Cover image: What Does This Country Kill in You? Syntagma Square, June 2011: photo by Stephanos Magriotis.

From the introduction by Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry:

The wave of demonstrations that followed the shooting of a young black man, Michael Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson (USA) on 9 August 2014, featured protesters holding their arms in the air and chanting ‘hands up, don’t shoot’, a striking embodiment of the reported final stance and words of Michael Brown. In the week following the shooting, this gesture of arms held aloft was reproduced by groups of protestors standing, sometimes kneeling, before lines of militarised police, marching silently down streets, closing down traffic intersections, and at vigils held in more than 90 cities, including a mass gathering that closed Times Square in New York. The gesture was adopted by the Washington Redskins as they entered the football pitch on 18 August, and by hundreds of black students of Howard University, staring solemnly into the camera (an image that spread rapidly on Twitter)¹ – performances of solidarity that revealed proliferating ensembles of people united in anger and grief, resoundingly insisting that ‘black lives matter’. As the protests continued after the announcement of the Grand Jury’s decision on 24 November 2014 not to indict the police officer who shot Michael Brown, this gesture was replicated by sports and media personalities, using their public profile to express solidarity, and by thousands of protesters as part of the occupations, marches, obstructions of highways, die-ins, and days of action that continue as we write this in December 2014. With arms raised, the torsos of protesters are exposed, echoing the original atrocity, providing a bodily canvas for the immediate disclosure of ongoing violence, and directing an obligation for restraint towards those holding and firing the guns. Dispersed across sites historically associated with the civil rights movement and economic and racial injustice, and in a country where an act of lethal violence against black men, women, and children is an almost daily occurrence,² these intensely charged figures call on broader publics to bear witness, demand that law enforcement be devoted to the protection of life, and at the same time lift the veil on an exceptional reality of violence and inequality….

Special Issue: Theatre, Performance and Activism: Gestures towards an Equitable World

Guest editors: Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry

Contents

Notes on Contributors
pages 295-299

Introduction: Gesture, Theatricality, and Protest – Composure at the Precipice
Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry
pages 300-312

Articles

Resolute Presence, Fugitive Moments, and the Body in Women’s Protest Performance
Maggie B. Gale
pages 313-236

Class/Work: Labor, Theatricality, and the Student
Lindsay Goss
pages 327-343

A Theatrical Gesture of Disavowal: The Civility of the Critical Mass Cycle Ride
Simon Parry
pages 344-356

Gestures of Resistance between the Street and the Theatre: Documentary
Theatre in Egypt and Laila Soliman’s No Time for Art
Nesreen Hussein
pages 357-370

Performing Resistance with Maya Rao: Trauma and Protest in India
Bishnupriya Dutt
pages 371-385

‘It Takes Six People to Make a Mattress Feel Light…’: Materializing Pain in Carry that Weight and Sexual Assault Activism
Shayoni Mitra
pages 386-400

Occupy the WEFT: Choreographing Factory Affect and Community Performance
Petra Kuppers
pages 401-416

documents: gestural notes

Notes on All Rise
Liberate Tate
page 417

All You Can’t Eat
Jess Allen
pages 418-420

The Trans-Plantable Living Room
Lisa Woynarski and Bronwyn Preece
pages 421-423

The Pansy Project
Paul Harfleet
pages 424-425

What Does This Country Kill in You?
Marios Chatziprokopiou
pages 426-428

Dispatches on Voluntary and Involuntary Arrest in New York City
Benjamin Shepard
pages 429-432

Principal, Get a Room with Me
Cuiyan Wen
pages 433-434

Reviews

Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice by David Wiles
Tracy C. Davis
pages 435-436

Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America by Jill Stevenson
Joshua Edelman
pages 436-437

Worlds, Bodies, Matters: Theatre of the Late Twentieth Century by Valentina Valentini
Silvia Battista
pages 437-439

Modernity, Community and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama by Richard Rankin Russell
Paul Murphy
pages 439-440

Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger’s Tales edited by Conn Holohan and Tony Tracy
Fintan Walsh
pages 440-441

Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900–2000 by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr, Siyuan Liu, and Erin B. Mee
Ashley Thorpe
pages 441-442

Musicality in Theatre: Music as Model, Method, and Metaphor in Theatre-Making by David Roesner
Brian D. Valencia
pages 442-444

Howard Barker’s Art of Theatre: Essays on his Plays, Poetry and Production Work edited by David Ian Rabey and Sarah Goldingay
Steve Nicholson
pages 444-445

Backpages
pages 446-464

Abstracts
pages 465