Interventions

202320222021
  • Interventions: Summer 2021
    Summer 2021: Outing Archives, Archives Outing
  • 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.
20202019
  • 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.
  • Austerity, Gender and Performance: Conversations with Anna Herrmann and Katherine Chandler
    Drawing on interviews with Clean Break’s co-artistic director Anna Herrmann and playwright Katherine Chandler, Sarah Bartley reflects on representations of women in poverty on the UK stage.
  • 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.
  • In space, nobody can hear you say you didn’t “get” it: theatre, science fiction, and genre snobbery
    Ian Farnell looks at the idea of “genre snobbery” in relation to contemporary theatre engaging with science fiction. Because in space, nobody can hear you say you didn’t “get” it.
  • Life in Post-Totalitarian East-Central Europe and the Problems of Participation
    Amy Bryzgel examines examples of participatory art in communist Eastern Europe, showing how artists in different countries deployed a range of inventive methods to subvert their surveillance states.
  • 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.
  • Latest journal: Volume 28, Issue 4
    Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.
  • “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.
2013
  • Latest journal
    Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners. The latest issue is available on Taylor & Francis Online  >>
2018
  • Latest journal: Volume 28, Issue 3
    Edited by Sarah Gorman, Geraldine Harris & Jen Harvie Drawing on examples from around the globe, and including a range of forms of theatre, burlesque, performance art and political action, this special issue celebrates “Feminisms Now”.
  • 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.
  • Reclaiming “Whatever!”: Half Straddle as Exemplar of Contemporary Feminist Theatre
    Some of New York company Half Straddle were once students of Gwendolyn Alker; now she takes her current students to see their work. Here she reflects on their ‘gloriously queer’ aesthetics and lineages of feminism.
  • “Let me be part of the narrative” – The Schuyler Sisters ‘almost’ feminist?
    With its hip-hop aesthetics and colour conscious casting, Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical is an international phenomenon – but, Clare Chandler asks, what agency does it give its female characters?
  • 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.
  • Latest journal: Volume 28, Issue 2
    Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.
  • 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.
  • What on earth is happening in Poland? On Klątwa, protest, and a new regime
    Bryce Lease discusses the protests that followed the premiere of Klątwa (The Curse) in Warsaw, in the context of political transformations and firings of artistic directors in Poland.
  • Latest journal: Volume 28, Issue 1
    Special issue: Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures Edited by Anna McMullan & Graham Saunders This special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review reflects on how selected contemporary theatre and performance practices and discourses have engaged with or been influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett.
  • 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.
  • Incommensurable Corporealities? Touretteshero’s Not I
    Derval Tubridy explores questions of neurodiversity and agency in the performance of Beckett’s Not I by Jess Thom of Touretteshero.
  • 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.
2017
  • Latest journal: Volume 27, Issue 4
    Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.
  • 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.
  • Gendered Bodies in Motion: Representation of Iranian Women Dancers in Public Spaces of Tehran
    Elaheh Hatami and Sepideh Ghalam explore how women dancing in public spaces in post-revolution Iran challenge a state regime that regulates and controls women’s bodies.
  • 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.
  • Latest journal: Volume 27, Issue 3
    Special Issue: Encountering the Digital in Performance: Deployment | Engagement | Trace Edited by Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Andy Lavender & Eirini Nedelkopoulou This special issue explores theatre and performance in digital culture – recognising that digital technologies are now in a second and even third generation of common use. In particular, then, it examines how changes in digitally enabled practices are affecting the way we make, participate in, and think of performance.
  • 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).
  • Latest journal: Volume 27, Issue 2
    Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.
  • 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.
  • Latest journal: Volume 27, Issue 1
    Special Issue: Theatre, Performance, and the Amateur Turn Edited by Nadine Holdsworth, Jane Milling & Helen Nicholson This special issue brings together research that examines amateurism as a cultural practice and as an aesthetic strategy, engaging with questions of shared experiences and sociability; everyday creativity; practical tools, skills, and volunteer labour; cultural legitimacy and value; and amateurism as a contested site of failure.
