This issue celebrates thirty-five years of TRI (New Series) publication, from the first issue in October 1975 through to this October 2010 edition. Last year, Cambridge Journals launched the digitized TRI archive, housing all of the volumes from the inaugural 1975 issue through to Volume 25 in 2000. During those first twenty-five years of now digitized publication, Oxford University Press served as the journal's home under the editorship of Claude Schumacher. It was in 2001 that the journal moved across to Cambridge with Brian Singleton as its Senior Editor.

The academic conference is an important feature of our professional lives. It constitutes a meeting ground, a forum, in which key topics in a field can begin to emerge; where cognate ideas and approaches get debated, affirmed or contested; where, in short, ideas can move (on) through academics being in contact with each other's ideas. Any journal editor is drawn inevitably to the conference ‘season’ as fertile, ‘hunting’ ground; trawls for papers that will yield article publications (if others do not get there first!). And so it is that my second issue of TRI since becoming editor is sourced from the 2008 Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas conference, hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles and co-sponsored by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. As this event is expertly introduced and the issue framed by co-organizers Sue-Ellen Case and Diana Taylor, this editorial note needs only to be brief. Indeed, I hesitated long at the computer keyboard thinking that perhaps no note at all was necessary. Except that two observations or headlines felt editorially important to me to express: the significance of Actions of Transfer for thinking generally about the nature of the conference event in relation to TRI's international, theatre research remit, and the mix of articles and the performance dossier brought together in the issue.

This is my first issue as Senior Editor of Theatre Research International. Picking up the ‘baton’ from Freddie Rokem is no easy task; I feel the weight of this responsibility and am conscious of a steep learning curve, despite the excellent insight, wisdom and knowledge Freddie has passed on to me during his term of office, for which I am deeply grateful. Joining me as Associate Editor is Charlotte Canning from the University of Texas, Austin, who, behind the scenes, is already proving to be an invaluable journal colleague.

Our co-authored article provides an introduction to the UCLA-based conference Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas (2008), a sister event to the opening of the new cultural and performance space with FOMMA – Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (Fortress of the Mayan Woman) – supported by the Hemispheric Institute and the Ford Foundation. Introducing the articles and contributions to the performance dossier arising out of the event and brought together for this special issue, we reflect critically on our conference set-up. Detailing our multi-sited project as a dialogic, hemispheric practice, we offer our reflections with the hope that this will lead to new possibilities and paradigms for international performance research and practice.

Based largely on transcripts and documentary footage of the trial, the play Aalst recounts the brutal killing of two children by their parents in the Belgian town of Aalst in 1999. This article explores the ways in which this performance engages spectators as witnesses in a play of seduction and estrangement during which the concepts of ethical responsibility and judgment are destabilized and radically challenged. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, Arne Johan Vetlesen and Emmanuel Levinas a case is made for the importance of ambivalence as a productive mode of reading and responding to Aalst.

As first senior editor of Theatre Research International when it moved to Cambridge Journals in 2001, I had the privilege of being involved from the outset in the reconfiguration of its aims and objectives, moving the subject from essentialist notions of theatre towards a much broader conception of what constitutes performance in differing world contexts. It was a move that mirrored the shift in the discipline since the beginning of the 1990s that saw the rise of performance studies and the influence of the concept of performativity on our reading strategies of all types of performance, but particularly of performance with intended social agency.

The history of the Theatre Historiography Working Group in IFTR/FIRT provides a case study of how and why the Federation has been transformed by its working groups during the last two decades. Founded in 1992, the historiography group has developed into one of the largest and most active in IFTR/FIRT. Over the last nineteen years, the members of the group, drawn from many of the countries in the Federation, have used the annual meetings to develop a diverse and often challenging scholarship on the history of theatre (broadly defined). By focusing on the basic issues in historiography, the participating scholars have refined their research and writing methods. Moreover, the essays and books, published in several languages, have contributed to major transformations in the methods and topics in performance history. The working group, besides serving as a transnational community for historical scholarship, has also contributed to revisionist methods in the teaching of theatre history in dozens of countries, especially during the last decade.

