Thoughts on redaction and care: Tia-Monique Uzor considers the link between dance and water as she reflects on her personal experiences and her work in Katherine Dunham's archive as spaces where the past, present and future collide.
Dispatches: 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.
Fugitivity through Black digitality: podcasting in the Black Plays Archive: 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.
On Being, Knowing, and Doing: 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.
More Now. Notes on the past in online documentary theatre: 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.
Archives are a SCAM!: 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.
Dispatches: Ramzi Maqdisi: 17-06-21: Through prose and soundscape, Ramzi Maqdisi reflects on his aural experiences of Palestine in response to the recent violence in Jerusalem.
Interventions: Winter 2020: Public Health, Politics, and Performance
Between Stolen Breaths: 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.
Brian Lobel: Performance, Politics and Public Health: ‘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.
Rituals of Home: Dispatches from the Kankana-ey Vegetable Gardens: 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.
Dispatches: 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.
Dispatches: 21-09-20: An excerpt from Andrei Kureichik's Insulted. Belarus(sia), written in real-time to the events unfolding around the 2020 Belarus election. Translator John Freedman introduces the piece and the worldwide reading project.
Dispatches, 24-08-20: 20-08-20
Milia Ayache's 'Vocal Hygiene,' with original artwork by Lina Ghaibeh, is a satirical survival handbook for actors in a revolution.
Interventions: Spring 2020: European Performance in Troubled Times.
Editorial by Aneta Mancewicz
(Re)Presenting ‘The Other’?: On Brett Bailey’s Sanctuary: 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.
Body States and Cross-territorial Choreographies: 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.
Interventions Winter/Spring 2019/20: Editorial by issue editor Eleanor Roberts, with Ella Parry-Davies, Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Poynton, and Broderick Chow
Interventions, Autumn 2019: Editorial by Broderick Chow, Aneta Mancewicz, Ella Parry-Davies, Bella Poynton, and Eleanor Roberts
Thinking Through and With Learning Disability: In the context of her work with Cyrff Ystwyth, a dance-theatre company, Margaret Ames examines kinaesthesic action as an affective and cultural tool that challenges hegemonic distribution of inclusion.
An Interview with Hancock and Kelly: Hancock and Kelly, interviewed by Jennie Klein, on their new performance, An Extraordinary Rendition, with accompanying photos and video excerpts.
Playing Politics: Versatile Operations in Site-Adaptive Performance: Melanie Kloetzel’s post-script ‘Playing Politics’ elaborates on her proposals for site-versatile approaches in performance, which may work to self-reflexively critique conditions of precarity in the neoliberal present.
We Need to Talk About (How We Talk About) Audiences: Kirsty Sedgman presents a commentary on Tomlin's Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship, engaging with debates and misunderstandings between empirical and theoretical spectatorship research.
Interventions, Summer 2019: Broderick D.V. Chow, Ella Parry-Davies and Aneta Mancewicz introduce CTR's new Interventions Postscripts initiative.
Rantin and Raving: an interview with Kieran Hurley: In this filmed conversation, David Overend thinks aloud with playwright Keiran Hurley about scales of connectivity linking theatre audiences to an aspirational political collective.
Safety, Risk and Speculation in the Immersive Industry: Anticipating the opening of Hartshorn – Hook and Alexander Wright's immersive adaptation of The Wolf of Wall Street, Adam Alston explores ideas of safety, risk, and speculation in the immersive experience industry.
Shadow/Boxing: Robyn Mayol and Ella Parry-Davies’ soundwalk ‘Shadow/Boxing’ takes us on a journey through east London’s Bethnal Green, ghosted by the voices of participants in a Muay Thai-based social care group.
Leaving a Secret Place: In his performative text ‘Leaving a Secret Place’, Raafat Majzoub explores how to shift through transitions between the competing fictive worlds of the powerful and the marginalised.
“It’s Your Whole-Ass Body!”: In this interview, Kelechi Okafor – owner of South London dance studio Kelechnekoff – discusses the transnationalism of twerk, anti-racism and black advocacy in fitness, and transformation in physical culture.
The Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show: Broderick Chow presents documentation from The Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show, performed at the Anatomy Museum, King’s College London, and explains its intervention into the history of physical culture and fitness.
Interventions 28.3 (October 2018): Alongside this special issue on "Feminisms Now", these online Interventions celebrate the formal and conceptual diversity of both feminist performance and scholarship.
