Editorial: On Fire

Theatre has a troubled history with fire. Both are agents of transformation, one more consuming than the other; theatre plays with fire and fire razes theatre. As theatre disappears in flames, so the performer arises from the ashes, staged images burn on the retina of the spectator and fire itself stages the greatest spectacles on Earth (from natural event, through riot and calamity) and in the sky, as orchestrated pyrotechnics, fireworks marking human achievement.

From the grand spectacle of fire to the radiant incandescence of an actor's energy, from the choreography of fireworks to the wild torchlight processions and rituals of burning effigies, from the conflagration of theatres (recurrent throughout history) to the ‘victim burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames’ (Artaud (1958: 13). This issue explores the elemental, creative and destructive force of fire (its assignations and allegiances, dalliances and collusion) with performance – at once transformative, celebratory, purifying, cathartic and catastrophic.

From firework displays in China in the first millennium to the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini's urban spectacles of the seventeenth century, from the fire spectacles of the nineteenth century and the heroism of emergent fire brigades to today's Burning Man Festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert; from the early twentieth-century European fascination with Balinese cremation to the New Age revival of Beltane and Imboic (sacred Celtic fire festivals); from the ravishing desolation of the arsonist act to the revelatory sacrifice of selfimmolation, the thrill of the backyard bonfire and the sparkling mystery of spontaneous combustion: Fire is spectacular, terrifying and awesome; it is flagrant and transformative, causing erasure and renewal – what better analogy (or aspiration) for performance.

Against the obscene cinematic blaze of napalm and the tele-visual glow of ‘shock and awe’ tactics, theatre's enduring love of smoke seems tame (without fire), and yet the magician's original ‘smoke and mirrors’ gains currency in an age of deception (in contrast, perhaps, to fire's formidable, ‘purifying’ consumption). To shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre will undoubtedly cause panic; fire has often reduced theatres to ashes from Shakespeare's Globe in the London Borough of Southwark to the Kabuki-za in Ginza, Tokyo, fire is both an instrument of riot and destruction and a burning metaphor for success and creativity – ‘to set the world on fire’; to be inflamed, to blaze, to alight, the theatre is lit, the flames leap …

Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance and offers itself with the warmth of love. Or it can go back down into the substance and hide there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance. Among all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and apocalypse. It is pleasure for the good child sitting prudently by the hearth; yet it punishes any disobedience when the child wishes to play too close to its flames.

(Bachelard 1964: 7)

The Psychoanalysis of Fire, which was written in 1938 by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard is probably the inspiration for this issue (and is referenced by many authors in this issue), in the sense that an encounter with this short text twenty-five years ago had a profound and formative effect on me and continues to smoulder in my imagination, and yet it would be difficult to be precise about what it actually inspires – there being both an alluring and elusive quality to the poetics that operate in Bachelard's writing. It is a wonderful and mischievous text, ignoring most conventions of academic enquiry – empirical evidence, sustained argument and robust conclusions – it is speculative and fabulous, the words themselves functioning like fire to enflame the imagination; it is a reverie on fire.

It was also the inspiration for a production that Philip Mackenzie and I struggled to make with members of The Practice (the ensemble of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre and Centre for Performance Research then located in Cardiff, Wales); struggled in that the never fully realised production went through many versions and phases of research and development, was showcased several times, shone brightly, briefly but hardly toured and somehow remained a fractured masterpiece, a brilliant failure: It was called The Burning of the Dancers. The title was ‘borrowed’ from anthropologist Edward L. Schieffelin's ground-breaking ethnographical study of the Kaluli people from the tropical forests of Papua New Guinea, and particularly their Gisaro ceremony. Schieffelin's book – first published in 1976 – is entitled The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers.

The production of The Burning of the Dancers was intended as the companion piece to The Origin of Table Manners as well as a third show entitled From Honey to Ashes, both shows also ‘borrowing’ titles from seminal anthropological works (of structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss), and, although inspired by the books, neither – as with The Burning of the Dancers – attempted to adapt or stage the texts as theatre productions.

