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The Bridge of Winds is an international research group founded in 1989 by Odin Teatret actress Iben Nagel Rasmussen. For thirty-three years, a core group of artists from 12 countries has met together annually, carrying out in-depth research into the actor's craft. During these encounters, highly detailed psychophysical training is recovered and developed by the group, which feeds into performances, concerts and barters. The aim of this critical article is to reflect on the role of agency in the Bridge of Wind's practice, drawing on field research carried out by the author in December 2021. It is argued that Rasmussen and her partners in the Bridge of Winds have re-envisioned laboratory theatre practice, allowing for an idiorrhythmic culture of practice to emerge that balances schema (fixed, fully developed form) and rhuthmos, (improvised, changeable form). Whilst the members of the Bridge of Winds are rigorous and disciplined, having inherited a laboratory ethos and schematic leaning grounded in the practice of Odin Teatret, there is a tenacious trace in their work of an idiorrhythmity that also allows for subversion, transformation and revolt. The group's training, in particular, accommodates the reality of the older actor's body, just as it enables younger arrivals to excavate a sense of bios. Thus, the essay will chart out the contours of a particular nomadic laboratory practice that advocates both individual agency and collective solidarity, serving as a creative touchstone and wellspring for its members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracing matters of death and ceremony across black studies, indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and critical decolonial jewish studies, I find myself most interested in that other death, the preliminary death, which precedes biological death. This is not "social death," the murder of kinship structures. Nor is it the death of the physical organism. This death is ceremonial, practical, and transformative. It is a kind of death practice, a daily practice of dying. Photo essay with images from the 2017 Judaica project embodied audiovisual laboratory: Ben Spatz with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceived as a symbolic gift to honor Teatr Reduta on the 100th anniversary of its inception and dedicated to the memory of recently passed theatre historian, Zbigniew Osinski, this extensive volume does more than commemorate and celebrate. It advances the studies of one of the most original and deeply influential undertakings in Polish theatre, which, despite securing its emblematic place in histry, deserves a closer analysis from the contemporary perspective, and further dissemination among scholars and practitioners. Reading the book from across the Atlantic Ocean, I will add, that this need for continued rethinking of theatre in dialogue with Osterwa and Limanowski in current Polish cultural and political context seems to be as important as challenging. On the one hand, religious and spiritual underpinnings of Reduta may be particularly susceptive to “committed” interpretations, to use Adorno’s term. On the other hand, memories bring the threat of nostalgia and sentimentalism which help to mythologize rather than analyze unique phenomena. Has Reducie na stulecie managed to stay free from these historiographic traps? What value do these history lessons bring to us today?

The article presents the history and principles of theatre education at Reduta in its successive forms: from Koło Adeptów [The Apprentice Circle], established in 1921, through the Reduta Institute, to Okop [The Trench], which was the last pre-war incarnation of the school. Based on documents and memoirs, the article discusses Reduta’s comprehensive and holistic model of education, in which regular theoretical classes were accompanied by practical and physical exercises. A crucial part of the education process was student participation in the theatre’s daily operations: rehearsals, preparation of stage productions, and tours. The aim of the school was to offer future artists comprehensive preparation for various theatre functions, as well as to produce ideologically engaged social activists, who consider serving the society through art as their primary task and mission. A comparison between Reduta’s schools and other educational initiatives confirms that in terms of scope, curriculum, work methods, practices, as well as atmosphere, the former were indeed pioneering and stood out from traditional pre-war drama teaching. Published as an appendix to the article is its source material: Juliusz Osterwa, Okop, edited and with an introduction by the author of the article.

What can jewishness be — a nation, a race, a religion, a style of humor? A history of diaspora? A relation to whiteness? A commandment to work for justice? Where is jewishness in the body? In this illuminated video essay, 30 minutes of uncut experimental songwork practice are augmented by 50 annotations or “illuminations.” These are embedded into the video, as they would more commonly be embedded in prose, providing a dense critical context for what unfolds. A handful of songs provide the spine of the work, while four carefully selected books stud the flow of song and evoke the elusive potential of a jewishness to come: antique, mystical, anticolonial, renewed. The four practitioner-researchers draw on their shared backgrounds in laboratory theatre to explore these materials in a dynamic flow of action and interaction. The uncut video grounds the viewer in the temporality of the practice and demands a close reading of the documented moment. The annotations enhance, clarify, and in some cases critique or interrogate the embodied research, offering a layer of commentary as a contemporary riff on talmudic ways of thinking. “He Almost Forgets…” was created through a new audiovisual embodied laboratory research method (Spatz 2020). It demonstrates the capacity of artistic research to generate new molecular identities and alternative forms of knowledge.

This article situates the theatre laboratory in the history of social innovation and attempts to show how the twenty-first century phenomenon of social labs productively offer modes of thinking that can usefully inform contemporary conceptions of the theatre laboratory. Through an examination of Maketank, a fledgling organization in Exeter, UK, the article proposes a new organisational approach called the cultural laboratory that combines principles of both the theatre and social lab with the aim of extending the theatre laboratory into broader realms of cultural action.

The present paper presents the journey of an Italian director in Romanian theatre, from the first encounter with Romanian great performances abroad, in Festivals, to the work on stage with Romanian actors, and for a Romanian audience, in Cluj-Napoca. The National Theatre in Cluj-Napoca offered the place of this encounter of different energies, ways of living, making and approaching theatre, and the space for an artistic challenge: to work not only in the experimental way the director was used to at the Laboratory in Pontedera, but to find the right path in the more strict system of a Repertory Theatre and for a much larger audience in a shorter laps of time. This journey is not only about theatrical places but also and mainly about people met there, about exchanges, work, challenges, wishes, artistic results in the past and the present and projections in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This dialogue contributes reflections on the ‘theatre laboratory’ to the scholarly debate surrounding methodologies of drama education and applied performance. The co-authors suggest that the experimental and ensemble-led approach of the Samuel Beckett Laboratory, founded at Trinity College Dublin in 2013 as a space for research into Beckett in performance, may offer one response to a question that Kathleen Gallagher proposes in the twentieth Anniversary issue ofRiDE(20.3), concerning ‘how drama educators might incorporate such practices of hope into their pedagogy’ [2015. “Beckoning Hope and Care.”RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Drama Education20 (3): 423]. This work suggests that the hopeful practice of laboratory exploration de-hierarchises a scholarly endeavour and recasts the student as co-creator of knowledge, rather than consumer of cultural capital. The values and practices of such a laboratory may open one avenue of participatory pedagogy that scaffolds risk and re-values failure. In the dialogue that follows, we draw on Gallagher’s ‘practices of hope’ to develop our own interests in thesubjunctivityof performance pedagogies in Beckettian contexts [cf. Heron, J., N. Johnson, B. Dinçel, G. Quinn, S. J. Scaife, and Á. Tyrrell, 2014. “The Samuel Beckett Laboratory 2013.”Journal of Beckett Studies23 (1): 73–94]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]