For all the lip-service French culture pays to reason and logic, it undergoes periodic eruptions of déraison or unreason. In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, ballroom dancing began to be infiltrated by such unbridled popular dances as the cancan and the chahut. Exuberant, even bacchanalian physical display served as a safety-valve in a heavily censored society. In the Second Empire, four working-class amateurs introduced the high-kicking, parodic Clodoche quadrille at the Paris Opéra. A non-verbal equivalent of the Marx Brothers, they became bywords through the Western hemisphere of zany, comic demonstrations of the hysteric convulsions described by the medical establishment. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a contributor to the International Encyclopedia of Dance. His many books include British Music Hall: A Bibliography (1981), The Age and Stage of George L. Fox (1999), and Cabaret Performance 1890–1940 (2001–2005).

Eugenio Barba’s letter of farewell to several main responsibilities for the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium in which the Odin Teatret was deeply rooted was not altogether unexpected, but came as a jolt, nevertheless. Eugenio has served for more than two decades as a contributing editor of NTQ, sending us such marvellous pieces as those to be found in NTQ 86 (2006) and issue 102 (2010), which complement his prolific writing. The latter, crowned by The Five Continents of Theatre and written with long-term co-author Nicola Savarese (English edition, 2019), is another of the rich, multifarious activities that he initiated and steered through with his tireless ensemble of actors and other devoted collaborators to world renown. The unique and diverse achievements of this group are widely known and can be gleaned from Eugenio’s modest account below, but also from NTQ articles, which focus on specific aspects of his massive contribution. So we meet him in the journal’s pages in conversation on his early innovations with Maria Shevtsova (NTQ 90, 2007), Erik Exe Christoffersen’s discussion of the Eurasian Ur-Hamlet (94, 2008) and Shevtsova’s and contributing editor Ian Watson’s records of the fiftieth anniversary of the Festuge, which the Laboratorium creates with the communities of Holstebro (119, 2014; 122, 2015). Eugenio’s letter of love and solidarity for and with the theatre is by no means his last act, and we look forward to his continuing collaboration with NTQ.

This round-table discussion, edited by Eva Urban and Lisa FitzGerald, took place on 5 July 2019 as part of the conference ‘New Romantics: Performing Ireland and Cosmopolitanism on the Anniversary of Human Rights’ organized by the editors at the Brian Friel Theatre, Queen’s University Belfast. Lisa FitzGerald is a theatre historian and ecocritic who completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC), Université Rennes 2 and the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She is the author of Re-Place: Irish Theatre Environments (Peter Lang, 2017) and Digital Vision and the Ecological Aesthetic (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2020). Eva Urban is a Senior Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast, and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Irish Studies, QUB. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011) and La Philosophie des Lumières dans le Théâtre Breton: Tradition et Influences (Université de Rennes, 2019). Rosemary Jenkinson is a Belfast playwright and writer of five short story collections. Her plays include The Bonefire (Rough Magic), Planet Belfast (Tinderbox), White Star of the North, Here Comes the Night (Lyric), Lives in Translation (Kabosh Theatre Company), and Michelle and Arlene (Accidental Theatre). Her writing for radio includes Castlereagh to Kandahar (BBC Radio 3) and The Blackthorn Tree (BBC Radio 4). She has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to write a memoir. Tom Maguire is Head of the School of Arts and Humanities at Ulster University and has published widely on Irish and Scottish theatre and in the areas of Theatre for Young Audiences and Storytelling Performance. His heritage research projects include the collection Heritage after Conflict: Northern Ireland (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Elizabeth Crooke). David Grant is a former Programme Director of the Dublin Theatre Festival and was Artistic Director of the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. He has worked extensively as a theatre director throughout Ireland and is co-investigator of an AHRC-funded research project into Arts for Reconciliation. He lectures in drama at Queen’s University Belfast.

This interview took place during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (August 2017), where Impromptu Shakespeare has been performing since 2013. An improvised theatre group, Impromptu Shakespeare weaves in one new ‘Shakespeare’ play at every show. The conversation was led by Marina Cano, as part of her research on improvised Shakespeare and improvised Jane Austen. It involved Impromptu actors Ailis Duff and Rebecca MacMillan, and touched upon matters of improvisation, methodology, adaptation, Shakespeare on stage, and gender-blind performance. Marina Cano is a Research Associate at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Jane Austen and Performance (Palgrave 2017) and the co-editor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film, and Performance (Palgrave 2019).

