‘Kitchen-sink’ drama was a term used (in the main by its detractors) of the drama of the late 'fifties and 'sixties located outside the drawing-room milieu then preferred by conventional West End playwrights. It was always an inaccurate term, in that many of the plays so described neither took place in domestic kitchens nor – more to Marcia Blumberg's point – addressed the issue of the place's usual attendant: a woman. Recognizing the dominance of the kitchen as an icon, and of its related domestic chores as traditionally the tasks of women, two performance artists have recently, and in very different ways, explored the actuality of ‘Kitchen’ occupations and preoccupations. Bobby Baker's Kitchen Show (1991) used ‘found’ environments of actual kitchens, including her own, to produce ‘new and often subversive significations’, while in Kitchen Blues (1990) the South African dramatist Jeanne Goosen constructed a ‘complex feminist bricolage’ through the voices and actions of a quartet of women, embodying ‘the multiple intersections of gender in a shocking tragi-comic evocation of personal upheaval during a period of flux in South Africa’. Marcia Blumberg, herself a South African, has recently been teaching in Britain with the Open University.

Tight Roaring Circle, a 1997 Artangel installation at the Roundhouse in London, was a collaboration between choreographers and a musician, as well as with the curators and the audience. Through the installation Dana Caspersen, William Forsythe, and Joel Ryan furthered their explorations into engendering, ordering, and composing movement. By obscuring each individual's contribution they also raised issues of authorship, disciplinary boundaries, and autonomy. Many of the issues provoked by the installation are also being pursued at the Ballett Frankfurt, where Caspersen is a dancer and choreographer, Forsythe is artistic director and choreographer, and for which Ryan often writes music. Having first studied philosophy, Steven Spier is a senior lecturer in architecture in the School of Urban Development and Policy at South Bank University. He has written an article on Forsythe's relationship to classical ballet for the Journal of Architecture, and a book that brings together an architect's and a novelist's work.

When the ‘action’ at major news events is observed over days or weeks by television cameras, how far does the medium become, whether knowingly or not, a participant and shaper in the action it observes? How far does the action itself become, to some degree, a performance before the cameras? While not ignoring either the moral or practical implications of such questions, lan Watson sets out primarily to analyze the ‘frame’ of television news broadcasting, and to consider the events within that frame as elements of performance. He considers the six days of rioting in Los Angeles in 1992, sparked by the acquittal of police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King – itself caught on camera – as a case study, in which the often ignored role of the observer, whether the news anchor-man in the studio or the audience watching at home, comes in for corrective scrutiny. He concludes that in the ‘mediated present’ of the news event on television, the medium is indeed as much a producer as a reporter of an action which is pervasively shaped by its presence. An Advisory Editor and regular contributor to New Theatre Quarterly, lan Watson teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers, where he is Co-ordinator of the Theatre and Television Programs.

The first production at Britain's first true repertory theatre – the Gaiety, in Manchester – under Annie Horniman's management was of a Shakespeare play: William Poel's staging of Measure for Measure, analyzed in detail by Richard Foulkes in Theatre Quarterly No. 39 (1981). Yet Miss Horniman's attitude both to Poel's experimental ‘Elizabethanism’ and to subsequent attempts at Shakespeare at the Gaiety remained ambivalent, and influenced by such personal tensions and disagreements as saw off Lewis Casson after his radical and political reading of Julius Caesar, in favour of safer stuff conceived as an alternative to Christmas pantomime. The author, Viv Gardner, teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Manchester: she is a former Book Reviews Editor of NTQ, and currently co-editor of the Women and Theatre papers. Here, she sets Shakespearean production at the Gaiety into the context of Miss Horniman and her colleagues' ambitions for the Gaiety and its intended role in Manchester's civic life.

Our sequence of features on the use of the new technology in the creation as well as the re-creation of live performance continues with a consideration of the implications of interactive CD-ROM – with special reference to its potential for liberating multimedia lesbian representation, and for other kinds of live performance which designedly subvert the norm. This article was sparked by Lois Weaver's solo performance of her own Faith and Dancing, which the author, Jan Goulden, saw at Jackson's Lane Theatre, London, on 9 August 1996: and extracts from Goulden's subsequent interview with Weaver intersperse her analysis of the nature and potential of multimedia in performance. Jan Goulden is a writer and teacher who lives in Wales and has taught with the Workers' Educational Association. She is currently writing a postgraduate thesis on ‘Myth and Variation: Lesbian Representation in American Fiction and Film’ with the Open University. Performing under the name Split Britches, Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw and Deborah Margolin have for the past fifteen years been at the vanguard of lesbian feminist theatre both in the US and in Britain. Their work, which addresses radical issues through its exploration of gender roles and desire in performance, is highly regarded in both theatrical and academic circles.

The great classical Indian dancer and co-founder of the International School of Theatre Anthropology, Sanjukta Panigrahi, died in June 1997. An outstanding exponent – and virtually the rediscoverer – of Odissi dance, Sanjukta Panigrahi was born in Orissa into a Brahmin family, and defied the prejudice of her caste as the first girl to pursue Odissi dance as a career. With the support of her family, she began studying at the age of five under the guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, with whom she worked for many years, and also trained in Bharata Natyam for six years with the master Rukmini Devi. Julia Varley, an Odin Teatret actress since 1977, knew and worked with Sanjukta for twenty years, and in the following article offers her memories and reconstruction of the experiences of apprenticeship, performance, technique, cultural exchange, teaching, and family and work relationships, both in India and within the multicultural context of ISTA. Sanjukta's own descriptions of her life and work, drawn from a wide variety of sources, are interspersed throughout the article, in an attempt to keep alive this remarkable actress/dancer's way of thinking and being, coloured by her particular female strength. Julia Varley was born in London in 1954, spent her childhood in Milan, joined Odin in 1976, and has been a participant in the ISTA sessions since their conception in 1980.

Especially during the later decades of the twentieth century, Shakespeare's plays have been adapted for production in many of the major Asian traditional theatrical forms – prompting some western critics to suggest that such forms, with their long but largely non-logocentric traditions, can come closer to the recovery or recreation of the theatrical conditions and performance styles of Shakespeare's times than can academically derived experiments based on scantily documented research. Whether in full conformity with traditional Asian styles, or by stirring ingredients into a synthetic mix, Min Tian denies that a ‘true’ recreation is possible – but suggests that such productions can, paradoxically, help us to ‘reinvent’ Shakespeare in fuller accord with our own times, notably by exploiting the potential of stylized gesture and movement, and the integration of music and dance, called for by proponents of a modernistic ‘total’ theatre after Artaud. In considering a wide range of Shakespearean productions and adaptations from varying Asian traditions, Min Tian suggests that the fashionably derided ‘universality’ of Shakespeare may still tell an intercultural truth that transcends stylistic and chronological distinctions. Min Tian holds a doctorate from the China Central Academy of Drama, where he has been an associate professor since 1992. The author of many articles on Shakespeare, modern drama, and intercultural theatre, he is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.