Building on a new wave of interest in intercultural theatre and performance in the last decade, Phillip B. Zarrilli, T. Sasitharan and Anuradha Kapur's Intercultural Actor and Performer Training gathers historical and contemporary perspectives from performers, educators and/or scholars working in classrooms, training studios and rehearsal rooms around the world. Their major contention, as laid out in their introduction, is that we must acknowledge all actor and performance training to be de facto intercultural in an unprecedentedly networked and globalized world where diverse student groups have become the norm rather than the exception, regardless of national context.

What the editors mean by intercultural, and how they and their contributors propose that we engage this idea as a theatrical and specifically theatrical training practice, however, differs from the top-down and extractive models (or stereotypes) that we might associate with previous waves. Instead this collection continues a recent turn towards minority and grassroots-led interculturalism by focusing on theatre training specifically in a global context, drawing on the shared sustained practical experiences of Zarrilli, Sasitharan and Kapur as educational and artistic leaders as well as scholars.

Authors in the collection consistently reflect on their own intercultural skill sets as a continuing and always haunted set of practices. In doing so, this collection makes available models of critical reflection that demonstrate how theatre practitioners’ embodied encounters with multiple training techniques and methods might be approached critically and ethically in the classroom and beyond. Shared across most of the chapters (which originally appeared across two special issues of the journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training) is careful consideration of interculturalism as an individualized negotiation that can never avoid the historical and practical genealogies that teachers/facilitators or directors kinaesthetically activate through their transmission of exercises or ideas. Tanya Calamoneri and Frances Barbe's eloquent and rigorous meditations on the application of butoh in the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company actor Greg Hicks (Calamoneri) and their acquisition and practice of butoh as it has evolved over time is one example. Other chapters further expand the field of intercultural performance studies, such as Tara McAllister-Viel's and Electa Behrens's call for more focus on voice, and specifically its decolonization through championing the studying of multiple voice paradigms globally, rather than falling back on Western voice-training practices championed as both natural and universal.

Sunhee Kim and Jeungsook Yoo's brilliant exploration of their individual experiences of creating and performing in the Llanarth Group's co-created production of playing ‘the maids’ (2014) takes the reader inside their creation and onstage experiences, reflecting on how they individually took up and remixed Korean cultural ideas, aesthetic principles and forms such as gu-eum and salpuri dance, while also responding to the culturally specific offering of their Irish collaborators, including sean-nós singing, from the phenomenological perspective of their time onstage. By sharing these two layered but absolutely distinct performance experiences from within the same production, Kim and Yoo model why intercultural performance theory must zero in on an individual's knowing metabolization of cultural, as well as intercultural, theatrical forms, as crucial to our understanding of the instability of culture as well as how performance forms evolve through consciously intercultural experiments.

Post-colonial criticism that balances historical and contemporary perspectives also remains key in this volume, such as in Kathy Foley and Marco Addo's chapters on modern Indonesian performance and their negotiation between indigenous and Western theatrical forms through tracing the training and collaborative networks of key mid-twentieth-century directors such as Arifin C. Noer, Putu Wijaya and W. S. Rendra – a genealogical view that reconstructs not only the pressure of Western theatre training practices on the global South, but also how these were remade and superseded by the innovations of the directors profiled.

One overarching takeaway from this collection is that new interculturalism must continue to reject the extractive in favour of the catalytic as its defining energy. Indeed many of the historical accounts in this collection indicate that when interculturalism is driven from within the global South, it has long been substantially more than a byword for the Western theatre's poaching of the other. Ultimately, while the collection is an audit of the global current state of play in this area, it is also an invitation to consider why staying with the fraught territory of interculturalism within our own training studios, classrooms and rehearsal rooms, whether at the university or beyond, urgently matters.

At the time of my writing this review, Phillip B. Zarrilli tragically passed away in April 2020, the end of a career in which he stayed with the trouble of interculturalism in deeply ethical and rigorous ways despite the necessarily urgent debates that have attached themselves to its practice in our field since at least the 1970s. That this is (to my knowledge to date) his last publication is fitting as it is an explicit invitation to continue his pedagogical as well as scholarly legacy in our classrooms around the world. To do this, we must continue refining how we understand interculturalism as a thorny and always situated undertaking that demands of us deep embodied knowledge of the histories and limits of the forms and practices we engage with each and every time we begin our work.