Like earlier mother activism in Latin America, the annual Caravana de Madres Centroamericanas (Caravan of Central American Mothers) through Mexico strategically activates the traditional archetype of mothers as passive, pious, suffering victims whose self-abnegation forces them, almost against their will, out of their supposedly natural domestic sphere. Three elements, however, distinguish the caravana from earlier protests staged by mothers. First, this protest crosses national borders, functioning as a transnational pilgrimage to the memory of the disappeared relative. This stage-in-motion temporarily spotlights and claims the spaces traversed by undocumented Central American migrants in Mexico, attempting to recast those migrants as victims of violence rather than as criminals. Second, through performances of both devotional motherhood and saintly motherhood, the caravana's mother-based activism de-normalizes violence related to drugs and migration. Third, performances of family reunification staged by the caravana organizers take place in the few cases in which they manage to locate family members who have not fallen prey to violence but have simply resettled in Mexico and abandoned or lost touch with families left behind in Central America. These performances of family reunification serve important functions: they shift the performance of motherhood from devotion to saintly tolerance, patience and forgiveness – even toward prodigal offspring who were ‘lost’ for years; they provide a chance for other mothers to vicariously feel joy and hope that their children are still alive; they exemplify world citizens challenging incompetent or indifferent nation state authorities; and they enact a symbolic unification of Central America and Mexico in defiance of contemporary nation state borders.

The focus of this article is a critical evaluation of the impact of international development and conflict-resolution funding on theatre in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The article complicates the predominant narrative of theatre as ‘cultural resistance’ in conflict zones by historicizing the Ford Foundation's role in the institutionalization of Palestinian drama; delineating the effects of neo-liberal state building and development on Palestinian modes of performance; and subsequently, analysing the Freedom Theatre's imbrication in a normative, humanitarian logic. Aid, while ensuring the material conditions for the growth of the Palestinian performing arts, promoted a structural dependency that emptied the language of anti-colonial resistance of emancipatory potential, generating a soft, phantom sovereignty for the audience of the international community. By reimagining ‘freedom’ as liberation from a backward, conservative society, the language of the human rights industry and its attendant cultural economy spawns a spectral ‘cultural resistance’ where freedom and nationhood appear real and unreal – visions refracting, but not existing in, reality.

This article explores the work of choreographer Dianne McIntyre as an improvisational artist entangled in questions of intermedial relations among sounds and motions. It discusses the terms of performance in relation to emergent paradigms of Afro-pessimism, and argues for a black regard as a method of engaging with experimental performances by artists of African descent. The article explores theoretical terms of witness and encounter with black performance in relation to queer alterities, and non-normative modes of physical expression. The article suggests further need for research into the work of an outstanding black American female artist of theatre and dance.

International aid has influenced and, in part, shaped the artistic sector in Africa's Great Lakes region (DRC, Rwanda, Burundi) since the 1990s, a period marked by numerous conflicts and mass violence. Due to NGOs’ programmatic foci, artists performing for social change are increasingly compelled to focus on reconciliation and conflict resolution, generating political awareness and bringing about social change, healing and peacemaking. Through a comparative analysis of European and local productions on the genocide this article asks, how and why does an ‘NGO-style theatre’ develop a specific audience in the region? How have themes such as mass violence, inter-ethnic conflict and social cohesion become the main concerns of the territory's theatre? How do performances made and/or sponsored by NGOs challenge not only theatre's form, its social stakes and functions, but also the conception of its audience and the relationships between actors and spectators?

This article introduces and theorizes ‘decadence’ as a key feature of Lauren Barri Holstein's performance Notorious (2017). The decadence of Holstein's work is approached in light of two main considerations: the spectacular presentation of witchcraft as an occult practice, and what Holstein ‘does’ with the staging of witches and witchcraft. Situated in light of performances associated with the neo-occult revival (Ivy Monteiro and Jex Blackmore), and a recent strand of feminist performance that revels in an aesthetics of trash, mess and excess (Ann Liv Young and Lucy McCormick), the article offers a close critical analysis of Notorious as a work that addresses and seeks to subvert gendered inequalities and forms of productivity in twenty-first-century capitalism. I argue that Holstein's overidentification with exertion and exhaustion as much as the subversive potentialities of witchcraft results in a decadent aesthetic, that her staging of the witch as a persecuted but powerful emblem of the occult sheds valuable light on the aesthetics and politics of decadence in performance, and that the subversive qualities of decadence emerge particularly strongly in its ‘doing’ as an embodied and enacted practice.

