‘Silent Voices/Forbidden Lives: Censorship and Performance’ was the topic of IFTR's annual conference held in Lisbon, Portugal, in July 2009. Introducing the theme of the conference, the organizers signalled the importance of censorship for Portugal and other countries with histories of governmental dictatorship, given the ways in which this has made an impact or left its mark on the cultural, social and political fabric of the nation. The first two articles in this issue, by Jean Graham-Jones and Paul Rae, arose out of papers presented at the Lisbon conference. Both authors open up the censorship debate to argue for more subtle accounts of how the term is conceptualized. In brief, both are mindful of the cautionary note sounded in an earlier TRI article on ‘the limits of censorship’ by Janelle Reinelt where she writes, ‘“Censorship” has become a common-sense catchword; since everyone knows what it means, merely to name it is to proclaim it.’

‘Radical bodies’, to borrow from Diana Looser's title, emerge as a central concern in this general issue of TRI, where five articles explore the policitizing possibilities of theatre in relation to multifaceted questions of gender, cultural hybridity, identity and social democracy, in a rich and diverse range of performances and geographical locations.

Traditionally, the role of theatre and performance scholars is to examine theatre from critical and theoretical perspectives that adopt an outside-in approach. That is to say, our vantage point locates at some disembodied, critical distance from the process and the practice, from the making and the moment of showing. Increasingly, however, there are signs of inside-out approaches to theatre where avenues of theatre and performance enquiry are shaped by means of getting closer to practice. The first three articles brought together in this issue have their own, distinctive inside-out routes to theatre and performance knowledge.

This article explores women's practice and theatrical presentation of jujutsu and judo in the early years of the twentieth century in the United States, Britain and New Zealand. My discussion treats three figures in particular: Fude Yamashita, who tutored upper-class Washington socialites and performed judo demonstrations on the American stage; the English militant vote-seeker, playwright and jujutsu practitioner Edith Garrud, proponent of jujutsu as a political activist performance and coordinator of the ‘fighting suffragettes’; and New Zealander Florence Le Mar, vaudeville performer and ‘the World's Famous Ju-Jitsu Girl’, who enthralled audiences with her spectacular show designed as an educational enterprise to empower women through transferable self-defence skills. A historical survey of these women's activities contributes to our understanding of the varied ways that women during this period used performance to resist patriarchal institutions and definitions, while offering insights into some of the ways that the Japanese martial arts were reinvented following their introduction to the West.

This article probes some of the ‘catches’ in the universal application of the common-sense word ‘censorship’. To do so, it scrutinizes the application of the Spanish-language term censura to theatre produced in Buenos Aires and its working-class suburbs in the past thirty-five years, under dictatorship as well as democracy, through the examination of specific cases of productions and plays classified as censored, self-censored, and/or counter-censorial. The article concludes by examining two plays whose writing pre-dates the last dictatorship but which are still considered illustrative of a certain kind of Argentinian censorship. Through these various examples drawn from Argentinian theatrical practice, the article exposes censorship as a problematic category when applied equally at all times.

Queer theorists from across a broad range of disciplines argue that we are in a ‘normalizing’ or ‘homonormative’ period, in which marginalized subjectivities strive to align themselves with hegemonic norms. In terms of LGBTQ rights and representation, it can be argued that this has resulted in an increased visibility of ‘desirable’ gays (monogamous – ideally civil-partnered, white, financially independent, able-bodied) and the decreased visibility of ‘undesirable’ gays (the sick, the poor, the non-white, the non-gender-conforming). Focusing specifically on the effects of this hierarchy on the contemporary theatrical representation of gay HIV/AIDS subjectivities, this article looks at two performances, Reza Abdoh's Bogeyman (1991) and Lachlan Philpott's Bison (2009–10). The article argues that HIV/AIDS performance is as urgently necessary today as in the early 1990s, and that a queer dramaturgy, unafraid to resist the lure of normativity or the ‘gaystreaming’ of LGBT representation, is a vital intervention strategy in contemporary (LGBT) theatre.

