This essay reflects on the different spectatorial, political, cultural, affective and bodily experiences of attending Lola Arias's MINEFIELD/CAMPO MINADO, both at the Royal Court in London and at a university auditorium in Buenos Aires. Drawing upon the 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War, the Argentine internationally recognized director's production featured six former soldiers who used to be enemies on the battlefield telling real stories about the conflict. Although there was almost nothing that could be called traditional theatre onstage, the production received standing ovations on both sides of the Atlantic. But what was applauded at the end of each performance? The audiences’ reactions, including my own, were very different at the two venues. I argue that Arias's production hinged upon a high-risk, highly exposed public encounter that envisioned a change of perspectives, not only for the ex-soldiers involved but also for the spectators. Rather than staging veterans as war heroes, Arias's social experiment exposed both teams on a common ground of vulnerability. MINEFIELD constructed a spectacle of intimate power that delineated a naked form of transnational citizenship.

This article analyses various approaches to the transposition of Chinese xiqu performance into moving-image media in terms of preserving xiqu's aesthetic aims. Pre- and post-Cultural Revolution filmic examples, as well as contemporary television serials, are discussed. I argue that within a ‘cinema of attractions’ rather than a realist line of inquiry, ‘filmed theatre’ continues as a viable and valued stream of access to xiqu performance for contemporary audiences.

20 October 1986: the Rukun Kemala troupe is hired to perform at a wedding in Kalianget Barat, its home village from 8.30 p.m. to 2.30 a.m. In a courtyard between two houses, the stage is erected on poles, with a floor of woven bamboo panelling; one whole side will collapse in the middle of the night under the strain of the actors' entrances and exits, without so much as the performance being interrupted. The gamelan orchestra begins to play at 8.30 p.m. exactly, as contracted. Fifty minutes later, slides are projected onto the lowered stage curtain depicting names of the head and leading members of the troupe together with words of welcome to the audience. At 9.30 p.m. the curtain is raised for the first time to reveal a ten-minute dance number: four female dancers appear before the monumental split gates of a Hindu kingdom bathed in red light and strobe effects with Catherine wheels whirling. Next, photos of clowns are projected while the public is harangued to take an active participation in the forthcoming elections, family planning and family education organizations. The curtain rises again to reveal a painted backdrop depicting a street scene in an imaginary modern town, to accompany the clown programme which lasts forty minutes. A final set of slides, ten minutes long, this time shows the actors dressed in the costumes of the characters they are about to portray, with a brief introduction to the story by the scriptwriter. At 10.30 p.m. the curtain opens on the first scene of the play which will last four hours without an interval: ‘Black Mask, in the Story of Yuliati Awaiting Happiness’ (Topeng Hitam dalam kisah Yuliati menanti bahagia).

This article examines what is at stake when performers and playwright critically transfigure oral histories when staging them theatrically. Representations of race and colonial history are integral to a nation's conception of its own cultural identity. These issues are at the forefront of many theatre productions in Cape Verde, an intensely creolized West African nation whose islands bear traces of the Europeans and Africans who have commingled there for centuries. The article examines two performances rooted in Cape Verdean history that challenge existing theoretical paradigms for the mimetic relationship between actors and the historical personae they portray onstage. Proposing the concept of the ‘historical imagination’, it explores how theatre artists self-consciously alter the local history they circulate to an international theatre festival stage and, concomitantly, how the theatre festival context and media coverage profoundly impact how national history is told within a global performance arena.

Identity mobilises feminist politics in Australia and shapes discursive and theatrical practices. Energised by the affirmative politics of hope, celebration and unity, Australian feminism is also motivated by injustice, prejudice and loss, particularly among Indigenous women and minorities. During the 1970s, when feminist theatre opened up creative spaces on the margins of Australian theatre, women identified with each other on the basis of an unproblematized gender identity, a commitment to socialist collectivism and theatre as a mode of self-representation. The emphasis on shared experience, collectivism and gender unity gave way in the 1980s to a more nuanced critical awareness of inequalities and divisions among women based on sexuality, class, race and ethnicity. My discussion spans broadly the period from the 1970s to the present and concludes with some commentary on recent twists and turns in identity politics.

In my book Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (Stanford University Press, 2010) I analysed four encounters between philosophers and theatre people – the thespians in the title – as a point of departure for presenting a typology based on the exploration of the complex border landscapes between the discursive practices of philosophy and performance/theatre. In this article, I take a closer look at one of these encounters, exploring the narrative strategies of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, as well as Franz Kafka, suggesting that they can be analysed on the basis of the games of chess and go. The differences between the rules of these two board games serve as the basis for a dramaturgical analysis where different aspects of performance/theatre and philosophy (practice and theory) are brought together. This hermeneutic ‘approach’ also reflects the basic pedagogic situation of studying and researching theatre and performance as well as many of the ethical concerns raised by our involvement with these artistic practices, along with those of philosophy.

It is not surprising that the ancient republics allowed the condemned to escape death through flight. Exile did not seem to them a softer sentence than death. Roman jurisprudence also called it capital punishment.

One of the most revealing traits of the Nicaraguan revolution is manifested in the profound changes registered in the realm of culture. If Sandinista ideology focuses not on the fate of an élite but on that of the vast majority of the Nicaraguan people, it follows that for people to become the true subject of politics they have to become the true subject of culture as well. The popular Sandinista victory of July 1979 brought about the immediate establishment of the Ministry of Culture (the first in the country's history). Its goal: to give shape and nourishment to the popular effervescence and creative energies awakened by the long struggle. Work began with the organization of theatre, poetry, music and dance workshops throughout all sectors of the Nicaraguan society (army and police included), with the inauguration of Centres of Popular Culture in all regions, the creation of cultural committees in all grass-roots organizations, the training of ‘cultural promoters’ to work with regional governments, and with the task of rescuing and revitalizing popular cultural traditions.