This article introduces hemispheric performance studies to suggest that performance in the Americas – and the very idea of the ‘hemispheric’ – may be usefully engaged as a set of connected practices in deep time rather than as a continental mass in uniform space. The argument is illustrated in relation to three contemporary artists: the Los Angeles-based photographer and multimedia artist Bruce Yonemoto, and the visual and performance artists Susana Torres from Lima, Peru, and Liliana Angulo from Bogotá, Colombia.

This article considers the performance of non-violent relationality. Focusing on a production of Big Love, it explores how performance might enlighten an ethic of non-violent being with others, and non-violent being in the world. While many theoretical models of identity emphasize the unavoidable aggressivity of intersubjective relations, this article focuses on scenes in which the subject is let go from violence and retribution. ‘Letting go’ is the strategically utilitarian term deployed here to think about a performative act that loosens the point of attachment between the subject and symbolic law, while paving the way for relatively non-aggressive conditions of being to emerge.

Eugenio Hernández Espinosa's María Antonia (1967) is regarded as one of the most important theatrical works to be produced during the first decade of the Cuban Revolution. Although most readings of the play tend to emphasize its investment in possession ceremonies (the use of santería rituals and symbols provoked a strong reaction from both audiences and critics), Hernández Espinosa's conflicted presentation of gender roles is what claims my attention in this article. By showing how María Antonia is unable to alter the strictures of machismo or successfully challenge hegemonic discourses of race and class, I argue that the play suggests that santería supports a social context in which female agency is seriously restricted, and may even be reduced to a utopian and self-destructive fantasy.

This article examines the sonic elements of Antonin Artaud's 1935 production of Les Cenci, Artaud's infamous attempt to realize his proposed ‘theatre of cruelty’. The aim is to qualify the critical opinion that Artaud was a failed theatre practitioner by analysing the conceptual complexity and potential effectiveness of the sound design for this production. Artaud utilized new sonic technologies and an aesthetic arguably derived in part from Balinese gamelan music to affect audience members on a physiological level, prefiguring the vibrational force and ultrasonic ambitions of modern sonic warfare. This analysis engages a range of primary and secondary materials, including an extant recording of music and sound effects used for the production, and is situated with reference to an estimated acoustic ‘horizon of expectations’ of Artaud's audiences and to neuroscientific conceptions of how the brain processes auditory input.

This article examines catharsis in recent one-to-one performances I shared with UK-based artist Kira O'Reilly. Focusing on my inter-experience of My Mother (2003) and Untitled Action: NRLA, The Arches, Glasgow (2005), I argue that both performances can be read as troubling and elucidating ideas about the presence, nature and affect of catharsis. I raise questions and reveal my responses to felt states such as risk, intimacy and confession, and draw on hysteria and Kristeva's concept of le vréel to articulate the embodied knowledge of my close encounters with O'Reilly's visceral body artworks. Ultimately I propose that O'Reilly's performance practice adopts cathartic strategies that activate aesthetic, formal and material kinds of feminist political responsibility in her performance ‘other’.

A remembered piece of student theatre returns the writer to an examination of what was staged: a play centring on survival of the Shoah; the actor himself, a survivor; or an old man's self-discovery in the theatre. A shocking gestus in this production broke the boundaries of theatre and (while the fourth wall remained intact) transformed the audience into witnesses, and theatre into testimony. The article theorizes traumatic memory and its manifestations in the body, trauma's staging and the shape of narrative, and the difference between history, its performance and its mark.

This collaborative article looks at the establishment in 2006 of an IFTR/FIRT working group in Arabic theatre, and the significance of this in terms of breaking the twentieth-century, hegemonic hold of European and North American subjects in theatre research. We trace the development of the working group from preliminary conferences and gatherings outside IFTR to its set-up and organization within the Federation. Surveying our methodologies, key issues, research areas and future directions, we argue the significance of the group's work in creating a research forum for Arab theatre scholarship.

