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Since the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in 1952, invisibility and hypervisibility have ranked among the central metaphors of black cultural production and the critical discourse on blackness. This article takes Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size (2007) and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (2018) as case studies for discussion of the ways in which contemporary African-American dramatists engage the familiar (and co-constitutive) poles of invisibility and hypervisibility to advance a new, more relational model for visualizing blackness. The article argues that pairing the plays uncovers an under-examined resonance between longstanding conversations in theatre and performance studies about disappearance and recent ones across disciplines on opacity.

Cornelius Cardew named his monumental graphic score Treatise after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophical masterpiece Tractatus logico-philosophicus, and this well-known fact has engendered speculation about whether there might be other connections between Cardew’s composition and Wittgenstein’s book. Previous commentaries have focused on possible allusions to the Tractatus in the visual imagery employed by Cardew, and this article includes further suggestions of this type. However, it concentrates on more general affinities between Treatise, as Cardew conceived of it prior to his involvement with the free improvisation group AMM, and the philosophy adumbrated in the Tractatus. Foremost among these is a striking concordance between Cardew’s initial enthusiasm for an isomorphic mode of interpreting Treatise and Wittgenstein’s picture theory of the proposition. The article also excavates traces of the picture theory in the numerological basis of Volo solo, a more conventionally notated by-product of the Treatise project.

Clare Barron’s award-winning 2018 play Dance Nation revolves around a group of elite young dancers as they prepare for the annual competition season. Praised for its authentic depiction of adolescence, ferocious and witty feminism, no-holds-barred dialogue, and engagement with women’s lives in our #MeToo moment, Barron’s work also features distinctive casting and performance directives. By encouraging productions to use adult actors without dance talent, Barron seeks to counter mainstream cultural representations of teenagers. But in performance, these directives create dissonance not only with her narrative but also with her efforts to portray the nexus of young women and artistic excellence. Additionally, Barron relies upon both conventional dance narrative tropes and dramaturgical structures that reinscribe her characters within the cultural framework she aspires to resist. Closer analysis suggests that Dance Nation ultimately offers deeply conflicted images of youth-forward feminism and girl culture, undermining Barron’s stated goal “to present a different picture of teenage girls onstage.”

This article presents Richard Alston's re-visioning of Chopin's music through two works: Such Longing (in two versions, 2005/2015), and Mazur (2015). Alston rescues the composer from dance associations with romance and sweet sentiment and celebrates his more robust, bolder and darker gamut of expression. The article includes detailed analysis of a range of solos and duets (for two men as well as for a woman and a man). Alston is widely regarded as an exceptionally musical choreographer, and the article identifies a particular choreomusical style emerging from his work. There is discussion of structural aspects, involving both music and dance, pursuing the dynamic interaction between them, and of creative processes and changes in the dances through the history of their performance. A landmark feature of Alston's choreomusical style is to allow rhythmic detail to shift more than most other choreographers would wish, encouraging subtle changes of relation to musical beat and bar-line as movement phrases ‘breathe’ within performance. I also foreground my own analytical process, which draws from music theory as well as dance principles. Film clips and music examples, some of which incorporate aligned notes on the choreography, illustrate my analyses.

Produced immediately before and during the presidency of Barack Obama, Julia Cho’s The Piano Teacher (2007) reflects the evasions of a contemporary moment when claims that the United States had become “post-racial” were particularly pervasive. The play offers a model of how the intimate relationship between paper and performance in drama might capture the contradictions of post-racial discourse. In its theatrical staging, the play generally discourages considerations of how racial demarcations might impact the relationships among its characters; however, it explicitly rejects this position in the published “Author’s Notes.” This gap between paper and performance becomes a site for staging a confrontation among an insistence on colour-blindness, ongoing suspicion of racialized bodies, and the seemingly paranoid responses prompted by the convergence of these two forces.

February 2010. The lights are off. As I adjust to the dark I can make out shapes of others scattered around the room. Disoriented and uncertain I wait for some sign or direction of what to do. The air is thick with anticipation, but as time drags it becomes clear that no instructions are coming. Then it begins all around me. Sat in the dark in a workshop in the courtroom studio of Toynbee Studios, I begin to feel anxious. I see the outline of another body in front of me and I panic. I should do something. I reach for anything that might keep things working, that might keep play going. Does anyone want to dance, I ask. I waltz. I sense someone dancing behind me.In what follows I think through my participation in a 2010 workshop led by Anne Bean, recounted in part above, to understand better the role of play in the conditions of production for theatre and performance under capital. Bean is an interdisciplinary artist, belonging to (or claimed by) multiple experimental art scenes, including visual, performance, and sound art, who has been a central figure of European live art since the 1970s. The workshop, which was conducted largely in the dark and focused on the aestheticization of cooperation through an emphasis on its participants doing play was held at Artsadmin's Toynbee Studios, the influential UK arts producing organization's home in East London. This article puts my account of Bean's workshop in conversation with Victorian economist Arnold Toynbee's demand for a new capitalist morality. Toynbee's appeal was, of course, not directed at me or the other workshop participants disoriented and uncertain in the dark. But, I argue, the situation of play that arose in Bean's workshop is a contemporary iteration of what Toynbee called agospel of life,a term referring to a commitment to self and civic betterment at the core of a burgeoning capitalist morality. The connection between the shaping of Victorian labor practices and the staging of cooperation between participants in Bean's contemporary workshop is the basis for this essay's core assertion: that the value of play as a counterpoint to work within practices and discourses of theatre and performance needs considerable rethinking.

