In this photo-essay and conversation, Rina Arya and Allie Carr explore the strange and magical interiors of theatres closed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Summer 2021: Outing Archives, Archives Outing

Nadine Deller considers the impact of institutional whiteness on her position as a Black “mixed-race” researcher and how developing a podcast on Black British theatre history helped her negotiate “Black fugitivity” within the BPA.​

In this dialogue based article Vicki Couzens and Priya Srinivasan think through decolonization from the place of praxis and cultural artistic exchanges in the Australian context.

Wojtek Ziemilski presents a multilayered hypertext in response to Lola Arias’ documentary theatre workshop Mis Documentos, playing with autobiography and the digital in archival performance.

Reflecting on his research on folk performances in subaltern communities in India, Brahma Prakash, in his article “Archives are a SCAM!”, critically considers the politics concerning structural archival conventions.

17-06-21: Through prose and soundscape, Ramzi Maqdisi reflects on his aural experiences of Palestine in response to the recent violence in Jerusalem.

Winter 2020: Public Health, Politics, and Performance

Photography and memory, ritual and writing come together in Vanessa Damilola Macaulay’s inquiry into racialised experiences of breath and breathlessness, from violent anti-blackness to Fanon’s revolution.

‘You live by charity, you die by charity.’ Brian Lobel, performance maker, curator and author of Theatre & Cancer on the economics of illness narratives and the precarisation of disability justice.

In this visual and textual autoethnography Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias explores how an Indigenous community navigates the precarities of neo-colonialism and finds sustenance in rituals of home.

14-12-20: Paul Rae profiles political advisor Dominic Cummings via Oscar Wilde, testing the capacity of performance studies to make sense of a present that seems increasingly fictional.

Spring 2020: European Performance in Troubled Times.
Editorial by Aneta Mancewicz

Katia Arfara examines Brett Bailey’s Sanctuary, the research-based installation she curated in Athens in 2017 to discuss the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Europe and the return to identity politics.

Diana Damian analyses Manuel Pelmus and Alexandra Pirici’s Public Collection at Tate Modern in 2016, which addresses artistic labour and mobility to showcase Europeanness in contemporary performance.

Azadeh Sharifi draws on Anta Helena Recke’s Die Kränkungen der Menschheit at Münchner Kammerspiele in 2019 to expose the exclusion of ethnic groups and migrants from the discourse on German identity.

Agnieszka Jakimiak confronts sexual abuse and mobbing in European theatre institutions looking at selected examples and her own theatre show, nosexnosolo from 2019 that focuses on Jan Fabre’s case.

Editorial by issue editor Eleanor Roberts, with Ella Parry-Davies, Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Poynton, and Broderick Chow

Giulia Palladini theorizes the musical ‘prelude’ as a temporal structure that actualizes possible futures in the present.

Asif Majid reexamines Octopus from “Entangling the British Muslim Woman” through the personal lens of minoritarian positionality, and the exhaustion it can produce specifically for Muslim artists.