This article considers what might be implied in the term ‘immersive theatre’, asking what kinds of ‘interior’ audiences are invited to become immersed in. To facilitate my argument I draw on performances by two London-based theatre companies, Shunt and Punchdrunk, as examples of immersive theatre which use architectural interiors: extensive environments which audiences explore in order to find the performance, and sometimes to give performances themselves. I begin with a description of how these physical interiors and the audience member's movement through them becomes part of the dramaturgy of the work, before moving on to a critique of the term ‘immersive’. This critique is initially based on analysis of its metaphorical character, using an approach derived from cognitive linguistics, and is developed through Josephine Machon's (syn)aesthetics and Heidegger's phenomenological aesthetics.

This article begins from the premise that a ‘critical turning point’ has been reached in terms of the relationship between performance and philosophy. Theatre and performance scholars are becoming increasingly engaged in philosophical discourse and there are growing amounts of work that take philosophy – from the work of Plato to Heidegger and Deleuze – as their guiding methodology for performance analysis. However, this article argues that we need to go further in questioning how we use philosophy in relation to performance, and that theatre and performance scholarship should attempt to go beyond merely applying philosophical concepts to performance ‘examples’. One way to do this, the article suggests, is by questioning the very distinction between performance and philosophy, for instance by exploring the idea of performance as philosophy. The article concludes by drawing from the work of figures such as Allan Kaprow, Henri Bergson, François Laruelle and John Mullarkey to argue that philosophers and performance scholars alike might extend their conception of what counts as thinking to include not only activities like performance, but embodied experiences and material processes of all kinds.

This article examines a particular aesthetic experience that is brought about by a destabilization, even a collapsing, of the dichotomous pair of concepts the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’. While a tension between the two, even in differing degrees, proves characteristic of all kinds of theatre, recent developments on European stages emphasize this tension. In the paper it is examined with respect to 1) the actors' bodies and 2) the theatrical spaces. In each case, the point of departure is two examples which are analysed with regard to the particular function that the tension between the real and the fictional might serve. It is argued that what in everyday life is neatly separated into two different worlds to be fully grasped by the dichotomous pair of concepts becomes blurred in the performances discussed here. The particular aesthetic experience coming into being in such performances is an experience of ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner) – a liminal experience. This way, they stimulate a new discussion of the concept of aesthetic experience, so central to all forms of art in the Western world since 1800.

At the Theatre Historiography Symposium, held during the 1993 Helsinki IFTR/FIRT Conference, a specific term came into circulation which infiltrated and permeated the discussion to such an extent that it appeared to adopt the position and function of a key term in theatre historiography: ‘theatricality’. This was no great surprise, however. For the symposium set out to consider two basic issues: first, to examine the application of analytic strategies from other disciplines to theatre history and, secondly, to identify the distinctive features of theatre history as a single discipline. Both concerns are closely related to the concept of theatricality.

This article considers the proposition that performance as research is a series of embodied repetitions in time, on both micro (bodies, movements, sounds, improvisations, moments) and macro (events, productions, projects, installations) levels, in search of a series of differences. It investigates the proposition in terms of Bergson's notion of ‘creative evolution’ and Deleuze's engagement with it, and is concerned with questions such as: what nature of differences does performance as research give rise to? Where do the differences lie, in the repetitions or in the spaces in between? And is there a point at which the unleashing of differences is exhausted, a point at which, perhaps, the evolution becomes an involution, either a shrinkage of difference, an inverted return to the same, or, in the Deleuzian sense, a new production no longer dependent on differentiation but on transversal modes of becoming?

In her 1983 book, Semiotik des Theaters, Erika Fischer-Lichte referred to theatre as part of ‘die Geometrie der Kultur’, a network of relationships materialized in space that symbolizes cultural experience. The concept of the geometry of culture may enable us to show how, in an urban space, different strands of human activities find their expression in the outline of urban space. Lewis Mumford demonstrates in The City in History that political programmes, economic interests, and cultural concepts influence the city's organization as well as the functions which individual buildings take in the urban environment. Cultural historians and semioticians such as Mary Henderson, Monika Steinhauser, Michael Hays, and Marvin Carlson have adopted this perspective for their investigations of the history of theatre in various metropolitan areas. For example, Henderson studies the relationship between the theatres and the financial district in New York City; Michael Hays and Monika Steinhauser analyse particular urban monuments, such as the Lincoln Center in New York and the Paris Opera. Marvin Carlson analyses how theatre buildings have been integrated historically as public monuments in various urban settings. Within the context of such studies I will examine the spatial and aesthetic re-alignments that World War II forced upon the integration of theatre buildings in Berlin, taking as case studies four major theatres: the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the Deutsches Theater, the Schillertheater and the Volksbühne.

