Insect metamorphosis fascinated Greek philosophers, bewildered Christian theologians, affirmed the beliefs of Chinese moralists, and continues to mystify science. Yet dramas representing human-animal transformations rarely involve insects. When they do appear, they usually serve as metaphors satirizing human flaws, but are also demeaning to the insect in their simplistic representation. In some 21st-century performances, however, that approach is evolving to better appreciate the multifarious intricacies of insect life.

At the 2021 Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (BIPAM), Southeast Asian dramatists presented new works that combined personal histories with the overarching political struggles in the region. One presentation, Deleted Scenes in SEA: Ownership Under Censorship, not only took up the issues of censorship and self-censorship but also entangled the distinct cultural identities of three countries – Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand – by reprising scenes formerly banned in them. The new versions were directed and performed in a language of one of the other countries. Adapting each other’s censored scenes, and re-enacting their similar experiences in countering political repression, required empathetic imagination, and could be a new theatrical platform for creating a sense of regional solidarity. Catherine Diamond is a Professor of Theatre and Environmental Literature at Soochow University, Taiwan. She is the author of Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) and the playwright/director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project (KETEP) in Southeast Asia.

Influencer marketing may be amplified on livestreaming platforms (e.g., Twitch) compared with asynchronous social media (e.g., YouTube). However, food and beverage marketing on Twitch has not been evaluated at a user level. The present study aimed to compare users’ self-reported exposure to food marketing and associated attitudes, consumption and purchasing behaviours on Twitch compared with YouTube. A survey administered via social media was completed by 621 Twitch users (90 % male, 64 % white, 69 % under 25 years old). Of respondents, 72 % recalled observing at least one food or beverage advertisement on Twitch. There were significant differences in the recall of specific brands advertised on Twitch (P < 0⋅01). After observing advertised products, 14 % reported craving the product and 8 % reported purchasing one. In chat rooms, 56 % observed conversations related to food and 25 % participated in such conversations. There were significant differences in the number of users who consumed various products while watching Twitch (P < 0⋅01). Of users who frequented YouTube (n 273), 65 % reported negative emotions when encountering advertising on YouTube compared with 40 % on Twitch (P < 0⋅01). A higher proportion felt Twitch's advertising primarily supported content creators (79 v. 54 %, P < 0⋅01), while a higher proportion felt that YouTube's advertising primarily supported the platform (49 v. 66 %, P < 0⋅01). The findings support that food marketing exposures on Twitch are noticeable, less bothersome to users and influence consumption and purchasing behaviours. Future studies are needed to examine how the livestreaming environment may enhance advertising effectiveness relative to asynchronous platforms.

Some recent performances have addressed events that created ‘human no-go zones’ such as Chernobyl (CEZ), Fukushima (FEZ) and the Korean DMZ. In the wake of the destruction that results in the absence of humans, non-human residents begin the process of recuperation, and the ‘no-go zones’ become inadvertent sanctuaries for wild and abandoned domestic animals. Each of the following productions takes a different view of what occurs when both the norms of nature and the practices of human societies and economies are profoundly disrupted. In addition, one play has depicted a community exercising a new restraint to establish an intentional ‘no-go zone’ to ensure its own survival. When confronted with catastrophes that threaten the existence of all life, as well as the surprising possibilities of renewal, dramatists employ heightened poetic diction and resort to mythical precedents in the attempt to capture the immensity of both the event and its aftermath.

In 2015, the Unfolding Kafka Festival was initiated by Thai dancer/choreographer Jitti Chompee, exploring the writings of Franz Kafka as a source of creativity for performers in Thailand and the Southeast Asian region. Three of the presented artworks focus on the concept of metamorphosis, and the body’s interaction with the environments it both creates and inhabits. Inspired by Isabelle Schad’s dance Der Bau (The Burrow), Chompee and visual artist/scenographer Yoko Seyama created Silence of the Insects, which adopted the cicada as a model of bodily transformation. Together, the two dances and the installation form an assemblage that can be considered under the rubric of Una Chaudhuri’s concept of a ‘theatre of species’. Catherine Diamond is Professor of Theatre and Environmental Literature at Soochow University in Taiwan, and is the director/playwright of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project, creating new plays addressing environmental issues in Southeast Asia.