Too programmatic an opposition to censorship fails to account for the nuanced justifications and popular support that underwrite some of the world's most refined censorship regimes. In this article, I argue that in order to do so, we need to place freedom, repression, regulation, expression and productivity in a more dynamic relationship than conventional critics of censorship are generally willing to entertain. By way of example, I examine theatre censorship in Singapore. The South East Asian city state inherited draconian colonial-era censorship regulations from the British, which it variously amends, rescinds and refines on a regular basis through a combination of negotiation, government review and, increasingly, public participation. I explore several examples, including an all-male production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which triggered a range of local and international responses, thereby exemplifying the complex historical, political and aesthetic dynamics of censorship in a highly globalized environment.

Founded in 1993, the Golden Bough Performance Society is one of Taiwan's foremost contemporary theatre companies, dedicated to decolonizing and localizing the theatre scene. Taking one of the company's most significant works to date, The Lady Knight-Errant of Taiwan – Peh-sio-lan, this article examines how cultural hybridity has come to inform the company's aesthetics, philosophy and practice in ways that serve to create an effective enunciatory site for the purposes of decolonization and empowerment.

The widespread discourse of ‘truth’ in theatre is problematic. Truth, as that which exists objectively before verification or as the correspondence between propositions and the world, may not fit with theatre as a creative process. While it might seem that there are correct or definitive choices on the rehearsal room floor, one might argue that these choices are merely subjective and relative. However, an alternative understanding of truth offered by Martin Heidegger's term aletheia might be helpful. In this article, I explore this notion of truth as ‘unconcealment’ by revisiting Gay McAuley's case study of a workshop for Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis by the South Australian company Brink. I argue that the rehearsal was not simply about meaning-making, but about the ‘disclosure of Being’ made possible through the energized play-space of the performance process.

Jingju (‘Beijing opera’) is China's most iconic traditional theatre, marketed as a global signifier of Chinese theatre and national identity. Although troupes from mainland China regularly tour Europe, audiences in the UK have also had access to Jingju via two indigenous organizations: the UK Beijing Opera Society (now defunct) and the London Jing Kun Opera Association (now in its ninth year). These organizations consist of Chinese, overseas Chinese and Western performers performing both Jingju and Kunju (‘Kun opera’). Where there is a mix of ethnicity, can ‘traditional Chinese theatre’ still be conceived of as ‘traditional’? How is Jingju mapped onto non-Chinese bodies? Can Jingju performances by ethnically white performers reflect diasporic identities? Drawing on the theories of Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, this article argues that by highlighting the performativity of identity, the performance of Jingju by non-Chinese performers challenges the notion of Jingju as a global signifier of ‘authentic traditional Chinese theatre’.

The profound spatial turn experienced by the humanities and social sciences over recent decades has prompted a re-examination of how space and place inform our understandings of theatre and performance. In this article we investigate the ways in which the theatrical labour that occurs within rehearsal and backstage spaces involves not only the making of theatrical performance but also the making of theatrical performers. Drawing on fieldwork-based research, and exploring the concepts of orientational metaphor, tactical inhabitation and training zones, we argue that performers’ use and inhabitation of rehearsal and backstage spaces is a key means through which they are formed as professional artists.

This article is about the power of cultural performances to shape and sometimes coerce public opinion and public behaviours. In the process, I intend to defend a concept which has few supporters these days: ‘political correctness’. So prevalent is this concept in our public discourse that its meanings have become habitual, thus ideologically invisible. Beginning with an examination of the term and its history, I situate it in relation to the arts through its relation to censorship, and frame it within the broad field of cultural performances to which it belongs. Concluding with a specific case study taken from theatre, I hope to perform a ‘correction’ of sorts – to reintroduce the term as a positive value and practice in an artistic milieu which has largely rejected its utility.

In a fashion that harks back to the birth of naturalistic drama, but also reflects contemporary anxieties about the etiolation of the real, the forensic capabilities of theatre have become, in the last two decades, the primary focus of theatrical attention. Reconsidering landmark works and rhetorical frames that helped to establish verbatim, virtual and in-yer-face theatre, this article explores the ways in which these key works and genres deploy, and attempt to jam, theatre's diagnostic machinery. The article contextualizes that machinery in relation to the medical underpinnings of naturalism, the growth of theatrical reflexivity from Pirandello to Beckett to Blast Theory, and the televisual phenomena of crime-scene investigation and fly-on-the-wall ‘reality shows’. In the final section I move to address two works which are explicitly about diagnosis, but which, in signal and purposeful ways, evade diagnosis: Must, by American performance artist Peggy Shaw and British company Clod Ensemble; and If That's All There Is, by UK-based company Inspector Sands.

