ABSTRACT This is a collaborative trans-atlantic meandering around our respective research fields, interjected with archival traces of our performances. Alongside us are The GUIDE, and #Sergina. The GUIDE is a survival praxis of how the Black identity performs in anticipation of being trapped in the gaze of being processed as other; a pedagogical deployment of research and critical theory from Black

ABSTRACT This editorial elaborates on the processes and practices of Open Call and its iteration as a print and online issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance. It offers a collaborative framing of the issue that includes the voices of its editors and peer reviewers, and suggests some possible pathways through the texts and artworks that comprise this special issue, which is titled open-call+response:

ABSTRACT This text reflects in part on Sosa’s ongoing project (in collaboration with Navild Acosta) Black Power Naps (https://blackpowernaps.black/), as well as ecologies of pleasure, and bio-technologies of the body in green city spaces. Sosa was an Open Call working group member in 2021, and was invited to re-visit their practice for this STP special issue.

ABSTRACT This offering is part 1 of 3 in Lou Sarabadzic’s series Making Sense, which re-visits the exploration of the physicality and materiality of language in her video work Traces (2021).

ABSTRACT This is part 1 of 3 of a conversation and a practice of listening about and speaking of composting grief. The exchange, between melissandre varin and Carmen Wong, was initiated via voice notes, voicemails, and WhatsApp recordings and was transcribed and composed/composted visually with illustrations by N. Drofiak.

ABSTRACT This contribution is a photo-essay comprising ten images of author’s actions (and ongoing project, Free Bitch / Fr33 b1tch) during lockdown in 2021 on Gadigal Land, Warrang.

ABSTRACT Elder reflects - in three parts - on family and friendship, noting references and past/present connections to art, music, Mardi Gras, and sites of cultural heritage.

ABSTRACT Fragments of Encounters is a performance-installation based research project that was first performed at the Infecting the City public art festival in 2019 in Cape Town. The project was build around a personal archive (over 150 hours of audio recorded material), comprised of fragments of everyday encounters and conversations with South Africans, Zimbabweans, Congolese, Nigerians, Pakistanis

ABSTRACT This offering is part 2 of 3 in Lou Sarabadzic’s series Making Sense, which re-visits the exploration of the physicality and materiality of language in her video work Traces (2021).

ABSTRACT ‘Summer Cannibals’ is a work of fiction, interspersed and illustrated with Izdihar Afyouni‘s paintings. It narrates an account of grief, rage, and violence.

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the special interests, friendships, tastes, and pleasures of those who are perceived as deviating from the norm, are labelled “activists”, and are expected to educate others on topics surrounding their own communities or marginalisations. This article creates a space of honesty in which one can exist beyond marginalisations.

ABSTRACT These are parts 2 and 3 of a conversation and a practice of listening about and speaking of composting grief. The exchange, between melissandre varin and Carmen Wong, was initiated via voice notes, voicemails, and WhatsApp recordings and was transcribed and composed/composted visually with illustrations by N. Drofiak.

ABSTRACT Anti-performance is a term that I use to describe my body of performances, which in actuality are also ephemeral moments in time-space. The ‘anti’ is derived and borrowed from anti-colonial, the radical (root) of ‘decolonial’ and ‘post’ colonial, in this case a direct opposition to what is expected of gendered, racialised bodies, by audiences but also that which is usually invited by institutions

ABSTRACT This offering is part 3 of 3 in Lou Sarabadzic’s series Making Sense, which re-visits the exploration of the physicality and materiality of language in her video work Traces (2021).

ABSTRACT Place can shape and influence audience behavior during a performance. This is especially noticeable in the site-specific immersive theatre model, where the performance occurs in a non-theatre setting and audiences have an active role. In this article, we argue that ‘place schema’ – a term from the interdisciplinary field of environment-behavior studies – provides a conceptual framework for

ABSTRACT A windy day in May in a small village Velo Grabje on top of the hill of the island of Hvar. A small, centuries old, chapel and a dry, dusty island’s landscape is the only mise en scene for the performance of the medieval saint play which is just about to take place in front of around 40 visitors. As the wind carries their entrance song and waves their costumes, long black and white black tunics