In this article Catherine Diamond examines the flows of transcultural hybridity occurring in dance between Spanish flamencos, Japanese exponents of flamenco, and Indian dancers interacting with flamenco within their classical dance forms. Japan and India represent two distinct Asian reactions to the phenomenon of global flamenco: the Japanese have adopted it wholesale and compete with the Spanish on their own ground; the Indians claim that as the Roma (gypsy) people originated in India, the country is also the home of flamenco. Despite their differing attitudes, flamenco dance offers women in both cultures a pathway toward participating in an internal androgyny, a wider spectrum of gender representation than either the Asian traditional dance or contemporary Asian society normally allows. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre and environmental literature. She is Director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia, and the director/choreographer of Red Shoes Dance Theatre in Taiwan.

Since the Sunflower Movement of 2014, when thousands of Taiwanese students protested against a trade deal the Nationalist government had made with China, the issue of Taiwan's sovereignty has again been brought to the political fore. Home to twenty-three million people, not only is Taiwan beset by threats from China and isolated by international organizations, but in its rapid push to industrialize it also has incurred severe environmental degradation. Two contemporary theatre troupes incorporated the Sunflower demonstration's ‘pro-Taiwanese homeland’ agenda into their works about the environment. Addressing both the pollution of the countryside and the demise of rural communities, they idealized pastoral life and emphasized Taiwan's roots in agrarian culture. Sun Son's Mulian Rescues Mother Earth imagined a perfectly organized small agricultural community trying to sustain its success, and San Que Yi's Earth Project portrayed two examples of rural communities engaged in David-and-Goliath struggles against industrial pollution.

Simianification is the practice of humans inhabiting the simian body on stage. Because Asians have lived with monkeys and apes, several Asian theatre traditions have long legacies of representing monkeys on stage. In Europe and North America, where non-human primates did not exist, they are not a familiar feature in performance until nineteenth-century music hall and circus and twentieth-century film and television. In some recent performances in Asia dancers and actors have expanded their understanding of monkey roles by incorporating scientific discoveries, modern movement techniques, and global pop culture. On the British and American stage, actors experiment to ‘impersonate’ the humanized ape bodily and mentally, without the aid of the disguises and prosthetics usual in film. These performers ‘embody’ the philosophical inquiry of what it means to ‘be monkey’ by inhabiting a monkey’s body while still performing ‘art’ for a human audience. Catherine Diamond, a Contributing Editor to NTQ, is a professor of theatre and environmental literature at Soochow University, Taiwan. She is also the director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia.

For its size, Singapore hosts an exceptional amount of theatrical activity, emanating both from within the city state and from its role as sponsor of regional international workshops and productions. Its English-speaking dramatists are in the forefront of staging original plays about the foibles of Singaporean society and serving as mediators among South-east Asian theatre practitioners. While troupes depend on government funding and must obtain government permits to perform, most have opted to take an alternative position to the government's narrative of the Singapore success story. This has created an uneasy relationship that undermines the strength of the theatre's social-political critique and encourages self-censorship. In the following essay, Catherine Diamond examines the psychologically cramped conditions within which current Singaporean dramatists operate through a comparison of monodramas. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre at Soochow University in Taiwan, and a frequent contributor to NTQ. She is currently directing a flamenco dance-drama adaptation of The House of Bernarda Alba.

A large proportion of Thai films and of traditional and modern dramas are based on significant figures whose lives helped shape the trajectory of Thai history, but who are in the end overwhelmed by events. Some works are produced with obvious propaganda intent, reflecting the efforts of cultural reconstruction and historical reinterpretation. This paper suggests that the plays under discussion follow an epic and episodic form, depicting the full scope of the protagonist's life rather than focusing on a single dramatic event or examining a tragic destiny. This structure resembles the paradigmatic epic underwriting Thai royalty, the Ramakien, even while the role and nature of the king is being newly exemplified in annual spectacles.

Unlike most Southeast Asian theatres, Vietnam has created a sizeable corpus of scripted spoken dramas that continue to be popular in performance with urban audiences. Initially influenced by French classicism and Ibsenist realism, the Vietnamese spoken drama, kich noi, very quickly adapted to local social realities and survives by readily incorporating topical subjects. While keeping abreast of current social issues, the theatre nonetheless makes use of its multi-cultural heritage, and in any given modern performance one can see the layers of influence – traditional Sino-Vietnamese hat boi/tuong; Vietnamese cheo theatre, Cham dance, French realism, Soviet constructivism and socialist realism, and most recently, western performance art. The Vietnamese playwrights, set designers, directors, and actors have combined aspects of the realistic theatre with the conventions of their suppositional traditional theatre to come up with a hybrid that is uniquely Vietnamese. It is argued that these manifold layers should be regarded as a kind of palimpsest rather than just as pastiche.