1972: Charlotte Moorman walked onto a concert hall stage – nude – and played a cello made of ice until it melted. 2001: Joan Jeanrenaud re-staged Moorman's piece wearing a wetsuit and brandishing a pitchfork. 2017: Seth Parker Woods performed a ‘protest’ version on an obsidian-coloured ice instrument. In this article, I argue thatIce(d) Music/Cello/Bodieshas become a musico-political palimpsest, a measure of the way Moorman and her art have been recuperated through performative historiography. Through a reconstruction of the historical circumstances under which Moorman, Jeanrenaud, and Parker Woods realized their performances, I show how contemporary discourses of gender and race are materialized through the physical and metaphorical resonances of human bodies in proximity to an unusual musical instrument. I explore the ‘palimpsest’ both as a theoretical lens that insists on texts as simultaneously overwritable and recoverable and as a methodology providing an analytic framework for broader study of avant-garde re-enactment.

This article discusses dissemination of dances in and out of Sweden, and the dancing communities these processes create. The examples are the African-American Lindy Hop, which originated in New York City, and the polska, a couple dance considered to be the number one Swedish folk dance. Both dances were once used in local community dancing, while today they belong to dancing communities in many places around the world.

This article examines dance pieces premiered in the Nordic countries at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015. Framed by the heated debates on current immigration policies, as well as prevailing tropes of a theater of migration and the figure of “the migrant,” the analysis centers on the potential for creating spaces of resistance in the encounter between choreographic performance and spectators. Drawing on analytical concepts such as migratory aesthetics and choreographic agency, the focus is on the interrelationship between the choreographic articulations of experience of migration and their materialization before an audience.

This essay considers what it might mean to learn ‘through’ Beckett, inaugurating a critical pedagogy that could be called ‘Beckettian’. By integrating existing strands of scholarship on Beckett and his relationship to education, the essay draws a distinction between the ‘practical’ and ‘biographical’ ways of thinking about Beckett and learning. This draws on previous work within the field, but also proposes a new vocabulary – derived from an interdisciplinary encounter with the scholarship of teaching and learning and the philosophy of education, especially ‘critical pedagogy’ – through which the possibility of ‘Beckettian pedagogies’ might be manifested. Recalling Beckett's biographers, his work's fundamental silence haunts most attempts to contain, explain, avoid or domesticate it. The essay proposes that a critical pedagogy of Beckett must be grounded in the concept of openness, especially in the notion that ‘void’ is a productive category, and in the embodiment of an evolving ecology of praxis. This alternative pathway reflects on the philosophy of education inherent within Beckett as an idea, engaging with ‘Beckettian pedagogies’ in an entangled sense of instruction, guidance and teaching with a particular focus on the latter in terms of the theory or principles of education. This move does not require abandoning existing traditions, but rather gathering them under new light, by placing the biographical Beckett (1906–89) in juxtaposition with the praxis of Beckett (ongoing) and the contemporaneous notion of critical pedagogy, as expounded by several scholars including Paulo Freire (1921–97). Beckettian pedagogies therefore remove dormant assumptions, habits of mind, and hierarchies that impede exploration to enable a move away from the curriculum, or toward a curriculum of unlearning and uncertainty, thereby disrupting the entrenched powers that Beckett saw fit to resist.

This practice-research (PaR) piece proposes autobiophony (vocal autobiography in/through voice) as both a new area of research for interdisciplinary voice studies practitioner-scholars and a distinct methodology for probing the interconnections of selfhood, narration, performativity, intersectional positionality and voicing. Using as a point of departure the PaR performance-lectureA Voice Is. A Voice Has. A Voice Does., devised by the author, this Voicing interrogates the makings of the polyvocal self as monophonic chorus. The I-voicer of the PaR piece is examined as both constitutively plural and communicatively dialogic (but never resolved as either), enacting a complex dramaturgy of belonging. Framed by a working manifesto on autobiophony, the Voicing below is itself composed in a way that invites autobiophonic engagement by the reader-listener and proposes suggestions for using autobiophony as pedagogy, performance analysis tool and research methodology.

This article considers the nature of vocal hyperreality in bio-musicals: a form of musical theatre in which actors simulate the voices of well-known pop singers or groups in theatrical retellings of their lives and careers. To do so, I employ the four successive stages of simulacrum found in Jean Baudrillard’s ‘The precession of simulacra’ (1981) to consider the potentials and limitations of such vocal simulation in the act of (re)authoring pop singers for the musical stage. Considering the way in which such performances mask or denature their source material (the ‘original’ voices of pop singers and artists), while at the same time employing a dual temporality of cultural memory and current experience, I offer a neologism that may help articulate the complex experience for audience members who attend these productions. The final part of the article considers the peculiar convention of releasing Original Cast Recordings of these works, arguing that these may be symptomatic of Baudrillard’s simulacrum, as popular culture reaches a terminus from which it is unable to progress without regression, intertextuality or manufactured nostalgia.

Contemporary halling, seen in theatrical dance works by the Norwegian choreogaphers Hallgrim Hansegaard and Sigurd Johan Heide, exists in a fluid interplay between traditional dance and influences from other cultures. This article examines how typical halling moves are negotiated and “remixed” through practices taking place inside and outside of the Nordic sphere. Hansegaard and Heide can be seen as representatives of “wayfinding artists,” influenced by migrant practices through moving, “wayfinding” in and out of the Nordic region.

It is through voice that oftentimes individuals find themselves breaking with conventions and systematically ingrained injustices. In the recent literature in the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary voice studies, the phenomenon of voicing has been projected as a powerful process, across cultures, to represent human agency at its most potent, and this article is a critical discussion on this very uniqueness of voicing in relation to social equity, corporeality and cultural value. The author, a female singer-researcher of Karnatik music of South India, unpacks the burdens and privileges of voice in the light of cultural contingency, global mobility and interculturality. Following a discussion encompassing literature and theories on voice, historical ideas of voice and feminist critiques on voice and the voicing female body from a South Indian angle, the author proposes a Pentagonal Entanglement framework for equitable engagement with the voice ‐ across scenarios and cultures, to critically address the socially pressing issues of our time through the medium of voice.