Lewis Mumford, writing in the 1930s, understood the city as a ‘theater of social action’. Mumford's ideas remain important in the context of the contemporary post-industrial city, in which theatricality and performativity are key drivers of so-called ‘experience economies’. Increasingly, urban planners are attuned to such theatrical notions as the ‘urban scene’ and ‘urban drama’ in framing policy. Adopting interpretive strategies enabled by Performance Studies, this paper gives an account of some of the ways in which theatre and performance are made manifest in cities. It considers some of the implications of urban performativity, arguing that good city planning demands an ethics of performance, whereby citizens become spectators and co-performers in the urban drama.

The essay describes ‘utopian performatives’, which are moments of performance in which utopia is ‘done’ in the intensity of exchange between performers and spectators and among the audience. As an example, the essay discusses the performance Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, an evening of slam poetry presented by a multiracial cast for a young, unusually multiethnic audience. It describes a process of feeling together over obvious differences, inspired by an intensely present moment of theatre.

This article examines a theatrical network, the Bandmann Circuit, managed by Maurice E. Bandmann in the first two decades of the twentieth century as a form of globalized theatre. It asks why this kind of transnational theatrical activity has received so little scholarly attention and proposes utilizing actor-network-theory as a means to make the complex connectivity of such enterprises visible. The first section of the article discusses the concept of early globalization, roughly the period from 1860 to 1914, as a period having many parallels with our own time. The second part discusses actor-network-theory as a theatre-historiographical method, which is then applied to selected nodes of the Bandmann Circuit, in particular repertoire, audiences and the use of local partners as examples of a much more multiaxial undertaking.

In 1875 George Henry Lewes published the following analysis of William Charles Macready's acting:

Whenever he had an emotion to depict he depicted it sympathetically and not artificially; by which I mean that he felt himself to be the person, and having identified himself with the character, sought by means of the symbols of his art to express what that character felt; he did not stand outside the character and try to express its emotions by the symbols that had been employed for other characters by other actors.

This article introduces hemispheric performance studies to suggest that performance in the Americas – and the very idea of the ‘hemispheric’ – may be usefully engaged as a set of connected practices in deep time rather than as a continental mass in uniform space. The argument is illustrated in relation to three contemporary artists: the Los Angeles-based photographer and multimedia artist Bruce Yonemoto, and the visual and performance artists Susana Torres from Lima, Peru, and Liliana Angulo from Bogotá, Colombia.

This article treats the Egyptian 25 January revolution as a struggle over the right to produce signs within an Egyptian cultural landscape long plagued by the state's attempted monopoly over meaning. Like an actor onstage who acquires a new sense of agency through performance, the individual citizen in revolt performs an existential act aiming to reclaim the uninhibited, free body from the regime and its cognitive hold. The revolution thus lends itself to analysis via the tools of theatre and performance studies. This theatrical mode of knowledge can be achieved in at least two strategic ways. First, by regarding the revolution as a battle between two distinct powers, each deploying its own discursive and cognitive weaponry – the revolution, qua conflict of wills, can be analysed as an event with discernible dramatic dimensions. Second, by viewing the revolution which took place in a specific time and place as a theatrical event capable of transforming mundane bodies into creative ones, while also reconfiguring place into a theatrical space and thereby subverting oppressive state power.

The analysis of theatrical performance has always provided a problem of particular difficulty to semiotic theory, for a variety of reasons—the ephemerality of the event, the complexity of the interrelationships of so many communicative channels, the almost infinite variety of physical realizations that may be generated from a single written script, the phenomenological concerns generated by the physical presence of the event, and the effects upon interpretation of changing historical and social reception strategies. Historical placement is of course a concern involved in analysing the interpretive process of any work of art, but it is particularly obvious and important in theatre, where an institutional collective process at a particular historical moment is always involved both in the specific realization and in the specific reception of the work.

Certain aspects of this complex problem have received useful attention, others have been very little considered. The Prague circle provided some useful distinctions in dealing with, for example, the various operations of the actor in the semiotic process.

