Abstract: Theorists have defined the key terms “play,” “performance,” and “ritual” in various ways and found different relationships and dualities among them. Richard Schechner, for example, places performance on a synchronic continuum between the polarities of play and ritual, with some performances involving mostly emotional release and asocial fun, while others are centered more on social or religious efficacy. In contrast, Eli Rozik denies that such a continuum exists and finds a binary opposition between ritual and theatre (along with other theatre-like perfor mances). Most theorists of play, including Brian Sutton-Smith, also consider religious ritual to be ontologically distinct from their area of study, but unlike Rozik they understand theatre and

Abstract: The Acts of Presence : Performing Presence CAVE Scenarios DVD-ROM accompanies this article. Presence is central to the operation of immersive virtual reality facilities. These VR technologies explore how phenomena of presence are performed, mediated, and experienced by individual participants, defining questions in computer science that can be advanced through performance theory, while offering new ways of thinking around liveness and mediation.

Abstract: What if we read “queer” Eastern European Jews not through a Central European psychoanalytic lens, but through the analytic resources of Ashkenaz? Could queer studies approaches to Yiddish culture, in their reliance on Freudian and post-Freudian perspectives, have failed to see the full contours of traditional Jewish erotic systems?

Abstract: The Chop Suey Circuit describes Asian American cabaret performers who toured the US from the 1930s through the '50s. Performing the era's popular songs and dances, these “Orientals” were novel yet familiar, exotic yet accessible. At a time of war, internment, and segregation they simultaneously solidified and challenged racial cartographies that would emplace race.

Abstract: We live in an era where many directors and artists in all disciplines seek to move beyond representation by bringing reality onto the stage, by creating the event—in truth, by introducing the spectacular. Presenting exceptionally violent, extreme scenes onstage brings art out of its theatrical framework and offers an experience identical to that of a real event.

Abstract: Weekly confrontation between Palestinian villagers and the Israeli army in Bil'in is a ritual played out with such consistency and deliberation one cannot but note the performance on both sides. A closer look reveals a politics of oppression and a strategy of resistance that extend far beyond the massive concrete wall being built between them.

Abstract: Deep within Mexico, an indigenous community offers tourists the chance to take on the roles of immigrants in a simulated border crossing experience, opening itself to charges that it is a “training camp” for illegal immigration to the United States. On the contrary, it functions as a highly politicized community performance aimed at cultural preservation and assertion, which are both threatened and enabled by the scenario of migration.

Abstract: During the late 19th century, the first portrayal of a Jewish woman on the American stage occurred in Leah the Forsaken. This successful production subjugated the Jewess by filling the title role with Kate Bateman, a non-Jewish actress, thus presenting a sanitized and palatable Jew for the middle-class Christian audience.

Abstract: The Asian tsunami killed approximately 225,000 people and led to an unprecedented humanitarian response, but who received the aid and how the story was told owed as much to pressures of performance as to the duty of care How and why do certain disasters take the limelight to the detriment of others?

Abstract: The multimedia performances of the Architecture Is Art Festival explore the connections of architecture, theatre, and architecture in theatre to voice a number of concerns relating to heritage preservation and technological development, historical memory and current politics. The interrogatives raised by these performances are intimately connected with the ontology of Hong Kong identity and testify to the spirit of traveling—through cultures, media, and disciplines—and the attitude of questioning that has become synonymous with Zuni Icosahedron.

Abstract: The arrest of the activist performance collective the VolxTheaterKarawane concretely reveals the discourse of criminalization state authorities used to brutally suppress dissent at the 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy. It is one example of the increasingly common strategy of political elites who promote the perception of political protest as a criminal act, a misapprehension that has profound consequences for the future of democracy and dissent in late capitalism.

Abstract: Intimacy is explored and encountered in contemporary performances that feature one performer and one spectator/participant, including Laotang by Israeli choreographer Danielle Agami. The state (and possible future) of human relations lies at the heart of one-to-one live works, which draw attention to the idea that our subjective experience is not only embodied but inherently relational.

Abstract: New theatrology is a field of research not in two dimensions (theory-practice) but in three: theory-history-practice. “Theory” can refer to two genetically different metadiscourses: the theory of the theatre that artists create through their work; and the theory about the theatre made by scholars and critics. New theatrology attempts to account for both. While new theatrology and performance studies share several presuppositions, the notion of performance needs to be better defined, especially from a historical point of view.

Abstract: “You know who else is Jewish?” is a question with a long history in American popular culture. How have contemporary forms of media distribution such as Web 2.0 changed the way American Jews ask and answer it? What does this mean for the performance of Jewish American identity?

Abstract: Kathy Change was a performance artist whose outrageous public performances and leftist politics were largely ignored by the University of Pennsylvania students she performed for, until she set herself on fire. Her 1996 self-immolation prompts an inquiry into the effectiveness of public suicide as a mode of political performance.