This article examines changes in casting practices which have begun to put black, Asian, and minority ethnic actors more regularly on British screens and in more significant parts. In the context of calls for improving BAME involvement at all levels of the film and television industry, I look in particular at how colour-blind casting has begun to have an impact on British cinema. The article looks initially at how calls for the campaign for changes entwine with the British tradition of public service broadcasting and examines the socially conscious criteria for casting introduced by the BBC and the BFI in 2016. I suggest that some of the ambiguous expectations of audiences in relation to colour-blind casting are similar to the potentially contradictory aspirations placed on institutions which receive public funding. In order to examine these issues in some detail, I draw on textual and paratextual analysis to demonstrate how frames of reference for understanding new approaches to casting can be found in recent period adaptations, a British genre strongly associated with whiteness by actors and critics. The examples discussed span the decade: Wuthering Heights (Arnold, 2011), Lady Macbeth (Oldroyd, 2016), and Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). The analysis demonstrates that while casting for the public good is becoming more common it nevertheless remains a complicated and controversial strategy.

How much is a theatrical design idea worth? Alternatively, how much should a professional theatre designer be paid? For many working today, standard minimum contract scales and “industry standards” help guide fee negotiations. In the United States, United Scenic Artists (USA) Local 829 was among the first bodies to align theatrical design with organized labor activism, and as such, its standard minimum contract for design is an object lesson in the value of artistic labor. These scales were developed nearly a century ago, and were the product of hard negotiation and legal action taken by US-American designers in the interwar period. Lee Simonson and Jo Mielziner are best remembered for their revolutionary use of space, scenery, and lighting, yet their professional advocacy within USA Local 829 provided the basis for today's standard design fees. Further, their defense of fair payment during the Depression and war years preserved scenic design as a form of labor analogous to other backstage crafts and trades.

PurposeThis article aims to bring together and demonstrate overlaps in three different areas of reflexive research concerned variously with audiences for contemporary dance. These are: 1) artists reflecting on their own creative process and engaging other researchers in doing so, generating new insights and language as a result; 2) humanities-based dance studies and a small number of dance scholars reflecting on this “process turn” in dance; and 3) the field of empirical audience studies, drawing on a single study specifically interested in access to creative process. The goal is to propose how these areas might coexist and mutually inform each other.Design/methodology/approachThe approach develops a three-fold framework where the multiple definitions and examples of reflexive research in dance-making processes coexist. It draws systematically on a detailed example of one self-reflective study conducted by a dance company into creative process, on new scholarly writing on the “process turn” in dance research and written analysis of a unique audience research project as well as related literature.FindingsIn conclusion, the article suggests that in whatever combination of different research approaches, empirical evidence is increasingly important. This risks tipping the balance towards a more utilitarian understanding, particularly in the area of audience studies. It is possible to counterbalance this with approaches from artists and scholars interested in understanding arrived at through reflexive study of creative practice.Originality/valueThe original contribution is to bring these three areas together for the first time to expose difference and overlaps and suggest that challenges of understanding (in a non-utilitarian form) could be mitigated through more systematic dialogue between them, such as presented here.

This paper examines the influence of intense scrutiny from Ofsted on school leadership and policy enactment. Data was collected in a coastal area of deprivation, providing the setting for a detailed case study of school leadership in a state secondary school and a state primary school, both with recent or ongoing experience of intense scrutiny from Ofsted. Seventeen interviews were undertaken with staff involved in leadership roles. The analyses of data and discussion form an understanding of how policy is enacted in relation to the dual responsibility that school leaders negotiate between the local context at Seatown and Ofsted. This paper suggests that Ofsted forces a privileging of a compliant and consistent enactment of policy; a hyper-enactment of policy, that reduces the capacity of school leaders to address the significant social context of the school. Foucault’s work on self-disciplinary technologies provides insight into the micropolitical spaces which open up for some school leaders. The discussion on the micropolitics of compliance and resistance offers insight into the tensions pertinent to school leadership teams and explores issues relevant to those interested in policy and inspection activity, particularly those within areas of deprivation.

In 2012 The Chinese Room launchedDear Esther, a video game that would go on to shape video game history and define a new genre: the walking simulator. Walking simulators renounce traditional game tropes and foreground walking as an aesthetic and as a dramaturgical practice, which engages the walker/player in critical acts of reading, challenging and/or performing a landscape. In October 2016,Dear Estherwas adapted as a site-responsive, promenade performance set on the Scottish island of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth. The resulting performance,Dear Rachel, was then experienced alongside the game under the umbrella nameInchcolm Project. This hybrid event ‐ multimedia (promenade performance, gameplay and musical performance) and mixed-reality (with physical, augmented and virtual components) ‐ required the development and implementation of complex processes of remediation and adaptation. Drawing from a range of theories and practitioner reflection, this article puts forward a design framework ‐ storywalking ‐ which reconciled the two adaptation challenges: responding to the site and to the game.

This article re-evaluates William Butler Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand as a site of transnational exchange. By focusing on the play’s occult symbolism – specifically characters and images drawn from tarot cards – the article argues that Yeats proffers transnationalism and utopianism in place of militant nationalism. Furthermore, his use of palimpsestic imagery creates a queer, deferred, and affective aesthetic that refuses tight definitional boundaries and imagines a potential role for the occult in transnationalism and decolonization.