  • 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.
  • ‘You start an amateur and you end up an amateur’
    Nadine Holdsworth interviews 81-year-old Arthur Aldridge about a career that has moved between amateur theatre and the West End.
  • Amateur Theatre in the Royal Navy
    This slideshow of archival and contemporary images offers a guided tour of amateur theatre in the Royal Navy.
  • Twenty-First Century Amateurs and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages Initiative
    Drawing on interviews and ethnographic research, Molly Flynn reflects on the Royal Shakespeare Company's Open Stages initiative that involved over 300 amateur theatre companies.
2016
  • Latest journal: Volume 26, Issue 4
    Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.
  • 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.
  • Two Episodes of Permission and Allowance: Oakland Summer 2016
    Olive McKeon looks at two specific examples where permission is negotiated in real time, among physical bodies: one in a theatre space, and one in a street protest.
  • Sex, Work, and Negative Affects in Participatory Performance
    Owen G. Parry reflects intimately on the process of writing about his own one-to-one practice and the stakes of spaces of permissibility in performance.
  • Latest journal: Volume 26, Issue 3
    Special Issue: Simon Stephens: British Playwright in Dialogue with Europe, edited by David Barnett This latest issue of Contemporary Theatre Review collects critical perspectives on the work of contemporary playwright Simon Stephens, with particular focus on his collaborative relationships with directors and the productive exchange between British and European theatre-making practices.
  • 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’.
  • When Little is Said and Feminism is Done? Simon Stephens, the Critical Blogosphere and Modern Misogyny
    Melissa Poll uses this online forum to argue that many criticisms of Stephens’ Three Kingdoms, including the main articles in this special issue, avoid grappling with its ‘modern misogyny’.
  • 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.
  • Latest journal: Volume 26, Issue 2
    Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal, engaging with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.
  • 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’.
  • Latest journal: Volume 26, Issue 1
    David Greig: Dramaturgies of Encounter and Engagement, edited by Jacqueline Bolton This special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review focuses on the work of contemporary Scottish playwright David Greig.  The issue emerges from a symposium held around the time of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and addresses issues of national identity and globalization, utopianism and dissensus, and political engagement and participatory practice.
  • 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’.
2015
  • 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.
  • Latest journal: Volume 25, Issue 4
    From a close reading of a recent playscript to an analysis of interventions in spectator relations, and from configurations of femininity in Japanese Butoh to the use of ‘play’ in the ceremonies of the Shona people of southern Africa, this latest journal reflects a breadth of contemporary theatre practices as well as a variety of scholarly modes of engagement with them.
  • 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.
  • Latest journal: Volume 25, Issue 3
    Special Issue: Theatre, Performance and Activism: Gestures towards an Equitable World Edited by Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry The latest print issue combines scholarly articles with contributions from artist-activists to explore the theatrical gestures of protest: gestures that traverse the private and public realms, gestures that manifest the labour of care, gestures of migration and movement, and gestures of solidarity.
  • 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.
  • ‘How do we imagine something other than what there is?’ An interview with the vacuum cleaner
    'How do we imagine something other than what there is?' This short film is an edited version of an interview with the vacuum cleaner, an ‘art activist collective of one’.
  • Latest journal: Volume 25, Issue 2
    Special Issue: Electoral Theatre Edited by Stephen Bottoms and Brenda Hollweg This edition of Contemporary Theatre Review is timed to coincide with the UK General Election of May 2015. It deals in part with theatre about electoral politics, but also considers electoral politics as a kind of theatre, taking an interdisciplinary approach to affective dimensions of voting, dramaturgical strategies of address, and critiques of broadcast media.
  • 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’.
  • Parallel Interview with Jonathan Petherbridge from London Bubble and Tom Bowtell from Coney
    In this ‘parallel interview’, Jonathan Petherbridge from London Bubble and Tom Bowtell from Coney reflect on electoral democracy and acts of voting as core themes in their recent work.