Because softness means being careful with one's self: "Because softness means being careful with one's self", an audio work by Jessica Worden, both describes and enacts an aesthetics (and ethics) of softness, vulnerability and care.
Interventions 28.2: Duška Radosavljević introduces this special issue of CTR Interventions on the controversial European theatre director Oliver Frljić.
Oliver Frljić interviewed by Duška Radosavljević: Oliver Frljić discusses his early encounters with the theatre in Split and Zagreb, key productions in his oeuvre, and international collaborations.
Dissensual Politics of Performance: Andrej Mirčev explores the controversy that greeted Our Violence and Your Violence (2016) when it premiered in Split, Croatia, through Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus.
Who’s afraid of Oliver Frljić?: Aljoscha Begrich, dramaturg at Gorki Theater Berlin, reflects on the many Frljić productions and many Frljić’s he has encountered before working on the new Gorki – Alternative für Deutschland.
Teatr Powszechny: Frljić’s theatre playground: Agnieszka Jakimiak, dramaturg on The Curse, reflects on that production and its controversy, arguing that Frljić’s work attempts to dismantle the complicity of representation with power.
Interventions 28.1 (March 2018): Anna McMullan introduces the set of Interventions published alongside this special issue on Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures, co-edited with Graham Saunders.
End/Lessness: Jonathan Heron discusses his series of projects with the late Beckett theatre scholar and performer, Rosemary Pountney, and the digital iterations and traces of that collaboration.
Virtual Play: Beckettian Experiments in Virtual Reality: Nicholas Johnson and Néill O’Dwyer reflect on a series of projects that use virtual reality and other twenty-first century technologies to creatively interpret Beckett’s plays.
Beckett, Ireland and the Biographical Festival: A Symposium: Reporting on a symposium they co-organised, Trish McTighe and Kathryn White argue that an analysis of festival culture is an important aspect of the consideration of Beckett’s place within contemporary art.
Interventions 27.4 (December 2017): This issue probes questions of ‘the civic’: the space where citizen meets public. A series of provisional reports from Broderick Chow, Jen Harvie, Simon Bayly, Elaleh Hatami & Sepideh Zarrin Ghalam
Free Dissociations: Simon Bayly, with Johanna Linsley, probe the state of 'contact', relation and non-relation, and the limits of writing for approaching all of these.
Civic Inquiry: Interview with Jen Harvie: Jen Harvie discusses her experience as specialist advisor to an inquiry into skills for theatre for the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications.
Civic Violence: Grappling with Life in the UK: Broderick D.V. Chow, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Bryce Lease, Royona Mitra, Grant Peterson, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and Joshua Abrams reflect on gaining Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK.
Interventions 27.3 (November 2017): This issue of Interventions accompanies the Encountering the Digital in Performance special issue. The four pieces explore new approaches to performance and audiences in a changing cultural and political landscape.
Sound Choreographer <> Body Code: Alex McLean and Kate Sicchio reflect on their collaborations around dance and code, focusing on their piece Sound Choreographer <> Body Code, which here uses your computer's microphone to generate choreographic instructions.
Fluidity and friendship: the choir that surprised the city: Elena Marchevska talks with activists-researchers Nita Çavolli, Jana Jakimovska, and Katerina Mojanchevska about democracy, location, and media in song protests of the Skopje choir Raspeani Skopjani.
Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE): In this playful video, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck interviews Tei Blow and Sean McElroy from Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE) about their use of karaoke, ritual, metaphysics, and media.
Digital Arts Organisations: 3-Legged Dog and The Space: Andy Lavender discusses digital culture with Kevin Cunningham, Executive Artistic Director of 3-Legged Dog, NY (USA), and Fiona Morris, Chief Executive of The Space, Birmingham/London (UK).
Interventions 27.2 (June 2017): This issue of Interventions attends to collaboration as a method of theatre-making and scholarship, and as a way of studying their conditions of possibility.
Hidden Vacancies: Hillary Miller analyses the curatorial and real estate collusions involved in Coney Island’s Art Walls.
Vulnerability and the Lonely Scholar: The research collective After Performance explores how vulnerability might productively work against the norm of ‘lonely scholarship’.
Dyspraxic Collaboration: Daniel Oliver and Luke Ferris’ video on/of ‘dyspraxic collaboration’ unapologetically performs the generative possibilities of ‘inattentivity’.
