The success of Katie Mitchell's production of The Mysteries for the Royal Shakespeare Company has again demonstrated the appeal of the plays for a modern audience. Most revivals trim and otherwise adapt the texts of the original, sprawling cycles: but Mitchell and her dramaturg, Edward Kemp, more calculatedly addressed the problems of updating not only the texts, but also the acting style and attitudes towards the dominant issues – notably those of gender representation. The original cycles often intriguingly juxtaposed religious faith and local politics in an assertion of civic pride which none the less also acknowledged the dominance of the established Church: and in the following article Katie Normington assesses the relevance of Mitchell's production for the secular, depoliticized society of the 'nineties. Katie Normington is a freelance fringe theatre director who is currently researching the role of women in the mystery plays and lecturing in drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

In this article, the first of a sequence on the ways in which women's bodies are recorded in performance documentation, Anna Cutler offers a new conception and systematic definition of three performance documentations – the ‘Proper’, the ‘Processual’ and the ‘Residual’. She argues against traditional and literary forms of documentation (the ‘Proper’) as a means by which women and women's bodies have been and continue to be excluded from performance records, and proceeds to discuss two theoretical types of body in performance: the ‘Inscribed’ (which represents an ideologically shaped, constructed, and censored body) and the ‘Potential’ (which represents the creative and ongoing moments of change made by the body in performance). She proposes the ‘Potential Body’ as a model for performance documentation, since, though difficult to translate into written forms, it offers a more effective communication of both the body and of live performance. Given the continuing prevalence of the written word as the primary mode of performance documentation, the author makes a case for écriture féminine to be appropriated as a writerly tool to document women's bodies and particularly the ‘Potential Body’ in performance. She concludes with a discussion of the theory and practice of Hélène Cixous' writing in relation to women's performance methodologies. The debate is taken up by Susan Melrose in the article following this. Anna Cutler is currently producing events for the Belfast Festival, while completing her doctoral research in the Department of Literary and Media Studies at the University of North London.

Taking up the arguments set out by Anna Cutler in the preceding article, Susan Melrose here cautions against what she sees as the dangers Cutler fails to take into account of nominalization as an inherently conservative process. She suggests that the reification of the term ‘the body’ carries its own dangers, unless its complexities – as suggested by the title of this article – are recognized and assimilated. Arguing that many of the problems identified by Cutler are as applicable to the male as to the female performer, Susan Melrose concludes that the primacy of the word in documentation processes, though contested by Anna Cutler, has none the less caused her to overlook existing, effective forms of performance documentation, perhaps because they originate from and primarily serve the interests of performers rather than academics. Susan Melrose is Senior Lecturer at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she leads the MA course in Performance Studies. She is author of A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text (Macmillan, 1994), and a contributor to numerous journals and symposia in her field. Further contributions to the debate initiated in these articles are planned and invited.

This article considers ways in which contemporary feminist theatre-makers respond to Shakespeare by reviewing the performance and production histories of two recent theatre pieces – a new play by Bryony Lavery, and an innovative staging of Hamlet by Jane Prendergast. Drawing on interviews with participants and observation of rehearsals for Ophelia, Jane de Gay looks at the practical issues faced by performers and directors as they explored issues of gender in Shakespeare's plays and characters. She also builds on her own research interest in intertextuality to look at the issues which arise when women writers attempt to ‘rewrite’ Shakespeare, whether by adapting his plays for performance or by writing new texts which allude and respond to them. Jane de Gay is Researcher with the Open University ‘Gender, Politics, and Performance’ Research Project, with whose chair, Lizbeth Goodman, she has edited The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance (1998). She was also a major contributor to Feminist Stages, edited by Goodman, a collection of interviews with women in contemporary British theatre, published by Harwood in 1996.

As a companion piece to the foregoing study of Ophelia and /, Hamlet, there follows a full appraisal of a project discussed in the previous issue (NTQ53) as part of our feature on the Open University/BBC experiments in ‘multimedia Shakespeare’. For King Lear: Text and Performance – one of the pilot CD-ROMS which were the end-products of the experiment – three teams of performers were commissioned, in collaboration with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, to create over a two-day period their own variations on the Heath Scene in Lear. The most innovative of these, in Teresa Dobson's judgement, was conceived and directed by the Canadian performance artist and writer Beau Coleman, who envisioned a female Lear – a woman who, having found success in a male-dominated world, comes to confront the nature of that power in the process of relinquishing it. Teresa Dobson, who teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, witnessed and here records the development of the project, also assessing how far it succeeded in its intention to ‘raise questions about the gender and power relations in King Lear, as well as questions about what happens when Lear himself is cast against gender’.

It is the modernist wisdom that each art or medium should be defined in its own terms, so as to delimit it from other arts or media, while also arriving at certain conclusions as to the ‘message’ of the medium in question and its preferred subject-matters. This tradition has often been criticized for an inherent essentialism, and a less prescriptive approach is proposed in the following article – which, while taking the interaction between the different arts and media into account, also attempts to understand this in its historical perspective. The author, Klaus Ulrich Militz, concentrates mainly on the interrelations between the audio-visual performing arts of theatre, cinema, and television, and refers in particular to a number of artistic approaches to theatre which appear to be based on media interplay as a major source of aesthetic innovation. He also includes some crucial statements by theatre artists, suggesting different ways in which they came to locate their aesthetic positions. Klaus Ulrich Militz is a member of the media research group at the University of Edinburgh, and is currently completing his doctoral thesis on the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Today, argues Cara Gargano, we are at the cusp of a scientific paradigm shift which is having a profound influence on the way we construct our art and our identity. Like the shift from an oral to a literary mode of communication, or from a geocentric to a heliocentric world view, the movement from a Newtonian to a quantum world view has altered not only the way we understand our universe but the way we write and perform it. In recent years, critics David R. George, Natalie Crohn Schmitt, David Porush, and William Demastes have used terminology and concepts from the ‘new science’ to theorize about theatre. In this article Cara Gargano explores three new works that premiered in the 1995–96 New York City season – Rent, Interfacing Joan, and The Universe (ie, How It Works) – and discusses the way these performances rely, consciously or unconsciously, on this paradigm shift. She proposes that all three plays, while different in style, venue, and narrative, have at their base an assumption of a quantum universe – that is, they create a holistic mythology that gestures toward the theatre's origins as a ritual interaction with our world, and moves from a postmodern to a pre-millennial stance. Cara Gargano is Chair of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She has published in Modern Drama, L'Annuaire Théâtrale, New Theatre Quarterly, and Dance and Research. Her recent article in Reliologiques deals with the myth of Orpheus as a model for the quantum world.

The folk theatre of North-Eastern Brazil has been given scant critical attention in the past. Even within Brazil itself attention has been largely concentrated in the writings of folklorists, musicologists, and those interested in popular dance. Marco Camarotti Rosa's article is the first attempt to provide comprehensive coverage of the activity as theatre. In describing the four major forms, with some reference to the proliferation of deviations from the norm which are bound to occur when performance is rooted in the oral rather than literary tradition, the article draws attention away from a futile search for historic precedents and stages of development in favour of viewing the performances as they are now, and considering the part they play in the hard-working lives of the communities of North-Eastern Brazil. Marco Camarotti Rosa is a Lecturer in the Department of Theory of Art and Artistic Expression in the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE).