In February of this year, I was fortunate to attend Bodies in/and Asian Theatres, a regional conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR, the scholarly organization with which this journal is affiliated). It was held at the University of the Philippines Diliman under the aegis of the IFTR Asian Theatre working group. Toward the end of a plenary panel on contemporary South East Asian dance on the final day, a debate arose over the work of one of the speakers, Eisa Jocson. A dancer and choreographer, Jocson's work explores the aesthetics of local and transnational performative labour, and is often based on forms she learns from Filipinos working in the entertainment industry. For example, Macho Dancer (2013) is based on a distinctive style of erotic male nightclub performance, Host (2015) on the work of Filipinas in Japanese hostess clubs, and the HAPPYLAND series (2017) on the high number of Filipinos employed at the Hong Kong Disneyland. In response to her presentation on these and other works, some scholars from the Philippines asked Jocson, who mainly performs in Manila and on the international contemporary performance circuit, why she did not tour nationally. After all, they reasoned, since Jocson's performances are inspired by the work of entertainers who often come from regional cities and rural areas, is it not right to present the work ‘back’ to such a workforce and their communities? Such questions are, of course, complex and loaded. In so far as Jocson's performances address the exploitation of Filipino entertainers’ affective labour, is there any risk that Jocson compounds that exploitation for her own benefit? And in so far as those performances explore the choreographies of entertainment capital and commodified desire, should Filipino audiences not be informed and perhaps educated about such things? Jocson countered that while wider local exposure for her work was desirable, it was wrong to presume that it could readily be presented in such circumstances. She makes her work within a specific critical and discursive context, she explained, and as part of a long-term thematic and aesthetic enquiry. To present it outside such contexts would benefit neither the audience, nor the artist, nor the work. If anything, she seemed to be suggesting, the work is not made for the producers of such performance forms, but for their consumers, and those who elsewhere participate in and benefit from such economies. She recounted making the ‘mistake’ of asking the owners of a ‘macho dancer’ nightclub if she could perform Macho Dancer there, as part of their regular line-up, late at night. They offered her an early slot, so as not to disrupt business as usual.

The Palestinian National Theatre's production of Roses and Jasmine presents an uncommon occurrence: Palestinians performing a Jewish-majority story on Palestinian and world stages. The play opened to divergent audience reactions in East Jerusalem, igniting controversy, and leading to the expression of opinions that ranged from absolute support to clear opposition. This article discusses the play's intervention into an orientalist rhetorical context, showing how reversing traditional orientalist ventriloquisms can be employed as a key strategy of cultural resistance. An analysis of the production's choices and the critical responses it generated suggests that by consciously representing Jewish characters who struggle with their own religious and national identities through Palestinian performers, the play opens up the possibility of breaking the perception of balance between the occupier and the occupied. Extended to a larger context, a resistant ventriloquism can reveal systemic oppression, rendering injustices visible in cases where systemic racism prevents the colonizer from seeing the condition of the colonized.

This is a reading into what someone can achieve as a theatre critic and a scholar when they have faith in change. Hazem Azmy was that someone.

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 article compares the efforts of two Australian entrepreneurs to import Japanese entertainments for theatres in mid-twentieth-century Australia. David N. Martin of the Tivoli Circuit and Harry Wren, an independent producer, were rivals in the business of touring variety-revue. Both travelled to Japan in 1957, the year that the governments of Australia and Japan signed a landmark trade agreement. Whereas Martin's efforts were hampered by the legacy of wartime attitudes, Wren embraced the post-war optimism for trade. Wren became the Australian promoter for the Toho Company of Japan, touring a series of Toho revues until 1968. These Toho tours have been overlooked in Australian histories of cultural exchange with Japan. Drawing on evidence from archival sources and developing insights from foreign policy of the time, this article examines why Australian entrepreneurs turned to Japan, what Toho sent on tour, and how Toho's revues played in Australia. It analyses trade in touring entertainment as a form of entrepreneurial diplomacy that sought to realize the prospects of regional integration.