This article offers a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's treatment of the actor and the concept of selfhood in The Gay Science and other works as an intervention in contemporary discussions of theatrical performance and the self, particularly Philip Auslander's critique of the logocentrism at work in various twentieth-century schools of acting. It argues that rather than representing an unproblematized or underproblematized constitutive selfhood, as Auslander suggests, the actor in Nietzsche's formulations becomes a prime vehicle for communicating the necessary but impossible fiction of the self. Nietzsche's vision of theatrical performance aligns with a number of recent theories of performance and agency as well as with the ideas on selfhood put forward in the stage work of director Tim Etchells and is explored for the way in which it offers contemporary theorists an avenue for moving beyond an epistemological critique of stage performance towards a greater appreciation of the theatre's potential for radically unsettling our notions of identity.

This article considers the uncanny action by three Slovenian artists in 2007 to rename themselves Janez Janša, the name of the right-wing prime minister of Slovenia. It assesses specific performances by the artists, including the Slovene National Theatre, a postdramatic verbatim piece about a Roma family evicted from their homes by Janša's government in response to the mob action of Slovenian villagers. It also interrogates their performance event for the Transmediale Festival at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin in 2008, first banned and then reinstated by the festival organizers, where they created a virtual signature of their new name on the memorial. Theoretically, the importance of naming and renaming as practised by the artists is examined in relation to concepts of subversive affirmation, the author-function in society and postdramatic theatre.

Drawing on an idea of the theatrical event, this article sets out to analyse the interactions between the housed (audiences) and the homeless (performers), in order to understand the theatrical conventions, performance contexts and sociocultural conditions that make it possible to narrow the gap between the housed and homeless. Focusing on three performances of zAmya Theater Project's Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup), I analyse theatre's capacity and its limits to build community and examine why different interpretive communities respond differently to the same staged moments.

This article analyses Sistren Theatre Collective's theatrical and organizational collective model by contextualizing the company's commitment to collectivity in terms of political and social shifts in Jamaica during the 1980s. Despite the importance of collective organizing as an important form of resistance to neo-liberalism, the article examines how race- and class-based divisions within Jamaican society were reproduced within Sistren. I argue that this was because collectivity masked the differences between the members of the group, rather than allowing for discussions on how these differences could be negotiated and the divides crossed.

Scottish vaudevillian Harry Lauder epitomized Scottishness in the Anglo-American cultural imaginary for much of the twentieth century. Yet Lauder's Scottishness was a carefully crafted performance, a collaborative effort between Lauder and his American agent, William Morris, centred on Lauder's embodiment of the ‘canny Scot’ stereotype. The article argues that this performance served two primary objectives within the context of early twentieth-century vaudeville. First, stories of Lauder's ‘characteristic’ Scottish thrift worked to deflect commentary about the star's status as a highly paid foreign commodity. By planting stories and arranging interviews that represented Lauder as a skilled and cunning Scot, Morris addressed growing anxieties that men, as well as women, were becoming mere cogs in the machine of corporate Broadway capital. Second, Morris's representation of Lauder as the epitome of all things Scottish guaranteed the loyal patronage of the Scottish diaspora and supported expressions of nationalist pride that were not antithetical to Scottish membership within the Union.

This dossier aims to report on recent developments and interventions that are changing the landscape of Irish theatre-studies scholarship, revealing the ways in which discourses of nationalism, sexuality, gender, class and the family are being renegotiated. Critical analysis of Irish theatre has, up until recently, focused upon the dramatic text in a legacy of work that has traditionally been valued for its ‘literary’ merit. Now, we can see how an interrogation of the process of canonicity and a focus on the conditions and potential of performance are being addressed by a new generation of scholarship. Such research serves to critique the narratives leading up to, and beyond, Irish independence, repositioning the relationship between the founders of the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century and cultural nationalism, as well as resituating the dramaturgical praxis of a central figure such as John Millington Synge. Contributors to this dossier also draw attention to the ways in which recent publications on Irish theatre take social transformations into account, and give a sense of the ever-shifting trajectories of theatre, performance and culture on the island.