In The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers Schieffelin describes the extraordinary Gisaro ceremony and advances it as one of the world's most significant performances (from an anthropological/ethnographic perspective – especially with regard to symbol, emotion and social reciprocity); it comprises one long-house family (the guests) dancing and singing songs to another (the hosts) and evoking memories of places and people that give rise to seething sorrow and uncontrollable weeping in the host community. This deep and communal sorrow finds conclusion in the violent burning – with torches – of the backs and shoulders of the dancers – who continue to dance while this is happening and who are eventually compensated and thanked for their sacrifice.

The themes of the burning body and the ‘burning of the dancers’ runs through this issue both as beguiling metaphor and as shocking reality. Eugenio Barba in his text In Praise of Fire draws attention to theatre's binding contract to burn down its houses (literally) and yet also focuses upon the defiant and mesmeric capacity of the performer – the dancer – to burn (metaphorically) and to capture (inflame, illuminate) the imagination of the on-lookers – the audience.

In my own article, Burning Bodies: Transformation and fire, I attempt to survey the spectacular nature of fire in public spaces and in the public sphere, as rupture, catastropheinterruption, punishment, ceremony and celebration: fire as transformative element but also a destructive force. Through ‘acts’ of self-immolation, witch burning, cremation, civic event, spontaneous human combustion and mechanisms of control, I work back to theatre and from the outdoors to the inside, from fire in the sky and on open ground to fire in the eye and contained in the body. Finally arriving at a notion of internal combustion within theatre, within the body of the performer, a containment achieved through technique and command, scorching the imagination of the audience, not igniting the fabric of the theatre – I end back in the Old Testament thinking of the burning bush that Moses saw, which burned fiercely and caught his attention but was not consumed by the flames.

In English, ‘fireman’ (in dictionaries situated between ‘fire maker’ and ‘fire manic’) is one of those words that can have two very different meanings; in this case, two opposite meanings are held by the word – it is he who fights fire, attends to them and attempts to extinguish them or he who ignites fires, stokes them, tends to them or maliciously releases them. The fireman (consistent with fire) is both protector (of life and property) and destroyer: the firefighter and the arsonist. In Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, (first published in 1953) the title refers to the temperature at which books auto-ignite – the flash point, the kindling point) the Firemen set light to books and the houses in which they are hidden, kept in secret – books are no longer tolerated as private property, now outlawed in this dystopian future society.

Captain Beatty, the chief fireman in Bradbury's novel, explains the need to cremate the dead and to incinerate books – to cause the living to forget and for there to be an erasure of communal memory (the opposite of the ‘sorrow’ evoked through songs of remembrance in the Kaluli people's Gisaro). Beatty says: ‘Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean’ (Bradbury 1987: 60).

The burning of books and the destruction of libraries scars most cultures – from the Nazi book burnings in Opernplatz, Berlin, Germany, to the destruction of the Ancient Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, from the Qin Dynasty burning books and burying author/ scholars in China to the recent conflagration of the Library of Baghdad; libricide has a sorry history throughout the world. And biblioclasm and vandalism towards libraries (even in – and in some cases especially within – universities) emerges again, rampant, unrestrained under signs of progress, rationalization and digitization.

In Fahrenheit 451 people who still hoard or have access to books need to begin to memorize the texts to protect against the lost and wanton destruction – or they self-immolate and burn amidst their treasures. Bradbury narrates:

Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and the keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.

(Bradbury 1987: 141)

In 1979, twenty-six years after it was first published (in an asbestos binding), Bradbury added a new final section to the book and in that coda wrote:

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority … feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse …. Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.

(Bradbury 2003: 175, 179)

Ted Hiebert, in his article That Which Burns: A meditation on fire, allegory and competitive telekinesis, does not reflect on the burning of libraries or on the burning of a single book but upon a solitary, flickering candle. Starting and ending with a description of a competitive game to influence the flame of a candle, in another site, at distance and through the power of thought and telekinesis; the article rapidly develops into a meditation on flame and fire, as if we, the readers, were in training, in preparation for such control and manipulation. Hiebert's article is perhaps the closest to Bachelard, and functions in a similar way: reverie, reflection and speculation. Whereas Bachelard can be located within a tradition of philosophy and literary analysis, Hiebert seeks the performative potential from a meditation on fire and the philosophical and strategic implications. Hiebert shuffles and weaves and draws the reader closer to the fire, seemingly all within the major scale of ‘B’ – Bachelard, Baudrillard, Borges, Bourriaud and Breton. The article is intellectually thrilling (a word seldom used in these pages) and sets the mind ablaze. In his opening section Hiebert states that: ‘[T]o think about fire is to potentially light oneself on fire in the process – to be seduced by the flames and perhaps even be burned in the process.’ This and Hiebert's observation that thinking about fire rapidly turns allegorical, obtains to many contributions contained in this issue.