Abstract: Contemporary Japanese visual artist Murakami Takashi's theory of “superflat” Japanese arts and culture is nationalist and masculinist. However, women artists—including Yanagi Miwa and the performers of the Takarazuka Revue and Kegawa-zoku—use two-dimensional aesthetics to challenge the nationalist and masculinist construction of Japanese womanhood.

Abstract: Beginning on 10 January 1939, Missouri sharecropping families — 1,300 women, men, and children — lived in makeshift shelters and out in the open on US highways 60 and 61. Their strategy of in situ exhibition manipulated conventions of minstrelsy through which media recognized them, successfully shaming landowners as violators of the moral economy.

Abstract: On Monday, 4 April 2011, Palestinian Israeli actor and director Juliano Mer Khamis, director of The Freedom Theatre in the Jenin Refugee Camp, was shot five times by an as-yetunidentified gunman. Mer Khamis died in the ambulance en route from the theatre to the hospital. His death is a great loss. His life’s work is a resplendent testimony to the possibilities of constructive art making, education, and drama therapy.

Abstract: Starting in the early 1980s, female striptease shows mounted on the backs of trucks, known as "electronic festooned vehicles" (EFVs), have been popular entertainments offered to the deities at temple festivals. The EFV takes the "realities" of contemporary Taiwanese society—sexism, capitalism, and social hierarchy—and re-presents them in an evocative/provocative form.

Abstract: The Bottle Dance in Fiddler on the Roof was inspired by what the director/choreographer Jerome Robbins called “field research” at Orthodox Jewish weddings. Reshaped and expanded by Robbins’s masterful showbiz sensibility, it became a show-stopping number — and, thus transformed, filtered back out of the musical into Jewish celebrations to confer “tradition.”

Abstract: Like the childhood songs and butt-shaking contests of Ghana, Batty Moves by the Brooklyn-based dance company Urban Bush Women celebrates the African American female form. The choreographer and the dancers share their memories of butt-tucking ballet classes, and the author shares her memory walk from Ghana to black America.

Abstract: Can time be performed? Departing from the “processualist” view in which time is the expressive activity of any given thing, being, or phenomenon, the processes of pervasive temporalization and musicalization—characteristic of Fluxus intermedia—converge to produce concrete, lived time and perpetuate the dialectical interplay of continuity and discontinuity.

Abstract: Founder of the avantgarde movement Internationale situationniste in 1957, Guy Debord is also known for his provocative essay The Society of the Spectacle, first published in 1967 and since translated into numerous languages. Is it possible to connect the concept of “spectacle” to theatre?

Abstract: The experience of audiences at performative events is too often devoid of stakes. Counter Indications examined how a theatrical installation can use media and spatial design to bring a passive audience into the decision-making process, and past the comfortable catharsis of traditional theatre to experience some of the implications of government-sanctioned interrogation and torture.

Abstract: When Milk and Honey opened on Broadway in 1961, it presented a unique setting: the relatively new state of Israel. The musical superficially glorifies the future of an exciting new land. More deeply, we find “restorative nostalgia” for Israel’s biblical roots, stemming from sublimated grief and disavowal of the Holocaust.

Abstract: Gob Squad — love children of the contemporary European performance scene — have "occupied" the Berlin Volksbuhne for their newest action: Revolution Now! So let the Molotov cocktails fly: "this revolution will be broadcast live!"

Abstract: On 22 June 2011, after 81 days of incarceration in an undisclosed location, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was released on bail, having allegedly confessed his crime of tax evasion. Ai’s release followed a huge international campaign to free him and came just a day before the Chinese premiere Wen Jiaboa left for state visits to the UK, Germany, and Hungary. Ai’s emergence from his arrest to reunite with his family opened the second act of a global performance that has been raging since his initial “disappearance” on 3 April 2011. Doubtlessly, the key players in this global performance, including the Western media, art communities, and governments, the Chinese CCP leadership, and Ai Weiwei himself, will continue to write the second act from their ongoing real-life actions with new points of public interest, but at this transitional moment, no interpretation regarding these key players’ motivations, calculations, and strategies provides conclusive evidence as to how the second act will unfold.

Abstract: 169 dent. Neither mode is susceptible to the connoisseur’s evaluation. In a letter from 1930, Beckett apologizes to McGreevy: “Do write Tom, and forgive all this gossip from the only source I have, the only source of reference, my own bloody self” (55). In the last letter included here, on the verge of fleeing the Nazi occupation of Paris in June 1940, Beckett writes: “You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose; a self that you did not know, if you are lucky” (684). Catnip for the connoisseur, Beckett’s works invited the learned scrutiny they have received. Even if in 1940, as in 1930, the self seems to be “the only source of reference,” there is a new sense that the self eludes the knowledge of the thinker who would master or value it.