This article examines the relationship among migration, performance and intercultural dialogue as social policy in the European Union since the late 2000s. Intercultural dialogue is currently enjoying a second wave of prominence with several recently published reports by the European Union explicitly highlighting the relationship between this strategy's transformational possibilities and the role of the arts. Crucially, in both European social policy and performance theory today, interculturalism is increasingly used to mean an embodied practice and site of encounter that strategically multiplies – rather than binarizing or reifying – cultural differences between individuals and within groups. This article compares the work of three European theatre companies who describe their work as theatrical interculturalism and use it as a means of practising and furthering intercultural dialogue: Kloppend Hert (Belgium), Terra Nova Productions (Northern Ireland) and Outlandish Theatre Platform (Republic of Ireland).

On 28 April 2013, ninety-five years after Finland's civil war (27 January–15 May 1918), artist Kaisa Salmi created a performance called Fellman Field: A Living Monument to 22,000 People. It was a site-specific event organized at Fellman Park in Lahti. There, for almost a week in 1918, thousands of civil war prisoners were held to await transport to a prison camp. In 2013, an impressive number of people (close to 10,000) gathered at this site to participate in a commemoration of the civil war, which is still one of the most repressed traumas in the national consciousness of the Finns. This article discusses Fellman Field as an artwork in terms of its utilization of embodied empathy: the sympathetic understanding of the other through physical and emotional experience. The case of Fellman Field demonstrates the challenges and successes of a site-specific participatory performance that aims to promote understanding and constructively handle the complexity of a national tragedy.

This article examines the haptic politics of the Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–2004) ‘theatre museum’ composed by Indian performance artist Pushpamala N. and British photographer Clare Arni. Through a transnational collaboration, Native Women re-creates a visual genealogy of ‘popular’ Indian women images, reckoning with legacies of colonial and photographic studio photography. The article focuses on the engagements of Native Women with colonial representations of ‘the native’ (woman) in particular and asks: How does a transnational project resituating colonial ethnographic practices inform feminist performance methodologies? How does this photo-performance develop a haptic attempt at transnational solidarity? In what ways do haptic entanglements with photo-performance constitute new imaginations for collaborative practices? The article repositions Native Women as a performance work that reflects collaboration as a process of political intimacy.

Throughout the British Empire, visiting and immigrating professional actors ‘from the old country’ realized and reinforced for settler cultures a dominant imperial identity. In Australia, Alfred Dampier (1843–1908) and his company exploited the opportunities that this cultural milieu offered by staging austere, ‘reverential’, well-elocuted Shakespearean productions which raised their artistic status and asserted their respectability while enabling Dampier to offer as well, without censorship or public condemnation, dramatizations of sensational and controversial bushranger and convict narratives.

The analysis of the following two Israeli plays is the focus of this article: Ghosts in the Cellar (Haifa Theatre, 1983) by Sami Michael, and The Father's Daughters (Hashahar Theatre, 2015) by Gilit Itzhaki. These plays deal with the Farhud – a pogrom which took place in Iraq in 1941, in which two hundred Iraqi Jews were massacred by an Iraqi nationalist mob. The Farhud has become a traumatic event in the memory of this Jewish community. Using the concept of ‘performing history’ as advanced by Freddie Rokem, I observe how these plays, as theatre of a marginalized group, engage in the production of memory and history as well as in the processing of grief. These plays present the Farhud and correspond with the Zionist narrative in two respects: (1) they present the traumatic historical event of these Middle Eastern Jews in the light of its disappearance in Zionist history, and (2) their performance includes Arab cultural and language elements of Iraqi-Jewish identity, and thus implicitly points out the complex situation of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

This essay examines the polarizing politics of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. I analyse the function of soft-power diplomacy in the design of the opening ceremony in relation to the international controversy around these games over the repression of civil and human rights. The Sochi Olympics became a lightning rod inciting pro-Western democratic protests against and Russian neo-national support for President Vladimir V. Putin's cultural reform programme. I argue that the Sochi stage was the opening scene of a much larger cultural propaganda campaign reflecting the government's move to boost a conservative world view. Sochi's spectacle mediated a reform strategy designed to reinvent Russian identity and restore Russia's global status. For contrast, I look back to the opening ceremony of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics and its vision of Soviet society in order to highlight the changing contexts in which soft power underscores broader objectives in geocultural politics.

Doomsayers and traditionalists prognosticate that the dominance of digital media spells the end of traditional arts in Java, Indonesia. Wayang kulit (shadow puppet theatre), while still highly regarded as theatrical heritage, is said to be under particular threat due to the long duration of its plays, complexity of language and the need for prior knowledge of characters and situations. Such features are at odds with the short attention spans and need for instant comprehension and gratification of Gen Z – the youth referred to in Indonesian media as inhabiting jaman now (literally the ‘era of now’). While digital social media, including Facebook and YouTube, definitely offer up alternative forms of entertainment and amusement, they are also being used by traditional puppet practitioners to reinforce and expand communities of practice. Facebook provides platforms for comparative discussion and critical debate, while YouTube potentiates the inclusion of a geographically dispersed audience, including overseas workers.