In August 2018, Ken Wilson completed Wood Mountain Walk, the first in a series of walking performances he intends to conduct—some solo, some with other people—in Treaty 4 territory in southern Saskatchewan over the next two years. “ Wood Mountain Walk and the Possibilities of Decolonization through Relationships with People and Land in Solo Walking Performance” examines the possibility that walking performance could open possibilities for decolonization by helping settlers begin developing non-extractive relationships with the land.

When Gordon Bottomley’s verse play Gruach (1918) was first published and staged, it was met with unanimous critical praise. Like Bottomley’s earlier, equally praised King Lear’s Wife (1915), Gruach built upon its Shakespearean inspiration (in this case, Macbeth) to reimagine its central female protagonist. In its dramatization of a forceful heroine confined by social and aesthetic conventions and in its emphasis on female sexuality, expression, and agency, the play aligned itself with some of the central themes of the New Drama. It also distanced itself aesthetically from neo-Elizabethan verse drama and Victorian and Edwardian commercial approaches to the staging of Shakespeare. In Gruach, Bottomley engages critically and aesthetically with some of the central tensions that characterized definitions of the modern drama at the time. He does so, however, by insisting on a contemporary imperative to defy social realism and argumentation and to return “poetry” – through language, stage design, and narrative – to an audience starved of beauty and the representation of putatively timeless, essential truths. In Gruach, the last of his dramas for what he would later term a “theatre outworn,” Bottomley engages with his Shakespearean inspiration in such a way as both to articulate a distinct dramatic aesthetic and to address prominent contemporary themes. In so doing, he also provides a significant, overlooked manifestation of an alternative vision for the modern stage.

Over the past decade, immersive theatre productions have rapidly increased not only in number but in scale: more actors, bigger sets, more elaborate tasks for the audience to complete. This article looks at Talk Is Free Theatre’s The Curious Voyage, which sent its audiences from Barrie, Ontario, to London, England, in the context of an increasingly competitive immersive theatre industry, its neo-liberal appeal to adventurous theatregoers, and the artistic and technical risk in treating audiences as co-creators in demanding productions.

Premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2016, Ella Hickson’s play Oil uses an elongated time span to show the growth in global dependence on oil since the nineteenth century and to speculate on its future consequences. Hickson’s play is formally influenced by the disrupted-time plays of Caryl Churchill. The present article, however, makes the case for another playwriting influence: that of George Bernard Shaw, whose discussion plays Oil comes to resemble in its third and fourth parts. Adopting the language Shaw uses in his critical study The Quintessence of Ibsenism, the article argues that Oil stages, in its dramaturgy, a dialectical struggle between the Shavian and Churchillian traditions. Viewed in this light, Hickson’s next play, The Writer, can be read as a synthesis of Oil’s formal experimentation and the critical reaction to it.

The scholarship on Tom Stoppard’s theatrical engagement with philosophy has glossed over the playwright’s unique choice to use both analytic philosophers as characters and analytic methodology in his dramaturgy. This article, considering the 2013 radio drama Darkside, argues that Stoppard creates a uniquely analytic dramatic and theatrical universe in his “analytic plays,” which include Jumpers and The Hard Problem. Darkside imagines Philippa Foot’s famed “trolley problem” thought experiment, a cornerstone in analytic ethics, with one character existing in an abstract “thought experiment universe” that tests the longstanding distinction between “physical/mental” and “body/mind.” In so doing, Stoppard creates new avenues for collaboration among analytic philosophy, drama, and theatre.

Full out the plug in order to get back to the physical body.—Marshall McLuhan, 19 December 1978Four Years Before a Massive Stroke Took Away his Ability to Speak, Marshall McLuhan Advised his Son Eric To “Develop the power and habit of listening. It is not a power that I have, and nobody ever told me how to go about getting it.” A notorious talker who would “lecture and discourse nonstop if anyone else was present” (Marchand 273), and who frequently telephoned his friends and colleagues in the wee hours of the morning to discuss his latest idea, this English professor turned media theorist was also one of the first academics to recognize and seize the opportunities offered by the new media of popular culture to reach audiences wider than the readerships of scholarly journals. From the 1960s onward, McLuhan made dozens of appearances on radio and television and even made a cameo film appearance: in Woody Allen'sAnnie Hall, he silences an arrogant Columbia University professor by declaring, “You know nothing of my work.” At once a raconteur and an aphorist, he was most alive when processing his thoughts aloud to a live audience, whether in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recording studio, at his family dinner table, or in his office at the University of Toronto, where he dictated many of his later writings (books, articles, and correspondence) to his secretary, Margaret Stewart (“Marge”). “Telephone conversations with Marshall would turn into miniature symposia,” recalled the University of Toronto president Claude Bissell (qtd. in Nevitt 284). Ironically, given his own wee-hours use of the telephone, McLuhan theorized this medium of secondary (or electronic) orality as “an intensely personal form that ignores all the claims of visual privacy prized by literate man” and as “an irresistible intruder in time or place” (Understanding Media296).

Every evening from 28 June to 24 September 2017, twenty-five minutes of digitally mapped and projected images transformed the concrete undersurface of Vancouver’s Cambie Street Bridge into a wild river filled with migrating salmon. Billed as a hybrid form that blends “cinematic storytelling and high-tech art installation” (Uninterupted.ca), the work spun a complex web of relations between humans, non-humans, and places, with a goal of inciting activist-style commitment to the issue of salmon depletion. The article argues that Uninterrupted manifests a civic imaginary in which urban infrastructure, a major catalyst of environmental degradation, can participate, through aesthetic intervention, in an act of recovery of biotic life.

