Paul Rae

Where is the cosmopolitan stage

The crowds swirl around the vast interchange that is the airport. ‘We’re a long way, now, from the lone field and the crowded workshop. Our message systems nowadays affect whole populations . . .. All of humanity, virtually. There you have the heroine of today’s tragedy: no more actor, no more choir, no more God, no class . . .. The whole of humanity in a state of interconnectedness.’ ‘It’s true to say that it is a state of communication, but what is it saying to itself? And, once again, why? ‘And can you tell me how the plot’s going to work out, and how it will end?’ ‘We don’t live in a theatre, or the cinema!’

Cat's Entertainment: Feline Performance in the Lion City

Singha the Courtesy Lion and the Merlion, a touristic icon, are among several leonine symbols deployed by the Singaporean state in its persistent effort to manage national identity and police subjectivity. Artists have responded with playful and affective inscriptions of a feline imaginary that expands and contests the narrow terms of the official symbology.

Workshop of Filthy Creation: The Theatre Assembled

Assemblage theory provides a framework for registering the active roles played by nonhuman entities in the creation of theatrical events. In particular, it enables a greater appreciation of how technical and other theatrical production elements inform performance analysis. In the Wooster Group’s House/Lights, people and things make equal attentional demands upon the audience; appropriately, a documentary on installing the production makes this most apparent. Additionally, the National Theatre’s Frankenstein performs these animating forces as a theatrical virtue.

Editorial: Traveling performance

It was when my mum told me she was taking my dad to Belgium to see Cirque du Soleil for his birthday that I realized something was afoot. My parents live in Southeast England. She’s a solicitor, and he’s an air traffic control consultant. Beyond the annual panto when my siblings and I were young, and the odd West End show after we left home, they’d never been big on the theatre. I was nonplussed. I thought I was the one who schlepped for art.

Editorial: Many Voices

In February of this year, I was fortunate to attend Bodies in/and Asian Theatres, a regional conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR, the scholarly organization with which this journal is affiliated). It was held at the University of the Philippines Diliman under the aegis of the IFTR Asian Theatre working group. Toward the end of a plenary panel on contemporary South East Asian dance on the final day, a debate arose over the work of one of the speakers, Eisa Jocson. A dancer and choreographer, Jocsons work explores the aesthetics of local and transnational performative labour, and is often based on forms she learns from Filipinos working in the entertainment industry. For example, Macho Dancer (2013) is based on a distinctive style of erotic male nightclub performance, Host (2015) on the work of Filipinas in Japanese hostess clubs, and the HAPPYLAND series (2017) on the high number of Filipinos employed at the Hong Kong Disneyland. In response to her presentation on these and other works, some scholars from the Philippines asked Jocson, who mainly performs in Manila and on the international contemporary performance circuit, why she did not tour nationally. After all, they reasoned, since Jocsons performances are inspired by the work of entertainers who often come from regional cities and rural areas, is it not right to present the work ‘back’ to such a workforce and their communities? Such questions are, of course, complex and loaded. In so far as Jocsons performances address the exploitation of Filipino entertainers’ affective labour, is there any risk that Jocson compounds that exploitation for her own benefit? And in so far as those performances explore the choreographies of entertainment capital and commodified desire, should Filipino audiences not be informed and perhaps educated about such things? Jocson countered that while wider local exposure for her work was desirable, it was wrong to presume that it could readily be presented in such circumstances. She makes her work within a specific critical and discursive context, she explained, and as part of a long-term thematic and aesthetic enquiry. To present it outside such contexts would benefit neither the audience, nor the artist, nor the work. If anything, she seemed to be suggesting, the work is not made for the producers of such performance forms, but for their consumers, and those who elsewhere participate in and benefit from such economies. She recounted making the ‘mistake’ of asking the owners of a ‘macho dancer’ nightclub if she could perform Macho Dancer there, as part of their regular line-up, late at night. They offered her an early slot, so as not to disrupt business as usual.

