Band 5, Heft 1

In Renaissance and Restoration England, many popular plays functioned as “voyage dramas,” offering opportunities for vicarious tourism to their audiences (McInnis 2012). The theatre became one site in which to receive and negotiate information about elsewhere, at a time before mass access to travel was available. The tagline of London’s Young Vic theatre – “It’s a big world in here” – suggests that something of this spirit survives in twenty-first-century performance. It is a sentiment that we find also in the festival director Mark Ball’s assertion that “theatre is my map of the world.” But the version of the world created here is necessarily skewed by a politics of mobility (Cresswell 2010): the uneven frictions, routes, speeds, levels of comfort, and power relations affecting how theatre-makers and productions move around the world. And contemporary audiences are themselves likely to come to the theatre with multiple and unequal experiences of travel. This article asks what function contemporary voyage dramas serve in a context of the widespread mobility of people, finance, goods and ideas, and what might be the political challenges of representing travel in the theatre. It investigates the claim to authenticity, the negotiation of privilege and remoteness, and the role of the performer as mediator in theatrical travel narratives. In particular, it focuses on Simon McBurney’s solo performance The Encounter (2015), arguing that its virtuosity served in part to tame – rather than to confront the challenge of – the world it sought to represent.

For people around the world, “Broadway” means the Broadway musical, the epitome of singing and dancing, glamor and dazzle. Although the Broadway musical is customarily perceived as the most distinctively U. S. theatre form – whose national and municipal identity is embedded in its name – it has circumnavigated the globe countless times. As the globalized cultural economy increasingly facilitates the worldwide circulation of multinational theatrical productions, Broadway-style musicals are being manufactured from Hamburg to Shanghai. They are no longer a specifically U. S. form, but a global brand that freely crosses borders, genres, and styles. The mobility of the newly deterritorialized Broadway musical is the result of many phenomena, notably the rise of a generation of producers, writers, directors, and actors around the world who have absorbed the musical’s conventions and vernaculars and who disseminate locally-produced musical entertainments. In the twenty-first century, these new Broadway-style musicals have become the preeminent transnational theatre form, whose conventions have also been absorbed into both popular and elite theatrical entertainments around the world.

The Bandmann theatrical circuit operated between the 1890 s and the 1920 s and comprised roughly two dozen towns and cities stretching from Gibraltar to Yokohama that the companies visited on a regular basis. This paper will examine a selected number of these localities both in terms of their cultural specificities but also in respect to their connectivity. The concept of theatrical entrepôt proposed here proceeds from an understanding of locality that is predicated on the passage and the conduit of goods (in this case theatrical). It employs terms from actor-network-theory that conceptualize locality not just in splendid isolation but as a set of interconnected nodes. Four entrepôts will be analysed in detail: Malta, Bombay, Calcutta and Singapore. In the case of Bombay and Calcutta, Bandmann’s theatre-building activities will be examined as a means to achieve a greater degree of locality. The ports of call such as Malta and Singapore were important as naval bases but in the case of Singapore as a multicultural entrepôt which enabled the distribution of opium grown in India and designed for export to China and East Asia.

Since their first performances in 1994, Robert Lepage and Ex Machina have engaged continuously with mobility by staging characters displaced physically or emotionally from home. Consequently, their narratives experiment with the relationship between onstage and offstage worlds, and inevitably produce un-homely, uncanny effects. These features underpin the hyper-mobility of their theatre, which is further articulated by material and aesthetic practices of mobility, including touring, marketing, and animated scenography. Although this hyper-mobility exploits the theatrical potential of the uncanny, this does not result in an alienating, depoliticised theatre practice. Rather, a complex reading of mobility is generated – particularly in relation to the idea of the city – by the intertwining of an aesthetic of active space with ideas and images of both spatial and social mobility. This reading creates a picture of a hyper-mobile theatre practice with vital, contemporary relevance. It also produces a new description of Lepage’s spatial aesthetic, enables his work to be re-positioned within a particular category of post-modern performance, and characterises Lepage and Ex Machina’s praxis positively.

Based on an interdisciplinary approach to mobility, this paper scrutinizes how Chantal Bilodeau’s climate change play Sila (which had its professional premiere in 2014) unravels mechanisms of meaning construction that prevail in discourse on climate change in the Arctic. Bilodeau addresses the impact of climate change on the Arctic by foregrounding competing notions and practices of mobility promoted by various interest groups living or working in Arctic Canada. Through a focus on real and figurative references to breath and to lines/paths, the play highlights individual experiences of loss and mourning rather than specific instances of environmental disaster. Sila demonstrates that the characters’ socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, generation, and species – along with their attitudes towards human and non-human, material and spiritual realms – largely determine which kinds of mobility they are associated with and how these types of physical or cultural mobility are assessed. The play responds to the challenge of dramatizing climate change, a phenomenon which is not graspable through single spectacular environmental disasters, by immersing theatergoers into a complex aestheticized network of life-giving and life-depriving natural and human-made situations and narrative practices that demonstrate intersections between local and global, synchronic and diachronic, material and immaterial phenomena.

The National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), which began producing work early in 2006, is a building-less theatre company which produces work in collaboration with a range of national and international partners. This article explores the ways in which mobility has been central to the conception and operation of the NTS throughout its first decade. In addition to an extensive commitment to touring, the company has made a feature of producing work in collaboration with local artists and communities across Scotland from Shetland in the far north to Dumfries in the south. The article focuses on the company’s inaugural Home project and on Ignition , a more recent large scale collaborative project devised and performed on Shetland under the direction of Wils Wilson. My aim is to show not only that the NTS offers an imaginative and flexible model that productively challenges the orthodoxy of existing national theatres, but that in so doing, it evidences a culturally distinctive and heterogeneous Scotland that privileges inclusivity and participation in arts practice and is de-centred and democratic in impulse.