Digital-audio performance walks can be powerful performances, responding to troubling pasts, giving voice to testimony, and creating an affective geography that satisfies a participant's desire to connect with the city rather than just walk through it. Yet digital-audio performance walks also raise questions about performance and voyeurism, and the disconnection of private headphone experience, alongside issues of agency, detachment and appropriation. This article addresses key issues associated with digital-audio performance walks, using two case studies of performance walks (from Israel and Ireland), that aim to communicate politically charged and painful histories, which are at once ‘now’ and ‘then’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. The article considers some of the risks in digital-audio performance walks: dark tourism, privatization and empathic quietism. Finally, the article assesses what creative strategies are available to creators – and audiences – to make collaborative performance walks that galvanize spectators to become active witnesses.

We Are All Treaty People is a Canadian play for young audiences (ages eight to twelve) that addresses difficult knowledge, Elders’ story sharing, and contemporary and historical Indigenous–settler relations. This article discusses the contemporary and historical political context of the play and its production, the creation process and its narrative anchors. It argues that through a respectful, Indigenous-led creation process, and structural techniques, the play has the potential to offer hope and healing, and encourage relationships based on knowledge.

During the 2018 World Cup in Russia, two Kosovo-born Swiss players stirred controversy when they flashed a double-headed eagle gesture during a contentious win over Serbia. The gesture was an assertion of ethnic Albanian pre-eminence in Kosovo and a rhetorical strike against the Serbians, who still claim ownership over Kosovo even ten years after its declaration of independence. The gesture sparked worldwide media coverage and prompted punishments by FIFA (the World Cup's governing body), which legislates against overt political expression during matches. In this article, I will examine the double-headed eagle gesture as an example of the body's unique capacity to perform multiple political interventions at once. Not only did it transmit a contentious history, it also undermined the anti-political boundaries erected around the scenarios of transnational combat engendered by FIFA, highlighted anti-immigrant sentiments still festering across Europe, and illustrated the communicative powers that elite players can access through their goal celebrations. Considering these valences supports my reading of this case as symbolic of the sort of ruptures produced by competing impulses operating in Europe today, one working for the affirmation of the union, the other for its dissolution.

We are increasingly experiencing an antagonistic polarization within the art schools. This seems to reflect the contemporary socio-political atmosphere, ruled by inequalities and injustices, fuelled by a narrative of scarcity and competition and by a very broadly spread mistrust, when not aggression, towards the very idea of the institution. As a matter of fact, schools are one of the few institutions in the theatre field providing a space for such polarizing relationships: they provide a space for friction, for conflict even.This paper approaches the theatre school as an institution and a thinking entity, in the attempt to explore the forms of agonism that it makes possible, and how they can support positive forms of polarization. It assumes the perspective that “we are the institution” and, by acknowledging the agency that each of us has within artistic institutions, suggests some ways of thinking and practicing theatre school otherwise.

This paper presents a QA conversation held at the Performance Philosophy Biennial in Amsterdam, 2019. Three presentations responded to the conference call of ‘intervening in the habit of academia as a place for mature or adult voices,’ by exploring ways of making space for children’s voices. Connected by a focus on intergeneration dialogues, children’s disruption and the possibilities of empowerment, both within education and within familial structures, the three presentations opened a discussion about interpellation, sensitivity and (in)security. This paper presents this discussion in a reworked and extended format, offering insight into the presentations on the day, the subsequent conversation and the overarching questions that these dialogues provoke.

This is my first attempt at approaching the notion of agency as a practice though the mode of dancing and writing; deconstructing and reconstructing what I know experientially and what I am trying to comprehend theoretically. I am looking for a way of releasing bodily capacities from the jurisdiction of the mind, whose cartesian definition I don't attempt to deny, as most people I have the chance to work with and teach exhibit in one way or another proof of the fact they’ve embodied the concept. All the while, I am considering philosophical texts, anatomical texts, and (science) fiction; I am taking into account my bodily experience, I am dancing and I am writing, I am teaching, conversing, occasionally making progress, occasionally falling back to the embrace of old habits, making unnecessary assumptions, and failing. Repetition is a part of the study. Minimal difference is a part of the study. Changing perspective is a part of the study. My strategy includes not trying to fix but approach with care and attention every step I am taking; every achievement, every set-back; every question and every answer. I assume my learning curve to be cyclical, as I continue to practice in public, always vulnerable but eager to engage in an exchange.

In this paper I share my personal attempt of co-working with plants as ghosts and how this has started to shape a curatorial practice that tries to resist extractivism. I wanted to rethink my own practice as a curatorand investigate how to shape relations and ethics differently. For this work I turned towards plants and ghosts as my teachers and allies. They pointed me towards strategies of being-with, generosity and sympoiesis, which I am trying totranspose into a (life-)practice. Rooted Hauntology Lab as an artistic-curatorial project is both the result and ongoing practical playground for this experimentation.

Performance theorists have long been drawn to the potential of performance to subvert established institutions. The results of performance are never fully determined in advance; performances subject established images to reinterpretation; they take place before an audience that can criticize and intervene. But performative principles also play a role in maintaining established institutions and ways of being. Performance demands that participants take on roles and perform them more or less effectively. Performance also establishes a separation between the relatively active people who have the authority to perform publicly important roles and relatively passive audiences who observe those institutionalized performances. In this paper I argue for a balanced view of the subversive potential of performance, taking seriously the tradition of anti-theatricality, in order to determine the role of performance both in undermining and in upholding established institutions, and I call attention to the potentially subversive (but often contradictory) role of what I call anti-performance, the attempt (which is just as contradictory as performance itself) to move beyond the performativity that is imposed by established institutions, in order to achieve new forms of being that are experienced not only as “played” but as “real.”

