With Sámi mythology and storytelling as dramaturgical anchors, Giron Sámi Teáhter uses the key aesthetic elements of yoik (Sámi song) and duodji (Sámi arts and crafts) to revitalize and promote Sámi language and culture. The troupe’s work nourishes pride in young Sámi audiences in their rich cultural heritage, which for centuries was suppressed by settler colonialism across Sápmi, the land of the Sámi people, which stretches across the Northern part of Norway, Sweden, and Finland all the way to the Kola Peninsula in Russia.

Since the early 2010s, the arts and culture in Sweden have taken a stand against the prevailing epistemic ignorance of the country's Indigenous Sámi people by confronting majoritarian society with the realities of settler colonialism. This article suggests that theatre and performance form part of this Sámi cultural activism and highlights the decolonial labour of Giron Sámi Teáhter, the oldest professionally driven touring company in the Swedish part of Sápmi. Taking one specific production as a springboard, the article demonstrates the larger, structural issues at stake. Giron Sámi Teáhter deploys the stage as a vibrant, decolonial forum where the history of settler colonialism and the Sámi people's struggle toward self-determination is performed, celebrated and encouraged. The company has long striven to gain official status as the national theatre for Sámi performing arts in Sweden and the article therefore also outlines the financial and political impediments encountered by Giron Sámi Teáhter.

Lest We Forget, my current research project at Concordia University, critically analyses the history of queer theatre and performance as it intersects with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada. Stretching over three decades and taking the country's bilingualism into consideration, its objectives are to study the aesthetic variety and political complexity of plays and performances that attend to the epidemic and to identify the multiple challenges faced by theatre artists and activists. Furthermore, the project explores the methodological and historiographical challenges when studying HIV/AIDS theatre and performance in a Canadian context.

Returning fresh from her summer vacation, the suntanned managing director of Gothenburg City Theatre, Karin Kavli (1906–90), proudly announced at a press conference in early August 1955 that she had secured the rights to produce the European premiere of Tennessee Williams's acclaimed play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.1 Well aware of the importance of creating a balanced repertoire that would satisfy the more artistically and literally minded audience and those who wanted some lighter forms of entertainment, Kavli understood that hosting the premiere of Williams's latest drama was quite a coup, especially in an age when television had begun to pose a great threat to theatre.

In this article Dirk Gindt discusses Ingmar Bergman's 1951 production of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo in the small Swedish town of Norrköping, demonstrating how Bergman methodically ignored the tragicomic nature of the play in order to develop and exaggerate its comic and grotesque elements. After extensive cuts and alterations in the script, the character Serafina delle Rose became even more overpowering than in the original text and dominated the action from beginning to end. Karin Kavli, a leading lady in Swedish post-war theatre and a frequent collaborator with Bergman, played the character not as a mourning widow but as a possessed disciple of Dionysus in an unabashedly entertaining and sexualized production which, despite reservations from critics, became a success with audiences. Dirk Gindt now works as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stockholm University. He is co-editor of Fashion: an Interdisciplinary Reflection (Stockholm: Raster, 2009), and has published numerous articles in journals such as Nordic Theatre Studies, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Theatre Survey, and Fashion Studies, as well as chapters in edited volumes. He is the editor-in-chief of Lambda Nordica: Journal for GLBT-Studies, for which he has edited a special issue on masculinities (2008) and a double issue on queer fashion (2009).