’s 1985 novel Slash. While these important and compelling texts have received considerable critical attention, the relationship between them is less known. I am interested in the ways in which these works both hail and offer critique to one another. In the contemporary moment, in which questions of appropriation of voice have gained renewed urgency within Indigenous literary circles in Canada and beyond, the relationship between these texts speaks to a historical instance of appropriation, but also of complicated processes of alliance-building. These texts demonstrate how agency resides across multiple locations. I read Ryga’s Ecstasy in the context of Jeannette Armstrong’s engagement with the play within her novel Slash in order to witness the ways in which Ryga’s text, in the first instance, appropriates Indigenous voices into an anti-capitalist critique. In the second instance, I read these works in order to witness how they might simultaneously provide a compelling analysis of the vulnerability of the people who are the subject of both works. I compare the interplay between Armstrong and Ryga’s texts to contemporary debates around appropriation in order to argue for the historical and ongoing importance of these two works as precursors to the crucial interventions made by contemporary Indigenous critics and writers.

This article introduces five principles of Deleuzian ontology and the conceptual framework of techniques and forces into emerging CCO scholarship addressing (dis)organization and power. By introducing Deleuzian concepts of (1) the virtual, (2) mutual (in)stability of meaning and materiality, (3) forces (and techniques), (4) communication, and (5) power, this essay builds a relational ontology that centers communication, speaks across existing theories of CCO, and offers a more detailed emphasis on power. In doing so, it enhances the explanatory power of CCO in general, as a set of theories useful for describing how organizational constitution and power play out in an increasingly (dis)organized world where the prevalence of bounded stable organizations can no longer be taken for granted.

Humour has various faces and forms, deriving from double meanings, situations, wordplay, often with hidden or obvious cultural references. It may also be subjective; the same things may seem humorous for some people and not funny at all for others. Probably most translators would agree that translating humour is definitely a very challenging task, especially when it is strictly related to the language itself or to a certain culture or community. However, there are certain forms of humour, especially situational or anecdotal, which focus on universal aspects or elements of human life, and therefore may be understood and considered as funny by people from different cultures. In this study, we discuss some theories, principles, recommended techniques and strategies related to translating jokes, wordplay, and humorous idioms which in our opinion may be included in the translator-training curriculum. We also examine the strategies and techniques used by a group of translator trainees in their second year of studies in translating humour from English into Hungarian, focusing on the difficulties they encountered, in order to assess their needs and include more practice and useful tips in the training process.

Theatre-making processes and performance opportunities offer young people who are vulnerable, marginalized or disenfranchised a means to rethink their current identities and consider different ways of being. This article discusses a three-month theatre-making programme with sixteen children from a low-income residential estate in Singapore. The programme, which culminated in two public performances, offered opportunities for the young people to re-engage with situations and experiences from their own lives. While exploration and story creation involved a fictional lens, the authors note the importance of including elements of authentic stories from the lives of participants. The theatre-making became a critical platform for the participants to examine the identities they performed; a state of being, and offered ways for them to see how they could shape future identities for themselves through the process of becoming. It was also a physical and dialogical space providing young people in need of supportive structures in their lives with alternative perspectives and voices.

Reacting to recent materialist developments in music studies and beyond, I argue for the value of dialectics in accounting for compositional orientations vis-à-vis their objects – be these objects sound-producing, non-human entities, such as musical instruments, or the object that is ‘sound itself ’. Engaging the compositional thought and practice of Busoni, Russolo, Varèse, Cage and Tudor by way of example, I highlight two intersecting tendencies: the first constitutes a presumed mastery over the object in question; the second is suggestive of an exploration of the object on its own terms. Interweaving aspects of post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that, ultimately, our orientation towards the object manifests a negotiation of the self in a changing material world.

This article problematizes the notion of ‘transformation’ in socially engaged theatre practice. A more nuanced understanding of the impact of theatre practice in marginal contexts is constructed from narrative analysis of the theatre workshop experiences of adolescents in a rights reparation program and men serving long prison sentences. In these contexts of double exclusion (poverty combined with the condition of being prisoners and homeless or violated adolescents), the participants’ long-term remembrances make constant reference to the theatre experience having signified a transit from one space or place to another. The theatre space was identified as a place of discovery, a place of validation and a place of relocation. Their theatre experience drew meaning from its implicit contrast to their everyday reality. It was a place they decided to make their own, because within it they truly experienced feelings of wellbeing not present in the marginal spaces they were inhabiting.

Colleges and universities that can withstand the fallout of the COVID-19 crisis will need to redouble their efforts to engage students in the kinds of intellectual and social experiences that cannot be attained remotely or in isolation. Public humanities, which promotes collaboration, civic and community engagement, and inter-institutional alliances, can be one such reparative force for the reconstructed university. This essay describes the work of graduate student researchers in an interdisciplinary public humanities seminar at Emory University who partnered with a large regional theater on a project involving dramaturgy and audience engagement for a spring 2020 production of Lynn Nottage’s play Sweat (first performed in 2015). The graduate seminar and the project—both before and in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak—offer a compelling model for critical humanistic pedagogy and research that counteracts the isolation and insularity exacerbated by the pandemic.

