The following is a transcript of the Q&A with Zoё Seaton on 2 August 2022.

For at least thirty years, scholars have debated the centrality of physical and embodied presence as essential to the experience of theatre and performance. A debate that was perhaps largely academic suddenly became a shared reality when COVID-19 shuttered live venues, closed universities and moved artists of all kinds online. Suddenly, much of the theatre world began acting for the (web)camera. This

All became data during the pandemic. Lockdowns made manifest what had developed for some time: that theatre has become inextricably entangled with digital cultures, the performing arts being increasingly encountered as a growing stock of multimodal fragments, textual discourses and networked communications. And, it is argued, it is precisely this appearance of theatre as (big) data that might prove

This article proposes to address the tension between digital co-presence and embodied spectatorship inaugurated by the pivot to online and hybrid forms of (post-)pandemic performance through the lens of the postdigital. The term is developed as a way of accounting for the complex mediatized co-presence between performer and audience in a representative example of this genre, Dead Centre's To Be a Machine

This article examines Scenes for Survival, a series of short digital artworks co-created by the National Theatre of Scotland, BBC Scotland and Screen Scotland, for its intersecting dimensions of precarity. On the one hand, the series shows how a pandemic's challenges are unevenly distributed. On the other hand, it addresses the expressly precarious position of (post-)pandemic theatre – precarious in

Taking a closer look at the digital monologue series Go mBeire Muid Beo (May We Be Alive [to See Each Other Again]), which was produced by the Belfast-based Irish-language theatre company Aisling Ghéar, this article seeks to document Irish-language theatre produced under coronavirus lockdown measures in Northern Ireland, whilst acknowledging the various issues that continue to haunt the Irish language

The purpose of this article is to explore different ways of countering the COVID-19 pandemic in Polish theatre that were not only attempts to provide protection against the potentially lethal coronavirus, but also attempts to actively combat other ‘viruses’: the capitalist compulsion for productivity and the exclusion of Others (the disabled, the elderly, women or LGBT+ people). Several Polish artists

Theatre is full of failure and risk. The digital medium, too, is fragile. Caridad Svich is interested in how the digital is dependent on stability and how this echoes the fact that theatre deals with instability on a granular level. The glitches in this video are therefore intentional.In theatre there is always failure. It is the eternal rope upon which the high-wire act of making is built. At every

This article examines two recent queer adaptations of Romeo and Juliet in Seoul, attending to their opposite receptions in relation to the gap between queer theory and gay reality. It focuses on LAS's Juliet and Juliet, hailed as ‘female queer theatre’ despite being conservative gay, while discussing briefly in comparison Yohangza's Romeo and Juliet, decried as ‘anti-queer’ for all its queerness. Although

The aim of this article is an interpretation of Eimuntas Nekrošius's performances staged in the National Theatre Warsaw in the last years of his life. In the context of complex political and cultural relationships between Poland and Lithuania, the aesthetics of the theatre of sensual metaphors invented by Nekrošius might be perceived from an uncommon perspective – not as a type of universal art presenting

Since the early 2010s, the arts and culture in Sweden have taken a stand against the prevailing epistemic ignorance of the country's Indigenous Sámi people by confronting majoritarian society with the realities of settler colonialism. This article suggests that theatre and performance form part of this Sámi cultural activism and highlights the decolonial labour of Giron Sámi Teáhter, the oldest professionally

For left cultural activism, ‘theatre’ forms an important ‘worksite of democracy’ which allows theatre activists to provide creative intervention within the existing ‘field of forces’. Cultural organizations and theatre groups of the Left – like the Delhi-based Jana Natya Manch (People's Theatre Forum) offer a critique of neo-liberalism through theatre. First performed in the year 2000, the street play

Alfonso Reyes's Ifigenia cruel has long been recognized as a personal hymn of liberation, which adapts Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris to the convulsed Mexican shore of the early twentieth century. The dramatic poem Ifigenia cruel by Alfonso Reyes was first performed in Mexico in 1934. The next documented performance, by the company Teatro de Ensayo Escena and directed by Aitor Goiricelaya, took place

This study explores the relationships of El año en que nací (The Year I Was Born) (2012) by the Argentine Lola Arias, within the social context of post-dictatorship Chile. Chile was characterized by a repressed and traumatized population whose governments aimed to depoliticize society in an effort to avoid the presumed cause of Augusto Pinochet's seventeen-year authoritarian government – the extreme

This article examines the status of counterhegemonic knowledge in art institutions – such as the theatre and the gallery – by analysing Forensic Architecture's investigation into the murder of Halit Yozgat in Germany. We argue for paying close attention to claims about art institutions’ inherent counterhegemonic potential. As evidence, we present a critical experiential account of our visit to Forensic

