As anyone who has dealt with bureaucrats or authoritarian regimes knows, sometimes it pays to act a little dumb. Glazing over good-naturedly in the face of a petty or corrupt demand can occasionally bring to light the inanity or cruelty of the situation in such a way as to prompt a momentary softening, be it through pity, impatience or even embarrassment. The stakes in such situations can be high: in the domain of the international with which this this journal is preoccupied, it might concern free passage on the one hand, or the right to remain, unhindered, on the other. More often the circumstances are banal, though not, for all that, without complexity. They point not only to the importance of stupidity as an enabling feature of life in complex and diverse modern societies, but also to the myriad forms it can take, from strategic ignorance, through the stupefaction necessary to manage the teeming stimuli of urban environments, to willing, if circumspect, participation in whichever confederacy of dunces makes up our place of employment, the organizations with which we affiliate, or the communities in which we participate.

One of the most forbidding and yet rewarding challenges in a substantive internationalization of arts scholarship is accounting for the experience and passage of time. The extent to which developments in theatre and performance over the past 150 years have been tied up with the larger social, economic and technological transformations reflexively understood as ‘modernity’ is a key reason an international journal readership is able to find interest and value in scholarship on performances they may not have seen, that are practised in places they have never been. At the same time, any such research – it is tempting to say ‘from outside the West’, but in fact the requirement holds everywhere – must register how the work under discussion complicates an otherwise oversimplified narrative of developmental modernity. This narrative treats a homogenized industrial and postindustrial ‘West’ as having led the way and established a model for how other parts of the world would modernize subsequently. The assumption is quickened in discussions of art because arguably one characteristic of those transformations as they happened in numerous centres of Euro-American power was the role that artists played in giving them aesthetic form and expressing their meanings. This is prominent in the emergence of modernism and the avant-garde, and it is logical that in recent times scholars of modernism have been particularly energetic in questioning the developmental narrative and demonstrating not only how such phenomena were constitutively reliant on processes elsewhere, but also how artistic developments everywhere both informed each other (often inequably) and manifested local and highly contingent characteristics.

‘In the humanities, journal decisions usually arrive by post.’ So wrote Wendy Laura Belcher in Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, a guide otherwise full of good sense, and published as recently as 2009. It is easy to scoff at such anachronistic information. But to do so would be to overlook all the seemingly outdated practices and conventions involved in publishing an academic journal, not the least of which is the inclusion of an editorial such as the one you are reading. The majority of TRI articles are accessed online, a process that almost inevitably involves bypassing the editor's introduction, let alone appreciating the order of the articles’ appearance within the print copy, or allowing their ostensibly diverse concerns to resonate with and inflect each other. Just before I took over the senior editorship of this journal, I discussed the viability of the editorial with my predecessor, Charlotte Canning, questioning its relevance and necessity. Charlotte rightly pointed out that to give up the editorial would be to relinquish the opportunity to introduce each of the articles in their own right, as well as a platform from which the editor can frame the issue and provide a rationale for decisions made along the way.

This article traces the reception of Oscar Wilde's play Salomé in Israeli theatre by focusing on the engagement of two artists – writer and translator Pinchas Sadeh and theatre director Ofira Henig – with the play at two different periods. In Salomé, Wilde utilizes his perception of Judaism, as well as the Song of Songs, for the creation of a theatrical space in which spectatorship and ownership are subverted and displaced. At the same time, ironically, the biblical and ‘Jewish’ presence in the play was fundamental for claims of ownership made by some in Hebrew and Israeli culture, asserting that the play somehow belonged to Hebrew culture and the Land of Israel. Despite these claims, the actual reception of Salomé in Israeli theatre proved that the play's ‘belonging’ was far more tenuous. The article examines how the tensions between the seen and the unseen, between owning and disowning and between placement and displacement play out – in almost opposite directions – in Sadeh's ideological reasoning for translating Salomé and in Henig's production of it.

Since the 1980s the Taiwanese theatre troupe Contemporary Legend Theatre (CLT) has been devoted to transforming jingju by way of adapting world classics. Through an analysis of its adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (2005), this article considers how CLT pushes the boundaries of jingju acting, which is made up of singing, speaking, dance-acting and combat. To meet Beckett's challenge of performing comic failure, CLT integrates jingju restraint and Western slapstick. In so doing, CLT liberates the actors’ bodies from jingju conventions to produce a new aesthetic, which also gives the original play a new metaphysical interpretation.