Learning to stand together: In this interview, Elyssa Livergant and the Precarious Workers Brigade consider the relationship between higher education, the cultural industries and labour through the theme of collaboration.
Interventions 27.1: This issue of Interventions extends some of the ideas and practices behind this quarter's special issue on ‘Theatre, Performance and the Amateur Turn’.
Evocative Objects: 'Evocative Objects' collects the stories and memories behind objects brought by amateur theatre-makers to research workshops.
Interventions 26.4 (December 2016): Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley introduce ideas of permissibility and allowance which frame this special collection of Interventions.
‘And what places light up the air between you...’: PA Skantze and Laure Fernandez reflect on the modes of permissibility and allowance that attend their movements across national borders, and how these affect their work and lives.
To Permit Refusal: Emma Cox inverts the liberal terms of the editors’ provocation to construct a powerful response to recent European referenda and increasing cultural permissions of exclusion.
Interventions 26.3 (September 2016): In his Introduction to this issue of Interventions, Adam Alston reflects, post-Brexit, on the prescience of Simon Stephens as an especially European British writer.
Things That Always Tend to Happen in Simon Stephens’ Plays: Louise LePage uses video as critical medium, assembling a cast of scholars to respond to Billy Smart’s provocation regarding ‘things that always tend to happen in Simon Stephens’ plays’.
Harper Regan by Simon Stephens: through a Greek lens: Reflecting on her staging of Stephens’ Harper Regan in the United States, Gaye Taylor Upchurch asks: ‘why is a woman with agency still such a scary notion?’
The Funfair: A New Adaptation by Simon Stephens: Walter Meierjohann discusses his production of Stephens’ The Funfair for the opening season at HOME, Manchester, in light of nationalist resurgence in the UK.
Interventions 26.2 (May 2016): This issue of Interventions explores what the digital might offer to performance scholarship, practice, and criticism.
Postmedia Performance: In ‘Postmedia Performance’ Sarah Bay-Cheng offers theatre and performance scholarship a provocation to rethink its approach to making sense of the digital.
Megan Vaughan - Public Twine: Using the interactive storytelling tool Twine, Megan Vaughan brings recent performances, public space and spaces of encounter into conversation.
Possible Public and Private Narratives: Johanna Linsley talks with artist Brian House about his recent projects and the relationship between data gathering, participatory systems and the performance of the private and public.
Listening post: Public voices on the digital stage: ‘Listening Post’ is a curated collection of artistic projects and critical reflections that offer insight into the performance of the vox populi, the ‘voice of the people’.
Interventions 26.1 (February 2016): This issue of Interventions accompanies a special issue of the journal dedicated to the contemporary Scottish playwright and theatre director David Greig.
Dan Rebellato in conversation with David Greig: In this excerpt from a live conversation, Dan Rebellato talks with David Greig about what it's like to have his work critically analysed and the playwright's process of writing The Events (2013).
“CONJURORS! CONJURORS!…Who wrote this!”*: Some Reflections on Lanark: A Life in Three Acts: Victoria E. Price offers reflections on the 2015 production of Lanark: A Life in Three Acts, Greig's adaptation of the 1981 Alasdair Gray novel of postmodern Scottish identity.
Welcome to the Fringe: Welcome To The Fringe, a collaboration between David Greig, Forest Fringe, and London’s Gate Theatre, supported Palestinian artists in visiting and presenting at the 2015 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Butterfly Mind: ‘Butterfly Mind’, a performance-text adapted especially for the web, recreates David Greig’s journey on what he calls ‘an adventure in contemporary shamanic soul retrieval’.
Celebrating 25 Years of Contemporary Theatre Review (part 2): This second collection of hand-picked articles from Contemporary Theatre Review's archives celebrates the journal's 25th anniversary year. These articles will be freely available for the next six months, until June 2016.
Interventions 25.4 (October 2015): This issue of Interventions focuses on the relationship between ‘practice’ and ‘research’, offering four different case studies in which these concepts are configured in quite different ways.
World Factory: The politics of conversation: In this cross-disciplinary forum, the research project and interactive performance World Factory, directed by Zoë Svendsen, is discussed from multiple perspectives ranging from social geography to marketing.