Published in Studies in Theatre and Performance (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT Combining phenomenological methods with practice-based research, this article explores what and how directorial strategies influence stage presence. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Joseph Chaikin’s idea of heightened awareness, in particular, it describes directorial strategies that can heighten awareness in the interdependent actor–audience relationship. Adopting the

ABSTRACT This article approaches the idea of architecture, theatre and cultural democracy as relational concepts, and considers the theatre building as a cultural artefact which both manifests and embodies power relations. We use the case study of Liverpool’s PurpleDoor to explore this idea. We consider theatre buildings as cultural artefacts to focus attention on the impact of material or physical

ABSTRACT Taking an interdisciplinary approach to information-led exhibitions focused on performance can be considered practice-as-research historiography if curation is engaged with as praxis. Approaching exhibition curation as research praxis is a knowledge-making process, reconfiguring exhibitions as far more than a ‘pathway to impact’ designed at securing a grant. In the curation of two linked exhibitions

ABSTRACT Dance, commonly seen as the art of rhythmical movements of the body, is actually a vehicle to project ideas, be it social, cultural, or even political, particularly among the Hausas in Northern Nigeria. Previous studies of Hausa Koroso Dance have focused mainly on its aesthetics, while little cognizance has been given to the interpretative roles of the dance. This article examines the interpretative

Abstract This editorial explores synergies between the articles gathered in this issue, which take a range of approaches to developing ecological analyses of both the creation and reception of performances and theatre history more widely. The editorial concludes with a reflection on the current UK government’s deliberate dereliction of the higher education sector, and its consequnces for the arts and

(2022). Preliminary thoughts on the death of the editor. Studies in Theatre and Performance: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 1-2.

ABSTRACT This paper describes an experimental project conducted by artists/researchers Crab & Bee (Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith). The project was put together in response to the Covid Lockdown restrictions during 2020 in the UK and drew upon an art and performance practice that had been unfolding since 2018. ‘Testing Scores for Performing Placestories’ describes the testing of a group of scores

ABSTRACT This article seeks to reconstruct and explore the initial theatrical reception of Lorca in the UK, focusing on why and how his texts entered the British theatrical ecosystem, and how they created connections among artists in and beyond Britain. This exploration of a largely ignored archive of the past also opens new gates for future theoretical reflections surrounding the complex symbolic

ABSTRACT This article investigates how deeply engaging embodied perception can be nurtured and refined over a lifetime. In this article, we propose the ways in which an industry-based, self-styled performance training trajectory and a DIY approach to lifelong learning in performance-making cohere as an ecology of practice. Selected exercises are drawn on to consider how skills are accrued and how a

ABSTRACT Crossing the frontiers looking for inspiration has been part of the Irish literary tradition, and translation and adaptation of continental writers such as Federico García Lorca have played an important role. The dissenting Lorquian voices revive in Ireland to find new meanings for the silences of the original play. This article explores an unpublished version of La Casa de Bernarda Alba,

(2022). Correction. Studies in Theatre and Performance: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 98-98.

ABSTRACT In Rasha Fadhil’s 2003 play Ishtar in Baghdad, she has Ishtar and Tammuz, mythological figures from Iraq’s ancient past, appear in Baghdad during the Iraq War, and has them experience many of the horrors associated with the American occupation, including being tortured at Abu Ghraib prison. This article demonstrates that, in writing the play, Fadhil attempted to engage audiences both in Iraq

ABSTRACT David Bergelson’s “I Shall Not Die but Live” takes place during the Nazi invasion of the USSR, in a collective settlement adjacent to an agricultural experimentation farm in the Ukraine. The world premiere of the play took place in Habima in May 1944. It was the first theatre production performed in an Eretz-Israeli theatre to deal with the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. This

ABSTRACT This article considers the impact of the not-for-profit motive promoted by radical campaigners of the New Theatre movement on accounts of British theatre history. Using the Malvern Festival (1929–1949) as a case study of similar ventures associated with the New Theatre movement, this article explores the ways in which influential figures involved with these projects have distorted narratives

ABSTRACT Created by Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Thinking at the Edge (TAE) enables the articulation of meaning implicit in embodied experience, which in turn discloses the affective meaning of words (or topics), thus, empowering one to speak and think creatively from one’s felt knowledge. In this article, I present and analyse three TAE processes undertaken by Portuguese native speaker performers

(2021). Performance and the Right. Studies in Theatre and Performance: Vol. 41, Performance and the Right: Strategies and Subterfuges, pp. 231-235.

