The four articles in this first issue of 2014 could not have, at first glance, less in common. The first piece, ‘Zooësis and “Becoming with” in India: The “Figure” of Elephant in Sahyande Makan: The Elephant Project’ by Ameet Parameswaran, examines the theatrical adaptation of a 1944 Malayalam poem by the company Theatre Roots and Wings. In ‘The Dynamics of Space and Resistance in Muhammad ‘Azīz's Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place’, Salwa Rashad Amin discusses the importance of ‘Azīz's play in the context of Egypt's recent and historical revolutions. Ketu Katrak takes up the performance of affect and its implication for social justice in ‘“Stripping Women of Their Wombs”: Active Witnessing of Performances of Violence’. Finally, Katia Arfara explores the work of a performance artist in terms of early twentieth-century precedents for European performance art, ‘Denaturalizing Time: On Kris Verdonck's Performative Installation End’. Theatre Research International readers will find much of value in each article, and they represent the kind of broad international focus our journal endeavours to provide.

I analyse Sahyande Makan: The Elephant Project (2008), a cross-cultural theatrical production in Malayalam and Japanese by the Kerala-based group Theatre Roots and Wings, as an instance of ‘zooësis’. The performance presents the state of an elephant in the space of a Kerala temple festival ritual, pooram. The elephant moves into a fantasy of the wild as it is under the physiological condition of musth. Approaching the question of the performing animal as intersectional, this performance challenges anthropocentrism and its assumed binary of human/animal, and draws a possible relation between domestic and wild, or the world of norms and freedom, both for elephants and for humans. I argue that by taking embodiment as the site of exploring discipline as well as imagining a freeing, and by positing an alternate way of ‘being worldly’ through affect and senses, the performance articulates what Donna Haraway has posited as the process of ‘becoming with’.

Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place (February 2011) by Muhammad ‘Azīz (1955–) documents how Egyptian youth played a leading role in coordinating and organizing the 25 January 2011 revolution through social media networking and how the battle fought at Tahrir Square exemplifies genuine human networking. ‘Azīz's play constructs its social and historical grounding as a fabulous mix between the real, the fictional and the virtual. It reimagines the possibilities of political theatre in the context of postmodern virtuality. This study explores how realism can incorporate other worlds as a way of rethinking theatre and politics in a richly multicultural, post-revolutionary Egypt. It illuminates Egyptians’ complexities, where individualities are reinforced against an oppressive regime. This analysis focuses on the dynamics of space and resistance, as multiple selves move from individualistic, alienated spaces towards connection through the space of resistance and shared political activity.

This essay creates a theoretical frame interweaving Jill Dolan's concept of ‘finding hope at the theatre’ with Michel Foucault's concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ to argue that spectators’ affective responses to performed violence in live theatre include hope and imagining social change. I draw upon my own active witnessing of theatrical performances of two works – Ruined by Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American Lynn Nottage, and Encounter by the Indian-American Navarasa Dance Theater Company. Along with Dolan and Foucault, I draw upon affect scholarship by James Thompson and Patricia T. Clough, and upon theorist Saidiya V. Hartman's discussion of slavery that makes the human into an abject ‘non-human’. Continuing forms of female enslavement and resistances to domination are evident in the representations of sexual slavery in the two works.

Originating from the avant-garde's attempt to supplant the structural limitations of perspective which ‘bound the spectator to a single point of view’, installation art emerged during the 1960s and the 1970s as a critique of the pure, self-referential work of art. Belgian artist Kris Verdonck integrates that modernist debate into his hybrid practice of performative installation. Trained in visual arts, architecture and theatre, Verdonck uses sophisticated technological devices in order to blur binary distinctions such as time- and space-art, inanimate and animate figures, and immateriality and materiality. This study focuses on End (Brussels 2008), which shows the possible final stages of a human society in ten scenes. I analyse End as an echo of the Futurists’ performance tactics, which prefigured a broadening of the formal aesthetic boundaries of performance art under the major influence of Henri Bergson's theory of time.