World Political Theatre and Performance brings together scholars and practitioners from multiple locations to analyse counter-hegemonic theatre and performance. International case studies are framed by a common reflection on the meaning of radical practice in the face of global neoliberalism.

World Political Theatre and Performance: Theories, Histories, Practices' is the second collection of essays to emerge from the Political Performances Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research. Bringing together scholars and practitioners from multiple locations, the book analyses a range of examples - historical and contemporary - of counter-hegemonic theatre and performance. 0Part 1 offers a diachronic view of the relationship between activism and performance; Part 2 focuses on the changing nature of what constitutes 'political theatre' today. Case studies from Finland to India and from Chile to China are framed by section introductions that underline both commonalities and tensions, while the general introduction reflects on what a radical practice can look like in the face of global neoliberalism. 0Contributors: Julia Boll, Paola Botham, Marco Galea, Aneta Glowacka, Pujya Ghosh, Camila Gonzalez Ortiz, Berenice Hamidi-Kim, Fatine Bahar Karlidag, Madli Pesti, Jose Ramon Prado-Perez, Trish Reid, Mikko-Olavi Seppala, Andy Smith, Evi Stamatiou, Wei Zheyu.

Preliminary Material -- Mapping Political Performances: A Note on the Structure of the Anthology /E.J. Westlake -- Performance as Sepulchre and Mousetrap: Global Encoding, Local Deciphering /Avraham Oz -- Witnesses in the Public Sphere: Bloody Sunday and the Redefinition of Political Theatre /Paola Botham -- Orality and the Ethics of Ownership in Community-Based Drama /David Grant -- The Théâtre du Soleil's Trajectory from “People's Theatre” to “Citizen Theatre:” Involvement or Renunciation? /Bérénice Hamidi-Kim -- Ways of Unseeing: Glass Wall on the Main Stage /Tal Itzhaki -- To Absent Friends: Ethics in the Field of Auto/Biography /Deirdre Heddon -- Reading the Blacks Through the 1956 Preface: Politics and Betrayal /Carl Lavery -- Barbarians and Babes: A Feminist Critique of a Postcolonial Persians /Sydney Cheek O'Donnell -- Performing Stereotypes at Home and Abroad /Tom Maguire -- The Comeback of Political Drama in Croatia: Or How to Kill a President by Miro Gavran /Sanja Nikčević -- Local Knowledges, Memories, and Community: From Oral History to Performance /David Watt -- Modalities of Israeli Political Theatre: Plonter, ARNA'S Children, and the Ruth Kanner Group /Shimon Levy -- Documenting the Invisible: Dramatizing the Algerian Civil War of the 1990S /Susan C. Haedicke -- The Erotic Politics of Critical Tits: Exhibitionism or Feminist Statement? /Wendy Clupper -- The Güegüence Effect: The National Character and the Nicaraguan Political Process /E.J. Westlake -- Do the Ends Justify the Means? Considering Homeless Lives as Propaganda and Product /Beverly Redman -- The Birabahn/Threlkeld Project: Place, History, Memory, Performance, and Coexistence /Kerrie Schaefer -- Non-Naturalistic Performance in Political Narrative Drama: Methodologies and Languages for Political Performance with Reference to the Rehearsal and Production of E to the Power 3--Education, Education, Education /Lloyd Peters -- Gay Muslims and Salty Meat Pies: The Limits of Performing Community /Sonja Arsham Kuftinec -- About the Contributors.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics is a volume of critical essays, provocations, and interventions on the most important questions faced by today’s writers, critics, audiences, and theatre and performance makers. Featuring texts written by scholars and artists who are diversely situated (geographically, culturally, politically, and institutionally), its multiple perspectives broadly address the question "How can we be political now?" To respond to this question, Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan have created eight galvanising themes as frameworks or rubrics to rethink the critical, creative, and activist perspectives on questions of politics and theatre. Each theme is linked to a set of guiding keywords: Post (post consensus, post-Brexit, post-Fukushima, post-neoliberalism, post-humanism, post-global financial crisis, post-acting, the real) Assembly (assemblage, disappearance, permission, community, citizen, protest, refugee) Gap (who is in and out, what can be seen/heard/funded/allowed) Institution (visibility/darkness, inclusion, rules) Machine (biodata, surveillance economy, mediatisation) Message (performance and conviction, didacticism, propaganda) End (suffering, stasis, collapse, entropy) Re. (reset, rescale, reanimate, reimagine, replay: how to bring complexity back into the public arena, how art can help to do this). These themes were developed in conversation with key thinkers and artists in the field, and the resulting texts engage with artistic works across a range of modes including traditional theatre, contemporary performance, public protest events, activism, and community and participatory theatre. Suitable for academics, performance makers, and students, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics explores questions of how to be political in the early 21st century, by exploring how theatre and performance might provoke, unsettle, reinforce, or productively destabilise the status quo.

Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance? The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance. Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others

Political Performances: Theory and Practice emerges from the work of the Political Performances Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research/Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche de Théâtrale. The collection of essays strives to interrogate definitions and expand boundaries of political performance. Members of Political Performances are from around the world and so approach the intersection of politics and performance from very different perspectives. Some focus on socio-political context, others on dramatic content, others on political issues and activism, and still others examine the ways in which communities perform their collective identity and political agency. The organizational structure of Political Performances highlights the variety of ways in which politics and performance converge. Each section - "Queries", "Texts", "Contexts" and "Practice" - frames this confluence according to certain common threads that emerge from essays that deal with topics from the ethics of autobiographical performance, the political efficacy of verbatim theatre, the challenges of community-based performance, political and self-censorship, and the impossibility of representing atrocity. The essays challenge existing ideas of political performance and point the way to new approaches.

In this passionate and controversial work, director and critic Rustom Bharucha presents the first major critique of intercultural theatre from a 'Third World' perspective. Bharucha questions the assumptions underlying the theatrical visions of some of the twentieth century's most prominent theatre practitioners and theorists, including Antonin Artaud, Jerzsy Grotowski, and Peter Brook. He contends that Indian theatre has been grossly mythologised and taken out of context by Western directors and critics. And he presents a detailed dramaturgical analysis of what he describes as an intracultural theatre project, providing an alternative vision of the possibilities of true cultural pluralism. Theatre and the World bravely challenges much of today's 'multicultural' theatre movement. It will be vital reading for anyone interested in the creation or discussion of a truly non-Eurocentric world theatre.