This dossier offers a collective mapping of a selection of six performances from the Actions of Transfer event. The practitioners detailed here come, for the most part, from areas in the Americas that are not immediately accessible to TRI readers, and perform in languages and traditions native to their communities. What they share in their very different ways is a commitment to socially and culturally interventionist practices. Mirroring the practice of the conference in its mix of scholarship, performance and activism, the dossier creates a critical space for thinking through practice. Key issues and questions opened up in the performances, such as those relating to gender, indigeneity, ethnicities or nationhood, are addressed and analysed by each contributor.

This dossier contribution focuses on Alutiiq performer Tanya Lukin Linklater's Woman and Water. It examines how the piece creates the opportunity for an experience of a way of being in the world, in intimate interconnection with one another, the land and other animals, and the experiences of time that this intimacy compels, that differs from the models of affiliation presumed in understandings of ‘nation states’ generally referenced by contemporary academic discussions of nationalism and transnationalism.

Modern academic training for theatre in India has a history of just over fifty years (since independence). The National School of Drama (NSD) was set up in 1957, but the prime objective of the institution at that time was to generate professionals to develop children's theatre and rural theatre. Although India possessed a wide range of traditional performance cultures throughout the country, from rituals to folk performances and classical performances, the NSD was modelled on the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) since the new institution was led by a graduate of RADA, Professor Ebrahim Alkazi, who put the institution on a functional track. Thus the toolkit used during the initial days was primarily based on Western models conducive to realism rather than growing organically out of the actual practices of the different forms of Indian performance. This early orientation remains today, emphasizing the creation of referential meanings on the stage through conventional methods and devices, taken as the unshakable organizing principle of theatre practice.

Examining a programme of four solos by Los Angeles experimental dance artists Taisha Paggett, Rebecca Pappas, Christine Suarez and Hana van der Kolk, this short article argues how the choreographed subject-in-motion can be deployed as a political tactic to critique identity as a static category by capitalizing on the flux of moving bodies.

One of the most urgent issues facing theatre research today is the question of how theatre is affected by the rapid processes of globalization.

Looking to the future, it is my view that Japanese theatre research needs to concentrate its efforts on scholarly exchanges with research communities in other Asian countries or cities.

This contribution to the performance dossier situates this 2003 play within the larger body of FOMMA's work and within the sociopolitical context of neoliberalism within Mexico, which has disproportionately affected indigenous communities in general, and indigenous women in particular.

In this special issue, Theatre Research International marks its thirty-five years of existence. This time span equals the approximate length of an academic career or, at least in my case, it happens to coincide with my participation in the activities of the International Federation for Theatre Research. In order to locate the present position and the future direction of theatre studies, I begin with a brief retrospective overview of the decades that I have experienced with IFTR/FIRT.

‘Casting Shadows in Global Land’ explores how Luisa Calcumil, a Mapuche actress from Patagonia, Argentina, works through parody and comedy to engage with activist discussions about the relationship between contemporary aboriginal identity and cultural roots in the face of marginalization and national indifference.

‘Ruptures Within and Without’ analyses Pageantry, performed by Asian women local to the Actions of Transfer conference site, for the ways in which the performance insists on opening up and interrogating the place (or displacement) of Asians in the Americas.

Now that the affects of the technologies of the virtual have spilled out across the topography of the real to such an impossible degree one can safely argue that the age of the virtual is now past, and that presently contemporary technologized and digital cultures are post-virtual (i.e. supersaturated with virtuality). Further, now that the biological is intimately folded within the technologies of the virtual in manners haptic, somatic and psychic, these contemporary technologized cultures can be modelled as bio-virtual, which means that life itself, through a strategy of bio-power, is contained and distributed through the ubiquitous digital modes of communication.

The female body both as the locus for interrogating ideological, economical, political and social discourses, and for the transference of ideas, histories, myths, traditions and, ultimately, actions, is considered here in an analysis of Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe's El Maíz.