This article considers Native American/indigenous (women's) theatre from the perspective of performing indigeneities/embodied spiritualities, in relation to ceremonial and ‘cotidian’ ri(gh)t(e)s, and the practice of personal and collective autonomy as a ri(gh)t(e). I situate my discussion within particular sites of the performance of indigeneity and the embodiment of spirituality in Chiapas, Mexico, where my research has taken me, within my own work with a performance course I created at the University of California, Davis, and within critical perspectives offered in Native American studies. I also provide some commentary on the two related gatherings that took place at the Centro Hemisférico/FOMMA, in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, August 2008, and the Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas conference at UCLA, November 2008. Both events were co-sponsored by the Hemispheric Institute on Performance and Politics of NYU and they were announced on the UCLA website as ‘sister’ events. In August 2008, FOMMA officially became a ‘branch’ centre of the Hemispheric Institute.

This article considers five tipping points or phases in the development of modern theatre studies in South Africa. It begins with the period from 1925 to 1935, a time when the first major theatre history appeared, a fully fledged (Western) theatre system was established and the African theatre tradition was recognized. It details 1945 to 1962 for the establishment of a coherent professional theatre system, the first state-funded theatre company and the first drama departments. Thereafter, 1970 to 1985 is identified as the most significant period in relation to the political struggle for liberation in South Africa, while the last two phases (1988–94 and 1997–9) under consideration are characterized by an increase in research output and by the need for practitioners and commentators to seek reconciliation and healing through theatre and performance.

Ho-Jin Yoon's production The Last Empress (1995) was the first Korean-brand, Broadway-style musical to travel to Western venues. This article explores how the play was influenced by its producer's commitment to South Korea's cultural development in light of the country's intensive globalization during the mid-1990s. My analysis concludes that the production's development and the musical itself comprise a set of interactions between the global and the national; in turn, these interactions indicate a mode of alienation in which the concept of ‘global’ becomes meaningless, a fetish, or an empty signifier used in the service of national glory. My analysis also shows how elements of The Last Empress magnify the national and how its esoteric, exclusivist idea of Korean-ness is visualized via gendered nationalism.

This article analyses Maxine Bailey and Sharon M. Lewis's play Sistahs (1994) as an instance of African diaspora feminism in the Americas. The drama's focus on five women in a Canadian kitchen displaces the hegemony enjoyed by African Americans as signifiers of blacknesss, challenging spectators as well as readers to remember instead the long history of blacks in Canada and the existence of multiple African diasporas in the Americas. Further, its rewriting of a 1970s cultural feminism dramatizes the labour of fostering an African diasporic sensibility and subverts that paradigm's conventional emphasis on heteronormativity.

Thirty-five years, the age of TRI, is roughly the length of time I have been involved in our discipline. I completed my Ph.D. in 1974 and entered the profession on the cusp of a generational shift. During my first decade in the academy, a number of new young scholars emerged and began to take the places of an older cohort who were primarily theatre historians and/or drama critics and interpreters. The theory explosion changed the way that both theatre history and dramatic criticism were carried out, and a whole new range of methods and objects of study began to appear in our journals and conferences. Post-structural and postmodernist ideas upset the reigning conventions of scholarship and also influenced creative artists who changed their practice to reflect these new ideas. Feminism transformed our field, as did new research on race, class and sexuality, while competing theories of the subject brought forward psychoanalysis and phenomenology as important tools for performance analysis. Cultural studies and the new historicism challenged positivist historiography and began to change the kind of theatre history (including subjects and documents) scholars researched and wrote about. Political critique was in the ascendency, after a battle to discredit what many of us perceived as a false objectivity in previous scholarship. This became, eventually, the new orthodoxy for many of us, and the senior scholars in our field today (for example Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Josette Féral, Erika Fisher-Lichte, Freddie Rokem, Joseph Roach) all participated in making these major changes happen as young scholars – while not necessarily agreeing with each other: the new generation was thoroughly heterodox in its approach to methods and topics.

This article offers an overview of theatre research and publication in India. It comes in two parts. The first examines theatre research post-independence (1947) up until the 1990s – a period of new economic thinking and a liberalization of sociocultural values. The second focuses on theatre research and publications from 2000 onwards, identifying ways in which more recent scholarship has been concerned with the concept of modernity in theory and practice; has begun to address questions of form, style, space and performativity; and has explored urgent social issues. What emerges in this overview is a feel for how complex the field of theatre research is in India given its multiculturalism. In concluding it draws attention to current and future challenges for theatre and theatre scholarship posed by issues such as globalization, communalism, terrorism and religious fundamentalism.