Early in the process of curating this issue I was pleased to hear from Eugenio Barba, who offered the text of a speech he first gave in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the occasion of being offered an honorary doctorate: In Praise of Fire relates fire to transformation and thus resistance – in marked contrast to indifference, for which fire offers no safe haven. Barba proposes theatre (in process and in performances) as ‘a land of fire’ but also points to theatre's fate (house – stage and auditorium) to be recurrently burned to ashes. He lists several examples of theatre's ‘binding appointment with flames’: His fascination with fire (that can also be witnessed in his own productions) and the roll-call first evoked in this speech has led to a much more ambitious project (with long-term collaborator and theatre historian Nicola Savarese) – to chronicle the occurrences of theatre fires across cultures and millennia. Barba points also to fire's double nature to be, on the one hand, destructive and catastrophic or, on the other, cleansing and transformative, and argues that the dance that constitutes and compels theatre making is firmly rooted in fire's second attribute – the cleansing and transformative; once again the dancer is burning.

Eugenio Barba suggested that I contact Nicola Savarese – with whom I had worked more than twenty years previously – to see if he would share some of the research he was and still is conducting (with Eugenio Barba) on a world history of theatres that have been destroyed by fire. The curiosity, enthusiasm and marvel (in the sense of a Boys' Own Book of Wonder) that imbued our collaboration decades before was instantly rekindled and a rapid exchange of ideas and examples flowed. The texts were translated by Thomas Haskell Simpson through serial postings and dispatches across several weeks and I wanted to keep this sense of instalment and accumulation in the pages of this issue. It has always been our hope that Performance Research might commission and assist in the translation of new texts (or previously untranslated work) for English language versions in the journal and I am especially pleased to have four contributions of translated work in this issue.

Savarese's Arabian Phoenix Goes to the Theatre focuses on eleven specific examples of theatres being reduced to ashes by fire, ranging from 2,000 years previously – Circus Maximus of Ancient Rome – to more recent occurrences – El Teatro del Picadero, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1981. He records both the accidental and premeditated destructive force of fire within theatre – from technical mishap to arson, from innocent mistake to political intent, and gives testament to fire's power to raze theatre to the ground but theatre's ability to rise from the ashes. Although natural disasters, riot, vandalism, property development, censorship and political agendas might ignite theatres' fragile and all too combustible houses, theatre itself remains defiant and molten, resisting both fire and water.

Following Savarese's broad spectrum of theatre fires, Pannill Camp focuses on a single instance – the burning of the Paris Opera in 1781 and particularly the paintings of Hubert Robert (known for his Roman ruin style). The paintings of Robert, depicting the Paris Opera in flames from various perspectives and distances are extraordinarily detailed and take on an impressive theatricality of their own – almost as if they were stunning backdrops to an opera. In his article Belle Horreur: Hubert Robert's scenic space and the Paris Opera fire of 1781, Pannill Camp eloquently draws out the complex web of issues surrounding such painting in an age before photography – the sense of reportage and documentation, the urgency of production, the aesthetic of ruins and antiquity and most of all what Camp terms the ‘theatrical vision’, which renders the horrendous fire of an opera house to appear as a splendid set.