The alternative culture in Poland formed between the late 1970s and the second half of the 1990s. In this period many artists were moving from cities into the countryside in order to find space for independent and experimental art. Among these new settlers were Erdmute and Wacław Sobaszek, who made their home in a small rural settlement of Węgajty in the 1980s. The Sobaszeks converted an abandoned farm into a stage and soon their undertaking became one of the most prominent alternative theatres in Poland. This article explores intersections of the Sobaszeks's art and rural landscape through the lens of humanistic geography, anthropology and philosophy. The purpose of the article is to reveal a deep attachment of the artists to local, rural space and to examine how it shapes their performances and community building. In the article, the Węgajty Theatre is recognized as ‘landscape theatre’, a term which attempts to emphasize a bond between the theatre and the natural environment.

This article explores the relation between body and voice in the performance of a contemporary opera, Ficarra and Whittington's The Empress's Feet, based on a Chinese tale relating the origin of the practice of foot binding. The tale relates the ancient practice to cure a queen from bouts of sleepwalking that afflicted her. I initially explore the opera's complex formal structure, its central themes and the way it transforms the original tale. I will then develop some of the significant aspects, imaginary as well as factual, of both the practice of foot binding and the phenomenon of sleepwalking. I suggest that the opera not only relates itself thematically to the tale and through it to the practice of foot binding, but also suggests a further parallel between foot binding and a form of bodily mutilation that is associated with the development of the medium of opera in the West, namely the phenomenon of the castrato. The threefold consideration of foot binding, sleepwalking and the voice of the castrato will serve to reveal a moment of liberation, at the heart of the opera – call it the agency or voice given to the feet ‘unbound’. I will conclude with an account of a production of The Empress's Feet which I directed in 2014, based on the interpretation suggested in this article.

This article provides a contextual analysis of Janakaraliya (‘Theatre of the People’), a theatre company acclaimed for its excellence in theatre for social justice and peace building in Sri Lanka. It discusses the governing conditions that enable its practice and evaluates its impact, whether this be the biopower of the state and non-state actors during periods of political violence, donor funding frameworks, or the Janakaraliya archive itself as an actant shaped by donor rationalities. Drawing on a recent research project entitled The Theatre of Reconciliation, the article builds an argument for changing the terms on which the arts in peace building are evaluated, and for a shift in the dominant narrative on Janakaraliya which collapses its sophisticated aesthetics to a binary of Sinhala–Tamil ethnic relations. The logic of this revision would be fuller acknowledgement of the troupe's aesthetic forms and styles as a more robust signifier of the pluralities that constitute Sri Lankan society today and therefore of post-war reconciliation itself.

European theatres were electrified between 1883 and 1913. This process has traditionally been associated with the advent of modernist theatre, but the details have rarely been examined, nor has the scope of the process's social and technological impacts been analysed. Reconstructing light bulbs’ early appearances in theatrical practice and discourse, this article traces the intricate entanglement between the electrical industry and theatrical culture around the turn of the century and highlights electricity's entanglement with concepts of hygiene and healing. Discussing an early light bulb in use in Bayreuth in 1882, the marketing strategies of the German Edison Company and Adolphe Appia's early manifesto, the article shows how electrification of theatres was shaped by competing visions of a future theatre. Also it demonstrates that aesthetics, technology and politics were intricately entangled in this process. Refuting teleological narratives of aesthetic progress, the paper proposes reframing modernist theatre's artistic autonomy as dependent on its embeddedness within the technologies of modernity.