On 16 April 2014, the Sewol Ferry capsized in the southern region of South Korea: 304 passengers died, including 250 high school students. Despite an international outcry, there has not yet been a comprehensive investigation into what caused the Sewol to sink and why the passengers were not rescued promptly. This article discusses how performance can represent something that defies explanation because we do not know how or why it happened. Yellow Ribbon’s Talent Show, Namsan Arts Centre’s From Pluto, and Camino de Ansan performed the role of the students who died. Taking these three case studies, this article analyzes the ways in which they strive to represent the unrepresentable as they attempt to document the sinking and achieve justice, while memorializing the victims and arguing for the necessity of a more safety-conscious society. Areum Jeong is Assistant Professor in Humanities at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute. Jeong’s research takes a transnational approach to Korean and Korean-American film, literature, theatre, and performance. Her current book project explores how performance documents death, loss, and memory in South Korean and diasporic communities.

In 1981 Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal established the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). While the Festival is generally recognized as having been highly influential in the field of British theatre over the past twenty-five years, it has received little academic attention. In this article Phoebe Patey-Ferguson examines the founding of the event, arguing that the specific socio-political circumstances of its early years gave shape to the innovative form of a city-based international theatre festival. The bureaucratic conflict between Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council (GLC) is identified as a central factor in the creation of LIFT, with reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the bureaucratic field and Loïc Wacquant’s development of this model in relation to neoliberal market capitalism. The article is derived from Phoebe Patey-Ferguson’s recently completed PhD on LIFT in its social, cultural, and political context at the Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London.1

Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal were the Artistic Directors of LIFT – the London International Festival of Theatre – from its conception in 1979 until their joint resignation in 2004. In this interview they discuss with Phoebe Patey-Ferguson the initial motivations and challenges of establishing an international festival in London and how these changed in maintaining the organization over twenty-five years. This conversation took place in London on 15 February and 14 March 2018, and complements the preceding article in this issue of NTQ by Patey-Ferguson, analyzing the socio-political circumstances of its early years.

Featuring hybridity, transgression, and improvisation, New Concept Kun Opera refers to experimental performances by Ke Jun and other Kun Opera performers since the beginning of the twenty-first century. From telling the ancient stories to expressing the modern self, this new form marks the awakening of the performer’s subjectivity and develops a contemporary outlook by rebuilding close connections between Kun Opera and modern life. A synthetic use of intermedial resources contributes to its appeal to today’s audiences. Its experimentation succeeds in maintaining the most traditional while exploring the most pioneering, thus providing Kun Opera with the potential for renewal, as well as an alternative future for Chinese opera in general. Chengzhou He is a Yangtze River Distinguished Professor of English and Drama at the School of Foreign Studies and the School of Arts at Nanjing University. He has published widely on Western drama, intercultural theatre, and critical theory in both Chinese and English. Currently, he is the principal investigator for a national key-research project, ‘Theories in European and American Theatre and Performance Studies’.

Originally funded by the US Department of Defense in 2009, Theater of War Productions’ first project, Theater of War, performs dramatic readings of Ajax at military bases, hospitals, and academic institutions throughout the United States. Developed by Bryan Doerries, Theater of War brings awareness to the epidemic of suicide and other forms of violence committed by American military service members in the wake of the United States’ so-called ‘war on terror’. But like Ajax, American military personnel typically turn to violence only after being betrayed by the institutions that they served. This article follows how Ajax’s more modern manifestation disrupts the tragic protagonist’s status as a sacrificial victim whose death precipitates tragedy’s cathartic effect, and challenges what René Girard calls the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ and its socio-political function. It argues that Ajax’s appearance as a cathartic figure in American society provokes spectators and artists to reckon with the conditions that can cause military personnel to act violently, and inspires protests against broader hegemonic socio-political structures and the military culture that sustains them. Matthew Roberts is Assistant Professor and Librarian for Comparative and World Literature, English, and Drama at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In this article Hanife Schulte discusses Thomas Ostermeier’s Ein Volksfeind, a German version of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People that toured to the International Istanbul Theatre Festival in 2014. In borrowing Maria Shevtsova’s notion of the sociology of performance, Hanife Schulte offers a sociological examination of Ein Volksfeind’s Istanbul performances and demonstrates how the first anniversary of Turkey’s Gezi Park protests at the time of the festival influenced the performances. These protests, which began in 2013, were in resistance to the Turkish government’s urban development plan for Istanbul’s Taksim Park. In her examination of the dramaturgy and stage design of the production and its Turkish reception, Schulte argues that Ein Volksfeind’s political dramaturgy-in-progress allowed Ostermeier to adapt its touring performances in Istanbul and transform them into events in which the Turkish audiences became fellow performers and adaptors who reflected on the Gezi Park protests. She also suggests that Ostermeier showed solidarity with the Turkish people resisting political violence and oppression in tackling their local politics. Hanife Schulte has completed three years of doctoral research in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University and is an alumna of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University, where she participated in the 2019 Session on Migrations.