This article examines the role of pugilistic gesture and form in queer performance, focusing on Franko B’s Milk & Blood (2015) and Cassils’s Becoming an Image (2012). Walsh considers how pugilism functions as a mode for “working out” queer fights—personal and cultural—that offers us a performative complement or reverse-orientation to Sigmund Freud’s psychologically centered idea of “working-through” (1914). Reading these pugilistic performances along the slide between working through and working out—their psychic and material practices and effects—allows us to perceive the body as both the object of loss and trauma and, in practiced form, the key instrument of processing change. It compels us to keep the body at the center of debates of traumatic intervention and negotiation in queer studies and beyond, as the fighting bodies themselves appear to insist.

This article explores the political and ethical implications of performance representing the ongoing realities of migration in contemporary Britain. Using Good Chance Theatre's The Jungle (2018) as its point of departure, the article problematizes the use of dramaturgies of proximity to confect simplistic notions of empathy as tantamount to political change. In a Brechtian vein, the article argues for modes of distanciation to foster critical engagement among audiences at the site of contemporary performance on migration. Focusing upon the production's West End transfer, its use of immersive strategies and its use of a comedic model to address ongoing issues in migration, this article finds that such strategies are not as politically transgressive as marketing and critical reception often contend them to be, with the onus of responsibility placed solely upon the individual spectator.

In the globalized twenty-first century, the relevance of intercultural performance is to forge supporting infrastructures between collaborators of divergent sociocultural backgrounds and disciplinary training. Fostering such infrastructures is vital for reconfiguring existing social relations and redistributing resources in the face of increasing sociocultural asymmetry. However, I argue that transforming collaborating ‘strangers’ into interdependent components of a sustainable symbiotic community necessitates the implementation of a collaborative ergonomics. It is an ergonomics concerned with the efficiency and efficacy of collaboration that actively seeks to traverse boundaries and borders. Linguistic translation, lexical translation and the transference and co-production of embodied knowledge are the crucial steps for effecting a collaborative ergonomics. Signs of an emerging symbiosis include the increasingly collaborative relationships between the collaborators and the transformation of embodied practices into highly reflexive and rigorous praxis.

The two performative genres of the dybbuk constitute a reciprocal system—as a Jewish possession illness and as a canonical play. Tracking the two highlights the dialectical relationship between the dybbuk-as-illness and the Dybbuk-as-play. Dybbuk possession cases reemerged in Israel at the end of the 20th century; one new and highly publicized case in particular kindled opposing moral crusades.

In this research, we brought together various theories and speculative conceptual connections of otherness associated with liminality especially as seen through one methodological experiment and art-based intervention, namely flash mobs. From our perspective, liminality and liminal spaces are incomplete and always becoming since often they cannot be documented or described through existing language and normative concepts. Moving away from normativity and speaking back from liminal spaces carry risks since complex and intersubjective liminal spaces challenge the authority of the researcher, knowing, and doing in Academia. In this work, we use examples from our flash mob events to bridge theorizing and public performances, actual limit experiences, and twisted forms of (normative) scholarship. We ask what is being produced through art-based interventions, resistance, liminality, and twisted scholarship in the context of inquiry.

What if I could use my body-in-motion as a research tool? From the understanding that movement can be a site of knowledge and the body a thinking soma, this article supports a practice of studio laboratory as a somatic method of research, working with Laban’s principles of thinking in movement to investigate the genealogy of Laban practices in Brazil. Based on embodied research perspectives and Rudolf Laban’s praxis that proposes a ‘movement-thinking’ as well as the merging between cognition and action, the laboratory is a way to employ movement practice in the research without focusing on an artistic product but using art as a means of research and not necessarily its end. In this article, I discuss and describe the use of laboratory practice as a method for embodied and somatic research, providing two examples of how this practice was implemented as part of the methodology for drawing the genealogy of Laban practitioners in Brazil.

This positioning article explores a reimagining within the field of applied theatre where through the medium of puppetry, the art and artist may become one as a way of healing. Building upon conceptual principles of animism, transference and embodiment, it is proposed that puppeteer training be usefully integrated into the higher education applied arts and health curriculum as an extension to existing programmes. Value is given to the metaphorical use of the puppet in both education and therapy. It is proposed that puppeteers may gain value from engaging with cross-disciplinary art-based research as a way to further understand puppetry’s uses and furthering their own practices.

The theoretical turn to object ontologies in the social sciences and the humanities brings puppetry work related to illness, disability and health to the forefront of artistic practice-as-research, disability studies and the medical/health humanities. Articulating chronic illness and disability through the tools and practice of puppetry animation can help form complex embodiment, where the person is empowered to value their embodiment as a site of knowledge. Puppetry pedagogy can train the bodies of medical students and clinicians to develop the capacity for embodied attunement and may decolonize both the knowledge of the body and medical education by reunifying mind, body and imagination. By training to perceive materials both physically and poetically, puppetry allows silenced bodies and histories to speak.