More recently, theorists with a phenomeno-logical orientation or with an interest in reception aesthetics have further enriched our understanding of what is involved in the theatre event. Clearly much remains to be explored. One area is the effect on theatrical reception of the re-use of the same performance elements or combinations of elements in physical realizations of what might be quite different written scripts.

The most obvious example of this is the individual actor, who in the course of a career will be seen by the public in many different roles.

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.

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’.

This article explores women's practice and theatrical presentation of jujutsu and judo in the early years of the twentieth century in the United States, Britain and New Zealand. My discussion treats three figures in particular: Fude Yamashita, who tutored upper-class Washington socialites and performed judo demonstrations on the American stage; the English militant vote-seeker, playwright and jujutsu practitioner Edith Garrud, proponent of jujutsu as a political activist performance and coordinator of the ‘fighting suffragettes’; and New Zealander Florence Le Mar, vaudeville performer and ‘the World's Famous Ju-Jitsu Girl’, who enthralled audiences with her spectacular show designed as an educational enterprise to empower women through transferable self-defence skills. A historical survey of these women's activities contributes to our understanding of the varied ways that women during this period used performance to resist patriarchal institutions and definitions, while offering insights into some of the ways that the Japanese martial arts were reinvented following their introduction to the West.

In December 1891, an adaptation by Paul-Napoléon Roinard of the Old Testament text of the Cantique des cantiques (Song of Songs) of Solomon was performed at the recently created Théâtre d'Art, expressly to present a new idea of theatre as total art by engaging the visual, aural, and olfactory senses of the audience. One of the few theatre historians who has mentioned this remarkable endeavour notes that in it,‘music, words, colour, even perfume, were to be harmonized; all the senses were to be involved, simultaneously, in the one overwhelming experience’. Roinard's synaesthetic experiment drew on a range of sources including Baudelaire, Wagner and Rimbaud, and, most strikingly, featured scents pumped into the auditorium on cue by young symbolist poets stationed in the far edges of the proscenium and in the balcony and using hand-held vaporizers. According to the outline Roinard provided in the programme, nine scents were used: frankincense, white violets, hyacinth, lilies, acacia, lily of the valley, syringa, orange blossom, and jasmine. Each of these odours had corresponding orchestrations of speech (specific vowel sounds), tones (original music composed by Mme Flamen de Labrély), and colours.

This essay is a report on the Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project (Dramaturgies), a forum for the investigation of issues in professional dramaturgical practice in Australia. It reviews the textual orientation of historical theatre practice in Australia before describing a series of events aiming to promote a wider and more culturally interactive understanding of dramaturgy. New forms of dramaturgy arising in response to the post-dramatic turn in theatre are discussed as a basis for exploring an expanded dramaturgical practice. Proposals for a politics of dramaturgy that revive theatre as a forum for social critique conclude the essay. While specific to one set of theatre interventions, it is intended that the proposals discussed herein have wider applications.

In 1926 the German theatre critic and scholar Julius Bab compared the endeavour of the theatre historian engaged in reconstructing past performances with that of the art historian required to study paintings solely on the basis of descriptions. The analogy serves as a justification for Bab's own study of contemporary theatre based on personal observations: only the privileged status of the eye-witness account can do justice to the transitory nature of theatrical performance, he argues. What today may seem like a self-evident truth was in the 1920s by no means so. German Theater-wissenschaft of the time was very much a historical discipline, focusing on the theatrical past and utilizing historiographical tools borrowed from neighbouring disciplines. Contemporary theatre was not in its field of vision.

This article explores the history and contemporary revival of male belly dancers – zenne or köçek – in Turkey and in cities with large Turkish populations, such as Berlin. What does the current revival of male belly dancing tell us about the relationship between modern ideologies of sex and gender and narratives of modernity as they have taken shape in Turkey? The zenne dancer embodies the contradictions of contemporary Turkish culture, which includes a variety of same-sex practices, along with sexual taxonomies that have developed in collusion with discourses of modernity. The revival of zenne dancing can be seen as part of a series of global transformations in the visibility of gay, lesbian, and trans people in popular culture and public discourse. However, it is also an unpredicted consequence of the Justice and Development Party's (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) purposeful revival and romanticization of Turkey's Ottoman past, which has been ahistorically remembered as more pious than the present. Re-emerging in the twenty-first century as an embodiment of competing definitions of sexuality and modernity in contemporary Turkey, precisely at a moment when Turkish national identity is a hotly contested issue, the zenne dancer is queer ghost, returning to haunt (and seduce) the present.