This dossier opens up a set of questions about what theatre and performance can do and be in a climate-changed future. Through a series of practice snapshots the authors suggest a diversity of responses to decolonizing and environmental justice issues in and through theatre and performance. These practices include the climate-fiction film The Wandering Earth, which prompts questions about what decolonizing means for China and the impact of climate chaos on the mental well-being of young people; The Living Pavilion, an Australian Indigenous-led project that created a biodiverse event space showcasing Indigenous art making; Dancing Earth Indigenous dance company who use dance as a way to engage Indigenous ecological thinking and Indigenous futurity; water rituals in the Andes of Peru that problematize water policy and ethnic boundaries.

This essay offers a comparative critique of all major Indian theatre histories written during the modern era. It reveals three distinct representations of Indian theatre and argues that each was a manifestation of a discrete historiographic approach, shaped by its particular historical and cultural moment. Theatre histories of the Orientalist period offer a narrow and elitist construction of Indian theatre as synonymous with a single defunct genre, the ancient Sanskrit theatre. Histories of the high nationalist phase make a token acknowledgement of the Sanskrit and traditional genres but define Indian theatre as comprising primarily of the modern genre. Postcolonial histories construct a democratic and comprehensive Indian theatre – embracing the Sanskrit, traditional, and modern genre – but with an unpersuasively high significance assigned to the modern genre's post-Independence phase. Such different representations of Indian theatre show how theatre historiography in the modern period, like theatre historiography in any era, regularly refashioned itself under the pressure of changing historical, political, and cultural conditions.

In the course of the 1990s, a new paradigm in cultural studies seems to have arisen. In the humanities, the metaphor of ‘culture as text’ held true until the late 1980s; culture as a whole and different cultural phenomena were understood and interpreted as structural sequences composed of single elements (signs) to which a particular meaning can be attributed. In the 1990s, however, the focus of interest shifted to the processes of making, producing, creating, doing and to the actions, processes of exchange, negotiation and transformation as well as to the dynamics which constitute the agents of these processes, the materials they use and the cultural events they produce. Thus, it seems that the metaphor of ‘culture as performance’ is gaining ground. Whereas the humanities prevailingly dealt with texts and monuments as the results, manifestations and greatest achievements of modern European culture, they are now concerned with all kinds of performative processes which are, by their very nature, bodily processes. Thus, it seems that the discovery of the performative nowadays directs the humanities and cultural studies in particular.

When in 1926 Leopold Jessner (1878–1945) staged Hamlet at the Prussian State Theatre in Berlin, the production created a major scandal. This uproar was not only related to aesthetic matters but also to the discourse of national identity. With reference to Marvin Carlson's concept of the ‘haunted stage’ the article examines the traces of this scandal in the genealogy of Hamlet on the German stage and its intersection with the politics of national identity. These traces indicate that German productions of Hamlet have always been determined by an implicit politics of exclusion. Jessner's production, by contrast, offered a radical re-reading of Hamlet, aiming to adapt it for the, then newly democratized society. The rejection of this adaptation by major parts of the audience, thus revealed the still powerful and active anti-democratic forces in the Weimar Republic.

German American theatre in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York City became a model for both a national American theatre and other diasporic theatres in the US. This theatre aspired to an autonomous, class-free, universal culture, which was seen as the legacy of a German Enlightenment tradition epitomized by Schiller's national(izing) theatre. German Americans were thus exceptionally positioned to claim the ideology of a universal culture as a national characteristic. At the same time, however, the theatre was structured by market demands and the need to appeal to a diverse German American constituency. This oscillation between idealistic and commercial culture made the German American theatre attractive. In the end, the theatre not only helped legitimize New York City's cultural periphery, but became a model when a new American ‘national’ culture, the national theatre, was being imagined, which ultimately illustrates the importance of the concept of legitimacy for hybrid public cultures.