  • 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.
  • ‘…faces behind the numbers’: Rimini Protokoll and Daniel Koczy discuss 100% City
    The topics of demography and representation are foregrounded in Daniel Koczy’s interview with Rimini Protokoll, which focuses on the challenges of staging populations in their 100% City project.
  • Latest journal: Volume 25, Issue 1
    The Politics, Processes and Practices of Editing, guest-edited by Maria M. Delgado & Joanne Tompkins This special issue brings together 33 short essays offering critical reflections and commentaries on the myriad practices, problems and provocations of editing. It is a conversation about how – as editors in formal and informal capacities – we write, how we curate, how we fashion and formulate, how we shape and feedback, and the changes and challenges that the digital era has introduced.
  • 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.
  • Editing Ourselves into History: A Live Art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
    Various participants reflect on a recent ‘edit-a-thon’ that sought to redress the invisibility of feminist Live Art practices within Wikipedia.
  • Postgraduate/Early-Career Researcher Forum on Academic Publishing
    This forum, curated by Charlotte Bell, offers five different views from postgraduates and early-career researchers on the shifting landscape of academic publishing.
  • NOTA
    NOTA, a collection of unedited responses produced and 'archived' in real-time, collapses the distance between performance and critical response.
  • Delegitimizing the Performance Document: Tales from the Open Call
    ‘So what is Performance if it includes this?’ asks Yelena Gluzman, editor of the deliberately non-selective compendium Emergency Index.
  • 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.
2014
  • Latest journal: Volume 24, Issue 4
    A Controversial Company: Debating the Casting of the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao, edited by Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe. The storm surrounding the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) 2012-13 production of The Orphan of Zhao brought to the fore issues of racial-ethnic theatrical representation in casting. This Special Issue brings together material from all sides of the debate, from the RSC and British East Asian (BEA) actors, from practitioners and academics, to offer a series of documents on what could become a decisive, and positive, moment in the history of BEA performance in Britain.
  • 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.
  • Purchase Power: The Marketing of Performance and its Discursive Effects
    To accompany his analysis of why the casting of The Orphan of Zhao became so contested, Ashley Thorpe provides a critique of the marketing of the RSC production.
  • 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.
  • Latest journal: Volume 24, Issue 3
    As with a previous forum on theatre-maker Tim Crouch, this special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review focuses on a single writer, contemporary British playwright Martin Crimp. Titled ‘Dealing with Martin Crimp’, this issue documents and expands on a conference held at the Royal Court in 2013. As the articles in this issue address, the source of Crimp’s originality is composed of a variety of factors: distinctive writing strategies that continue to be refined, an understanding of internationalism but also of distinct cultural sensibilities, and the value of collaboration across a diverse range of genres and media.
  • 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.
  • Composition as Textual Illumination: Martin Crimp and George Benjamin Discuss Written on Skin
    Watch a video of Martin Crimp in conversation with composer George Benjamin about their collaboration on the 2012 opera Written on Skin.
  • 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"'.
  • Writer or Director? The Case of Martin Crimp
    Aleks Sierz, author of The Theatre of Martin Crimp, challenges the binary opposition of writer and director in Crimp’s work.
  • Keeping it Real: Stories and the Telling of Stories at the Royal Court
    Dan Rebellato teases apart the reputation for realism at the Royal Court, where many of Crimp’s plays have premiered.
  • Volume 24, Issue 2 (May 2014)
    Methodologies for our discipline continue to expand to recognise the cross-cultural currents that shape much scholarship across the live art, performance and theatre boundaries. As such, the articles that constitute this issue similarly demonstrate a breadth of methodologies used in contemporary theatre, performance and live art studies, through: close readings of a production from first-person viewing; study of play texts and their reception histories; cultural materialist analysis of venues and urban settings; and interdisciplinary analysis drawing particularly on the history of art (and particularly of photography).
  • 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’.