In the winter of 1845–6 the United States Army languished on the border waiting for an opportunity to provoke what would be the Mexican–American War, or, as the Mexicans would come to call it, La Intervención Americana. To break the dull monotony, the army turned to theatre. In January, Second Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in a production staged for the troops and the local community. Grant would later be the victorious general in the Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. He was not yet that person. In 1846 he was a twenty-four-year-old, newly commissioned officer, only three years out of the US Military Academy. His peers, a cohort of junior officers who would become the senior military leadership on both sides of the Civil War, were also actors in the production, as well as its producers. The anecdote is humorous in large part because the Grant of national record and memory is the least Desdemona-like figure anyone can conceive. It has been repeated multiple times across the nineteenth century and still holds in the imagination almost two hundred years later.

The Twelfth International Theatre Institute (ITI) World Congress met in New York City over 4–10 June 1967 at the same time as the Arab–Israeli War was taking place. This context very much framed the delegates’ debates over the idea of artists as national leaders. One panel in particular, The Responsibility of Theatre to the Progress of Society, on Friday 8 June, offered an opportunity for the delegates to wrestle with the concept. The participants focused on three key questions: how audiences were witnesses to national reinvention, how theatre could serve as a pedagogical form, and how the intersection of these two allowed audiences to see themselves as citizens. This article focuses first on ITI's place in the geopolitical moment and then on the contributions during the conference and after by a specific set of artists from diverse countries, including the US, India, France, Morocco and Nigeria. The conversations represented a profound articulation of how theatre was influencing the complex ways in which nations were identifying and defining themselves and their citizens.

This editorial is a bittersweet one for me. I am incredibly proud of the six articles in this issue. They are provocative and compelling, and offer new knowledge of performance. Taken together, along with the other articles in this year's volume, they offer us innovative and exciting understandings of how live performance travels and matters, and what it means. This issue also is perhaps one of the most global I have ever edited – the authors look at performance in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America – demonstrating that as a field we are increasingly aware of the limitations of the national study. Each article illustrates the pleasures, risks and rewards when different cultures intersect through the medium of live performance.

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.

One of the most productive contributions to performance that scholars have made to theorizing globalization is to document how people understand global transformation as expressed through representation. An additional element of this contribution is the examination of reception – what understanding did audiences and critics glean from what they saw onstage. This issue of Theatre Research International brings together a diverse set of articles, ones that were not written with any of the others in mind. Despite this, however, read together these articles offer a primer on the effects, successes and failures of performance in the context of global movement currently and in the past. Some of these authors look at theatre that literally travels – around the world, around the nation – and others that travel more figuratively – as part of historical circuits of transmission like colonialism. In whatever sense travel is defined and explored in this issue of TRI, all of these articles remind us that live performance is always about the circulation of embodied ideas through time and space. Travel is built into the form itself.

This special issue is unique in that it is the first time that this journal has collaborated with another to share the same set of questions ramified through the two journals’ different missions. Editor Esther Kim Lee and I proposed to link Theatre Research International and Theatre Survey in order to explore how the ‘2008 worldwide economic crisis brought scholars of theatre and performance to re-examine how neoliberalism, economic nomadism, and transnationalism affect artistic practices’, as we wrote in the call for papers. The response was impressive and demonstrated that performance scholars around the globe are thinking about these pressing issues in contiguous and contradictory ways.

All I seem to be able to read about recently is war. Some of that reading is predictable—I read the New York Times and the local paper every day—but lately it has seemed to me that in each book I pick up, no matter what the subject or purpose, passages about war leap out at me. Until I realized this, I made no conscious attempt to select books about war, but over this past spring and into the summer, I have been choosing to read about war.