In this conversation, Adrian Curtin, Prarthana Purkayastha, and meLê yamomo highlight how their research on sound and dance engages embodied knowledges and vice versa. They account for how archival work challenges presumptions about the research process as well as what the scholar assumes they are looking for in the archive. The research process demands flexibility because studying performance invites interpretation, adaptation, and cultural understanding as intermediaries in understanding archival materials. Each participant emphasizes how, for them, research processes have incorporated creative endeavours because of the embodied and artistic dimensions of performance and historiographic analysis.

Adrian Curtin [AC]: What led you to adapt August Strindberg's play Miss Julie?

Kaite O’Reilly [KO’R]: I’d always found it interesting, but deeply problematic. It's misogynistic, it could be argued, of course. Strindberg was a product of his time, but there was something about the character dynamics that stayed in my head. I started imagining putting the play in that extraordinary period between the World Wars. And, as a disabled person and a proudly identifying ‘crip’, I thought it could be very interesting to explore disability as one of the last taboos. When it was written, the taboo might have been class, between the haughty Miss Julie and her underling. We know there have been other productions in the past that have touched on race etc., and I felt that one of the last taboos was around disability. Even now, in 2022, people seem to be surprised when disabled people are romantically involved with non-disabled people. And I wanted to explore that as a taboo.

I also wanted to set it in a period where it made sense to me. What if Julie's mother was actually a New Woman and had been involved with the Welsh suffrage movement? I was really interested in what they called ‘the surplus women’ at that time in history. If you’re a woman in 1919, you’ve been bred for a certain future. You were going to be a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, and that's right across all the classes. What happens if that is interrupted by one million men being slaughtered at the Somme? And I find the impact of ‘the surplus women’ fascinating. They became teachers. They became useful. And then the tension between the men coming back from fighting and women who had been showing their skills so strongly, keeping everything going during the First World War. First of all, the path that they were supposed to follow, for many of them, was now blocked off because their fiances or possible future mates were not available because of the terrible death in the trenches. But not only that: they’re now supposed to move aside and become invisible to let the men have the jobs back again.

Midway through Chekhov's First Play (2015) – a production by the theatre company Dead Centre, inspired by an early, untitled work of Anton Chekhov – a demolition ball suddenly appears and smashes through part of the naturalistic set, a country house interior. A spotlight picks out an audience member, who rises and joins the actors on stage. Modern-day street noises are heard through the audience's headphones, followed by electronic music. A flame is set alight on the demolition ball and the actors perform a synchronised dance to the music. Now, when they speak, they lipsynch to a recording of their own voices.

This juncture marks a shift from a relatively conventional presentation of Chekhov's play, at least with respect to the use of text and the acting style, to something more unpredictable and mysterious. The actors no longer perform Chekhov's play, but rather a text that is more obviously authored by Dead Centre. The world of the play is relocated from nineteenth-century Russia to twenty-first-century Dublin. The recruited audience member is made to represent the hitherto unseen, but much discussed, character of Platonov and given private instruction via (visible) headphones. The stage action takes on a dreamlike, surrealist quality, with inexplicable occurrences, such as a pregnancy dissolving into gushing water. The characters undergo existential crises and out-of-body experiences, their identities ultimately becoming void as the actors remove their costuming. It is all very odd, and, on the face of it, very different to what Chekhov wrote. I remember sitting in the audience at the Battersea Arts Centre in London in October 2018 and feeling giddy and discombobulated as I experienced the performance, particularly the second half. I was caught between trying to follow what was happening, trying to make sense of it all, and being swept up by the dynamism of the performance and its peculiar affective mix of liberation and gloom – a signature Chekhov cocktail, served here with a twist.

Chekhov's First Play could be regarded as a postmodern production, given its ironic deconstruction of Chekhov's text and its playful collage of intertexts, including sources from popular culture (for example, Miley Cyrus's hit single from 2013, ‘Wrecking Ball’, which closes the show) and unannounced quotations from modernist literature (specifically, lines from Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing), but that is not the conceptual frame I will use in this analysis.

Open a season brochure for a theatre today and you will most likely come across a new production of an old warhorse by one of the major playwrights associated with modernism. The promotional blurb may state that the play is as relevant and timely now as it was when it was first written – an overused turn of phrase, but often apposite. Many modernist plays are over a century old and have become canonical. Like the work of Shakespeare, they are regularly produced on the world stage in a wide variety of theatrical reimaginings. Indeed, some modernist plays have continually been produced since they were first staged. One would be hard pressed to find a single decade from the twentieth century in which there was not a production somewhere in the world of one of Ibsen's plays, for example. Emerging and established directors love to tackle canonical texts, including modernist drama, stamping their vision on a play, sometimes transforming it almost beyond recognition. Theatre companies use modernist drama as inspiration for the creation of newly devised work. Playwrights continue to offer their own versions of modernist texts, creating works that are designated ‘after’ that of their predecessors. It isn't only well-known plays that are reworked and re-produced, either. Little-known modernist plays, including texts that have rarely or never been performed before, also find favour among contemporary theatre-makers and practice researchers, especially those who are experimentally inclined. Decades after they were first conceived, relatively obscure offerings by modernist dramatists are belatedly being spotlit as theatre-makers transform these artistic curiosities and give them a new lease of life, using current technologies and staging practices.

