This is my final issue for Theatre Research International. Handing over to Charlotte Canning as Senior Editor and Paul Rae as Assistant Editor, I want to wish them every future success with the journal. At the same time, I would like to thank everyone involved in the journal over the last three years, from those who submitted articles to those who contributed invaluable, behind-the-scenes labour – the editorial board, books-reviewing team and peer reviewers. A special thanks to Cambridge University Press for the assistance they provided with all aspects of the production process – especially to James Carr who has overseen each and every issue during my term of office. Leaving the editorship of the journal, I am pleased to note its buoyant subscription and submission rates – its revenue, despite the global, economic recession, continues to rise, while the number of articles offered for review has doubled over the course of the last three years.

This article argues that the theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio constructs a meta-affective practice of spectatorship that engages with an ethics and politics of contemporary cultural memory. The promise of theatrical meta-affect can be found in the ontological surprise or rupture that enables feelings, if we understand them as the embodied archival trace of an affect, to be re-felt. In crafting an inversion of the mechanics of representation, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio generate a particular affective dimension that remediates the function of affect as it works to empathically bind spectator subjectivities through relations of power to images of suffering others. This generates a form of spectatorship that hurts: morally, emotionally and physically.

This article considers what might be implied in the term ‘immersive theatre’, asking what kinds of ‘interior’ audiences are invited to become immersed in. To facilitate my argument I draw on performances by two London-based theatre companies, Shunt and Punchdrunk, as examples of immersive theatre which use architectural interiors: extensive environments which audiences explore in order to find the performance, and sometimes to give performances themselves. I begin with a description of how these physical interiors and the audience member's movement through them becomes part of the dramaturgy of the work, before moving on to a critique of the term ‘immersive’. This critique is initially based on analysis of its metaphorical character, using an approach derived from cognitive linguistics, and is developed through Josephine Machon's (syn)aesthetics and Heidegger's phenomenological aesthetics.

This article explores the notion of participation in contemporary theatre and performance on two levels, namely how participation is shaped within performance, and how performance participates in the public sphere. Using recent examples from Sudan, Russia and Lebanon/Netherlands, I investigate how the political premises underlying the call for participation are reimagined aesthetically, and, conversely, how artistic strategies of shaping audience participation render visible the failures and possibilities of people's participation in the public sphere. The connection between these two dimensions of participation is made by engaging the concepts of ‘representation’, ‘collectivity’ and ‘theatricality’, which I call ‘vectors of participation’. I discuss how the artistic representation of an idea is complementary to political representation, how the demand for collective participation in the public sphere transforms into collective creation in the artistic sphere, and how theatricality in spectatorship is linked to the political call to bear witness.

This article is concerned with an extraordinary artwork created by a young Swedish art student, Anna Odell. Odell's re-enactment of an earlier suicide attempt on a bridge in Stockholm, filmed for an art installation, caused an outcry from the public and medical authorities and a court case that stimulated heated debate in the national press. Here I examine Odell's work for the ‘critical’ questions it in turn provokes about artistic creation and communication: the difficulties for the performance scholar in addressing the enactment when it is so generically hard to define; why the art/artist was found guilty of a ‘fraudulent practice’; and what might be revealed and further problematized by theorizing the enactment as a cultural, socio-political event.

This article examines an early example of martial arts performance in Australia occasioned by the tour of – purportedly – the first team of sumo wrestlers to leave Japan. By examining the performances and reception of the Japanese sumo wrestlers against the backdrop of international political relations, which included the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, this study contributes to our understanding of the transnational circulation of the martial arts on popular stages, and to our understanding of the circus as a politically dynamic site that nurtured performative transnational encounters. The case of the sumo wrestlers reveals, furthermore, ways in which the popular stage of the circus worked to undermine negative racial stereotypes prevalent in Australia's homeland culture.