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.

11 May 2003. As I was preparing to write the Editorial for this, my last issue as Senior Editor, three seemingly unrelated incidents of transnational significance impinged on my consciousness. First, a Nigerian woman asylum-seker in Ireland was granted a stay of deportation, a direct challenge to a ministerial change in the Irish constitution which now decrees that foreign-national mothers of Irish-born children no longer have any residency rights. Her choice is stark, like that of Grusha in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle: she can either take her child back to Nigeria with her, or (since the child is an Irish citizen) leave him behind in an orphanage. No sooner had I read of this woman's plight than I discovered the case of four Kosovan Albanian asylum-seekers in the UK who had fled as much for reason of persecution of their homosexuality as an escape from ethnic fighting, but who ended up, because of their statelessness and immigrational illegitimacy, being forced to prostitute that same sexuality in order to pay off their unscrupulous traffickers. And then at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport's railway station I watched in despair as a Romanian woman risked her life to retrieve a €1 coin from the tracks, dropped inadvertently by an American tourist moments earlier.

This collection addresses issues of performativity and the practices of representation, both historically at the interfaces of theatre practitioners and sexual practices, and intermedially at the intersection of performance and the constructed liveness of mediatized events. The formula of the performative as a ‘doing’ by a thing done, as phrased by Elin Diamond, neatly conveys the ‘mediation’ of the events which are extra-performative and locates performance in a particular tense, thus heightening the tension between the simulation of an act and its enaction.

The Irish literary revival at the beginning of the last century established the concept of ‘house’ as a symbol of ‘nation’ in dramatic writing. Strangers to the house thus took on the mantle of imperialist forces whose colonial project, practices and values had to be resisted and expelled. The allegorical situations of houses and strangers in theatre foreshadowed revolution and eventual independence for the country decades later. Contemporary Irish playwrights continue to use the house/stranger, familiar/foreign dichotomies as templates for their exploration of the current state of the ‘nation’, but they are also beginning to explore the idea that ‘strangeness’ might be a condition that should be embraced to ensure the future health of that nation.

Indian theatre practice under British colonial rule was marked by differing strategies of resistance: agit-prop drama to promote social and political reform; the preservation of classical dance as cultural heritage; and the continuing practice of folk rituals in rural areas outwith the immediate control of the colonial authorities. Postindependence India, however, has witnessed those ‘deviant’ practices of resistance become the dominant ideological performance practices of modern India. Much actor training continued to be modelled on British drama schools such as RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art); classical dances have survived to incorporate certain aspects of western ballet (for example, group sequences in Kathak); and the folk rituals have come increasingly under the microscope of western cultural tourists. Indian theatre practice, therefore, succumbs to the power of the dollar, as western academics and practitioners, with their financial and technological power, act as legitimizing agents for the global recognition of Asian culture. We are at a time when great currency is being attached to the notion of intercultural rejuvenation of home cultures by acts of productive reception with foreign cultures (a more positive definition of the practice by Erika Fischer-Lichte in direct response to Edward Said's charge of cultural colonialism which he terms orientalism). It is worthwhile taking note of how certain forms of modern Indian theatre are resisting intercultural practices, not by refusal or direct opposition, but by theatrical acts of intra-cultural rejuvenation, without the injection of the foreign culture as a serum.

In his introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said lays to rest my fears of political incorrectness and of being orientalist in my teaching and research of Asian as well as European theatre practices and proto-theatrical forms. Said empowers me by locating my nationality (Irish) and the locus of my vision of the Orient in the very realm of the Orient: amongst the colonized peoples of the world. Theatre historians in recent years have embraced Said's modernist dichotomies of Orientalism, and mistakenly divided the theatrical manifestation of culture into West/East, first world/third world, bad/good, colonizers/colonized. The simplicity of such binary opposites consequently denounces and sanctifies. The politics of culture, however, is a much more complex affair. Modern Irish theatre, for example, contemporaneous with social struggle and revolution, is lauded by Said as a strategy of resistance against cultural imperialism. In Asia the resurrection of pre-colonial dance forms and folk traditions is similarly seen as a cultural assertion of independence. Conversely fin de siècle European theatre divorced from its formalist, societal and religious origins has looked to the oriental theatres for inspiration. In the same mistaken paradigm à la Said, this is branded as eclectic purloining of the surface of foreign cultures of the third world, a colonial plundering disguised as aesthetic pursuit.

In her analysis of interculturalist theatre practice, Erika Fischer-Lichte has developed a theory of productive reception, in which the subsuming of a source culture's codes and conventions into a target culture's production has a telos of solving problems (political, aesthetic, cultural) and/or of filling gaps. In The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, Fischer-Lichte sites the practice's operation: ‘An intercultural performance productively receives the elements taken from the foreign theatre traditions and cultures according to the problematic which lies at the point of departure’. The theory also extends to the act of reception by the spectator in that it implies a reading which is non-oppositional between source and target cultures, which demands the interculturalist performance be read as a monoculturalist product. The Théâtre du Soleil's Greek tetralogy Les Atrides (1990–3), directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, is an example of intercultural performance with which one can engage Fischer-Lichte's theory in relation to the reading and classification of signs.