These four articles are very different in subject, geography, methodology and evidence. Despite these significant divergences, their presence in a single issue is fortuitous. What these articles offer as a single entity is an important reminder of how theatre is always concerned with and emerging from exchange and movement. Sometimes the movement is across global geopolitical boundaries; sometimes it is only across counties in a single nation. Sometimes the movement is the global circulation of ideas, and artists of very different cultures may be approaching similar subjects in similar ways although they have never met. Sometimes those routes may be traced on a map; sometimes they are roots only revealed as pathways through the transformative act of performance. Sometimes, of course, the movement is simply that of the body in representation. In all these essays the routes/roots involve challenges to collaboration and understanding, and results may come from achieving the goal of connection and/or from falling far short. Through comparing these articles with one another, we can enrich our own work as scholars and artists because they remind us to re-examine how we define even our most basic terms and assumptions.

Bangkok, Singapore, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg – some thirty performers of the Boosra Mahin Siamese Theatrical Troupe toured the world in 1900. Daily newspapers enthusiastically reported on the unprecedented shows of the performers ‘from the land of the white elephant’. After they disappeared from the map of theatre history, in 2010 Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun ‘revives’ the troupe in his performance Nijinsky Siam. He follows their October 1900 St Petersburg show – the very performance attended by choreographer Mikhail Fokine and costume designer Léon Bakst, who later worked closely with Vaslav Nijinsky. In 1910, Nijinsky's La danse siamoise/Siamese Dance premiered at the Marinsky Theatre, St Petersburg. This article follows the routes of the Boosra Mahin Troupe on the basis of selected primary sources and from a global-historical perspective. In tracing the Boosra Mahin Troupe and their tours, the article not only maps their manifold routings and reroutings, but also advocates for the need for a global theatre historiography that puts past cultural entanglements and connected performance histories centre stage.

Grounded on personal experience in Augusto Boal's workshop, this article explores his essential and radical concept of the spect-actor and its limitation. When he conceptualized the term, Boal seemed to ignore diversities and differences of subject in the grid of power relations such as class, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference and race. Furthermore, a silence that most of the workshop participants maintained needs to be examined critically, instead of unquestioningly, regarding their ‘democratic’ choices. In order to effectively discuss the limitations of the spect-actor concept, as well as the silence that was ignored in the workshop space, I speculate on similar relationships that occurr both in theatre workshop and classroom settings. Drawing the conclusion that both educators and theatre practitioners require self-reflexive attitudes, I expect a greater contribution of Theatre of the Oppressed to globalized societies.

This article is developed from a paper presented at IFTR as part of the Performance and Disability Working Group in summer 2013. The work considered is a practice-as-research contribution by Welsh dance theatre company Cyrff Ystwyth towards a large Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded enquiry into performance, place, dislocation and vulnerability. The article uses contrasting concepts drawn from the work of critical theorists and dance scholars André Lepecki and Carrie Noland to think about the implications of Cyrff Ystwyth's site-specific performance authored by choreographer Adrian Jones, who has a learning disability. The research question is interrogated through the lens of the practice and understandings of place, performance and vulnerability, and proposed in the light of theory and its application to practice. The practice's challenge to theory is then considered as it confronts the researcher's expected outcomes and posits new understandings.

This study explores the theme of carnivalesque homoeroticism in medieval decadent Cairo as portrayed by oculist and littérateur Ibn Dāniyāl in his third shadow play The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion. The playwright's satirical response to Sultan Baybars's campaign against vice in Egypt in the thirteenth century falls within the irreverent burlesque tradition. The article analyses the playwright's carnivalesque and satirical shadow play in light of Bakhtin's theory of carnival. He related the carnivalesque – a burlesque dramatic genre aiming to secretively challenge and sabotage the social and political hierarchy of an autocratic regime through satirical obscenity and rhetoric – to the medieval carnivals and feasts of fools throughout Europe. Bawdy burlesque comedies were intended to provoke hilarious laughter by mockingly satirizing the despotic government's absurd subjugation of its citizens. The study shows how carnivalesque dialogic, long thought to be limited to medieval literature in Europe, found fertile soil in medieval Cairo. Ibn Dāniyāl's trilogy Ṭayf al-Khayāl, which consists of The Shadow Spirit, The Amazing Preacher and the Stranger, and The Love-Stricken One and the Lost One Who Inspires Passion, can unquestionably be studied in the context of Bakhtin's plebeian popular culture of laughter and the carnivalesque tradition.