ABSTRACT The terror attack carried out at two mosques in Aotearoa New Zealand by a white supremacist in 2019 was intended as a spectacle for mass public consumption. Its live-stream on Facebook invited hyper-identification (akin to a first-person shooter game), exploiting the disembodied nature of digital connection. In this essay, I draw from Judith Butler’s concept of ‘hallucinatory merging’ to characterize

ABSTRACT This article investigates Donald Trump’s performances of right-wing populism, contrasting these with the professional theatrical practice of US political speechwriting. The public performances of US presidents are theatrical constructions in a broad conceptual interpretation of the term: as speechwriters work to construct the presidential persona and the national audience, they abstract and

(2021). ‘Truth’, technology and transmedial theatre in Europe. Studies in Theatre and Performance: Vol. 41, Performance and the Right: Strategies and Subterfuges, pp. 263-280.

ABSTRACT This article offers a reflection on the authors’ curation of (Dousos and Ieropoulos) and participation in (de Senna and Pfützenreuter) The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures, a performance festival that took place at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2018. Dousos and Ieropoulos present their thoughts around the need to curate such an event in the first place, discussing the context within which

ABSTRACT This paper examines the modes of cultural organisation that facilitate the Right-wing’s appropriation of historically Left-wing theatre practices such as the Street-theatre in New Delhi in the service of percolating Hindu-nationalism. The paper suggests that a thorough understanding of the organisation behind the creative methods for mobilisation employed by the Right-wing is indispensable

ABSTRACT Reactionary retrenchment in UK society, including the resurgence of national chauvinism and anti-immigration sentiment, has recently stimulated explorations of right-wing politics in theatre. This article offers a reading of three recent productions that illuminate the way that reactionary politics is currently framed, explored and interrogated in UK theatre: What Shadows (2016) by Chris Hannan

ABSTRACT Where are we in the story of British democracy? Was the 2016 EU Referendum a rehearsal for a new political system of direct democracy that ultimately benefits the far right? Or will the Internet replace the conventional machinery of government with a radical new form of network power where people discursively experiment with new political realities through aesthetic modes of social relations

ABSTRACT This article uses the concept of ‘mediation’ to account for the sociomateriality involved in the rehearsal of a new play. Drawing on ideas from the ‘New Sociology of Art’ that has its origins in Science and Technology Studies, we show how the sociomateriality of the rehearsal is an essential part of the process of theatre-making. It means giving to materials, bodies and matters in the rehearsal

ABSTRACT This article attempts to frame and examine the structuring of labour struggles from the precarious subject position of theatre workers, without isolating these struggles into the occupational sector of the creative industries in the Zimbabwean context between 1980 and 1999. In this article, I frame theatre practitioners as ‘art – workers’ and collectives such as the NTO and ZACT as mobilising

ABSTRACT In this work, I intervene in discussions of robot performance, pointing to a history of a performance mode I classify as ‘robot camp’ that, in offering techniques that overcome potential affective repulsion to these near-human machines, shifted the trajectory of the relationship between humans and robots. I first invoke ideas of theatre artists Edward Gordon Craig and Oriza Hirata, along with

(2021). 41.2 Editorial. Studies in Theatre and Performance: Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 133-135.

ABSTRACT While Victorian classical burlesque has been traditionally dismissed as low culture for both, its insouciant treatment of classical mythology and its inability to raise serious social issues, this article focuses on Robert Brough’s Medea to demonstrate that his burlesque and its performance constitutes a fascinating example of a product of popular culture that discusses Victorian socio-political

ABSTRACT '(Skin)Aesthetics (First Manifesto)' offers an introduction to my new performance theory and method of performance analysis: ‘(skin)aesthetics’. In the spirit of a manifesto, I outline the theoretical development of (skin)aesthetics as an approach and its objectives. (Skin)aesthetics focusses on the spectator’s skin as an active and reciprocal site of engagement in the performance environment