The aim of this paper is to analyse Laetitia Dosch's play Hate, first performed in Lausanne in 2018, in light of recent theories on female nudity, interspecies sexuality and non-human animal subjectivity. Featuring a completely naked woman and a white stallion, the show revolves around the possibility of interspecies communication and the need to re-evaluate the meaning of humankind and animality through

This article offers a critically reflective discussion of and suggestions towards the role of embodied cognitive science within theatre and performance discourse. Through a critical analysis of literature that takes its lead from within the framework of embodied cognition, this article argues that theatre and performance discourse may need to re-examine how embodiment is conceptualized within practical

The picture of the group of scholars on the steps of the University of Helsinki in 1993 is typical of Thomas Postlewait and depicts at the same time an important moment in the history of the International Federation for Theatre Research (Fig. 1). Tom keeps in the background, furthest back in the top row, next to Selma Jeanne Cohen and Martine de Rougemont, then the vice president of IFTR. This position

In 2002, I published an article in Theatre Research International called ‘Heiner Müller as the End of Brechtian Dramaturgy: Müller on Brecht in Two Lesser-Known Fragments’. I had written my doctoral dissertation on Müller, and, in the course of my studies, had come across two shorter pieces that, to my knowledge, had not been discussed by scholars. The first was Philoktet 1979 (Philoctetes 1979), a

This article investigates live performance in the broad geo-historical context of the Anthropocene, a contested term in recent scholarship, but one that offers a breadth of focus on human relations with its coexistent non-human other. These interrelations are examined through a range of theatrical and non-theatrical genres and sites from the Australian parliament's coal theatrics to exemplary performances

Since the eruption of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the arrival of refugees in Turkey has been unprecedented in the country's history. Theatre practitioners have been slow to address this migratory moment, but an exception has been Istanbul-based Dostlar Tiyatrosu's 2017 production Göçmenleeeer, a translation of Romanian–French playwright Matéi Visniec's Migraaaants. Developed in the context of Europe's

This article uncovers the connections between the legal and scientific art of searching for human remains and theatrical performances. NAKA Dance Theater, a performance group based in Mexico City and Oakland, California, is at the centre of this intersection of art and forensics. Founded by José Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, NAKA creates theatrical events to configure a claim for social justice where

The large-scale theatre exhibitions in Vienna (1892), Berlin (1910) and Magdeburg (1927) contained extensive displays on the history of German-language theatre. This article analyses the pedagogical and epistemological discussions about different ways of mediating theatre history that formed part of the context of the three exhibitions. Curators and scholars used the German term Anschauung to measure

See PDF] Shortly after my first post-lockdown evening in theatre, British prime minister Boris Johnson proclaimed ‘Freedom Day’ – no more COVID restrictions, no more masks, no more social distancing, no more government responsibility – all kinds of shows, events and mass spectacles can and must go on. The numbers of COVID cases in the UK are soaring, as this editorial is being written, yet the public

through the radical performances of drag performer Mario Montez, comparing them to Nao Bustamante’s media appearances and artwork. Meanwhile, chapter  (‘The Sense of Wildness’) uses the activism of the transgender activist Sylvia Rivera as a lens to analyse Tsang’s documentary. The Sense of Brown is full of this type of enlightening readings and will appeal to readers interested in critical theory

Like earlier mother activism in Latin America, the annual Caravana de Madres Centroamericanas (Caravan of Central American Mothers) through Mexico strategically activates the traditional archetype of mothers as passive, pious, suffering victims whose self-abnegation forces them, almost against their will, out of their supposedly natural domestic sphere. Three elements, however, distinguish the caravana

This article introduces and theorizes ‘decadence’ as a key feature of Lauren Barri Holstein's performance Notorious (2017). The decadence of Holstein's work is approached in light of two main considerations: the spectacular presentation of witchcraft as an occult practice, and what Holstein ‘does’ with the staging of witches and witchcraft. Situated in light of performances associated with the neo-occult

The alternative culture in Poland formed between the late 1970s and the second half of the 1990s. In this period many artists were moving from cities into the countryside in order to find space for independent and experimental art. Among these new settlers were Erdmute and Wacław Sobaszek, who made their home in a small rural settlement of Węgajty in the 1980s. The Sobaszeks converted an abandoned

European theatres were electrified between 1883 and 1913. This process has traditionally been associated with the advent of modernist theatre, but the details have rarely been examined, nor has the scope of the process's social and technological impacts been analysed. Reconstructing light bulbs’ early appearances in theatrical practice and discourse, this article traces the intricate entanglement between

From the notebook of Richard Schechner concerning the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Paris, 2–7 July 2019.

