Lea Anderson is one of the leading choreographers to have emerged over the past decade, her most characteristic work having been with the all-female group she co-founded, the Cholmondeleys, and its all-male counterpart, the Featherstonehaughs. This article explores the distinctively intertextual elements in Lea Anderson's work – elements which, the authors suggest, make it at once accessible, distinctive, and distinctively postmodern. Sherril Dodds addressed the relationships between postmodernism and popular culture in Anderson's work, with particular focus on the television image and the dance image, in her MA dissertation for the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey, where she is currently a research student. Her co-author, Janet Adshead-Lansdale, is Head of Department at Surrey, and has also edited Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice (1988) and co-edited Dance History: an Introduction (1994).

TARA presented its first production, Tagore's Sacrifice, in 1977, so this year marks the company's Sacrifice, in 1977, so this year marks the company's twentieth anniversary. How did it come into being?

It was, as with most companies, a mixture of accident and intention. The intention part of it relates to 4 June 1976, which was a day when this young Sikh lad in Southall, Gurdeep Singh Chaggar, was killed. It became very obvious within a day or so that this was a racist murder. In retrospect it doesn't seem to be a terribly significant thing, because we've had so many; but at the time it galvanized a particular generation of Asians.

In NTQ47 (August 1996), Sarah Werner argued that contemporary voice training did not provide a neutral set of tools to help actors perform classical texts, and that it was needful to reveal the cultural biases and underlying ideology of voice work in order to clarify a feminist understanding of acting and speaking Shakespeare. The three leading voice practitioners who came under Ms Werner's fire – Cicely Berry, Kristin Linklater, and Patsy Rodenburg – mounted a sturdy defence of their methods in NTQ49 (February 1997), to which Sarah Werner responded in the following issue. Now Jane Boston takes a fresh view of all sides in the argument, putting these into a broader historical context which embraces the culture of our own times as much as of Shakespeare's, and calls for an understanding and reconciliation of mutual misconceptions between the academy and the conservatoire. Jane Boston was a founding member of the feminist Siren Theatre in the ‘eighties, and has subsequently taught at the National Youth Theatre, the Poor School, and at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she was Head of Voice for the BA in Acting, which she helped to create. She now combines a pedagogical and practical role at Central as supervisor and trainer on the Postgraduate Diploma in Voice Studies, and has recently presented papers on acting and stress at the Institute of Psychiatry.

The list of female Hamlets, in which the most familiar names range from Siddons and Bemhardt to Frances de la Tour, is extraordinarily long. Tony Howard here discusses a great but much less familiar production featuring a female Hamlet, both in its socio-political context and in the context of the earlier work of its director, Andrzej Wajda. Teresa Budzisz-Krzyzanowska was Wajda's Hamlet in Hamlet (IV) – which, momentously, opened in Poland in 1989, just as the Solidarity-led opposition came to power. Tony Howard, who is writing a cultural history of the phenomenon of female Hamlets, teaches at Warwick University. He has written for NTQ on Polish subjects ranging from the Marxist work of Jozef Szajna to such oppositional groups as Theatre of the Eighth Day and

The plays of Bernard-Marie Koltès have been phenomenally successful, not just in Europe, but worldwide – his last work before his death in 1989, Roberto Zucco, having been performed in seventeen countries. Despite an early production of Twilight Zone by Pierre Audi at the Almeida Theatre in 1981, English appreciation has been tardy, but now this situation is set to change, with the Royal Court Theatre commissioning Martin Crimp to make a translation of Roberto Zucco, to be directed by James Macdonald, and Methuen bringing out a volume of Koltès's plays. These present a unique fusion of the French classical tradition combined with Shakespeare (he translated The Winter's Tale into French) and modern influences such as Genet and Fugard (he also translated The Blood Knot). After his death, Giles Croft wrote of Koltès: ‘He considered himself an outsider, rootless, and this perception of himself is reflected in his characters, whose tragedy is their inability to connect with one another, often despite their ability to articulate their despair. He created dark, mythic, polyglot worlds where people are dwarfed by or divorced from their surroundings: hotel rooms, construction sites, quaysides.’ Koltès's career was closely linked with that of Patrice Chéreau, who produced all his major plays, and who performed in his own production of In The Solitude of the Cotton Fields at last year's Edinburgh Festival. Here, David Bradby, Professor of Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, contributes his own assessments of both men's life and work, to complement full chronological and bibliographical details of Koltès's career.

Everybody would agree that agitational political theatre has fallen on hard times, but whether this is due to a changed political climate, a changed theatre, or a more politicized relationship between companies and funding bodies remains a matter for debate. Here, Baz Kershaw adopts a lateral approach to the problem, looking not at dramatized forms of protest but at protest as an action which has itself become increasingly theatricalized – in part owing to its own tactics and choices, in part to the ways in which media coverage creates its own version of politics as performance. After looking at the major focuses of protest in two decades after 1968, Baz Kershaw examines the ways in which political and performance theory has and has not addressed the issue. Presently Head of the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, his previous publications include Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (with Tony Coult, 1983) and the Politics of Performance: Political Theatre as Cultural Intervention (1992).