Writing in 1853, Gábor Egressy, one of the leading actor-directors of the Hungarian-speaking National Theatre in Pest-Buda (Budapest), observed that representatives of different nations were appearing in increasing number on and off the stages of the major cities of Eastern Europe: Today not only ideas fly on lightning wings, but humankind as well. Quick and easy as well as cheap travel has mobilized humankind and created worldwide and constant migration. Now, we do not have to leave our place to see the people of the faraway world of whom, so far, we have had merely vague ideas through rumors and fairy tales: rather these people visit us in our home. From every part of the world, fantastically colorful groups proceed from time to time before our eyes. Whatever is pleasant, great, and fine on Earth, all visit us. Groups of Italians, French, Negroes, and English are coming here and offering the divine products of their homelands.Egressy shared this observation with readers when the black, British-American actor Ira Aldridge visited the National Theatre in 1853. Aldridge and his English company received a warm welcome from Hungarian audiences and leading intellectuals. At the same time, however, he was under surveillance by the Habsburg secret police, and was later politely asked to leave the city. In my article, I investigate Aldridge's visit to Pest-Buda using the concepts of surrogation (Joseph Roach) and mediatization (Christopher B. Balme), and pay close attention to the way the actor's contemporaries interpreted his visit.

Nicht zuletzt aufgrund der Online-Fachzeitschrift Scenario, die seit 2007 die fachübergreifende Diskussion über dramapädagogisches Lehren und Lernen in den Fremdsprachen maßgeblich vorangetrieben hat, aber auch durch zahlreiche Forschungsaktivitäten in der fremdsprachlichen Literatur- und Filmdidaktik haben kunstorientierte Ansätze in der Fremdsprachendidaktik einen festen Platz. Allerdings führen sie immer noch eher ein Nischendasein: Versuche einer übergreifenden Einbindung der Künste – d.h. neben Theater, Literatur und Film auch von Musik, Bildender Kunst und Tanz – in den Fremdsprachenunterricht gibt es bislang nur vereinzelt (vgl. z.B. Bernstein & Lerchner 2014; Gehring 2017; Mentz & Fleiner 2018). Viele Fragen sind daher noch offen, z.B. die nach möglichen Transfereffekten von den Künsten zum Fremdsprachenunterricht. Forschungsarbeiten aus dem Bereich der Kulturellen Bildung weisen darauf hin, dass Musik, Tanz, Bildende Kunst und das Theater Einfluss auf die Persönlichkeitsentwicklung nehmen, und zwar insbesondere auf die Wahrnehmungs- und Empathiefähigkeit, auf die Kreativität und die emotionale Intelligenz (vgl. z.B. Rittelmeyer 2012).2 Doch welche Rolle spielt dies für den Fremdsprachenunterricht? Und in welcher Weise können die Künste darüber hinaus einen spezifischen Beitrag zur Entwicklung, Innovation oder Diversifizierung des fremdsprachlichen Unterrichts leisten? Während mögliche Schnittstellen zwischen den Künsten und dem Sprachenerwerb im angelsächsischen Raum bereits seit den 1990er Jahren in den Blick genommen ...

This article examines the vibrant city infrastructures of Karen Tei Yamashita's 1997 novel Tropic of Orange in order to highlight interdependency as political and aesthetic value. The novel's emphasis on urban support systems—the oft-unnoticed roads, pipes, wires, and labor networks that allow the city to function—positions infrastructure as itself a critical lens, one that can reassess the relationship of ethnic American literature and subjectivity to the values of self-ownership, protest, and independence. By amplifying the overlooked support networks that underpin fictions of self-sufficiency, Yamashita's Tropic of Orange diverges from the narrative of self-ownership as liberatory endpoint. Instead, it recuperates the much-maligned category of dependency, positioning dependency as a vital site of aesthetic and political possibility within anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle. This recuperation proves particularly significant in light of pernicious and persistent dependency mythologies, such as the “illegal immigrant,” that frame racialized subjects as drains on the public. Infrastructure, as an often unseen entity nonetheless central to the operation of cities and the global distribution of resources, represents a key vehicle in Tropic of Orange for thinking about contemporary ecologies of assistance, power, and provision, and for mapping the global imbalances of power that render certain dependencies hypervisible while erasing others.

International audience; Talking about arts and education brings us to the encounter and dialogue between two disciplines that might seem dissimilar but are profoundly complementary. The vast scientific literature demonstrates the immense possibilities of the performing arts applied to the educational sphere. Performing arts foster strategies of social cohesion and empowerment, promote the learning of new codes of expression and dialogue, and prepare to face conflict situations in a peacefully and creatively. The dialogical paradigm, for its part, is articulated around the dialogue of all the agents involved in educational phenomena. As a result of its dialogical nature, this paradigm has great self-critical potential and is in a constant process of redefinition. For this reason, it dares to pose questions that manage to combine the loss of meaning of post-modernity and the fall of metanarratives with a constant effort to find new and changing orientations that offer provisional guidelines. This article, of an essayist nature, offers a vision from the paradigm of complexity to the art/education binomial, where the potential of the performing arts for the construction of the educational experience is considered from a dialogical approach.

I was so unimpressed with the city council. … They had a line of homeless people who were allowed to vote because Kevin [Michael Key] was running for councilman and everything. So, they wanted IDs … [The person tabling] asked me, “Well I need some id. Do you have any ID?” And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any id. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible. He was just going through the motions of making the sound. But he didn't know he was dealing with R-C-B. So when I dropped my passport, and I do mean dropped my passport on the table, that's when I got respect.—RCB, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)What does it mean to perform presence or selfhood? What conditions necessitate these performances? In the opening epigraph, RCB articulates an instance when transparency was mapped onto his body—a moment in which he was simultaneously invisible as an individual and hypervisible as the projections of stereotypes surrounding homelessness and blackness collided on his body, rendering his history, present, and future as instantly knowable. During the election cycles of 2010, 2012, and 2014, KevinMichael Key, a prominent, formerly homeless Skid Row activist, community organizer, and member of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), ran for a position on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC). As part of his campaigns, Key sought to help homeless residents of Skid Row exercise their right to vote. One instantiation of this objective involved tabling in the neighborhood. In a show of support, RCB lined up to vote and subsequently encountered the tabler. “And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any ID. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible.” As understood by RCB, the tabler did not expect homeless individuals to possess government-issued identification. Instead of acknowledging RCB's individuality and subjectivity, the tabler assumed that RCB's status as homeless meant not having state ID, an official marker of occupancy in a state-recognized residence. In this interaction, RCB's political subjectivity was under erasure, invisible. For RCB, in this confrontation, homelessness marked him as a knowable (non)subject—a generic homeless man.

