This is my first issue as senior editor of Theatre Research International. That the journal and I are almost exactly the same age is at once thrilling and a little unsettling. One feels both the weight of tradition, and the sense of mission and possibility that contemporaries can share. Indeed, looking through back issues, I am struck by how integrally TRI has both reflected and driven changes in performance practice and scholarship that I recognize from my own intellectual development. I began my undergraduate studies at Bristol University Drama Department – publisher, from 1959 to 1974, of one of TRI's two precursors, New Theatre Magazine (the other being Theatre Research/Recherches théâtrales). That was in 1992, in the same year an editorial by Claude Schumacher highlighted a reorientation of the journal away from text-based drama towards ‘the theory of theatre practice’. I left the UK to make theatre (and a life) in Singapore in 1996, just as the journal began notably to expand its international scope. And I commenced my PhD on cosmopolitanism and performance in 2001, at the same time as Brian Singleton's overhaul of the journal's structure and focus set the internationalizing standard for the publication that exists today. That year, I made my first trip to Australia, to present on a panel for emerging scholars at a conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR, the organization with which this publication is affiliated), hosted by the University of New South Wales. Subsequent conference participation brought me into contact with TRI editors Christopher Balme, Freddie Rokem, Elaine Aston and Charlotte Canning, and, courtesy of the IFTR member's subscription, the material they were publishing.

Focusing on the UK, where feminism is gaining momentum through multiple sites of activist dissent from a neoliberal hegemony, my primary concern in this article is to understand how, given this renewal of feminist energies, theatre might be able to play its part in agitating for change. Inspired by Chantal Mouffe's compelling description of a ‘network of resistance’, as a possible way forward I conceive of theatre politically as a series of heterogeneously formed sites of oppositional and affirmative activity, each linked into articulating dissent from neoliberalism and the desire for socially progressive change. This provides the critical framework for my engagement with three radically diverse performances ranging from new playwriting (Lucy Kirkwood's NSFW), through the flash mob (Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising campaign), to the West End musical Made in Dagenham.

In the autumn of 2008, artists Chaw Ei Thein and Richard Streitmatter-Tran and collaborators laboured outside in the sweltering heat to create September Sweetness, an installation made of five and a half tons of sugar, for the second Singapore Biennale. September Sweetness was intended to honour the memory of those who perished in the 2007 uprisings known as the ‘Saffron Revolution’ in Myanmar, and to show the ‘erosion of hope’ for a better future. September Sweetness took place a number of years ago now, but the intentionally ephemeral nature of the art object itself – a sugar temple that gradually melted away – as well as its social reception, multiple meanings and collaborative construction process, and the ways in which the memory of the work continue to resonate with past and present politics, make the performative acts that radiated through this project important to recount.

During the period of the Khmer Rouge (1975–9) culture was turned back to ‘Year Zero’ through the murder and destruction of about 90 per cent of the country's artists and intellectuals. These art forms are now being remembered, revised and reinvented in order to articulate a contemporary Cambodian identity. In the spring of 2013, New York City hosted a month-long festival of Cambodian arts called the Season of Cambodia. The festival, which sought to celebrate and reaffirm Cambodian identity through the arts, set the stage for other post-conflict nations seeking renewal through artistic expression. A performance of sbeik thom, or large shadow puppets, was staged at the site of the former World Financial Center, seeking to create a dialogue between New York and Cambodia themed around healing and renewal.

Javanese actor, puppeteer and musician Slamet Gundono (1966–2014) created performances with everyday objects and materials (mud, dried grass, cooking utensils, condoms and food) in combination with conventions from wayang kulit puppetry. His performances were based on personal, often controversial, interpretations of well-known stories, from the Mahabharata epic to the nineteenth-century literary work Serat Centhini. By analysing three of his performances, I argue that Slamet Gundono's objects become temporarily endowed with the status of heirlooms (pusaka). Each of his performing objects is a non-spiritual pusaka that is used to take attention away from the spiritual quests that dominate traditional wayang. Gundono invokes everyday objects to focus on the more mundane, though urgent, questions of gender inequality, religious intolerance and environmental destruction.

This paper examines the complex questions that arise around the appearance of children in contemporary performance. Drawing on performances by Nottingham-based theatre company Zoo Indigo and by Tim Etchells and the Flemish theatre company Victoria, I consider the extent to which Hannah Arendt's theorization of natality as ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’ that gives rise to the political potential to ‘begin something anew’ can help us to understand the ethico-political dimensions of children's appearance as natal, biological and relational beings in contemporary performance. In particular, I draw on feminist interpretations of Arendt's work to articulate the significance of the embodied aspects and ethical quality of children's relation to adult spectators and performers. I argue that these performances prompt a rethinking of the child's potential to generate political intervention, which moves beyond Arendt's gendered account of political agency in a public sphere from which children are excluded.