What does the #MeToo movement reveal about how acting is understood at the present time, both in practice and by the public at large? The claim of one convicted abuser, New Zealand acting coach Rene Naufahu, was that his sexual offending in the classroom was simply preparing his students for the ‘real world of acting’. Drawing from Elin Diamond's argument that dramatic realism does not simply reflect the real but in fact produces it, I examine how figures like Naufahu promulgate certain notions of acting in order to produce a reality that legitimates abusive behaviour. Furthermore, I suggest that this behaviour is often a performance of acting itself whereby the actor, director or coach, in a selectively self-reflexive manner, exploits their professional ‘role’ in order to exert power over their victim. I argue that one way of contesting real-world practices that rely on hegemonic assumptions of what acting is or should be is to redeploy the critical terminology of acting to analyse and expose such abuses for the acts that they are.

Identity politics, or collective activism based on embodied experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity or nationality, existed before the late twentieth century, but the term was coined in the 1970s and widely circulated in the 1980s as a response to social injustice, widespread prejudice and even assault borne by members of specific minority groups. For lesbians, gays and transsexuals, for ethnic minorities like Native Americans in the US or First Nations in Canada, for women in many Western countries, identity politics has meant working proactively for full legal and social recognition. Feminism often flies under the banner of identity politics with the argument that gender equality is still far from the norm in Western societies and even less so in many Asian and African societies, and in those of the Arab world.

The challenge and the excitement of expanding both the focus of our research and the field of our praxis beyond Theatre (or Film, Pop or Video) to Performance is to identify phenomena which transcend one medium and may enable us to know something about acting as such, spectating as such and thus ‘being’ as such: performance, not as a second-hand version of some more primary reality, but as a ‘realm’ in its own right.

It is an hysterical and unpleasant affair and would have no chance of being produced here it if had been written by an Englishman. To some soi-disant ‘intellectuals’ anything foreign is good. (Lord Chamberlain's Report on Toller's Mass Man, 1924)

Bangkok, Singapore, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg – some thirty performers of the Boosra Mahin Siamese Theatrical Troupe toured the world in 1900. Daily newspapers enthusiastically reported on the unprecedented shows of the performers ‘from the land of the white elephant’. After they disappeared from the map of theatre history, in 2010 Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun ‘revives’ the troupe in his performance Nijinsky Siam. He follows their October 1900 St Petersburg show – the very performance attended by choreographer Mikhail Fokine and costume designer Léon Bakst, who later worked closely with Vaslav Nijinsky. In 1910, Nijinsky's La danse siamoise/Siamese Dance premiered at the Marinsky Theatre, St Petersburg. This article follows the routes of the Boosra Mahin Troupe on the basis of selected primary sources and from a global-historical perspective. In tracing the Boosra Mahin Troupe and their tours, the article not only maps their manifold routings and reroutings, but also advocates for the need for a global theatre historiography that puts past cultural entanglements and connected performance histories centre stage.

Skylight Theatre's productions of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Earl Bales Park in Toronto (1987 and 1989) situated Prospero on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, set the action during the late eighteenth-century voyages of Captain James Cook—the period of the area's colonization—and cast Ariel and Caliban as Haida Indians, Canadian Aboriginal people.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Evreinov (1879–1953) has never been accorded his due credit as one of the most original thinkers and practitioners of modern European theatre. The absence of a rigorous and extensive appraisal of Evreinov's vast creative output has undoubtedly blinded otherwise well-informed critics to the seminal importance of his ideas on the essence of theatre. While names like Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Strindberg, Piscator, Brecht, Artaud, Craig, Appia, Reinhardt, Pirandello and even the lesser known Russians, Vakhtangov and Tairov have all become by-words in the history of experimental and innovative theatre, Evreinov has remained a shadowy figure.

A consideration of identity formation in contemporary Australian multicultural theatre is offered through a re-assessment of the unsettled (and unsettling) constructions of Australia as ‘home’ in the work of three playwrights. William Yang's Sadness disrupts a localized perception of home, space, and cultural communities to amalgamate two disparate communities (the queer/homosexual community in Sydney and the Asian-Australian, or ‘Austasian’ community) into a reconfigured Australian identity. Janis Balodis's The Ghosts Trilogy uses many actors who play across the unsettled lines of history, amid numerous voices, homes, and homelands that indicate the enormity of what ‘Australia’ comes to signify. Noëlle Janaczewska's The History of Water constructs a way of locating the self by means of a metaphoric home as each character establishes herself on a psychic plane rather than choosing the strictly physical locations to which she has access. In their interrogations of home and homeland, these plays challenge assumptions regarding identity, disrupt notions of the ultimate ownership of land/culture by anyone, and problematize the idea of settlement as it is currently articulated in Australia.

