One of the most forbidding and yet rewarding challenges in a substantive internationalization of arts scholarship is accounting for the experience and passage of time. The extent to which developments in theatre and performance over the past 150 years have been tied up with the larger social, economic and technological transformations reflexively understood as ‘modernity’ is a key reason an international journal readership is able to find interest and value in scholarship on performances they may not have seen, that are practised in places they have never been. At the same time, any such research – it is tempting to say ‘from outside the West’, but in fact the requirement holds everywhere – must register how the work under discussion complicates an otherwise oversimplified narrative of developmental modernity. This narrative treats a homogenized industrial and postindustrial ‘West’ as having led the way and established a model for how other parts of the world would modernize subsequently. The assumption is quickened in discussions of art because arguably one characteristic of those transformations as they happened in numerous centres of Euro-American power was the role that artists played in giving them aesthetic form and expressing their meanings. This is prominent in the emergence of modernism and the avant-garde, and it is logical that in recent times scholars of modernism have been particularly energetic in questioning the developmental narrative and demonstrating not only how such phenomena were constitutively reliant on processes elsewhere, but also how artistic developments everywhere both informed each other (often inequably) and manifested local and highly contingent characteristics.

This article traces the reception of Oscar Wilde's play Salomé in Israeli theatre by focusing on the engagement of two artists – writer and translator Pinchas Sadeh and theatre director Ofira Henig – with the play at two different periods. In Salomé, Wilde utilizes his perception of Judaism, as well as the Song of Songs, for the creation of a theatrical space in which spectatorship and ownership are subverted and displaced. At the same time, ironically, the biblical and ‘Jewish’ presence in the play was fundamental for claims of ownership made by some in Hebrew and Israeli culture, asserting that the play somehow belonged to Hebrew culture and the Land of Israel. Despite these claims, the actual reception of Salomé in Israeli theatre proved that the play's ‘belonging’ was far more tenuous. The article examines how the tensions between the seen and the unseen, between owning and disowning and between placement and displacement play out – in almost opposite directions – in Sadeh's ideological reasoning for translating Salomé and in Henig's production of it.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s in Shanghai, the remnant of wenmingxi (civilized drama), China's first form of Western-style spoken drama, which had flourished in the 1900s and 1910s as a hybrid of Western spoken theatre and indigenous performance, experienced a brief resurrection and ultimate demise under the name of tongsu huaju (popular spoken drama). Considered until then as popular entertainment inferior to the officially recognized form of modern theatre, huaju (spoken drama), that adhered to Western realistic dramaturgy and performance, tongsu huaju staged a six-play festival in January 1957 thanks to liberal art policies, received a warm welcome in Beijing and other cities, and attracted the attention of some huaju experts who praised its affinity to indigenous performance, thus triggering a debate over its efficacy as a localized alternative to huaju for the future of modern Chinese theatre. Using contemporary sources, this article examines tongsu huaju’s brief rise and fall in Shanghai, with a focus on its performances, the debate, the policy changes that decided the fate of China's first form of modern theatre, and the implications of its fate for the narrative of periodization in modern Asian theatre.

What might the contemporary performing body look like when it seeks to communicate and to cultivate the need to live well within the natural environment, whether the context of that living well is framed and set upon either by long-standing cultural traditions or by diverse modernizing forces over time? The Singapore performance and visual artist Tang Da Wu has engaged with a present and a region fractured by the predations of unacceptable cultural norms – the consequences of colonial modernity or the modern nation state taking on imperial pretensions – and the subsumption of Singapore society under capitalist modernization. Tang's performing body both refuses the diminution of time to the present, as is the wont of the forces he engages with, and undertakes interventions by sometimes elusive and ironic means – unlike some overdetermined contemporary performance art – that reject the image of the modernist ‘artist as hero’. Part of the cause for this distinctive art committed to historicity and a deliberate ordinariness is that artistic communication to him means provoking self-reflexive thought rather than immediate action. Over the years this has resulted in collaborative artistic workshops, in which he has imaginatively transferred art making from his body to the realm of ordinary people. These workshops become his particular extension of the neo-avant-garde's breaching of art's infrastructures.

Researchers who seek to capture and analyse audiences’ responses are facing a dilemma. In a political climate beleaguered by efforts to delegitimize expertise, what are the implications for a research tradition that seeks to understand cultural value from a range of diverse perspectives? In light of visibility generated by the 2009 publication of Helen Freshwater's Theatre & Audience and the subsequent launch in January 2017 of the international Network for Audience Research in the Performing Arts (iNARPA), the time seems ripe for a detailed critical overview of the audience studies discipline as it has been applied to theatre. In providing that survey, this article contends that the early decades of the new millennium have seen research into arts participation becoming trapped between two colliding agendas. Whereas on the one hand there is a growing pressure to celebrate cultural engagement in all its contradictory forms, there has on the other hand been a simultaneous imperative within the arts to push back against the encroaching de-hierarchization of cultural value beyond critical and scholarly perspectives. By revealing the potentials for and limitations of the field, this article queries how future audience research projects might productively investigate audience experience without diminishing the legitimacy of expert knowledge.

These three essays on distinct research areas and case studies cover a broad history of educational institutions in India, their focus on theatre and cultural education, and their role in creating citizens active in the public sphere and civic communities. The common point of reference for all the three essays is the historical transition from pre- to post-independence India, and they represent three dominant genres of Indian theatre practice: the amateur progressive theatre emerging out of sociopolitical movements; the State Drama School, which has remained at the core of the state's policy and vision of a national theatre; and college theatre, which comprises the field from which the National School of Drama sources its acting students, as well as new audiences for urban theatres.

Though India declared itself a sovereign nation only in 1947, after two hundred years of British rule, its people had unleashed the processes of ‘Indianization’ well before independence. While addressing the transition from colonial subjecthood to independent citizenship is intricately linked to efforts of decolonization, the role of English-medium education in the creation of a new emergent class of independent Indian citizens often gets overlooked. This essay analyses the immediate impact of independence (1947–50), and locates the educational spaces where Indians (predominantly elite Bengalis) were struggling to unlink citizenship from nationalism and exploring inter-community relationships such as those between the Bengali elite and the micro-minority Jews, Parsis, Armenians and Anglo-Indians. I show how theatre activities by the students of St Xavier's Collegiate School and College, their new roles as potential public intellectuals and citizens of post-independent India and their theatre constituted an important intervention in the new democratic processes. I examine the duality of a Bengali elite who acquired an English-medium education and performed English-style Shakespeare while trying to construct a political dramaturgy as an ensemble or collective.

Since independence, theatre in India has been touted as a platform to foster a sense of national community and exhibit the ideal citizen. The new theatre, and official cultural-policy documents since independence, prescribed ways to become an ideal citizen–actor of a new nation's cultural manifestation. A conscious modification and disruption of the post-independence national canon, as I argue in this essay, came in the late 1980s from a group of teachers and directors with a gendered sensibility. The essay will focus on the unique performance and theatre-making processes of these women directors, with Anamika Haksar's Antar Yatra being the case study. The question it will raise is, how successful was Haksar in decentring the various hierarchies? Could her collaborative work engage her students as co-creators of knowledge rather than as citizens created out of hegemonic pedagogy, conditioned by the state's national identity politics?

This essay explores contemporary cultural practices of feminist politics emerging within the women's college campus at the University of Delhi. Through the study of two examples of a public demonstration and campaign against high prices of certain essential provisions and a formal performance outside the campus, the essay tries to map cultural practices, transgressions and political potentials, but also the limits and shortcomings. The essay intends to read these examples through a gender critique and alternate registers of sisterhood, collective imagination and solidarity.