In the aftermath of the 2019 pro-democracy protests and amid the pandemic, Hong Kong theatre collective Zuni Icosahedron staged two productions, Bach Is Heart Sutra and 2 or 3 Things about Interrupted Dream. Bach draws on Buddhist concepts to retrain the senses and unlearn perceptions, inviting audience–participants to reflect on the forms and concepts that define Hong Kong. 2 or 3 Things revises a section of the kunqu opera Peony Pavilion to revisit the protests and offer an explicit statement on censorship. Both productions provide a space for experimentation and reflection within a city that has seemingly foreclosed on practices of questioning, exploring and gathering. Situating these works in relation to the protests, as a distinctly infrastructural movement, and drawing on Lauren Berlant's conceptualization of infrastructure, this essay examines Zuni's theatre as an infrastructure, of sorts, mediating a moment of transition and trying out new ways of moving within it.

How might we think queerly about the politics of performance in public space? Inspired by ‘queer’ as a straying from the straight-and-narrow and by the street as a site of chance meetings and awkward run-ins, I stage in this essay an encounter between two different approaches to thinking the politics of performance in public space. The first approach follows a familiar path: Bertolt Brecht's ‘street scene’ and Walter Benjamin's account of epic theatre. The second approach follows the walking performances of two queer migrant artists – South Korean-born Jisoo Yoo, now based in France, and Mozambican-born Jupiter Child, now based in Denmark – who interrogate the disorientation of the queer migrant body in Western European public space. Exploring the surprisingly busy intersection between the Brechtian street scene and the work of these two artists reveals a politics of performance in public space that favours orientation over rupture.

Pān-toh is an ancient practice of collaborative roadside banquet in Taiwan, in which participants temporarily occupy a public space, arrange the meal and enjoy the anarchic feast. Although this custom has declined in frequency as a result of capitalist developments, the idea has seen a nostalgic revival in the past decade amidst international military tensions and domestic ideological battles. It has been appropriated into artistic productions to demonstrate an activist gesture of minority alliance that reflects the (post)colonial histories and reticent survival tactics therein. This essay takes Gather Theatre Group's Twelve Dishes Ballad as an example, to see how the pān-toh performance allegorized a reparative solidarity that departed from the paranoid interpretation of political scenarios and moved forward to a non-violent practice that emphasizes underground mutual dependence and intervulnerability. This apparatus of solidarity, nourished by Taiwan's experiences, contributes to a critique of the currently prevalent tendencies of defensive protectionism.

This article focuses on Watchlist, a new play written by Alex Vickery-Howe, placing it in a context of contemporary Australian political writing for the stage which sees playwrights, such as Stephen Sewell and Suzie Miller, adopt an international outlook in order to tell stories of activism. By creating nuanced characters and engaging with the popular, these playwrights are inspiring activism in their audiences in engaging and challenging ways, arguing that what is deemed off-limits should not be left off-stage.

The article traces the production and reception of Love as Strong as Death, a dramatization of the Song of Songs that was performed in Mandatory Palestine in the years 1940–42 by a group of Yemenite Jewish actors. We argue that the tensions between the actors’ amateur status and their image as embodying a long-lost Biblical heritage were emblematic of the inherent contradictions within the hegemonic Ashkenazi Zionist discourse and the Orientalist perception of the role of Yemenite Jews in it. By exploring both Yemenite and Ashkenazi voices in and around the production, we analyse how the stage, the theatre hall and the written press all served as contested sites regarding the participation of non-European Jews in Hebrew theatre and culture. In the paper's conclusion, we demonstrate how Love as Strong as Death anticipated later debates in Israeli theatre about the place of Mizrahi Jews on stage and in the auditorium.

This article examines the COVID-era shift in the disability politics of sensory-theatre artists in the United Kingdom who create work for neurodiverse young audiences, arguing that the pandemic pushed them toward a more expansive and overtly political understanding of disability. I examine the work of three companies – Oily Cart (London), Frozen Light (Norwich) and Spectra (Birmingham) – who adjusted their practices to embrace their audiences’ shifting access needs, including those in caregiving roles. These changes move sensory theatre into a more politicized realm, echoing calls from crip studies scholars and disability justice activists to reimagine disability as a relational category from which solidarity can arise that does not hinge entirely on medical diagnosis. These artists’ renewed commitments to relational access provide lessons for performing artists and audiences navigating how to care for one another through the massive death and disablement of the ongoing pandemic.

The article explores the scenographic rendering of trauma in the theatre performance 872 days. Voices of the besieged city staged by a small theatre, Subbota, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The performance delves into the complex issues of private narratives of traumatic experiences, which, for decades, were deemed unimportant and even disruptive within the context of victory and glory of The Great Patriotic War. The production is based on memoirs and diaries of witnesses of the Leningrad siege. This study explores the connection between the scenographic ecology and empathic unsettlement, which is understood as a tool of approaching trauma through the experience of the audience. The article analyses how the scenographic rendering of trauma allows for potential representation and understanding of traumatic experience. It further looks at a theatre space as a place for mourning and reflexivity that allows the possibility of working through past trauma to better understand the present.

The Naoshima Onna Bunraku, an all-female bunraku troupe on the island of Naoshima in Japan's Seto Inland Sea, has revitalized a puppetry tradition dating back to the Edo period (1603–1868). This article examines how the Naoshima Onna Bunraku negotiates the pull of its local, community-oriented past and its global present as a folk performing art on an island now known for art tourism as the site of the Setouchi Triennale. I trace Naoshima's puppetry networks from the Seto Inland Sea that nurtured their ancestors to new networks that extend globally to reveal the dynamic flows that animate and sustain puppetry on Naoshima.