This essay examines Korean American playwright Young Jean Lee’s provocative interrogation of the meanings of blackness in the Obama age with her 2009 play The Shipment . The play demonstrates how certain notions of blackness travel across time as well as aesthetic praxis and, thus, ironically remain inflexible in their mobility. But Lee also moves beyond such critique of stereotypical conceptions of race. Drawing on Michael Fried’s and Fred Moten’s respective theories of theatricality, this essay discusses the ways in which the playwright situates blackness in a complex force field marked by the nodal points of representation and physiognomy, object and subject, onlooker and performer. It argues that what Lee brings into focus by setting up such a relational force field is not blackness as such but the relationality of its deployment and uses. Ultimately, then Lee’s play is also about whiteness, particularly about white audiences’ continued investment in the privileges of looking and interpellating racial Otherness.

debbie tucker green’s theatre can be seen as a reaction to the state of heightened mobility in a globalised world in which social problems can no longer be contained locally but inevitably register globally and vice versa. Her plays that move remote suffering to the centre of attention qualify as cosmopolitan for two reasons: Not only do they address such suffering by making use of globally diverse settings, but they also express cosmopolitanism’s belief in an undeniable responsibility for the other that connects all humankind. The plays make a cosmopolitan ethical appeal by facilitating an immediate affective accessibility of faraway suffering with an aesthetic strategy that can be described as ‘universalisation through familiarisation’: Devices such as cross-racial casting or the use of universally familiar constellations like the family are used to lend mobility to the abstract hardships of remote others, allowing them to intrude into the familiar world of the audience’s concrete experience. Implicitly, this entails the demand to accept responsibility for and, eventually, take action against global suffering, which is the core of any cosmopolitan ethics.

Based on Vazha-Pshavela’s narrative poem of the same name, Roland Reed’s and Synetic Theatre’s play Host and Guest premiered in Arlington/VA in 2002 and was remounted to high critical acclaim in 2008. In the wake of the terror attacks of 2001, it explores themes of hospitality, ritualistic scapegoating, and of grieving that which Judith Butler has called an “ungrievable life.” Reed’s play invites a discussion of how contemporary theatre in what is generally called ‘the global North’ investigates the culture of hospitality in the light of simultaneous border consolidation and a decline in national sovereignty in a globalised world. Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s discussion of the foundation of community as a relationship of mutual obligation and on Butler’s suggestion to redefine kinship as a relation of choice, the focus of this paper is on theatre’s sounding of the extent and the limits of hospitality in the face of migration that is often regarded as a threat, and on the theatre’s potential for creating hope.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times (2009- ) play cycle makes exhaustion central to its theatrical experience: The dynamics of im/mobility that revolve around the exhausted body represent a key element of the (not yet completed) ten-part cycle’s performance aesthetics. An expansive multi-medial life-writing project that takes about a day to perform, Life and Times inevitably wears out performers and spectators – physically, affectively, and politically. In the context of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, the experience of exhaustion carries specific cultural significance: As an affective mode, exhaustion (and adjacent states such as burnout, fatigue, or depression) is structurally interwoven with neoliberalism’s investment in practices of self-improvement, flexibility, adaptability, and self-exploitation. In particular, this essay problematizes three dimensions of exhaustion in the age of neoliberalism: the reconfiguration of the ordinary as an ongoing moment of crisis; the production of ‘overwhelming’ environments for biopolitical management; and the demand for overtime that increasingly makes labor and non-labor indistinguishable. By addressing these dimensions as forms of aesthetic experience, Life and Times points to the tenuous link exhaustion constitutes – between the physical and emotional well-being of human beings and the exploitative routines of neoliberal capital accumulation.

The paper focuses on the twenty-first-century resurgence of political concerns in British theatre, in the traditional (post-1950s) sense of criticising the unequal distribution of power in society. A key approach combines the seemingly incompatible genre characteristics of dystopia and the Theatre of the Absurd to foreground immobility, and two representative cases of such absurdist dystopias are studied in detail: Mark Ravenhill's The Cut (2006) and Edward Bond’s Have I None (2000). Mobility is denied in a number of respects in these works: In contrast to earlier political theatre in Britain, the unjust hierarchies are not portrayed as changeable, and audiences are pointedly not supposed to be ‘moved’ by any clear-cut messages either. Moreover, the system representatives and their domestic relationships are shown to become increasingly static through the corrupting force of power, both literally and metaphorically. On the whole, these curiously abstract representations result in claustrophobic scenes, which can have profound indirect effects on the spectators. As the plays also allude to the developments in political discourse from New Labour onwards, the pervasive immobility on stage can at the same time be read as obliquely mocking the recurrent insistence on ‘change’ in the rhetoric of all major parties in Britain.

In 2014, Karen Tei Yamashita – award-winning playwright and author of novels such as Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, and I Hotel – published Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance with Coffee House Press, “a memory book” featuring her collected plays, musicals, and performances. At the 25th Annual CDE conference in Eichstätt, she spoke about the artistic inspirations, themes, and experiences that fuelled her theatrical work. The following keynote and the ensuing conversation with Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, a dramaturg and associate professor in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California Los Angeles, took place on 28 May 2016.