Let Down (2018) is a practice-as-research (PaR) dance performance that communicates women's experiences of breastfeeding in Northern Ireland, a jurisdiction with one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, due, in part, to the social stigma attached to breastfeeding in public. Choreographed in collaboration with a composer and social scientists, Let Down is a duet for two lactating women who dance alongside a digitally transposed and augmented soundscape of sonic aspects of maternal experience, and improvise to the live sounds produced by infants in the audience. The work responds to a ‘quietening’ of maternal corporeality in some Western societies through a feminist dramaturgy of sonic disruption that refigures intermedial relations between sound and movement in performance to make unheard experience sensible. Attending to the complex sociopolitical and affective terrain that informed the work's creation, I discuss how a methodology of ‘quietening’ developed during the choreographic process generated space for a dialogue between private and public spheres of experience. I propose that the methodological concept of quietening offers both an alternative approach to choreographies of affect, and a critical framework for questioning representations of socially ‘quietened’ corporealities.

From 1980 to 1981, the Baxter Theatre of Cape Town, South Africa, produced a multi-racial Waiting for Godot that garnered vastly different reactions in the various cities to which it toured. With a cast led by John Kani and Winston Ntshona, icons of anti-apartheid theatre, it was sometimes hailed as a scathing anti-apartheid polemic, sometimes admired for its ‘universality’, and in one case denounced and shut down by anti-apartheid activists as a piece of pro-apartheid propaganda. Based on both archival research and interviews, this essay investigates the artists’ intentions and the public's reception in order to illuminate how the international theatrical circuits dovetailed with international activist circuits, sometimes supporting one another, and occasionally tripping each other up.

From the notebook of Richard Schechner concerning the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Paris, 2–7 July 2019.

How can indigeneity be understood through training actors in a colonial context? Do ‘Western’ acting schools misrepresent and exploit indigenous practices and cultural traditions towards reinforcing the settler state? Or does a given school's integration of such praxis and customs demonstrate inclusivity, equity and progressivism? At what point does incorporating indigeneity in actor training become a tokenistic appropriation of marginalized cultures? Drawn from fieldwork as a 2019 Fulbright scholar at Toi Whakaari, New Zealand's National Drama School, I intersect training with culture and society. Using the Acting Program as a case study, I deploy an ethnographic methodology to address the aforementioned questions by investigating Toi Whakaari's bicultural pedagogy while positioning it as a reflection of New Zealand's national identity. I especially explore the school's implementation of Tikanga Māori, the practices and beliefs of the country's indigenous peoples. I argue that while some questions remain, Toi Whakaari integrates Māori forms in a manner that is culturally responsible and pedagogically effective, thereby providing a model from which other drama schools can learn.

Dear John is an experimental choreomusical work that reinterprets Cage's works while advancing his ideas of sound as sonic events and embodied choreography. In this episodic work, improvised movement unfolds to a soundscape of defamiliarized instruments, sound devices and sonicities of macro- and micro-movements. The correspondence and (in)congruence between dance movements and music's kinetic energy become the means to examine a politics of the body and sound, of music on movement. Additionally, in this ‘auditory architecture’ the quanta of time, its relations and (lack of) unity are exposed. This article then examines the intersubjective interplay of movement and music, body and sonicity; it considers the resonance of the performing body as intermaterial vibration and how this invites a sonic politics of relational possibility. The article will then also investigate the ways in which the interaction of motion and music, movement and stillness engenders experiences of time's indeterminacy and elasticity.

The tragedies taking place within the waters of the Mediterranean, and the simultaneous reassessment of social and cultural politics inside Europe, call for our attention as scholars, and as art practitioners in the region. I will traverse this area to discuss some choreographic experimentations dealing with migration issues, and to prove how acts of listening in performance can emerge out of a racist narrative, allowing practices of corporeal hospitality to be envisioned. The sonic dimension is here perceived as the sharing of an event that occurs in the body, and among the bodies, and reverberates in multiple dimensions and directions. At the crossroads of post-colonial and performance studies, this article engages with listening as a political and creative act for both engendering and perceiving alternative ways of choreographing hospitality in the Mediterranean area.

This text introduces our dossier on contemporary theatre in Brazil, highlighting the ways it fights back against social and political injustice.