Pannill Camp's text has a wonderful resonance with the next article that also focuses on a specific theatre fire – the Brooklyn Theater fire of 1876. Now in the early age of photography and illustrated newspapers, the image not of the building on fire but the leading actress in peril becomes central (conflated with the actual photograph of the pitiful orphan she was playing). J. K. Curry delves into the life of Kate Claxton who miraculously escaped the Brooklyn fire and gained significant publicity and ‘celebrity’ profile from it, only to be ever haunted by fires and the association with fire – with audiences eventually being deterred by her appearances and her life becoming the subject of ridicule. It is rare in Performance Research to give space to an article firmly placed in a theatre history genre but Fire Jinx: The aftermath of the Brooklyn Theater Fire adds greatly to these pages and requires us to think through issues of escaping theatre fires (and the consequence) in a different light.

After three substantial articles of theatre history we now make a break with theatre fires. Abhay Ghiara's text is a series of fragments, like a necklace of beads, perhaps worry beads (kombolói), and as in the Greek practice we are invited to turn each one and reflect for a moment. In Thirteen Fragments of Life and Death Abhay Ghiara weaves autobiographical memories of fires – from Parsi ancestors, temple rites, travels across India and ultimately the teenage challenge to jump through a hoop of fire. These fragments are interlayered with short interjections on economics, Adam Smith and Ghandhiji and residing behind all of the fragments is the question as to whether fire itself can be defiled or whether it only ever cleanses and purifies (a fundamental difference in Parsi and Hindu belief and practices).

From the private and personal fragments of Abhay Ghiara we leap to ‘fireworks as a paradigm for the relationship between theatre and politics’. This is how Fred Dalmasso opens his essay Badiou's Spectator: Subject and fireworks display. But before we encounter Badiou, it is Mallarme's observation of a crowd witnessing a firework display in 1878 that provides the springboard for the article – the ‘celebratory conflagrations’ affirming State grandeur. The fireworks are co-opted and at this point the crowd is not yet mobilized; the events of the Paris Commune are yet to happen. Badiou's reflection on Mallarme, the 1880s, and the events of May 1968 in Paris form the backbone of this article, which flexes around notions of the crowd, mass, mobilization, the audience (and its dispersal) and the possibilities (potential) for those gathered at a firework display and those at a theatre event. A collective formed by chance, ‘present’ at something ephemeral, witnessing a disappearance and wondering about the performers and the pyrotechnic trace.

The three sets of Artist Pages within this issue add dimension and graphic portrayal of fire in a curious, enigmatic and disconcerting way. Horse Breaking and Walking on Fire is a performance document by Daviel Shy that first focuses upon the durational aspect of fire and its own transformation – wood, charcoal, carbon and ash – and then her own process of learning to walk on fire connects with horse breaking and horse blessing. And then the barbecuing of Shy, or horse or lamb … This piece ruptures the other texts in a disorienting way. As does Cinders by Rudy Lemcke, a single page/canvas capturing and memorializing the faces and obituaries of numerous residents of San Francisco who died from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Lemcke collected the obituaries and set light to them, pasting the cinders onto canvas with beeswax, creating a beautiful yet disturbing mosaic – a quilt of fire and memory. Sarikartal and Ovalioglu's Visual Impulse charts a complex process of collaboration between a visual artist and a performer researching ancient singing traditions of Anatolia: The utterances of deaf mute people, the texts of Dante, and the visualization of sound waves are all layered to create a series of dissonant sounds and ululations that are then further transformed into a series of fire paintings.

Also in a marked shift from the historical accounts of theatres burning and the destructive force of fire, Zoe Barltrop's text Playing with (The Erotics of) Fire in Circus Performance springs from the resonance of fireworks and circus and the coupling of sexuality and eroticism, and with Jean Genet's essay The Tightrope Walker inspiring an enflamed reading of circus, fire, sexuality, ‘queer’ and desire. The work of Circus of Horrors (founded in 1995) and specifically their touring show Evilution (2006) is analysed in depth and placed within a loose but fruitful theoretical frame and an insightful series of literary references. The bizarre acts of this ‘adult’ circus are described with great pleasure and the detail of fire acts contained within the various routines ignore all advice not to play with fireworks and instead generate desire to ‘live dangerously’. The fiery antics of Captain Dan and Dr Haze amaze and appal: Barltrop passionately communicates Circus of Horrors' ability to momentarily encourage its audience to ‘participate in the inflamed life of the world’.