This text introduces our dossier on contemporary theatre in Brazil, highlighting the ways it fights back against social and political injustice.

This article examines the relationship between the performing arts and Amerindian peoples, specifically the Araweté, Juruna/Yudjá and Kamayurá peoples, which belong to the Tupi branch, whom I met as part of postdoctoral research carried out from February 2018 to January 2019, at the University of São Paulo (USP). It analyses the conjuncture of the fight of Amerindian and riparian peoples before the

This article seeks to reflect on how theatre presents itself as a fabular medium allowing for the emergence of performances that create and re-create stories and identities. In particular, it examines how theatre allows for the development of epistemologies that enhance our understanding of black bodies, knowledge, traditions, subjectivities and desires.

This article summarizes recent transformations in the field of performing arts in Brazil, with attention to feminist theatrical production. It provides a description of the context of this branch of Brazilian political theatre, between the civil–military coup of 1964 and the present, focusing on 2015, a period named the Brazilian ‘Feminist Spring’. This historical arc of almost sixty years celebrates

This article analyses how the political circumstances of the extermination of transgender people in Brazil aggravates the vulnerable conditions of performing-arts production. Cisgender dominance in theatre is presented as a neoliberal and colonial factor that maintains trans people in structural danger within artistic processes. While whiteness produces an ethnocentrism in Brazilian arts, cisgenderness

presents a number of key theoretical concepts to explain his theatre. For instance, bricolage, a French term for ‘improvisation or a piece of makeshift handwork’, is used repeatedly throughout the book to describe how Chong sees his theatre: ‘a new world created out of any and all available materials from an old world, resulting in luminosity’ (p. ). Chong creates his theatre by juxtaposing and defamiliarizing

Unmaking Mimesis, seem squarely to intervene in what Diamond describes as the ‘still-fractious debates about identity politics’ (p. ). Unmaking Mimesis has in this regard (and in many others) a huge deal to offer still, and in recalling the dual etymology of mimesis not only as representation but also as the work of doing the representing that Diamond stresses as her starting point, it may be worth

This article explores the work of choreographer Dianne McIntyre as an improvisational artist entangled in questions of intermedial relations among sounds and motions. It discusses the terms of performance in relation to emergent paradigms of Afro-pessimism, and argues for a black regard as a method of engaging with experimental performances by artists of African descent. The article explores theoretical

Let Down (2018) is a practice-as-research (PaR) dance performance that communicates women's experiences of breastfeeding in Northern Ireland, a jurisdiction with one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, due, in part, to the social stigma attached to breastfeeding in public. Choreographed in collaboration with a composer and social scientists, Let Down is a duet for two lactating women who

Dear John is an experimental choreomusical work that reinterprets Cage's works while advancing his ideas of sound as sonic events and embodied choreography. In this episodic work, improvised movement unfolds to a soundscape of defamiliarized instruments, sound devices and sonicities of macro- and micro-movements. The correspondence and (in)congruence between dance movements and music's kinetic energy

The tragedies taking place within the waters of the Mediterranean, and the simultaneous reassessment of social and cultural politics inside Europe, call for our attention as scholars, and as art practitioners in the region. I will traverse this area to discuss some choreographic experimentations dealing with migration issues, and to prove how acts of listening in performance can emerge out of a racist

This conversation paper examines the visual, sonic and corporeal entanglements that inform the work of the Vietnamese-American-Japanese artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. It explores the corporeal and aural qualities that are central to an understanding and sensorial experience of the artist's installations and visual practice. In paying attention to breath, sound and motion in visual art production, Jun

The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he began measuring the acoustic properties of a premodern performance space in the mid-1990s, and has been building ambisonic microphones since the early 2000s in order to carry out his project in further locations. Bringing together

Reassembled, Slightly Askew (RSA) is an audio theatre work which takes the audience through the visceral and embodied experience of Shannon Yee (Sickels) as she lives through a catastrophic brain infection and surgery, and eventually (as the title indicates) reassembles herself, and familiarizes herself with her acquired brain injury. Audience members experience RSA lying in hospital beds, wearing

Unsettling Sound examined the at once destabilizing and liberatory experiential dimensions of sounding through three dialogue-events, opening up possible meanings, sensations, ideological and bodily potentialities of the sonic, and the sonic potentialities of bodies. This series of conversations, co-devised by Sara Jane Bailes and Arabella Stanger, took place remotely and online. Here, traces of the