In 1980 the Republic of Zimbabwe became recognized internationally as an independent state. This independence marked a shift from white minority rule to black majority rule in the form of ZANU–PF in a transition in government that was fraught with brutal violence, tense negotiations and tremendous hope for the democratic state that would emerge. This article begins with a brief overview of key political-theatre and public-arts funding practices that emerged in the newly independent Zimbabwe in the 1980s and continues with an examination of an influential political play from the era by Cont Mhlange entitled Workshop Negative (1986). This article's analysis of Workshop Negative considers how the economic pressures explored in the play mirror the precarious working conditions that arts-funding models placed on political-theatre practitioners in Zimbabwe at the time.

This article discusses Sophie Tucker's racialized performance in the context of early twentieth-century American vaudeville and black–Jewish interracial relations. Tucker's vaudeville musical acts involved mixed racial referents: ‘black-style’ music and dance, Jewish themes, Yiddish language and the collaboration of both African American and Jewish artists. I show how these racial combinations were a studied tactic to succeed in white vaudeville, a corporate entertainment industry that capitalized on racialized images and fast changes in characters. From historical records it is clear that Tucker's black signifiers also fostered connections with the African American artists who inspired her work or were employed by her. How these interracial relations contended with Tucker's brand of racialized performance is the focus of the latter part of the article. Here I analyse Tucker's autobiography as a performative act, in order to reveal a reparative effort toward some of her exploitative approaches to black labour and creativity.

This article looks at the relationship between Haitian vodou, sound recording, and migration. I argue that Haitian vodou has a special relationship with technologies of sound, understood in Jonathan Sterne's sense of media as embodiments of social desire. There is a parallel between vodou possession and the practice of pwen (throwing verbal insults), on the one hand, and, on the other, the tape recorder's ability to manifest a person through the sound of his or her voice, making him or her present both in Haiti for the Haitian vodou congregation and in the diasporic land, thus bridging the separation across oceans and time. This transnational character underscores how Haitian vodou, which has been much maligned and often misunderstood, is an incredibly flexible and adaptive religion, necessary as a means of cultural survival for citizens of one of most economically disadvantaged nations, harshly subject to insertion in global neo-liberal labour markets.

Zha Mingzhe's 1997 production of Sartre's Morts sans sépulture takes bold creative license in the form of retooled dialogues; hard-edged stage design; moody, ironic music; and the brutal acoustic ‘facsimile’ of torture to reimagine the play for Chinese audiences. Zha's production is neither an exuberant celebration of ‘heroism’ as the term is conventionally understood, nor a parable-like play given to ‘philosophizing’ the core tenets of Sartre's existentialism. Rather, it is a full-scale, in-your-face presentation of ‘total heroism’: heroism that is flawed, falling far short of the kind of heroism idealized in the annals or mythologies of the so-called ‘red classics’, but it is heroism nonetheless. It is an interrogation, in the fullest sense of the term, of the ‘essence’ of being tested in the crucible of ferocious tortures, and a ‘cruel’ antidote much needed to shock the numbed nerves of the body politic.

This article is an adapted version of a text originally published in Turkish in the historical materialist journal PRAKSIS in 2016, and translated into English by the author.1 It focuses on performative protest acts and the role of the performing artist in Turkey in the context of the Gezi Park uprisings of 2013. The article examines how some of Gezi's performative protest actions evidence a larger cultural transformation, of which we can see a continuation in new theatre playtexts.

This essay discusses how maritime migrations contribute to movements of ideas across transnational ethnic communities. It focuses on actors from the African Grove, a New York City-based African American theatre company. Actors in this company worked as stewards on transatlantic packet ships where the architecture of the ship supported intercultural exchanges.

This series of provocations on the changing work of theatre historians opens with a contribution by David Wiles, who recounts a meeting of IFTR's Theatre Historiography Working Group in London in 2018. Wiles's reflection is followed by responses from scholars working in or on different regions, including perspectives by Oscar Tantoco Serquiña, Jr (Philippines), Lorena Verzero (Latin America) and Promona Sengupta (India).

The sociopolitical turbulence in the recent history of Turkey has radically affected the theatre and performance scene. In a climate of fear and repression, performing arts have been fighting for survival and developing ways to endure the dark times, to achieve freedom of artistic expression and open platforms for critical communication. This collection of articles considers contemporary theatre and performance in Turkey, reflecting on some of the complex issues that practitioners, academics and institutions have faced in the current political environment. Each author presents a part of the complex picture of theatre and performance culture in Turkey, and hopes to start a conversation about this oppressed, yet fertile, artistic landscape.

This article discusses the Hijra community from South Asia, and examines their rituals and performance culture to argue that there is a multiplicity of expressions for gender identities in South Asia, and they have been performed in a variety of ways, in a variety of spaces beyond the political rhetoric of the West. The paper also tries to discuss questions and difficulties around situating these cultures within an already established concept and the possible negotiations that would be needed for such an effort to even be imagined.

The writing of theatre history has been a challenging intellectual commitment in the Philippines. This mode of inquiry and inscription largely manifests more as a strand of general historiography than as a systematized and specialized critical practice in Philippine academe. No wonder, then, that Philippine theatre histories primarily come from academics whose disciplinary backgrounds are not solely in theatre arts per se but in a range of different but intersecting disciplines, such as film, literature, dance, anthropology, history and music. These historians have accounted for the medium's forms, geographies of production and performance, material aspects, lead practitioners, groups or organizations, and historical periods. They have thus far yielded a congeries of print materials: from the encyclopedia to the anthology or reader, the survey, up to the full-length book manuscript. More recently, theatre histories have also appeared in online catalogues or digital repositories.