The Sick of the Fringe: Brian Lobel and Hannah Maxwell assess The Sick of the Fringe, a Wellcome Trust-funded programme of talks and events exploring the relationship between medicine and the arts at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Infecting Archives: An interview with Martin O'Brien: In ‘Infecting Archives’, Johanna Linsley talks with Martin O’Brien about his collaboration with Sheree Rose and their work with the Bob Flanagan archive at the ONE Lesbian and Gay Archive.
Karen Christopher: The duet residencies: Following ‘duet residencies’ with Chris Goode and Lucy Cash, performance-maker Karen Christopher reflects on how the artistic residency might remain open to collaboration, surprise, and even mayhem.
Interventions 25.3 (July 2015): This issue of Interventions is focused on activism and performance and accompanies the print journal’s special issue ‘Theatre, performance and activism: gestures towards an equitable world’.
Domestic Gestures: Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry reflect on a collectively authored blogging project on activist performance, in which 'domestic gestures' emerged as one of its core themes.
Irresistible Images: In this interview Shane Boyle and Larry Bogad reflect on the relationship between performance and protest through a critical exploration of the ‘irresistible image’.
Celebrating Margaretta D’Arcy’s Theatrical Activism: Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A and Robert Leach contribute to a reflection and celebration of Irish writer and performer Margaretta D’Arcy’s ongoing activism.
Interventions 25.2 (May 2015): This issue of Interventions looks ahead to the UK General Election on 7 May 2015 and accompanies a newly published Special Edition of the print journal on ‘Electoral Theatre’.
Acts of Voting: A Lexicon: Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager compile a ‘lexicon’ on acts of voting, presenting contributions from 26 scholars who explore the ambitions, achievements and economies of voting in Europe.
Early Days: Reflections on the Performance of a Referendum: A short film by Laura Bissell and David Overend on theatre, performance, and the Scottish Referendum, featuring interviews with Christine Hamilton and Scottish theatre-makers.
Interventions 25.1 (February 2015): These online Interventions offer a variety of perspectives that complement the journal’s latest special issue on the politics, processes and practices of editing.
Celebrating 25 Years of Contemporary Theatre Review: In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Contemporary Theatre Review, the current editors have hand-picked a selection of articles from the archive that reflect something of the breadth and distinctive character of the journal. The articles will be freely available until the end of 2015, and are introduced by the members of the editorial team.
Interventions 24.4 (October 2014): Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe, co-editors of the special issue debating the casting of the RSC's The Orphan of Zhao, introduce the online features that accompany the print issue.
Orphan à la Crouching Tiger: In 'Orphan à la Crouching Tiger', Daphne Lei reports on a production of The Orphan of Zhao in La Jolla, California, featuring an all-Asian American cast.
Anna Chen - Yellowface: Watch a video of Anna Chen performing her poem Yellowface, which satirises and reappropriates this practice of racial stereotyping.
The Orphan of Zhao Redux: This specially commissioned video, The Orphan of Zhao Redux, features an all-British East Asian cast, performing a hybrid text edited and compiled by Daniel York.
Interventions 24.3 (July 2014): Alongside our special issue on 'Dealing with Martin Crimp', these online Interventions complement and extend the discussion in the print journal.
Sounding Crimp’s Verbal Stage: The Translator’s Challenge: Elisabeth Angel-Perez, who contributes a longer article to the special issue, reflects on the challenges of translating Crimp's world where 'acts of language are all there is to "see"'.
Interventions 24.2 (May 2014): This new website provides a gateway to Contemporary Theatre Review, as well as online Interventions that add to and complement the themes and topics of the journal.
Comment: Sochi 2014: Following on from a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on the 2012 London Games, Yana Meerzon and Lynne McCarthy address the cultural politics of the Sochi Olympics.
Video: The radical in engaged practices: Watch a collection of artist films and interviews coming out of Beyond Glorious, a symposium that explored connections between experimental forms and socially engaged practices.
Audio: Performance Matters Crossovers: Listen to a dialogue between Gareth Evans, Mike Dibb, Hugo Glendinning, Deborah Levy, and Alan Read, recorded as part of Crossovers, an initiative of the Performance Matters project.
Parodying 'Blurred Lines' in the Feminist Blogosphere: Geraldine Harris, whose discussion of ‘post-post-feminism’ appears in the latest print issue, comments here on the proliferation of online parodies of Robin Thicke’s controversial ‘Blurred Lines’.
