Editorial

In my last co-authored editorial – with mélissandre varin and Carmen Wong (Curtis, varin, and Wong 2022) – we (as editors) enacted a kind of refusal to guide the reader through the contributions, but rather, we wanted to emphasise the issue as a meeting point – however temporary or enduring – for thinkers, makers, writers, and readers. An attempt at re-forming or re-thinking the role of an editor, and echoing Glenn Odom’s last editorial for STP (Odom 2022), which emphasised the editor as facilitator in supporting authors’ articles to publication, the impulse to draw away from commentary or curating could risk being read as a smoothing over the dynamics of power embedded in the processes of publishing. This is not to suggest that opening opportunities for readership between and among our particular editorial framings should be dismissed, but that the constant shifting of meaningful connections between and among our contributions is inherent in the critical work we do in research, creative practice, and education. Asking difficult – perhaps even awkward – questions of and about the world (our immediate environment and that which we encounter, momentarily or otherwise), helps to foster a mode of critical and dialogic solidarity that I hope attends to (rather than glosses over) instability, precarity, and crisis.

We are, at the time of writing, in the UK, still in a period of industrial action in higher education: the UCU marking and assessment boycott has officially ended, but members are facing further strike action at the beginning of the new academic year.¹ I would like to continue from Bryony White’s important emphasis on the strike in her editorial earlier this year (White 2023a) to say that things are still desperate, and that conjuring positivity remains hard. Solidarity and endurance are being tested. I have found some comfort and connection across disciplinary and institutional divides in union branch meetings, UCU Solidarity Movement meetings,² and informal (and often brutally honest) conversations with colleagues and friends. Opportunities for collaboration in research – including in the work of editing – have emerged, for me, as networks of peer support from which to draw strength; the first (special) issue of STP for 2024 will be dedicated to the possibilities of seeking solidarity, perhaps even wonder or hope, through performance, and the current development of that issue is being shaped by and in the context of the constantly shifting ground(s) on which we find ourselves.

We have some things to celebrate within the STP team (and the discipline), and I would like to give those items some space here. Our newest editor, Bryony White, was awarded the TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) Early Career Researcher Prize for 2023 for her article ‘Returning to the scene of the crime: gendered and racialised violence in Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene ’, which is published now in Art Journal (White 2023b). We also had six submissions to STP (one of five disciplinary journals to which candidates can submit their entries) for the TaPRA Postgraduate Essay Prize for 2023 – thank you to all of the peer reviewers who offered thoughtful and supportive comments on these entries. Debanjali Biswas’ ‘En/k/counter: reflections on violence and performance in India’ – submitted for STP – was a runner up in the final three essays, and so will be developed for publication in the coming months. We are joined for 2023–24 by Estelle Papadimitriou as STP’s social media editor; Estelle has already been hard at work developing the journal’s social media platforms, including @JournalStp on Twitter/X and @journalstp on Instagram, announcing new articles and issues, calls for submissions and special issues, and ‘from the archives’ posts highlighting (and celebrating) articles from STP’s back issues. In this and the previous issue, there have been no book reviews published. Following on from Glenn Odom’s in-conversation review with Esther Kim Lee and Aparna Dharwadker (Kim Lee, Odom, and Dharwadker, 2023) we are continuing to search for new ways of reviewing books, performances, and exhibitions that reflect the discursive nature of this event and advance the review process towards more dynamic and dialogic interactions between peers. We will soon be announcing a call for expressions of interest in a reviews editor role, who will support the development of this area of the journal.

The selection of articles in this issue represents the international reach of STP, and reflects the breadth of work that is submitted to us. Within the contributions for this issue, there are striking themes of performance’s locatedness, whether in the embodied experiences of performers, geographic or national specificity of theatrical forms, or cultural exchanges (including translation) of themes and styles. The first contribution, by Ana Cristina Nunes Pais, offers a development of studies in recent years on affect and the senses, and proposes the process of ‘Thinking at the Edge’ (TAE) as a critical tool for practitioners to articulate – through written/spoken language – embodied experience and felt knowledge. Engaging with three Portuguese native speaker performers from Portugal and Brazil, Pais presents discursive and affective interactions with these practitioners that are focused around three key terms: performing, presence, and play. The performative and often personal accounts that emerge draw meaningful connections to love, care, and uncertainty, and move to help articulate the ‘fuzzy feelings and vague intuitions’ that facilitate and accompany our navigation of contemporary lived experience.