I sketch those characteristics of the mise en scène at the Ring of Brodgar stone circle and associated sites that might solicit within the visitor something like a dynamic performance. Drawing on surrealism, Robert Smithson and archaeology, I argue that the mise en scène at Brodgar – and the visitor's response to it – is characterized by a sense of presence which exists in a dialectical tension with the perception of that which is absent. Brodgar is indexical (like a photograph) and hauntological, in semiotic terms. The Neolithic site is, at some level, unknowable. The visitor becomes aware of coincident yet incompatible manifestations of time and space (heterochronia) and imagines the potential return of unknown, cryptic ritual performances (metatheatre). This solicits within the viewer something akin to Max Ernst's model of frottage. As Breton put it, ‘The imaginary . . . tends to become real’.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the orientation of buildings in ancient Greece received a great deal of scholarly attention; since that time, it has fallen from favour. In 1939, William Bell Dinsmoor made an ‘attempt to illustrate a method of obtaining more accurate information concerning the dates of Greek temples and certain details of religious practice through the application of an outmoded theory, that of “orientation”’. When this complex study, replete with trigonometric calculations of seasonal star positions met with little favour, orientation became a dead issue for several decades, only reviving in 1962 with the publication of Vincent Scully's The Earth, The Temple, and the Gods (New Haven: Yale University Press).

In this essay, I argue that human performers and technological media can work together as equal partners rather than as rivals competing for the audience's attention. Understanding presence in the ‘strong’ sense of the word – namely the actor's ability to draw the spectators’ undivided attention as opposed to the ‘weak’ sense of simply being present – I substantiate this claim with a model of intermedial presence in The Marionette, a popular Korean b-boy show that combines live dancing with video and black light. The show's central motif of puppetry puts the live dancers and the media elements in a highly integrated relationship while their distinct ontological identities are maintained. Understanding the show's intermedial dynamics in terms of collaboration and hypermediacy challenges the conventional binary between the live and the mediatized, as well as the assimilationist position that regards the two as fused in intermedial performance.

In 1986 Howard Barker abridged Thomas Middleton's tragedy Women Beware Women and wrote a new ending. This version was published and staged as a collaboration between the Jacobean and the modern playwright. There are a number of differences, but also points of connection between Barker's version and Middleton's Jacobean tragedy. Middleton sets out a moral fable on the corrupting nature of desire and greed. Leantio, a clerk, falls in love with Bianca, a rich man's daughter. They elope and live in secrecy with Leantio's mother. Despite her husband's exhortations to keep herself private, Bianca is spotted by the Duke of Florence, who determines to make her his. A wealthy neighbour, the widow, Livia, aids him in this, luring Bianca and the mother to her house where Bianca is raped by the Duke. Bianca's story is mirrored by that of Isabella, who is being ‘sold’ into marriage with a rich fool and is tricked into an incestuous relationship with her uncle Hippolito. Bianca leaves her husband to become the Duke's mistress. Leantio is taken up by Livia.

The article begins with a short description of the current situation in Polish theatre where the traditional understanding of a dramatic text has made the reception of formally innovative European playwriting difficult. On the basis of recent German plays by Rainald Goetz, Dea Loher and Roland Schimmelpfennig, which have been translated into Polish and published but have not yet received significant productions, the article tries to answer two important questions. Firstly, how the postdramatic texts written for avant-garde, feminist and postcolonial theatre during last three decades have influenced plays written for and put on the mainstream stages in the 1990s. Secondly, in what ways the new texts, which in many respects go far beyond the borders of traditional drama, have changed the existing definitions of theatrical mimesis and theories of drama

The present paper will explore some of the re-enactments of the so called ‘Arab Spring’ in selected performances from Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, with their seamless connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among the concepts examined are Habermas's ‘public sphere’, Deleuze's ‘revolutionary-becoming’ and Rebecca Schneider's ‘re-enactment’. The remediation of revolution in performance reveals the material conditions and geographic locations of social unrest. Significantly enough, artistic re-enactments of the revolution have already been inflicted by ‘techno-imagination’, whereby most of us have become either spectators or citizen journalists of public dissidence, and yet we have been connected to the unprecedented upheaval by watching mediated images or implementing and re-editing them for distanced audiences.

The focus of this article is a critical evaluation of the impact of international development and conflict-resolution funding on theatre in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The article complicates the predominant narrative of theatre as ‘cultural resistance’ in conflict zones by historicizing the Ford Foundation's role in the institutionalization of Palestinian drama; delineating the effects of neo-liberal state building and development on Palestinian modes of performance; and subsequently, analysing the Freedom Theatre's imbrication in a normative, humanitarian logic. Aid, while ensuring the material conditions for the growth of the Palestinian performing arts, promoted a structural dependency that emptied the language of anti-colonial resistance of emancipatory potential, generating a soft, phantom sovereignty for the audience of the international community. By reimagining ‘freedom’ as liberation from a backward, conservative society, the language of the human rights industry and its attendant cultural economy spawns a spectral ‘cultural resistance’ where freedom and nationhood appear real and unreal – visions refracting, but not existing in, reality.