The Oberammergau Passion Play – arguably the largest and longest-running Passion Play tradition in the world – depicts Jesus’ arrest, conviction and crucifixion at a spellbinding scale. It has also been at the centre of a controversy regarding its historic antisemitism and its efforts to reform, having engaged a director with a zeal for radically changing it. However, this article, informed by a large ethnographic study, argues that the feud that engulfed the town for decades – with reformers and traditionalists at loggerheads – has now abated. The 2022 Passion Play was made almost entirely by pro-reform locals, with traditionalists now outnumbered and sidelined, due to both their own choices and intentional exclusion by those at the helm. What remains of the feud has now changed shape, focusing not on the changes to the play but on the leadership style of the director.

This dossier explores the ways in which theatre and performance practitioners across the globe have addressed the deeply gendered modes of differential access to public spaces, institutional support, and resources through their creative as well as activist work, during the pandemic and its aftermath. In the last three years, the pandemic has transformed experiences of urban space globally. Access to public space has always been gendered as well as shaped by geographical location, race, caste, class and sexual identity. These traditional modes of differential access have been radically reorganized by the isolation and uncertainty engendered by the global pandemic. While ‘working from home’ was certainly not an option for everyone (most notably, care-workers in an overwhelmingly feminized profession), confinement to domestic space also meant escalating incidents of gendered violence for others. Additionally, the lack of sustainable income opportunities meant, as contributions to this dossier will demonstrate, the stripping away of roofs from over the heads of vulnerable citizens, whether impoverished artistes in want of state support or migrant workers on an uncertain daily wage. Staying at home was no longer an option, because ‘home’ often ceased to exist as a viable shelter, whether literally or by implication. For performers and theatre-workers all over the world, it was a time of intensified precarity: not only a loss of employment and income, but also a growing sense of artistic and professional purposelessness. While some were able to reorient this bewilderment through virtual and digital performances, for many grassroots performers, especially in the global South, access to these modes of public engagement were limited. In countries like India, street theatre activists felt unable and unwilling to switch to the digital space, while the prohibition on public assembly struck an irrevocable blow to women's protest movements.

In the present article,1 I will examine how topics of domestic work, care and family values were critically addressed by female performers in 2022 on various Hungarian stages. Two short analyses will show that the notion of womanhood is deconstructed through questioning superficial and populist images of traditional female roles. While Baby Bumm – Propinquity Effect, a community theatre production highlights the actual toll of becoming a mother, a one-woman-show titled God, Home, Kitchen detects the numerous and often contradicting roles assigned to an average Hungarian female citizen by politicians. Both productions build on the physical limits of the performers’ bodies, the actual burden of taking care of children, as well as fulfilling duties in and outside the household, to show the unreal nature of politicized ideas on women. This is a public topic that further emerged in post-pandemic times, especially in the light of the government's determination of acceptable social participation for women.

The growing literature on Covid-19 and theatre has demonstrated how the pandemic has intensified gendered precarities in theatrical labour.1 However, the pandemic has also provided feminist theatre makers with unexpected or unlikely resources, albeit with limitations. The Istanbul Municipal Theatre's (İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Şehir Tiyatroları or İBBŞT) production of Melek that premiered in 2020 is an indicative example of such rare and largely invisible cases of pandemic theatre. Critically engaging with the archives and repertoires of tuberculosis (TB) melodrama and the Turkish lives of the genre, Melek conducts an experiential mapping of the performativity of death and the porous borders between everyday performance and artistic performance. The production offered independent feminist theatre practitioners, who otherwise maintain a precarious existence in Turkey's theatre world, access to new spaces, resources and audiences. Combining archival with ethnographic research, I will demonstrate how, in the case of Melek, the intersections between actual and fictive viral contagion – what I define as viral interstitiality – constitute inclusive economies amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. In somatics, the interstitial is theorized and enacted as suspensions of static schisms that shape relational empowerment.2 Drawing upon this grasp of the interstitial as connective thresholds, viral interstitiality sheds light on the practices and the economies of care that emerge from the porous dynamism between the viral and the theatrical.

An attendant exerts all his strength to squeeze in as many passengers as possible into a car at the 28th Street Station in New York. The most prominent passenger feature is the contorting face of a Black man. He is surrounded by white riders, one of whom is trying his best to read the newspaper, a little girl, who stands with her legs akimbo, and a white woman, obscured by the window. The hectic scene muddles the identity of body parts, more akin to a game of Twister than a fantasy of public mobility across an urban landscape. Reduced to limbs and faces, the diverse passengers portrayed in Bernard Brussel-Smith's 1940 lithograph demonstrate its title: Subway Crush.1

The politics of our post-Covid times are expressed through various registers. In Kolkata, one especially powerful artistic medium for such expressions was the revival of street theatre as young and senior theatre practitioners plunged into exploring critical issues that have been all-pervasive since the beginning of the pandemic. As people finally started to venture out, content to be amidst human congregations, street plays, being located in open-air spaces, proved both economical and safe. The issues these street performances highlighted and their modes of presentations could be described as what Tony Fisher calls ‘activist theatre’ – which mobilizes the people by interpellating its audience around a specific grievance or issue that possesses an emotional appeal.1 These performances are a form of artistic activism, or ‘artivism’ as termed by Chantal Mouffe: the use of aesthetic means for political activism, ‘as a counter-hegemonic move against the capitalist appropriation of aesthetics’.2