This article analyses theatre project ‘Hul’q’umi’num’ Heroes: Reclaiming Language through Theatre’, which aims to stem the decline of the Hul’q’umi’num’ language by bringing traditional stories about heroes to life in dramatic performances that spark and hold the interest of language speakers, language learners, and the general public. The territory of the Hul’q’umi’num’ people extends along the Salish Sea from Nanoose to Malahaton Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. Today, around forty fluent first-language speakers remain, mostly over the age of 60, and thus Hul’q’umi’num’ is considered an endangered language. However, among the population of over 6,000 Hul’q’umi’num’, there are many people who desire to learn the language or improve their fluency. By embarking on the next step—turning traditional stories into theatre—the wproject is hoping to bring the language to the eyes and ears of the community, and, for the participants, it will possibly help unlock their ability to speak Hul’q’umi’num’. This article argues that applied theatre can be used to effectively address concerns pertaining to—in this case—the indigenous community the language revitalization work is meant to benefit, even though there are multiple challenges that stand in the way of such a process. The work has a strong focus on traditional and playful artistry and on consensus.

In her 1979 touchstone address, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” Audre Lorde makes it clear that the only feminism that matters is one that includes and even centers the voices of “poor women, black and third-world women, and lesbians.” She argues that this type of representation is not a mere academic exercise, but a means of survival for women within these groups. Speaking at the Second Sex Conference in New York, Lorde also laments the lack of attention paid to the ways women can and should embrace their differences while still relying on a solidarity that she sees as foundational to creativity and liberation. Women of color have always borne the greatest share of domestic and physical labor in the United States, and thus creating this solidarity is a challenge; when workers are spread far and wide, scared of management, and just living month to month, it can be difficult to organize and unite them. In the 1970s, the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) took on this challenge, seeking to organize women of color economically, culturally, and politically, embodying Lorde's charge in the decade prior to her speech. One of the key methods of organizing by the TWWA was a series of original skits, many of which were performed during celebrations of International Women's Day (IWD, 8 March).

Contributors to this new rubric draw attention to terms that are frequently used when we speak or write about our pedagogical practices. The idea is to engage Scenario readers in a discussion of key terminology in the area of performative teaching and learning. Through Scenario Journal and various Scenario Forum initiatives, including conferences, symposia, colloquia, the term performative has become a key term in the modern languages debate.2 Many readers will remember the 2014 conference entitled Performative Teaching, Learning, Research, the 2017 conference on Performative Spaces in Language, Literature and Culture Education; and the 2020 conference, which carried the title Going Performative in Education, had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 related lockdown. Like with any other term the meaning of the term performative very much depends on how it is used in a specific context. The photograph below draws our attention to a context that is particularly noteworthy against the background of the recent worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. Fig. 1: Underground station Mohrenstraße in Berlin Why is the streetname crossed out with a red line? From medieval times the German word Mohr was often used when reference was made to people with dark skin. Similary, in the ...

Critics writing on the poetry of Charlotte Mew have long considered the cri de coeur—often described as an involuntary exclamation of the speaker's, or the poet's, secret suffering—a defining element of Mew's poetics; this focus has contributed to an ongoing critical tendency to read Mew's work as pathologically divided between authentic feeling and artificial performance. Due to Mew's liminal position in literary history—writing from the 1890s through the 1910s—her work is often also read in terms of a struggle between Victorian propriety and modernist innovation. Attending to Mew's own use of the phrase “cri de coeur,” however, shows that she used it not primarily to indicate the expression of deep feeling but as a quotable, extractable catchphrase or tag that might circulate independently from its source text in quite different literary and cultural contexts. Reading Mew's poems “The Farmer's Bride” and “The Fête,” as well as her unpublished short story “Thic Theer Kayser,” with this definition of the cri de coeur in mind reveals a poetics rooted in the lively print and performance cultures of Mew's own lifetime—a flexible, entertaining poetics that challenges conventional understandings of the boundaries of literary periods.

Although sectarian violence characterized life in Belfast for hundreds of years, 1864 marked a shift in how violence played out in the city. Unlike previous conflicts that occurred in open spaces and reflected long-held rural rituals, the riots of August 1864 took place in the city's rapidly developing urban streets. The violence broke out in response to celebrations around the foundation laying for a new statue of Daniel O'Connell, the late Catholic politician, in Dublin. Thousands of Belfast Catholics traveled to Dublin for the celebration. Upon their return to Belfast, ten thousand Protestant loyalists greeted them by burning an effigy of O'Connell on Boyne Bridge and staging a mock funeral and procession that attempted to enter a Catholic burial ground. The resulting violence and rioting continued for ten days on the city streets, where homes and businesses faced destruction on a scale previously unseen. Expelling residents of opposing views, rioters reinforced older ideas of “communal conflict” expressed through “disagreements over each group's place—literally and imaginatively—in the city” and strengthened notions of neighborhood geography based on religious beliefs. As historian Mark Doyle argues, the shifting patterns of violence resulted from “[t]he steady advance of working-class alienation from the state, the growing hegemony of violent extremists in working-class neighbourhoods, the sectarian alliance between Protestant workers and elites, the insecurity of the Catholics and, above all, the polarising effects of earlier outbreaks of violence.” Lasting reminders of conflict lingered as the city recovered, reminding anyone walking the streets of the city's violent past and the likely potential of future clashes.

