In my previous editorial, I made reference to what Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry call ‘literacy brokering’ amongst non-native speakers of English who seek to publish in anglophone academic journals. The term ‘literacy’ makes sense in the context, and, as I noted, the practice is hardly exclusive to those whose first language is not English. However, as Aoife Monks of Contemporary Theatre Review and I planned a New Scholars session on academic publishing for this year's annual conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR, with which this journal is affiliated), a supplementary way of thinking about academic knowledge production came to mind: as conversation. And it is a conversational mode that wends its way through the articles presented in this issue of Theatre Research International.

The theatre that developed in late nineteenth-century India, especially in the Bengal and Maharashtra regions, catered to an audience that was much wider than the new educated middle-class males who introduced the European stage form in Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. Driven by private capital, the new Indian theatre adopted the melodrama as its main dramatic form. When performance capital shifted to the more lucrative field of cinema in the middle of the twentieth century, the melodramatic form again became the chief narrative mode. Such is its power that it has become the principal rhetorical form of popular democracy in India. In the decades after independence, theatre was rescued from imminent death by the support provided by state agencies which sponsored the production of a national theatre canon and style, as opposed to the prevailing regional ones. However, with bureaucratization and political interference, theatre in India today must revert to its one inherent superiority over the cinema – the immediacy of its encounter with small audiences.

Between 1999 and 2008, Zimbabwe was in political and economic crisis. A number of theatre-makers responded by creating several different kinds of protest theatre. They did this to compensate for a media monopoly by the state, to promote active citizen engagement in politics, and to promote political change. This article first surveys developments in protest theatre at this time. It then draws attention to a brand of protest theatre that emerged after the crisis in Zimbabwe, after the formation of a Government of National Unity. Reconciliatory protest theatre, I explain, was concerned with issues of national healing and reconciliation which dominated the post-crisis situation in Zimbabwe. Whilst both the state and protest artists concurred on the fact that the nation ought to be healed and that reconciliation was needed, tensions emerged as to how the processes of healing and reconciliation were to unfold. By looking at two examples in detail, I explain how Zimbabwe's theatre artists viewed this issue, and how the state reacted.

The myth of Korean-ness is reconstructed via the figures of minorities in a documentary/performance, An Eternal Parting, performed by the South Korean performance group Movement Dang-Dang in 2011 and 2013. It showcases the phenomena of Korean diaspora, starting with the deportations of Korean exiles from Siberia under Stalin during the 1930s, and hinges on the presence of the descendants of exiled Korean ethnic populations in contemporary South Korea, including how they are both accepted and excluded by their countrymen. However, although An Eternal Parting tries to redefine the myth of Korean-ness from a marginal viewpoint, its fundamental ambivalence does not escape hegemonic Korean ideologies of nationalism, bloodline, family and home.

In the verbatim theatre performance The Disappearances Project (2011–13), Australian company Version 1.0 explored the state of unresolved loss felt by those left behind by missing persons. Rather than relying on verbatim testimony to simply ‘tell’ the stories of the left-behind, directors Yana Taylor and David Williams sought to immerse the audience in an indeterminate world, characterized by pathologies of endless searching and waiting, and a sense of paralysing loss. In this article, I argue that the performance hinged on dramaturgical practices of stillness, slowed movement and friction to produce the disturbing sense of ‘sticky’ indeterminacy characteristic of the experience of the left-behind. To develop this interpretation, I turn to the post-disciplinary field of mobility studies, which highlights the movement (or otherwise) of people, objects, information and capital, as well as embodied experience and sensory and kinesthetic environments. This provides ways to identify and analyse mobility-as-dramaturgy as well as the co-production of affective atmospheres within Disappearances and the wider field of performance.

Recent years have seen an increase in extraterrestrial exploration projects. What was once a series of competing displays of Cold War political and military might between the US and the USSR has now re-emerged with international collaborations and fresh contestants that range from newly developed, government-based Space programmes to a growing list of private and corporate investors and entrepreneurs. Historically, performances and performative actions and utterances have been important instruments for the representation and politicization of outer-Space discovery and exploration. An inevitable corollary of the recent developments of Space exploration, therefore, is that diverse performances and performatives in and about Space are also flourishing. Their multiplicity reflects the complexity of contemporary geopolitics as well as the forms that these performances may take, including extreme sports, theatre, music videos, social-media interactions and experimental performance. The increase in expressive possibilities calls for a mode of critical attention that addresses them in their scientific, geopolitical and formal particularity.