From the large ensemble and multi-national world of London-based Circus of Horrors we move to the Berlin-based Pyromantiker (core team of two) whose origins lie in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Bronwyn Tweddle in The Anarchy of the Theatrical Moment: A profile of The Pyromantiker offers an analysis of their use of pyrotechnics in various productions and an overview of their development and adaptation – from their roots in the famous ‘East German’ theatre school, Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, to German unification, through puppet theatre, to what some countries categorize as community or theatre in education work – an evolution of a ‘poetic slapstick fireworks’. This work is in stark contrast to the shocking and purposefully outrageous Circus of Horrors; The Pyromantiker are deliberately attempting to apply theatre and pyrotechnics to social, educational and political issues/agendas at a more domestic level.

And although fireworks can be controlled, even domesticated (think of indoor fireworks), their compelling shock and awe lies in their thrilling combustion; dynamite and gunpowder explosions ignite chemical implants of wonder – one only needs to read a partial list of components (phosphorus, sulphur, chlorine, potassium, magnesium, zinc, sodium and titanium) and the mind is ablaze and incandescent, the eardrums hurt and the smell overpowers: It could be war, the terror of the battlefield. Greer Crawley in Proving Grounds: Live fire, starfish and incendiaries offers a sweeping account of the military's use of fireworks in training, mock battles and decoys and the staging of the real throughout history but he also folds back the theatrical and spectacular nature of military display to reveal theatre design and scenographers' engagement in modelling and testing explosive impact, developing more elaborate decoys and as a method of predicting damage and effect. The interplay of theatre techniques and military use of fireworks generating and informing representational strategies – a two-way street in which artists explore ‘the possibilities of the spectacle in military displays’ but that the military utilizes theatre crafts and designer techniques to model their scenarios and construct simulations; here the Theatre of War takes on another chilling but fascinating dimension.

It would have been strange if an issue of Performance Research on Fire had not included what is undoubtedly the largest fire performance festival in the world today, part corporation, part community, part pop-up city, part sculpture park, part potlatch, part New Age rite (or old hippie ritual) and part anarchic fireball – all of these parts do not add up to what the Burning Man Festival comprises. Rachel Bowditch's lavishly illustrated article Phoenix Rising: The culture of fire at the Burning Man Festival goes a long way to capturing the creative fervour and regenerative dynamic of this ever-burgeoning annual event. In the UK the Glastonbury Festival held in British midsummer inevitably results in festival goers enjoying a wet life in a quagmire of mud; for the Burning Man Festival it would seem that fire is built upon fire, as the community – an entire city is built around the central effigy – lives for a week in the blazing heat, in one of the driest places on Earth, the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, USA, and spends all day and night playing with fire. Bowditch offers the context and development of this major event in sculpture making, performance, pyrotechnics and alternative living; she emphasizes the community spirit and the complex organizational structures that lie behind this seemingly anarchic event that espouses (and sustains) radical inclusion. With the burning of the central effigy the city begins a process of its own erasure and while Bowditch points to aspirations of phoenix-like transformation within the process of community gathering, it is the image of the community cleaning the desert before departing, all structures burned that is impressive and testament to fire's purifying quality. Here the phoenix not only disappears in immolation but even the debris and ashes are removed in a cleansing act of repair and renewal – before it may rise again.

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe engages consciousness studies to apprehend fire's creative and destructive force as an agent of renewal and as catalyst in the process from ‘ashes to ashes’. Starting from the cosmic mind and Vedic concepts he works through Craig and Wagner to reveal fire's function in ‘unmanifest to manifest creation’.

Christel Weiler entreats the reader to appreciate ash; she hopes that theatre might ignite more than one spark and that fire itself might be the trace (for what has been erased). In this playful and poetic text Flying Sparks (also in part inspired by Bachelard), Weiler struggles to remember, to piece back together again, the events and fragments that led to her agreeing to set light to herself for a ‘site-specific’ performance created in 1988 for the ruins of the Belvedere near Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany (a nineteenth-century castle in dereliction since the early 1960s). Recalling a stuntman's disdain of her fiery theatrics, wrestling with the image of the young girl Paulinchen ablaze in Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter (Shockheaded Peter) and perplexed by a possible misreading of a letter that Jan Palach left in Wenceslas Square, Prague, Czech Republic (when he self-immolated in protest to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring), Weiler's text layers autobiographical conundrum with reflection on fire.