Next in the issue is Soudabeh Ananisarab’s study of the Malvern Festival (1929–1949), which seeks to complicate accounts of theatre history – in this instance, the development of the New Theatre Movement in British theatre – which tend towards binarizing models of theatre perceived as having artistic value as opposed to commercial success. Ananisarab examines the policies and politics of the Festival through the interactions of key figures involved in its founding, its funding, and its occupation of Malvern, a town in the West Midlands (Worcestershire), including the questionable financial (and perhaps even cultural) benefits for its residents. As Ananisarab makes clear, the querying of artistic value, economic/commercial success, and the function of theatre and performance is familiar in the UK’s arts funding landscape. In a detailed analysis of the Malvern Festival as a case study, including the exploration of unpublished and under-explored correspondence between its progenitors, Ananisarab unpicks the relative failures of the Festival in order to provide a more nuanced accompaniment to narratives of ‘successful’ or ‘progressive’ experimental British theatre of this period.

Olumuyiwa A. Akande’s article on Hausa Koroso Dance seeks to situate this dance form – originating in Northern Nigeria – on a global academic stage. Building on conventional understandings of the aesthetics of Koroso Dance, and giving detailed commentary on set movements, costumes, and the context of the form, Akande argues for the possibilities of Koroso Dance as a social commentary and positions dancers as interpreters of cultural and political life. Drawing from performance observations and artist interviews, Akande uses social and anthropological theories of dance – as developed by Andrée Grau – to analyse the use of Koroso as a mode of satire and of social control. Attention is also given to the adaptations of Koroso Dance (or integration into/of other styles) across Africa and the Hausa diaspora, which offers a further meditation on the interpretative possibilities of the form.

There then follows three articles focused on the role of theatre in cultural and transnational exchange, and national imaginaries that have been shaped by conflict. María Bastianes’ contribution is the first of two articles on the work of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. Specifically, Bastianes explores the early reception of Lorca’s work on the British stage (and radio) between the 1930s and 1950s. Bastianes’ commentary on early productions of Lorca’s work in the UK reflects their complex reception, and develops the resonances of Lorca’s social and political context with working-class audiences of theatre and Catholic Irish culture. María Del Mar González Chacón’s article on Irish playwright Lynne Parker’s unpublished version of La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba, 1993) brings the discussion of Lorca’s work in an Irish context into sharp focus. First providing a context for Irish theatre between the 1970s and 1990s, Chacón pays particular attention to the representations of women in Lorca’s Spain and in Parker’s Belfast, and to their centrality in the play. In her adaptation of Lorca, Parker describes – in an interview with Chacón, included in full at the end of the article – her development of the text to include Irish terms of speech and colloquialisms, in order to bring the play closer to Irish audiences and to liberate the lyricism of Lorca’s text from the English translations that she used as source material. Chacón argues that Parker’s play be acknowledged as part of the canon of Irish re-writings of Lorca, and considered within the context of European theatre in terms of the possibilities of exploring Irish identities through other cultures. Shelly Zer-Zion’s study of David Bergelson’s play I Shall Not Die But Live (1944) traces the transnational network facilitated by the play between Jews of Soviet Russia and Jews living in Palestine. Bergelson’s play, originally conceived as a script for a full-length Soviet propaganda film, was subsequently censored and ultimately premiered as a play at Habima in Tel Aviv. The play depicts the Nazi invasion of an agrarian community in Ukraine; when officers threaten to execute the Jews of this community, the family patriarch, Avrom-Ber states ‘I shall not die […] but live’, an echo of Bergelson’s radio broadcast in 1941 in which the author proclaimed the distress of Jews under Nazi occupation. Zer-Zion’s analysis of the play highlights its stimulus for ‘a vibrant public discourse’, and its role in shaping transnational Jewish identity in the context of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Nazi-occupied zones of the USSR.

The final contribution in this issue, by Rea Dennis and Kate Hunter, establishes the possibilities of an ecology of practice in performer training, which includes a ‘Do It Yourself’ approach to life-long learning and performance-making. Crucial to this discussion is industry sustainability and performer wellbeing, emphasising an ethical approach to embodied perception and a move away from teacher-led training towards a finessing of ongoing self-knowledge. Drawing from their own experiences as women performance practitioners and educators in Australia, Dennis and Hunter offer a series of exercises for crafting a DIY trajectory of training, alongside a manifesto for an ecology of practice that prioritises agency, self-care, and sustainable practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See: ‘Start of university term to be hit with five days of UK-wide strikes’, 6 September 2023. https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/13171/Start-of-university-term-to-be-hit-with-five-days-of-UK-wide-strikes [Accessed 15 September 2023].

2. See: UCU Solidarity Movement: https://www.ucusolidaritymovement.org/ [Accessed 15 September 2023].