World literature has recently been critiqued for its normative, world-making force and, not unrelatedly, for its genealogical ties to orientalism. This article shifts the focus in world literature from the ‘world’ to the ‘literature’ by suggesting that within a nexus of politics, religion and knowledge production, the stylistic requirements of literature were fundamental to the reification of numerous performative modes that were not predicated exclusively on language's semantic dimensions. Literature, as a ‘vanishing mediator’, thus enabled not only translations but also comparative valuations – philological, mythological and racial – of entire cultures in an unethical epistemological encounter. Through the examination of the circuitous route of the Sāvitrī myth, which was translated from Sanskrit into Italian, English, French and German as ‘dramatic literature’, and finally to Gujarati as a play for theatrical production, this article uncovers performance's potential to problematize the figuring of text as world-encompassing entity.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s in Shanghai, the remnant of wenmingxi (civilized drama), China's first form of Western-style spoken drama, which had flourished in the 1900s and 1910s as a hybrid of Western spoken theatre and indigenous performance, experienced a brief resurrection and ultimate demise under the name of tongsu huaju (popular spoken drama). Considered until then as popular entertainment inferior to the officially recognized form of modern theatre, huaju (spoken drama), that adhered to Western realistic dramaturgy and performance, tongsu huaju staged a six-play festival in January 1957 thanks to liberal art policies, received a warm welcome in Beijing and other cities, and attracted the attention of some huaju experts who praised its affinity to indigenous performance, thus triggering a debate over its efficacy as a localized alternative to huaju for the future of modern Chinese theatre. Using contemporary sources, this article examines tongsu huaju’s brief rise and fall in Shanghai, with a focus on its performances, the debate, the policy changes that decided the fate of China's first form of modern theatre, and the implications of its fate for the narrative of periodization in modern Asian theatre.

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.

This article explores the history and contemporary revival of male belly dancers – zenne or köçek – in Turkey and in cities with large Turkish populations, such as Berlin. What does the current revival of male belly dancing tell us about the relationship between modern ideologies of sex and gender and narratives of modernity as they have taken shape in Turkey? The zenne dancer embodies the contradictions of contemporary Turkish culture, which includes a variety of same-sex practices, along with sexual taxonomies that have developed in collusion with discourses of modernity. The revival of zenne dancing can be seen as part of a series of global transformations in the visibility of gay, lesbian, and trans people in popular culture and public discourse. However, it is also an unpredicted consequence of the Justice and Development Party's (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) purposeful revival and romanticization of Turkey's Ottoman past, which has been ahistorically remembered as more pious than the present. Re-emerging in the twenty-first century as an embodiment of competing definitions of sexuality and modernity in contemporary Turkey, precisely at a moment when Turkish national identity is a hotly contested issue, the zenne dancer is queer ghost, returning to haunt (and seduce) the present.

This article examines a significant change in the hierarchies of value in cultural production in urban Cape Town, where there has been a bifurcation of theatre in the urban centre and on the township periphery. Theatre at these two sites differs in aesthetic character, themes and infrastructural resources, which derive from a history of legislated racial separatism that is still evident today socially, culturally, educationally and in the development of the city itself. Here, I identify changes that have come about in recent years not so much because of the government's policy of redress, but because leading artists are using their pre-eminence and institutions to catalyse educational experiences, performance platforms and a positive marketing environment for theatre and artists from the townships. The Baxter Theatre and its Zabalaza Festival serve as a case study.

National Collection was a participatory tour performance presented at Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2015 by Public Movement, a group that investigates public choreographies and forms of social order. This article discusses the work's examination of the interdependency between the state and its cultural institutions, both as a paradigmatic form and as historical narrative. By following the different stages of the performance score – the group's arrival at the museum's original building where Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence ceremony took place, a march in public space to the current museum and the tour held inside – the article explores the ways in which National Collection ‘restates’ the aesthetic political scene of foundation and the museum's central role. Along with the embodiment of institutional authority, the performance formulates a significant critical dimension, conveying doubt and a constant sense of crisis embedded in establishing a state and prominent by displaying or reforming museum order.

What might the contemporary performing body look like when it seeks to communicate and to cultivate the need to live well within the natural environment, whether the context of that living well is framed and set upon either by long-standing cultural traditions or by diverse modernizing forces over time? The Singapore performance and visual artist Tang Da Wu has engaged with a present and a region fractured by the predations of unacceptable cultural norms – the consequences of colonial modernity or the modern nation state taking on imperial pretensions – and the subsumption of Singapore society under capitalist modernization. Tang's performing body both refuses the diminution of time to the present, as is the wont of the forces he engages with, and undertakes interventions by sometimes elusive and ironic means – unlike some overdetermined contemporary performance art – that reject the image of the modernist ‘artist as hero’. Part of the cause for this distinctive art committed to historicity and a deliberate ordinariness is that artistic communication to him means provoking self-reflexive thought rather than immediate action. Over the years this has resulted in collaborative artistic workshops, in which he has imaginatively transferred art making from his body to the realm of ordinary people. These workshops become his particular extension of the neo-avant-garde's breaching of art's infrastructures.