Hazem's major international work in theatre was connected to his significant involvement with the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), the most important international organization of theatre scholars. In this organization, Hazem became one of the best-known and most respected younger members. He began regularly attending IFTR in 2005 and the following year he and I, along with Khalid Amine from Morocco, gathered the required fifty signatures from members of the organization to establish an ongoing working group dedicated to research in the theatre of the Arab/Islamic world. The Arabic Theatre Working Group was officially established by the organization in 2007 and Hazem served as co-convener of the group from that time onward. As such he was responsible for much of the organization and energy of the group, which became one of the most active in the organization, producing a variety of books and publications, regularly organizing major panels for the plenary sessions of the annual conventions, and establishing an online journal, Arab Stages, which appears twice a year and offers essays, interviews and translations from the Arab world and the Arab diaspora.

The Europa Europa anti-nationalist cabaret was created in the run-up to the 2014 Swedish elections by the Ful collective in collaboration with ‘house band’ the Knife. Part rally and part concert, Europa Europa responds to the Sweden Democrats party's anti-immigrant propaganda specifically and the migration policies of the European Union more generally, by enacting a kind of ‘no-borders’ politics in a moment of rising nationalisms. The cabaret aims to build a temporary coalition between different but like-minded audiences as an aim distinct from changing minds. This solidarity is also practised by the performers onstage, who use the ambiguous theatrical positioning of migration stories to challenge conventional imaginaries of heroes and criminals. Through Europa Europa and its inheritances, from historical agitprop to the Macarena, this essay extends performance's repertoire as a form in which to practise strategic anti-nationalism, and to engage with friction in the process.

We, faculty members and students in the Ain Shams University Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, miss Hazem profoundly on both the personal and academic levels. Both have been well integrated in a way that recalls Hamlet's commendation of Horatio, whose ‘blood and judgement are so well commingled, that they are not a pipe for fortune's finger to sound what stop she please’. Hazem possessed this even-handed temper. No wonder, then, that his passion for the theatre coupled with his sound and carefully measured judgements will be remembered and rest firmly in our ‘heart's core, ay, in our heart of hearts’.

At the height of the 2015–16 ‘refugee crisis’, how were immigrants and refugees portrayed and self-portrayed on Finnish and Swedish stages? The production and reception of two plays translated from Arabic – Karim Rashed's I Came to See You (2015) and Hassan Blasim's The Digital Hats Game (2016) – reveal a complex politics of representation in both scripting and staging. Reading Blasim and Rashed's works in light of Arab–Nordic literary studies and migration theatre studies, we also set them against two other migration-themed plays staged in Stockholm: Swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri's groundbreaking Invasion! (2006) and British playwright Anders Lustgarten's more recent Lampedusa (2015). Blasim and Rashed, we argue, had to navigate three traps or boxes endemic to Arab diasporic theatre: the audience expectations of biographical voyeurism, orientalism and the allegory of collective worthiness. Both aimed to reject the first two expectations and embrace the third, seeking to define new directions in Nordic–Arab theatre.

In June 2015, a small strange protest erupted in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, around a sumptuous red kimono, provided to visitors to try on and emulate the 1876 painting La Japonaise, by Claude Monet. Protesters named themselves Decolonize Our Museums and took to the gallery and social media with strident messages condemning the Kimono Wednesdays try-on activity as racist, orientalist appropriation; soon after, counterprotesters faced off, defending the programme for sharing Japanese culture with the community. In this article, I consider the kimono protests as part of a history of kimono, internationally created yet indelibly marked as Japanese. In this context, the kimono protests provide an occasion to consider the ramifications of contemporary debates about cultural appropriation and appreciation. Through a performance-theory inflected analysis I propose a theatrical ethic of ‘inappropriation’ as a means of moving discourse and public performances of culture beyond the stultifying binaries of right/wrong or appreciation/appropriation.

For me Hazem Azmy was not only a very close friend, despite the infrequency of our in-person meetings, but also the interlocutor who provoked some of my best work. His questions, his challenges, his invitations and the publications he edited have inspired and deepened almost everything I have written about Arab theatre over the past ten years. They provoke me still.