Conceiving a play as an extended ‘temporal and cultural process’ – as something that can perpetually be remade and modified through (re)writing and performance – means that modernist drama, like work from other genres, is not just a historical artefact but, potentially, a vital spark in contemporary theatre-making. (It's alive!) A new production of a modernist play can theoretically be considered both modernist and contemporary, further blurring the lines between these categories, or else it can have elements of the former intermixed with other sensibilities, such as postmodernism. Conversely, it might not be regarded as modernist at all, or only in an outmoded manner that follows the letter, but not the spirit, of the movement.

In approaching the question of whether modernism is still alive, meaningful and salient in contemporary theatre – and if so, how so – the editors of this volume have had the opportunity to discuss our own experiences in theatres around the world over the past twenty years. We have identified most often as audience members, but also as practitioners, facilitators, allies, critics and academics, in a rich variety of cultural contexts across four continents. What these conversations have revealed is a remarkable commonality that pre-dates our collaboration and marks one way of articulating the genesis of this book: each of us reports multiple occasions of sensing the presence of ‘modernism’ (as we understood it at the time) while experiencing a piece of theatre that is ostensibly new. This not only occurred in the case of obvious or external linkages, where the source material or dramaturgy explicitly referenced the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, but also emerged in unanticipated locales, contexts and situations, often in cases where the rhyme between centuries seemed unconscious on the part of the makers.

In online pandemic-era theatre, we found a strange revenge of naturalism (in work that surrounds actors with their own objects) alongside resonance with surrealism (in work that foregrounds the inner life of those objects), despite assurances that livestreaming marked a new era of drama. At experimental theatre festivals in Cairo and Fez, we saw non-narrative work composed mainly of coloured light and geometric shapes – except in lieu of referencing the Bauhaus, these works deployed abstraction to navigate political censorship. In the English theatre, we saw grotesquery and anarchy on stage that ostensibly owed a debt to Alfred Jarry – except the drama graduates who made the work in question claimed never to have heard of Ubu Roi. In the Irish theatre, we saw fierce young companies appear to rediscover the anti-audience activities of dada and futurism and marry them to the earnestness and eschatology of expressionism – except everyone said their strongest influence was the postdramatic, defined as whatever is happening in Berlin.

While modernism seemed to keep arising by surprise, was it also disappearing from the places we would expect to find it?

In Moscow stands the Shabolovka Radio Tower. Designed by Vladimir Shukhov during the Russian Civil War and completed in 1922, it is emblematic of a proletarianinspired avant-garde, not only in its design (reminiscent of the famous constructivist tower designed by Vladimir Tatlin in 1920), but also in its purpose: to affect the masses by transmitting radio waves across the new Soviet state. The tower still stands, rusting and decrepit – an obsolete yet strikingly beautiful emblem of modernism that perseveres despite the ever-encroaching city.

Radio towers, many of which are still etched on our landscapes, were icons of modernity and technological progress in the early twentieth century, enabling a wide(r)-scale transmission of information and culture. As a broadcast medium, radio was a ‘vital source of entertainment and information implicated in complex networks of transmission, reception and feedback’, notes Ian Whittington in his book on the BBC during the Second World War. Radio also provided a ready means for propaganda and misinformation to enter the home. Melissa Dinsman observes that radio was, and remains, a ‘medium historically connected to both the transmission of language and the military’, reminding us that modern mass media and communication technologies (including telephony, television and, more recently, the internet and social media) can be diverting and emancipatory as well as potentially destructive and repressive.

Transmission is a tremendously generative keyword for both modernity and modernism, and it has special purchase in theatre and dance. Technologically enabled transmission of information, ideas and culture is not unique to modernity, of course, but new forms of media, such as radio, meant that transmission could happen more quickly and at greater scale; such transmission could also be more egalitarian in terms of access. Modernity supercharged a human universal – the conveyance of information from person to person, place to place, and generation to generation. This is fundamental to culture, which, as George Steiner notes, depends on ‘the transmission of meaning across time’ as well as ‘the transfer of meaning in space’. In modernity new technologies and infrastructures, including those pertaining to transportation (trains, cars, aeroplanes), altered spatio-temporal experience and led to increased and enhanced opportunities for informational and cultural exchange.