The small and sparsely populated country of Laos is squeezed between Thailand and Vietnam, and receives information, financial investment, and cultural influence from both – arguably overwhelming the development of its own modern identity. While theatre has often been a popular and important means of disseminating cultural information and values in societies with low literacy levels, in today's Laos the mass media have become the most influential source of information and influence, with Thai television dominating the Lao airwaves – and Vietnamese-style socialist realism still the model for the live performing arts. Although the troupes disseminate didactic messages deemed important by the central government, they are supported primarily by foreign aid agencies that also dictate their content. In the following article, Catherine Diamond traces the history of the three major performing arts in Laos, describes their present state, and assesses the difficulties they face in developing along their own creative and artistic paths. Catherine Diamond teaches theatre and ecology in literature at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. She is a theatre reporter in Southeast Asia, and has previously written about theatre in Burma, Vietnam, Turkey, and the Czech Republic for NTQ.

Building on the early European experiments with animated shadow figures, American dalang Larry Reed – narrator and puppet manipulator – has enlarged Balinese shadow puppetry to cinema-sized dimensions and combined it with live actors and dancers. In conjunction with Balinese puppet masters, Reed has created several pieces which explore the interaction between puppets and human shadow figures as well as performers in front of the screen. Moreover, Reed's productions are bilingual and bi-cultural, mixing Balinese and American humour and mythology so that the hybrid creations find favour with audiences in both locations. As his technique increasingly becomes refined in the process, each new production expands more subtly on the theme of melding shadow with flesh and the blurring of illusion and reality.

All major cities are now competing with each other to attract cultural tourists: yet Prague, since the Velvet Revolution, has been distinctive in using the city itself as a cultural icon, also capitalizing on the artists associated with it – notably Mozart, Gluck, Kafka, and Arcimboldo – to create performances that present an idealized and imagined Prague, the city as its own persona. Since tourists might hesitate to go to Czech-language drama, theatrical entrepreneurs instead offer puppet opera, Black Theatre, and Laterna Magika – forms closely associated with Prague, and which circumvent the language problem. Thus, during the summer, when the regular theatres close, Prague theatricalizes itself for tourist consumption. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre in Taiwan, where she also dances and directs. A regular contributor to NTQ, she has written several books, including Sringara Tales, short stories about Asian performers, and Madmen and Fools: Taiwan Theatre 1988–1998.

The Burmese zat pwe, an exuberant variety show involving almost every kind of performing art, has fascinated foreign visitors to Myanmar for the past hundred years. It continues today as a vibrant amalgam of singing, dancing, acting, and comic improvisation, still performed annually at pagoda festivals. As Burmese scholars have noted, the Burmese performer is primarily a singer and dancer rather than a dramatic actor, and therefore tends to use plays as frameworks for demonstrating virtuosity in these areas. This is reinforced by the training given at the two State Schools of Music and Dance, and while the Drama Department at the University of Culture does acquaint students with dramatic acting, the emphasis remains on music and dance. Moreover, the scripted drama, especially the classical drama, which reached a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, is increasingly omitted from the pwe programme, having gradually been displaced by the pop music that is considered necessary to attract young audiences. Despite such changes, which alarm traditionalists, the pwe performance has shown a resilient flexibility to adapt to audience preferences and remains a lively highlight at the festivals. Catherine Diamond – who has previously written for NTQ on Vietnamese and Turkish theatre, and on oriental approaches to classical tragedy – is a dancer and drama professor who is currently directing for the Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.

Criticism is increasingly being levelled at western directors who, in the name of a vague intercultural aesthetic, embark on experiments combining western texts with various kinds of oriental movement, costume, and music. In this article, Catherine Diamond raises the same issues in regard to productions of western drama in Asia, and offers a detailed analysis of three productions of ancient Greek tragedies to reveal how a new kind of non-specific orientalism has come to pervade the international stage, originating no less in Asia than in the West. Lavish productions, mounted to impress the international festival circuit rather than to engage local audiences, appropriate western tragedies primarily on account of their status in the western literary and theatrical canon; and rather than offering new interpretations of the texts from a different cultural perspective, they contribute to the creeping ascendancy of superficially exotic spectacle. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor, is currently a director with Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.