Aesthetics. Politics. The Public Sphere. These emerge as connective headlines in this edition of TRI. Taken as a whole, the articles provoke key critical questions about the choice of aesthetics in relation to the potentiality of theatre's transformative capacities, and also about how the possibilities (and limitations) of the transformational power that theatre is commonly deemed to be capable of are conditioned by the kind of role theatre and performance have or are permitted to have in the public sphere.

This article focuses on Arna's Children, a 2004 documentary about the children's activities and theatre group founded in 1989 by Israeli activist Arna Mer Khamis in the Jenin Refugee Camp of the occupied West Bank. While the documentary provides an in-depth look at how theatrical practices can prove restorative in the face of destruction, my discussion suggests that its portrayal of the aesthetic medium also interrogates the limits of the relationship between theatrical practice and emancipatory ideals.

Contemporary theatricalized refugee narratives are often understood to communicate the profound trauma associated with forced displacement, even as this trauma is made ‘meaningful’ or ‘recognizable’ to audiences by the identification, however nebulous, of hope. This article examines some of the ways in which an affective dialectic of victimhood and hope functions in Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking (2006–), a small-scale international touring work directed by Mark Fleishman and produced by Cape Town-based Magnet Theatre. Paying attention to questions of narrative and performative form, I investigate how, and for whom, victimhood and hope function in and through the work, constructing its emotional and political tensions. I trace some of the conditions of its circulation, with particular emphasis on its transnational work with respect to a metropolitan audience at London's Oval House Theatre in 2010. In this, my purpose is to probe the question of who is served (as well as who is implicated and mobilized) by refugee narratives that may occupy all too easily a generalized geopolitical imaginary: ‘far from here’.

Despite the stylish blend of multimedia and live performance in Robert Lepage's The Blue Dragon, touring in 2010 and 2011, critics are surprised by the reappearance of the archetypal love story in the space of contemporary intermedial performance. This article argues that the performance, set in contemporary Shanghai, explores the lived experience of transience and mobility through a narrative in which individual lives are implicated in a transnational, transcultural and transgenerational romance. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's work on liquid modernity and liquid love, we argue that the performance grapples with the experience of being unbound and disconnected in a liquid world.

This article focuses on an incident of censorship and police intervention at the Königstädtische Theater in Berlin in 1828, occasioned by a performance of Gotthilf August von Maltitz's The Old Student (Der alte Student). Identifying how the playwright and his actors sought to represent political topics onstage allows me to explore how theatre functioned as a potential player in an incipient public sphere. In turn this reveals how the desire to represent political topics onstage and to become a performative player in the public sphere was already under way in the 1820s, well before the revolutionary turbulence of 1848.

This dossier documents a research collaboration between members of the School of Art and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India, and members of the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, United Kingdom, between 2008 and 2010. This collaboration was dedicated to a cross-cultural inquiry into methods and topics of performance research that might serve to produce a robust international dialogue capable of approaching performance through multinational lines of inquiry. Participants chose a common topic (History, Memory, Event, and the Politics of Performance 1970–1990), and composed an archive of materials drawn from six nations which was analysed and interrogated by the group. The dossier offers examples from the archive and an account of the way the group processed these artefacts.