I have worked with Tara Arts for over ten years, as the company's designer for most productions during that time. And one of the reasons that I enjoy working with Tara is that I can use my own mixed nationality both politically and artistically: I feel at home.

When is a theatre event not a theatre event? Where, in the shifting relationships between (and even the shifting definitions of) actor and audience in modern and postmodern performance, is a useful line to be drawn – if only for purposes of analysis and discussion? How adequate are such traditional concepts as the ‘suspension of disbelief’, when the distinction between the ‘realities’ of the theatre and of the everyday begin to merge or dissolve? Ian Watson, an advisory editor of NTQ who teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey, here explores how the issue is affected by the differing pre-interpretive perspectives of performers and spectators. In this light he describes three recent theatre events – the Broadway production of Death and the Maiden, Harold Pinter's London production of Circe and Bravo, and an instance of Augusto Boal's ‘Invisible Theatre’ – to suggest that it is in these perceptual variations that the clue to understanding theatrical reality may lie.

For most western theatre people, accustomed to the festival as an institutionalized annual ritual, the notion of a theatre festival as a celebration of true, holiday festivity – as signifying freedom from institutionalized ritual – comes alive more often in the pages of Bakhtin than on the stages of Edinburgh or other ‘festive’ cities. Yet Juliusz Tyszka, surveying no fewer than a hundred and fifty festivals that have sprung up or renewed themselves in his native Poland during the post-Cold War ‘period of transition’, finds that, while their economic success has been surprising in a straitened economy, the social causes which have ensured this success have to do with changed notions of communality and sociality. The festivals signify, he suggests, a rediscovery that joining together in celebration need not be an imposition of church or state, but can be a means of renewal for the national psyche after a long period of suppression. The following article has the quality rather of a heartfelt polemic – and, through lavish illustration, a celebration of the multiplicity of performance styles – than the academic analysis to which NTQ more usually subjects the new theatres of eastern Europe. It is none the less significant as a theatre document for our times.

The functioning of human consciousness in interpreting and staging a theatrical performance is, as Gordon Armstrong argues in this article, among the most highly selective and adaptive operations known to physical science. According to this view, the theatre, as a substrate of consciousness, was part of the package that defined modern man as a reflective species: whereas for the first four million years of human existence man was silent about a probable inner life, the dawn of empathy some 200,000 years ago saw a neural explosion – the enlargement of the angular gyrus in the left hemisphere of the brain, unlocking a new kind of reflective consciousness. In isolation, this aberrant neurological connection proved so advantageous for hunting and for communication that members of a tribe who possessed this aberration prospered: and adaptation to the ice ages that began 200,000 years ago was a motivating factor in stimulating the emergence of what we can recognize as art. Gordon Armstrong is immediate past Secretary of the American Society for Theatre Research, and Review Editor for Theatre Research International. He has taught at UCLA, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Rhode Island, and has designed and directed productions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. His full-length works include the revised Golden Ages of the Theatre and Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words.

My relationship with Tara Arts began in 1989, with the production of Danton's Death. Jatinder had made it very clear that none of the assembled actors would know the roles they were to play until at least the third week of rehearsal. Unsure about this process, I scanned the list of Büchner's characters full of doubt. Then, in the certainty that none of them was called Patel, I decided to put whatever reputation I had amassed during my previous twelve years as an actor in Jatinder's hands. Patel is a fine name, but I had played four characters called Patel in the last twelve months, and was just about to play another. And I was feeling claustrophobic. In the end, Jatinder cast me as Robespierre opposite the splendid Muraly Menon from Trivandrum in South India, who played Danton. Since then I have played various characters of both genders for Jatinder and Tara, and I have visited countries and continents where I have worked with performers whose skill and knowledge have humbled me.

In one sense Tara belongs to a loose grouping which could be described as ‘companies of identity’, which might include the Black Theatre Co-operative, Sphinx (formerly the Women's Theatre Group), Graeae, and Gay Sweatshop. The classic funding pattern here is that the company is initially founded by individuals with shared educational, cultural and political backgrounds: then, after a number of projects or productions, the group receives funding for a specific proposal, either from a special-interest organization, a trust, or local government.

I came from Cape Town, South Africa, to Britain in 1976, after graduating at a drama school, and for the next fifteen years worked for InterAction, Common Stock, Joint Stock, the RSC, and the National, and in other theatres. In 1990 I began my association with Tara Arts by Playing the Mayor in Gogol's The Government Inspector.