If spectacles are effects of power, designed to win wars, win elections and win customers, then how can these spectacles be better understood, so that we can better understand how they seek to work on us and others around us? And what part can theatre play in developing this understanding? In this article I explore Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of ‘violence without violence’, as set out in his essay ‘Image and Violence’ (2003). The synthesis of life's variety and disarray into an artwork is a violent act for Nancy. But if this violent act itself explodes the very seams which hold it together, it can enable ruptures or openings that prevent its violence from becoming ideologically oppressive. In this way the image inevitably participates in the ‘violence’ of representation, but simultaneously avoids the ‘violence’ of ideology. By way of an example I analyse the singular ways in which Lola Arias's production MINEFIELD – first staged at the Brighton Festival in 2016 before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre during the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) – disarticulated the spectacles of power, heroism and virtuosity that are often weaponized by leaders and by the dominant media for the purposes of fighting and winning wars.

In 1984, Duma Kumalo was sentenced to death under the apartheid law of common purpose. He was only spared by the transitional negotiations that led to South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994. However, his suffering did not end with his release. Nor did his appearance alongside many other victims of human rights abuse at the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission provide any measure of therapeutic relief. Instead, he continued to confess, as part of his performance in Yaël Farber's He Left Quietly (2002), to a trauma so overwhelming as to undo, it seems, any such a claim to healing. It has now been ten years since Kumalo passed away and this article returns to Farber's play in order to examine the theatrical form this melancholy takes, the challenge it poses to confessional orthodoxy and the ethical ends towards which such a melancholy performance might potentially drive, even still.

Researchers who seek to capture and analyse audiences’ responses are facing a dilemma. In a political climate beleaguered by efforts to delegitimize expertise, what are the implications for a research tradition that seeks to understand cultural value from a range of diverse perspectives? In light of visibility generated by the 2009 publication of Helen Freshwater's Theatre & Audience and the subsequent launch in January 2017 of the international Network for Audience Research in the Performing Arts (iNARPA), the time seems ripe for a detailed critical overview of the audience studies discipline as it has been applied to theatre. In providing that survey, this article contends that the early decades of the new millennium have seen research into arts participation becoming trapped between two colliding agendas. Whereas on the one hand there is a growing pressure to celebrate cultural engagement in all its contradictory forms, there has on the other hand been a simultaneous imperative within the arts to push back against the encroaching de-hierarchization of cultural value beyond critical and scholarly perspectives. By revealing the potentials for and limitations of the field, this article queries how future audience research projects might productively investigate audience experience without diminishing the legitimacy of expert knowledge.

These three essays on distinct research areas and case studies cover a broad history of educational institutions in India, their focus on theatre and cultural education, and their role in creating citizens active in the public sphere and civic communities. The common point of reference for all the three essays is the historical transition from pre- to post-independence India, and they represent three dominant genres of Indian theatre practice: the amateur progressive theatre emerging out of sociopolitical movements; the State Drama School, which has remained at the core of the state's policy and vision of a national theatre; and college theatre, which comprises the field from which the National School of Drama sources its acting students, as well as new audiences for urban theatres.

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’.

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.

Though India declared itself a sovereign nation only in 1947, after two hundred years of British rule, its people had unleashed the processes of ‘Indianization’ well before independence. While addressing the transition from colonial subjecthood to independent citizenship is intricately linked to efforts of decolonization, the role of English-medium education in the creation of a new emergent class of independent Indian citizens often gets overlooked. This essay analyses the immediate impact of independence (1947–50), and locates the educational spaces where Indians (predominantly elite Bengalis) were struggling to unlink citizenship from nationalism and exploring inter-community relationships such as those between the Bengali elite and the micro-minority Jews, Parsis, Armenians and Anglo-Indians. I show how theatre activities by the students of St Xavier's Collegiate School and College, their new roles as potential public intellectuals and citizens of post-independent India and their theatre constituted an important intervention in the new democratic processes. I examine the duality of a Bengali elite who acquired an English-medium education and performed English-style Shakespeare while trying to construct a political dramaturgy as an ensemble or collective.