This article will discuss how the puppet’s body is the perfect vessel to reclaim the voices of those that have been ‘othered’.1 It examines the history of the fractured puppet and the emergence of disability-affirmative puppet theatre in the twenty-first century, exploring the puppet’s ability to fracture, reform and move in new and exciting ways that allow different approaches of expression; these seek to challenge how the body, the puppeteer and the puppet are viewed. I will examine how puppet plays, A Square World, Meet Fred, The Iron Man and my own show Pupa, represent disability through puppets’ bodies in new and interesting ways. Through the use of the puppet’s body, these shows seek to shine a light on the absurdity of an exclusive world and make us question the cultural constructions around the disabled and puppet body.

Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly.

Drawing on somatic practice, psychology, philosophy and the dance experience, this article operationalizes Sartre’s ideological response to movement pedagogy. The ‘thisness’ experience of embodiment during traditional dance styles negatively impacts on the realization of our body’s somatic potential. However, Sartre’s ‘body-for-itself’ mode can be stimulated with certain somatic practices, due to the concentration on the inner experience and sensations present in the body. In this sense, the body becomes a learning outcome in itself, through a deep and respectful connection with the dancer’s inner being. Pedagogically, this combination of Sartre’s theory with holistic techniques of the self, specifically the fundamental principles of Feldenkrais and dance literacy, can benefit the realization of individual potential during dance, and optimize positive embodiment. This article discusses initial materializations of the learning experiences of the dance student, informed by Sartre’s thinking on embodiment, and a theoretical discussion of the pedagogical implications of Sartre’s ideas for somatic pedagogy in contemporary dance.

Drawing on refugee studies, “Picturing Katrina: The Queer Child and Black Death-Birthing Narratives” explores the transient performance of antiblack and refugee policies and procedures and how this transmutation manifested around Hurricane Katrina. The article focuses on Beasts of the Southern Wild, which is an allegory of Hurricane Katrina, and its black death-birthing narrative— Beasts calls upon a black girl to produce an imagined future grounded in the reproduction of a structure hostile to black life. By positing her as harbinger of a more sustainable ecological future, Beasts’ black death-birthing narrative queers Hushpuppy, a 6-year old living in intense poverty. This article focuses on Beasts to explore the relationship among the watery deaths and depths of Hurricane Katrina, refugee policies, and transatlantic slavery. The article closes with a brief turn to a “real-life” black death-birthing narrative featured in People magazine in order to not only to suggest the breadth of media forms that utilize black death-birthing narratives centering on childhood and disaster, but also to begin to interrogate the material conditions that enable the proliferation of these narratives as well as the narratives’ material effects.

The public video project The Public Library includes the performance of writing field notes and of choreographed dance sequences — which together serve as an ethnographic prompt for discussions about city life in northwestern Canada. The growing presence of crystal methamphetamine in sidewalk life and in the lives of First Nations persons is part of the discussion.

This visual essay explores the creative practice of The Stitchery Collective, which uses costume as a strategy in their participatory works. Inspired by performance artist, queer icon and costume lover Leigh Bowery, The Stitchery Collective has created The Bowery Party, a series of events encouraging radical dress up. These immersive occasions emphasize the significance of costume as enabling joy, community and extravagant social performance. The essay discusses the importance of Bowery as a figure in designing the party in terms of the nature of participant responses, as his legacy provides a subversive approach to costuming the self. The analysis focuses on strategies for and the importance of making and holding space, both physical and virtual, for alternate visions of the body – an empowering ethic that celebrates diversity and inclusivity. The costumes created by the attending public are challenging, often both to wear and to social, gender and body norms. This essay offers a brief example of the costumes created by participants in direct response to Bowery as a radical, slippery and chaotic aesthetic target.

In this paper, I reflect on the body–landscape relationship based on my experience with directing and choreographing my dance film Human Habitat in which a dancer takes us on a journey from a sustainable to a destructive relationship with the Arctic landscape. I outline the background and thoughts involved in producing a dance film in the Arctic and analyse the characteristics of the dancer’s bodily interventions with the landscape. I investigate the properties of being embedded in a processual landscape and examine the consequences of these properties for choreographing movement in a landscape. I further outline how the film evokes kinaesthetic empathy and therefore fulfils my intention of bringing the Arctic into people’s awareness. My examination has a phenomenological approach, and I draw on processual theories of landscape, material specificity and kinaesthetic empathy. I denne artikkelen vil jeg reflektere over forholdet mellom kropp og landskap basert på min erfaring med å regissere og koreografere dansefilmen min Human Habitat. En danser tar oss med på en reise fra et bærekraftig til et destruktivt forhold til det arktiske landskapet. Jeg skisserer bakgrunnen og tankene om å produsere en dansefilm i Arktis og analyserer egenskapene til kroppslige intervensjoner med landskapet. Jeg undersøker egenskapene ved å være innebygd i et prosessuelt landskap og undersøker hvilke konsekvenser disse egenskapene har for å koreografere bevegelser i landskap. Jeg skisserer også hvordan filmen fremkaller kinestetisk empati og derfor kan oppfylle intensjonene mine om å bringe Arktis til folkets bevissthet. Min undersøkelse har en fenomenologisk tilnærming, og jeg trekker på prosessuelle teorier om landskap, materialspesifisitet og kinestetisk empati.