Extending a Hand/Lending an Ear

This essay is a partial transcript of a public lecture by Rebecca Schneider, combined with a reflection on audition by a member of her audience, Paul Rae. Schneiders transcribed talk, ‘Extending a Hand,’ asks about the geologic time of climate change in relationship to the human time of racialization and other damaging by-products of the Capitalocene. If Schneiders talk performs a call, Raes companion commentary performs a response that is, simultaneously, a reflection on the ways and means of academic labour on and as performance. In Schneiders talk, Paleolithic negative hand stencils are read beside contemporary protest acts and both are considered as ‘hails’, suggesting a reverberatory, ongoing, and even ‘live’ duration to gesture. Call and response is thus considered both in terms of geologic time and in terms of human time. ‘Extending a Hand’ was delivered as a keynote address to the 2016 Performance Studies international (PSi) conference in Melbourne, Australia, the theme of which was ‘climate change’. In order to recover and examine aspects of the ‘climate’ of its initial presentation and reception, the format overlays portions of the initial transcript of the talk with the interpolative interjections made by the speaker, as well as a series of thumbnails drawn from the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. In ‘Lending an Ear’, Rae offers a parallel commentary on where and how Schneider, as speaker, departed from the written text, and considers what this tells us about the oral qualities of academic presentation, and how these in turn inflect the issues raised by the paper.

Editorial: Time Travel

One of the most forbidding and yet rewarding challenges in a substantive internationalization of arts scholarship is accounting for the experience and passage of time. The extent to which developments in theatre and performance over the past 150 years have been tied up with the larger social, economic and technological transformations reflexively understood as ‘modernity’ is a key reason an international journal readership is able to find interest and value in scholarship on performances they may not have seen, that are practised in places they have never been. At the same time, any such research – it is tempting to say ‘from outside the West’, but in fact the requirement holds everywhere – must register how the work under discussion complicates an otherwise oversimplified narrative of developmental modernity. This narrative treats a homogenized industrial and postindustrial ‘West’ as having led the way and established a model for how other parts of the world would modernize subsequently. The assumption is quickened in discussions of art because arguably one characteristic of those transformations as they happened in numerous centres of Euro-American power was the role that artists played in giving them aesthetic form and expressing their meanings. This is prominent in the emergence of modernism and the avant-garde, and it is logical that in recent times scholars of modernism have been particularly energetic in questioning the developmental narrative and demonstrating not only how such phenomena were constitutively reliant on processes elsewhere, but also how artistic developments everywhere both informed each other (often inequably) and manifested local and highly contingent characteristics.

Editorial: Behind the Scenes

One of the pleasures of editing Theatre Research International is the opportunity to engage with scholars from different parts of the world about their research. In the past year or so, I have visited several universities in South East Asia, finding out about the practices and ideas people are investigating, and how they are doing it. In the process, I have been struck by the alacrity with which ambitious universities in the fast-developing economies of the region – and, I suspect, elsewhere in the world – are embracing the metrics and other criteria required for success in global university rankings exercises. The legitimation, prestige and increased attractiveness to talented staff and students that a good showing in such exercises can bring is presumably an important reason why governments and university administrations see participation as an efficient use of limited resources. However, as anyone with direct experience of rankings-motivated institutional change will be aware, the practical results can be highly disruptive, and their cost can fall disproportionately upon arts and humanities researchers, so much of whose activity remains resistant to easy quantification.

Editorial: Joining the Conversation

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 years 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.

International A Dialogue

with some field-specific knowledge, whereas the journal article will likely be looked at by one editor (often along with a graduate student assistant and peer reviewers). The acquisitions, content, copy, and production editors at the scholarly press are likely, as they are professional editors, to have undergone some degree of training and continuing professional development, perhaps formal training in journalism as well as the types of programmes described above, whereas the journal’s academic-editor and graduate student assistant are more than likely not to have received any formal training, which places the editorial emphasis instead on curatorial practices and engagement in the discipline.