Welcome to the final issue of 2019 – 24.4 – and the first of which I have had the pleasure to be the editor. I’d like to thank all those who helped bring this issue together through reviewing, writing and editing its different parts. As always this is a collective effort, requiring the good will and hard graft of many colleagues. I was asked a few months ago to take on the role of interim editor of the journal and was delighted to throw myself into a round of reading and responding to both existing articles and the new ones as they came in. As ever the range of articles demonstrates the health of our area of theatre and performance studies – in the scholarship and the practice in which it engages. It’s a particular honour for me to take on this task as I have a long history with the journal both as an editorial board member and as a writer. It is the journal in which I was lucky to be first published and I still remember the insightful critique and care with which my first articles were dealt (however painful some of those review comments might have been!). Supporting early career researchers is a major ambition of this journal, and however daunting the rounds of peer review may be, a testament to the support offered by editorial board colleagues and others can be seen in the range of writers featured in this edition. I’m particularly pleased to see a Points and Practices piece from an Undergraduate student and a full article from a current PhD candidate.
Besides the range of academic and practitioner voices represented here, it is also important to note the geographic spread of the practices that are being written about. We have researchers from China, Europe, India, Singapore and South Africa writing about theatre practices from Assam (India), Kenya, Taiwan and the Philippines. Geographic spread is, of course, no automatic proxy for quality but what is important for a journal like RiDE is to ensure that the knowledge about applied theatre, drama education, community-based performance or socially engaged arts practice draws from a diversity of contexts. The range here illustrates unequivocally that insight is both generated and developed through different forms, methods and locations of practice.
While this geographical spread is welcome, it is also notable how the concerns of these very different articles overlap. A number expresses an overriding concern with both form and method, demonstrating how discussions of theatre form and method cannot be easily detached from analysis of research form and method. Peilin Lang’s piece on her beautiful work with the Nanyang Sisters interweaves the case for care in ethical research documentation with the documentary form in performance. Choices of how to conduct respectful research cannot be untied from the demands of her ‘docuvention’ theatre form. Although a profoundly different context, Molly Stedman’s account of the pragmatic difficulties with inclusive research practice while working on learning disabled theatre again demonstrate a questioning of research method that combines sensitivity to the dilemmas both of making theatre with and researching with diverse communities. Poppy Spowage, writing on the ‘East Africa Soul Train’, similarly questions the ‘outcome-based narratives’ of research practice, but is of course making an important point about the narrative-based assumptions of much theatre for development.
The intersection of the ethics of research methods, approaches to theatre making and then theatre form as it is realised in performance is most acutely analysed here in the article by Nena Močnik on embodied research practice with war-rape survivors. Again attention to the importance of embodied research is placed alongside a demand for more embodied practices allowing women in this post-war context in former Yugoslavia to ‘rehearse forgiveness’ in a way that gives proper space for the ‘pain stored in their bodies’. Across all the articles here, therefore, is a sense that openness to divergent forms of theatre and drama demanded by different contexts and different human experiences must be met by close attention to the subsequent necessary divergent methods for researching, documenting and then writing about this work.
This theme is also tackled in the final three articles in the edition. In their different registers, they address the way that non-dominant knowledge systems and practices are marginalised, ignored or repressed. Catherine Diamond’s account of a performance in the Philippines which demonstrated the cavalier approach to GM crops illustrates how Western, technological solutions in fact can be the cause of the problems they are seeking to resolve. Similarly, Yvette Hutchinson and Steve Ranford demonstrate an acute awareness of knowledge production through their focus on an approach to decolonising indigenous research methodologies. The difficulties faced when valuing indigenous performance forms are also discussed by Debajit Bora in his account of Badungduppa theatre in Assam. The economies of knowledge, and the dangers of spectacles of indigenous aesthetics becoming a tourist commodity, are the central themes in his work. All these pieces, of course, demonstrate how a commitment to decolonising research methodologies cannot be separated from the very theatre practices any new, more equitable methods are deployed to examine. ‘Colonial’ assumptions about what forms of theatre are prioritised, what forms of rehearsal and devising are chosen, and which voices take the stage can only be challenged when the very methods used to account for them are recognised as part of the problem we are seeking to address. And of course these are vital concerns for a journal like RiDE – as we seek to present different voices and practices but simultaneously recognise the very particular power we have to publish these articles in the first place.
Being interim editor of the journal is to signal that my position is temporary. And while the board will decide on the longer term, of course every editor of this journal has always been an interim. All we can do is read, review, select and support authors – along with the many other colleagues who make the journal – for a given period. Interim is Latin for ‘in the meantime’ or a period between events. It is therefore a duty of all editors to think of themselves as only editors in the meantime – and to be attentive to their particular, and often peculiar, present. In my specific meantime, I would argue that support for early career researchers is vital – we live in a present when the pressures on academic colleagues are huge. And then our present also demands that we consistently de-centre assumed locations of authority and knowledge. These are demands, I believe, this edition makes some tentative steps towards.
Being interim also suggests being positioned between events and the two events that I sit between as I write this are a US President telling Congresswomen to go back home and next week the selection of a new dog-whistling Prime Minister of the UK. While I won’t disguise my alarm at the rhetoric they employ and/or deny its very real impact, reading this issue has been an important reminder that this interim, these events, have no automatic right to function as the only reference point for the problems facing our world.