This article examines how the exchanges of archival and artistic practices in Central European and, more precisely, in Hungarian theatre and performance can create performative sites calling attention to the continuities and recurring reflexes of pre- and post-1989 realities. The genre of re-performance allows performance artists to comment on their own experience with the communist regimes, as well as to enact the continuing political and aesthetic potentials of past performances. In 1986, a recently founded performance group, the Collective of Natural Disasters, premiered its piece Living Space in Budapest, considered to be an iconic production in the history of Hungarian dance theatre, and earning international success. The solo performer (Yvette Bozsik) was set in a small glass box, suggesting the claustrophobic atmosphere of the 1980s in the country. In 2012, the group re-interpreted the 1986 production with considerable critical changes under the title (In)Finity. The new solo performer (Rita Góbi) was locked in a similar glass box. However, the group refashioned the main question about freedom by offering a mediatized landscape on stage where the recurring experience of claustrophobia was seen through technical innovations forming new regimes and forms of surveillance. Kornélia Deres is a Humboldt Research Fellow in the Institute of Media Culture and Theatre at the University of Cologne. Between 2015 and 2018 she was an assistant professor at Károli University (Budapest), and since 2017 has been a lecturer at ELTE University in Budapest. She is co-editor of five books and the author of Hammer for Images (2016), as well as two volumes of poetry.

This article examines the relationship between medieval Islamic philosophy and contemporary Tunisian Sufi ritual. Focusing on the metaphysics of time and space in the writings of the twelfth-century Andalusian saint Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, the author explores the dhikr ritual within the framework of Sufi ontology in order to highlight the relevance of Islamic intellectual history to the religious practices of the ‘Issawiya Sufi community. The dhikr is one example of many indigenous performance traditions that are part of the rich cultural life of Tunisia. These are spaces where adepts engage with complex philosophical ideas through embodied performances. Thus, Sufi rituals raise important questions about the relationship between theory and embodied practice, which, although grounded in a particular cultural context, could be of relevance to the broader range of theatre. Dia Barghouti is a playwright and PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her plays have been performed at the Ashtar Theatre, the SIN festival of video and performance art, and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, all in Ramallah, Palestine.

Thousands of amateur theatre groups performed regularly in Britain during the 1930s but their activities have generally been overlooked by historians. Important features of the amateur world were the regional and national festivals organized by the British Drama League and the Scottish Community Drama Association. In this article Don Watson examines how the festivals could provide opportunities for progressive drama by groups outside the organized Left, and considers the League in relation to the Left theatre movement of the time. It broadens our understanding of where politically engaged theatre took place in the 1930s and thus the appreciation of British amateur theatre as a whole. Don Watson is an independent historian and holds a PhD from Hull University. His theatre research has been published in Labour History Review, Media, Culture and Society, and North East Labour History.

This article discusses the relationship between drama and performance, using the Derridean concept of ‘supplement’ in theatre, which exceeds polarities and attempts a more dialectic approach. A review of Marvin Carlson’s theories of illustration, separation, translation, and fulfilment is a starting point for a comprehensive analysis of the views that encourage the binary drama-performance. This is examined in combination with Diane Taylor’s distinction between the ‘archive’, which preserves and bears all the written culture, and the ‘repertory’, which contains the world of performance. The ‘supplement’ holds two meanings: as a supplement, an external addition-to, and as a complement, a supplement-of, that comes in to fill a gap. One example is used to present the relationship between archive, repertory, and supplement: Brecht’s The Downfall of the Egotist Johann Fatzer. Theatre can be thought of in formations of heteropoietic sequence, through chains of supplements, including the texts, the performances, the rehearsal devices, the publication context, and the director’s notebooks. George P. Pefanis is a Professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and also teaches theatre and cinema history at the Open University of Greece and Cyprus. His publications include Adventures of Representation: Scenes of Theory II, Spectres of Theatre: Scenes of Theory III (both 2013), and Theatre Adherents and Philosophers (2016). In 2006, he received the award for the best book in the study of theatre for The Kingdom of Eugena (2005).

This article analyzes Suzuki Tadashi’s version of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, staged multiple times during the past forty years. While this cross-cultural production carries specific socio-cultural signs and juxtaposes different traditional Japanese styles (Noh, Kabuki, and Shingeki), it aims to create a third object that does not belong specifically to any of these traditions but is composed of the sum of their specificities. It argues that The Trojan Women was created by Suzuki and his company as a response to the state of culture and society in Japan during the 1970s, breaking with old and new fashions in an effort to revitalize Japanese contemporary theatre. Offering a socio-cultural analysis and drawing on the writings of Michael Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu, it sheds light on Suzuki’s humanistic quest for a universalism pursued through the re-discovery and transformation of traditional styles together with an appropriation of Western texts. Lorenzo Montanini is a theatre director whose work investigates the boundaries of theatre and live performance in a multicultural context. He has taught for more than fifteen years in universities in Italy, including RomaTre, Università di Macerata, and Università l’Orientale di Napoli.