The Twelfth International Theatre Institute (ITI) World Congress met in New York City over 4–10 June 1967 at the same time as the Arab–Israeli War was taking place. This context very much framed the delegates’ debates over the idea of artists as national leaders. One panel in particular, The Responsibility of Theatre to the Progress of Society, on Friday 8 June, offered an opportunity for the delegates to wrestle with the concept. The participants focused on three key questions: how audiences were witnesses to national reinvention, how theatre could serve as a pedagogical form, and how the intersection of these two allowed audiences to see themselves as citizens. This article focuses first on ITI's place in the geopolitical moment and then on the contributions during the conference and after by a specific set of artists from diverse countries, including the US, India, France, Morocco and Nigeria. The conversations represented a profound articulation of how theatre was influencing the complex ways in which nations were identifying and defining themselves and their citizens.

This article compares the efforts of two Australian entrepreneurs to import Japanese entertainments for theatres in mid-twentieth-century Australia. David N. Martin of the Tivoli Circuit and Harry Wren, an independent producer, were rivals in the business of touring variety-revue. Both travelled to Japan in 1957, the year that the governments of Australia and Japan signed a landmark trade agreement. Whereas Martin's efforts were hampered by the legacy of wartime attitudes, Wren embraced the post-war optimism for trade. Wren became the Australian promoter for the Toho Company of Japan, touring a series of Toho revues until 1968. These Toho tours have been overlooked in Australian histories of cultural exchange with Japan. Drawing on evidence from archival sources and developing insights from foreign policy of the time, this article examines why Australian entrepreneurs turned to Japan, what Toho sent on tour, and how Toho's revues played in Australia. It analyses trade in touring entertainment as a form of entrepreneurial diplomacy that sought to realize the prospects of regional integration.

In June 2015, a small strange protest erupted in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, around a sumptuous red kimono, provided to visitors to try on and emulate the 1876 painting La Japonaise, by Claude Monet. Protesters named themselves Decolonize Our Museums and took to the gallery and social media with strident messages condemning the Kimono Wednesdays try-on activity as racist, orientalist appropriation; soon after, counterprotesters faced off, defending the programme for sharing Japanese culture with the community. In this article, I consider the kimono protests as part of a history of kimono, internationally created yet indelibly marked as Japanese. In this context, the kimono protests provide an occasion to consider the ramifications of contemporary debates about cultural appropriation and appreciation. Through a performance-theory inflected analysis I propose a theatrical ethic of ‘inappropriation’ as a means of moving discourse and public performances of culture beyond the stultifying binaries of right/wrong or appreciation/appropriation.

Now a decade old, Rimini Protokoll's 100% City continues to stage civilians as statistical samples. Considering the project as a series, this paper proposes that ‘seriality’ governs not just the project's touring model, but also its creation of individuals, populations and a homogeneous group of ‘diverse’ metropolises. These serializations are a foundational part of the project of statistical reason. Surveying the nineteenth-century origins of these practices and their early public articulations, and contrasting these practices with the newly emerging regime of ‘big data’, this paper argues that this serial logic is in fact a nostalgic one. 100% City’s celebration of statistics, however troubling, appears as a comforting articulation of a social model now dissolving in favour of algorithmic enumerations of peoples. The statistical project has long been tied to the theatre, while data analysis may articulate a limit to theatrical representation.

Gostan Forward is an excavation of pioneering Malaysian contemporary dancer-choreographer Marion D'Cruz's life history. Conceived in 2009 as a solo lecture performance, it traces D'Cruz's growth as a student, dancer, choreographer and educator, revealing her choices, strategies and influences over the span of a forty-five-year dance career. The performance text published here is accompanied by an introduction from D'Cruz's collaborator and director Mark Teh.