This mixed-methods research documents the integration of educational drama and theatre into a teacher-preparation program for Austrian teachers-in-training who plan to teach English-as-a-foreign-language to Austrian school children. Observations were conducted of the plays developed and performed in English by two cohorts of Austrian teachers-in-training who participated in the teacher-preparation program. Observations were also conducted of the second cohort’s process developing a script based on an English young adult novel, as well as their process of producing and performing the play in English for middle-school and adult audiences. In addition, a survey of participants’ perceptions of the program was conducted. This study investigates how the teachers-in-training responded to the process of creating and performing a play in English, and their perceptions of its benefits and challenges for themselves, as well as for their future students.

In this article, we consider the relationship between education and applied theatre, the growth of applied theatre curricula within Canada, the issues that presently we identify as ‘productive tensions,’ and political and social concerns that now frame the ways in which we shape and conduct our practice. Our thoughts and suggestions, while limited by those constraints we offered above, may serve to open a space for discussion on what is and what might be. In our view—looking back over two decades of development in the field of applied theatre programs in Canada—there are a number of tensions that have come into clearer focus as applied theatre has been finding its feet. We see these tensions as productive and offer them not as criticisms but as opportunities to reconsider methodologies in light of a post-dramatic world. Applied theatre programs tend to operate in theatre departments that mostly focus on training for independent careers in text-based mainstream theatre. Such an intention may make it difficult for some who see theatre as a path to careers different from performance and/or production. Certainly, the recent addition of applied theatre to university curricula has revealed some interesting pressures. The division between the hierarchical traditions of theatremaking, with the top-down approach of director-designer-actor-audience, may be beginning to shift with the advent of new thinking. The ways of working that are integral approaches to applied theatremaking require a broader interdisciplinarity of courses than those traditionally offered in departments of theatre.

We are therefore saying that the work of expanding the habitual levels of life is the only valid art installation / the only exhibition / the only work of art that lives.We are artists and we feel ourselves participating in the grand aspirations of all, presuming today, with South American love, the gliding of eyes over these lines.Oh, South America.In this way, together, we construct the beginning of the work: a recognition in our minds; erasing the trades: life as a creative act …That is the art / the work / this is the work of art that we propose.—¡Ay Sudamérica!,Colectivo Acciones de Arte, July 1981At 11a.m.on 11 September 1973, the Chilean Air Force bombed the presidential palace, La Moneda, as part of an attack that ended the presidency of Salvador Allende, suspended democracy, and initiated the repressive military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Eight years later, on 12 July 1981, in the midst of dictatorship, six airplanes again flew over Santiago in military formation. This time, however, the planes did not drop bombs. Instead, they scattered four hundred thousand pamphlets with a text that urged Chileans to claim their space, thoughts, and lives by asserting the potential for artistry within all people. This art action, titled¡Ay Sudamérica!(Oh, South America!) and orchestrated by the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (Art Actions Collective, or CADA), subversively re-created a central moment from the violent history of the military coup in order to disturb and articulate an alternative course for that history (Fig. 1). In doing so, CADA challenged the regime's conception of Chilean citizenship by calling for an expanded space of existence and invoking the possibility of an artistic and contestatory subjectivity within everyone.

Iako se emocionalni registri često zanemaruju u evaluaciji konceptualnih projekata, ovaj članak tvrdi da je, primjerice u slučaju projekta Janez Janša, koji se služi strategijom subverzivne afirmacije, upravo njegova afektivna ambivalentnost ono što ga čini relevantnim i u umjetničkom i u političkom smislu. Mijenjanje imena trojice umjetnika u ime identično imenu političkog dinosaura Janeza Janše dovelo je do kompleksnih reakcija njihovih obitelji, prijatelja i umjetničkog konteksta kojem pripadaju. Te afektivne reakcije duboko su relevantne za razumijevanje ovog projekta, koji istovremeno želi i ne želi biti umjetnički, odnosno realizira se kroz vlastitu neodlučivost u tom smislu., Although emotional registers are often disregarded when it comes to the evaluation of conceptual projects, this article claims that, in the case of the Janez Janša project, which engages procedures of subversive affirmation, it is precisely its affective ambivalence which makes it relevant both artistically and politically. The name change of three artists to the name identical with the name borne by one of Slovenian political dinosaurs, Janez Janša, brought about complex reactions of their families, friends and the artistic context in which they operate. Those affective reactions are deeply relevant for the understanding of this project, which simultaneously attempts and refuses to present itself as artistic; in other words, it articulates itself through its own ambivalence.

Mineral extraction in Africa has exacerbated ecological degradation across the continent. This article focuses on the example of the Niger Delta scene of oil exploration depicted in Michael Watts and Ed Kashi’s multimedia project,Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta.Analyzing the infringement on human and nonhuman bodies due to fossil fuel extraction, I read the Delta, inscribed in Watts and Kashi’s image-text, as an ecology of suffering and as a site of trauma. Although trauma studies tend to foreground the past and the present, I argue thatCurse of the Black Goldinvites serious consideration of trauma of the future, of-the-yet-to-come, in apprehending the problematic of suffering in the Delta. I conclude with a discussion of the ethics of representing postcolonial wounding, which on the one hand can create awareness of ecological degradation and generate affect, but which on the other hand, exploits the vulnerability of the depicted and leaves an ecological footprint.