ABSTRACT Over the past twenty years, a collection of theatre makers in Russia have staged suppressed and marginalised voices to engage with the political and social realities of contemporary Russia. The work of these innovative theatre practitioners has been collated under the idiom of New Drama (Novaya Drama). Previous studies of New Drama have placed an emphasis on the role of the text and the playwright’s

ABSTRACT Samuel Beckett’s stage play That Time offers an aesthetic exploration of the paradoxical and deconstructive nature of identity and selfhood where the ability of narrative acts to express and capture a preexistent, originary identity is put into question. That Time implies that there is no such core identity and that any identity is constituted by performing and narrating one’s selfhood, thus

ABSTRACT This article develops an analysis of flamenco performance and religious processions in Andalusia by deploying and extending Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of drawing, using the results of extensive ethnographic field research completed by the author among the Roma community in southern Spain. The article demonstrates how the Gitano body becomes a corpus of drawing, in Nancy’s sense, through a performance

ABSTRACT This comparative essay analyses the dramatic representation of horses in two early twenty-first-century American plays by Sam Shepard and Sarah Ruhl. Both plays bring a horse figure onto the stage as a prop and couple it to human characters fashioned by the iconography of the American cowboy. While both plays rely heavily on the symbolic power of horses and trope the animal, thus failing to

ABSTRACT This article reflects on a series of wild experiments in literal field sites. It develops a practice-based methodology that aims to identify, perform and assert wild presences and unruly processes, playfully engaging with vibrant and dynamic ecologies. To explore these concerns ‘in the field’, a series of research trips were undertaken in the United Kingdom between 2017 and 2020, including

(2021). Editorial: taking a snapshot of theatre and performance studies. Studies in Theatre and Performance: Vol. 41, Towards Decentring Theatre and Performance Studies, pp. 1-11.

ABSTRACT With the climate of Brexit, xenophobia and white supremacy on the rise, health and safety of Black and Global Majority people under threat during the spread of Covid in the UK and elsewhere, a discussion of colonialism, migration, borders, and equality – in the classrooms and outside – is more pertinent than ever. Situating the ongoing Decolonise the University movement as part of broader

ABSTRACT The field of social theatre is founded in community-engaged creative processes. It is inherently political, embedded in its geopolitical and social environment. Yet existing methods of documentation – the distribution and gathering of data and its output - do not always reflect this tradition. Methods related to documentation raise various concerns around consistent ways to gain and share

ABSTRACT In 2004, Performance Studies came to Singapore for a brief visit, and, by some accounts, it was a fraught encounter. That year, a Performance Studies international (PSi) conference, PSi #10, was hosted in Singapore, the first time this association gathered in ‘Asia’. In this essay, I use this conference as a starting point to tease out the intersections between my discipline and my home country

ABSTRACT ‘Asking the Wrong Questions: Musings on a Conversation with Gakire Katese Odile about Intercultural Theatre’: After an interview with Gakire Katese Odile, a Rwandan drummer, director, and entrepreneur, I was struck by the failure of my theories to account for her work. Rehearsing this failure allows for an exploration of the ramifications of acknowledging the fact that Odile had already theorized

ABSTRACT 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 Teatro de Santo André and the Universidade Livre do Teatro Vila Velha, both theatre schools operating at the margins of the official Brazilian educational establishment and making use of overtly

ABSTRACT In 2014, I founded Scene/Asia, a platform of critique and dialogue for Asian contemporary performances. The main objective of the project was to extract performance tropes and concepts cultivated on the Asian soil; we tried to build a pool of knowledge that uses ‘Asian theatre [and not Western theatre] as method’, to cite Rossella Ferrari, who, in turn, borrowed from Kuan Hsing-Chen. Taking

ABSTRACT Most histories of psychological-realist acting identify the mid-twentieth-century style with Lee Strasberg’s eponymous ‘Method,’ tracing its genealogy back to the work of Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky and his Moscow Art Theatre protégés. The style’s most iconic practitioner—Marlon Brando—was more circumspect, however, rarely crediting Strasberg for his acting credentials. Taking

(2020). From the producer’s perspective: Kayza Rose. Studies in Theatre and Performance: Vol. 40, Artist Development: Class, Diversity and Exclusion, pp. 275-279.