In response to the call for proposals for this issue, I was surprised to receive many evangelical, fire-inspired, Christian-zeal proposals from Africa, the Americas and Europe. It would seem that the fires of hell are still burning, flaring not smouldering, in the imagination and hearts of many Christians around the world and some of these proposals had the quality of proselytizing and dramatizing that is embedded in Pastor Keenan Roberts' Hell House. Having not accepted any of the far too flagrant and partisan proposals in this category, and yet wanting to find a way of engaging with the dominant function of fire in Christian constructs of Hell, it was serendipitous to discover that the Geelong (Australia) based theatre company Back to Back were planning a one-off community staging of Pastor Roberts' daemonic play (as in a haunted house fairground attraction, spectators are taken on a journey through exhibits of sinful vignettes) and that Theron Schmidt had the opportunity to observe the devising and rehearsal process.

Schmidt's article Outsider Theatre: A journey through Back to Back's Hell House was the last piece to be written for this pyre of an issue and chronicles an unlikely staging of Roberts's script. Pastor Roberts produces ‘kits’ and allows the play to be produced by anyone without charge but no element can be changed; often it is a project of evangelical churches and their congregations, but in the bodies and minds of Back to Back (whose actors are often described as having ‘intellectual disabilities’) the play, its ‘rooms’, exhibits and scenes/scenarios underwent considerable change and refraction, even if Roberts' script was ingeniously and reverently observed.

Consistent with an observation made in my own article – that fire's ‘natural’ home in relation to art and performance is within outdoor spectacle and that any attempt to ‘domesticate’ it and bring in indoors is both dangerous and potentially catastrophic (seemingly obvious but surprisingly often ignored) – Jeni Walwin begins her timely reappraisal of British-based performance artist and ‘pyrotechnic sculptor’ Stephen Cripps (1953 – 82) from the position of a curator having to produce work for outdoor spaces. This was due to the necessity to protect and safeguard the Victorian mansion where she worked in the early 1980s – commissioning the work of Cripps and other emerging UK performance artists for the grounds of Bracknell Hall, Berkshire, England (rather than its rooms).

London riots (2011).Fire raging through a building in Tottenham

Walwin locates Cripps' work within a tradition of European art practices, events and works, reaching back to the Italian Futurists, through the Fire Paintings of Yves Klein, the triggered control system explosions of Roman Singer, the book burnings of John Latham and the destructive art of Gustav Metzger. She offers an account of his all too brief body of work, his aesthetic, his artistic strategy and ethos and the artists who collaborated with him. The article then proceeds with tracing legacy and influence and constructs an overview of performance art engagement with fire across the last thirty years. She focuses on the differences in emphasis towards process and product: For Klein, no matter how spectacular the process (always the showman) – here the naked model impressing her flame-retardant doused body on the canvas; Klein then ‘painting’ with flame thrower – it was the resultant art object that mattered (and could be sold); for Cripps, where nothing remained it all disappeared: the event, the performance and the process of fire was the art work.

I end amidst tremulous flame and thinking of William Blake (1757–1827) the visionary artist and poet who witnessed the Gordon Riots when mobs set London in flames in June 1780 and who through chance encounter saw in graphic detail the burning of Newgate Prison (just inside the City of London) – the fires of unbridled revolution to haunt and inspire him. An artist so often associated with fire and the image of a body in flames, I give Blake (almost) the last words:

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare sieze the fire?

(1826 [1794]: 34)

On Fire will find its counterpoint in On Ice to be published later this year and in case fire and ice seem to summon the world's end, recall Frank Zappa who once said: ‘It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia’ (1989: 203).

This issue has been compiled and edited during an extremely difficult period in my life, with compounded work and health problems – the fire of curating often spluttering, faltering and in danger of being snuffed out. The issue is delayed but now finally ablaze. I should like to thank all the contributors for their patience and my family and colleagues at Centre for Performance Research for their support and loyalty but most especially Sandra Laureri (Performance Research, managing editor) who kept the flame alive.

Notes