Protesting against the Marcos regime in 1985, farm workers and other activists and their supporters from multisectoral groups are ‘massacred’ in front of the Escalante town hall by state police and paramilitary troops, resulting in the death of twenty persons. A year later, Teatro Obrero, the ‘cultural arm’ of the Negros Federation of Sugar Workers, stages a re-enactment of the massacre. Thirty-two years later, in 2017, the theatre group performs the re-enactment for the thirty-second time; the group has been doing the re-enactment every year since 1986. What is the reason for this fidelity to the restaging of a traumatic event? What is the logic of the repetition that happens relentlessly in the same way every year? Drawing from a co-performative engagement with Teatro Obrero and its re-enactment theatre, I argue that the reason may be found by looking at the long history of the sugar workers’ oppression, which spans centuries, and which is about more than Marcos and his repressive regime. The theatre has not changed because the social conditions that birthed it have not changed. It has become an intergenerational resource for the Escalante survivors who have once again lost their trust in promised change under the current national leadership.

Now a decade old, Rimini Protokoll's 100% City continues to stage civilians as statistical samples. Considering the project as a series, this paper proposes that ‘seriality’ governs not just the project's touring model, but also its creation of individuals, populations and a homogeneous group of ‘diverse’ metropolises. These serializations are a foundational part of the project of statistical reason. Surveying the nineteenth-century origins of these practices and their early public articulations, and contrasting these practices with the newly emerging regime of ‘big data’, this paper argues that this serial logic is in fact a nostalgic one. 100% City’s celebration of statistics, however troubling, appears as a comforting articulation of a social model now dissolving in favour of algorithmic enumerations of peoples. The statistical project has long been tied to the theatre, while data analysis may articulate a limit to theatrical representation.

Gostan Forward is an excavation of pioneering Malaysian contemporary dancer-choreographer Marion D'Cruz's life history. Conceived in 2009 as a solo lecture performance, it traces D'Cruz's growth as a student, dancer, choreographer and educator, revealing her choices, strategies and influences over the span of a forty-five-year dance career. The performance text published here is accompanied by an introduction from D'Cruz's collaborator and director Mark Teh.

This article demonstrates that José Pérez Ocaña's political performances open up the possibility of questioning the narrative of the transition to democracy in Spain as one resulting from political consensus. Using sources available in documentaries and in the archives of the counterculture, the essay studies Ocaña as a political subject of the transition. Among his public acts, the essay considers his street performances, his sexually explicit performance in the Canet Rock music festival and in International Anarchist Days in 1977, and his problematic participation in gay pride parades in Barcelona. In his public appearances, Ocaña eroded the distinction between public and private while asserting his right to appear. Despite his prominence in countercultural realms, gay activists and anarchist organizations rejected him. I argue that Ocaña opted to disidentify with all labels as he confronted both gender norms and the countercultural public sphere.

What does the #MeToo movement reveal about how acting is understood at the present time, both in practice and by the public at large? The claim of one convicted abuser, New Zealand acting coach Rene Naufahu, was that his sexual offending in the classroom was simply preparing his students for the ‘real world of acting’. Drawing from Elin Diamond's argument that dramatic realism does not simply reflect the real but in fact produces it, I examine how figures like Naufahu promulgate certain notions of acting in order to produce a reality that legitimates abusive behaviour. Furthermore, I suggest that this behaviour is often a performance of acting itself whereby the actor, director or coach, in a selectively self-reflexive manner, exploits their professional ‘role’ in order to exert power over their victim. I argue that one way of contesting real-world practices that rely on hegemonic assumptions of what acting is or should be is to redeploy the critical terminology of acting to analyse and expose such abuses for the acts that they are.

The article explores historically and theoretically the phenomenon of shen-ti wen-hua (culture of the body) in the context of Taiwan's experimental performance in the 1980s–1990s. By highlighting different corporeal discourses in various sociopolitical contexts across time, it addresses such critical issues as the relation between the individual and the collective in the history of Taiwanese modernity, the quests for identity in art and culture, the transformation of the role of the avant-garde in aesthetic and political pursuits, and the ultimate question of the relationship between art and society from the colonial era to a contemporary world dominated by consumer culture and global capitalism. The body, with its materiality and rich semiotic possibilities, has at certain historical moments served as a potent metaphor for questioning the sociopolitical status quo and envisioning new identities and alternative power relations in Taiwanese society: the period under consideration in the article was one of those moments.