The recent performance work, Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep, directed by Romeo Castellucci for his company, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, explores the ‘crisis of creation’, brought on by the scientific revolutions of genetics and nuclear physics and the cultural atrocity of the Holocaust. Genesi is analysed against Eduardo Kac's art installation, Genesis, which combines advanced media for telepresent interactivity and genetic engineering. Genesi and Genesis relate not only in the cultural concerns of science and technology studies, but in their interdisciplinary strategies, which include combining aspects of theatre, visual art, sculpture, and technology. Castellucci and Kac engage the risks inherent in the destruction possible through creation (both aesthetic and scientific) and isolate manners in which contemporary constructions of the human are challenged. The works signal an awareness of the constantly shifting boundaries and borders of aesthetic genres and the developing convergence of the disciplines of science and art.

This essay creates a theoretical frame interweaving Jill Dolan's concept of ‘finding hope at the theatre’ with Michel Foucault's concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ to argue that spectators’ affective responses to performed violence in live theatre include hope and imagining social change. I draw upon my own active witnessing of theatrical performances of two works – Ruined by Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American Lynn Nottage, and Encounter by the Indian-American Navarasa Dance Theater Company. Along with Dolan and Foucault, I draw upon affect scholarship by James Thompson and Patricia T. Clough, and upon theorist Saidiya V. Hartman's discussion of slavery that makes the human into an abject ‘non-human’. Continuing forms of female enslavement and resistances to domination are evident in the representations of sexual slavery in the two works.

Mexico's popular theatre is a multi-faceted ancient art whose roots extend deep into pre-Hispanic cultures, as well as into the popular dramatic tradition of Spain. Today, nearly five centuries after the arrival of the Spaniards, popular theatre continues to be a phenomenon both of urban and rural Mexico, reflecting the rich gamut of cultural and historical characteristics found throughout this vast geographic and ethnic patchwork. While a wide range of distinctive qualities exist across the broad spectrum of popular theatre, formal differences give way – through careful observation and analysis – to the perception of an underlying unity of purpose which supports all popular theatre: addressing the spiritual and material needs of the common people.

This article offers a dramaturg's perspective on the day-to-day rehearsal activities of the director Peter Sellars as he prepared his highly controversial production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 1994. Because Sellars had conceptualized his production well before his arrival in Chicago, and because he was inaccessible prior to the first rehearsal, the usual pre-production collaboration could not take place. On one level the article is about the dramaturg being thrust into the thick of an unusual process and finding his role(s) along the way: as enquiring interlocutor asking questions to clarify the proceedings for self and for the audience, another as documenter. Sellars readily agreed that any other person's perceptions of his process are different from his own. My purpose here is to offer a dramaturg's-eye view of the working methods of one of contemporary theatre's most iconoclastic and innovative directors, along with some critical reflections on the process.

When scholars of any nation become so proud of their mastery of alien concepts that they forget or suppress their own cultural identity, they willingly succumb to ‘theoretical imperialism’. The flip side is the arrogant and wholesale imposition by Western scholars of theories created in the crucible of one culture on other cultures, subcultures or historical eras with divergent philosophical foundations. This article introduces several key Japanese critical theories that modify or fuse Japanese and Western psychoanalytic and aesthetic concepts, arguing that they can be fruitfully applied by theatre and performance scholars to works originating either in Japan or elsewhere. The article proposes a ‘both/and’ perspective that respects cultural differences without exoticizing the Other.

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 essay examines the US tours (2007–13) of Black Watch, a docudrama about the eponymous military unit, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). I argue that the production manifests a ‘banal theatrical nationalism’ when theatrical national signifiers meet quotidian acts of soldiering and the mundane labour required to remount the production at each tour venue. I focus attention on the regimental history recounted through ‘Fashion’, the play's central military uniform dressing sequence, and introduce into my analysis a New York City fashion show, Dressed to Kilt, to interrogate the stakes of fashion, cultural production and visibility. Black Watch materializes what I am calling a ‘Scottish operative’ that acts on behalf of the NTS in securing international attention and potential investment. In order to query the sociopolitical stakes of this production's US success, I identify political, cultural and military links between the US and Scotland.