This article offers a rereading of Theatre Workshop HaTikva Neighborhood’s activity as a unique troupe in the field of community-based theatre in Israel. There are three interrelated factors that account for this group’s distinctiveness: (1) it functioned as an independent theatre without public subsidies; (2) its repertoire shifted from a politics of distribution to a politics of recognition; (3) it underwent a transition from amateurism to professionalism. This is a rare status in relation to the common model of community-based theatre in Israel. The study explores these three factors within the theatrical and historical-political contexts of the period.
Focusing on the Sufi festival (mawsim) of Nabi Rubin, which used to take place near Jaffa in Palestine, this article explores the indigenous performance traditions that were an important part of Palestinian cultural life prior to the mass displacement of Palestinians by Zionist forces in the Nakba of 1948. Using the extinct festival of Nabi Rubin as a specific example, the article sheds light on a significant and neglected part of Palestinian theatre and performance history: indigenous Palestinian performance practices which have been omitted from the literature on Palestinian theatre. Thus the article advocates for a more inclusive approach to the study of performance that gives value to indigenous performance practices, which form a fundamental part of Palestine’s rich cultural history. It also examines the sociocultural changes that accompanied the Arab Nahda (‘renaissance’) and the manner in which it influenced cultural life in Jaffa and the festival of Nabi Rubin.
In this essay, I analyse how practices of press denunciation operated within Hungary and impacted the theatrical landscape during the Cold War era. I examine how this technique of denunciatory criticism was transformed in Hungary with the change from the Stalinist ideocratic field of power to a post-Stalinist, now post-ideocratic, system, and also how denunciatory theatre criticism in the press, in its most severe form in the given circumstances, operated in this system. Adopting a structural approach, my aim is to examine what I am calling the ‘denunciatory article or criticism’ – the published article denouncing a particular artist or work aiming at ‘withdrawing from circulation’ the targeted artist, work or, indirectly, sometimes a whole series of artworks, or an entire movement. I argue that the denunciatory article is part of the system of state cultural control rather than simply aesthetic criticism. I am taking a well-known case in Hungary – the neo-avant-garde artists of Balatonboglár – to explore the operations of sociopolitical and professional power that resulted in the exile of these artists from Hungary in the early 1970s. In an era of ‘fake news’ and of increasing censorship of publications, this operation of power is becoming increasingly relevant and urgent.
This article explores the 2017 performance of Harrison David Rivers's play, And She Would Stand Like This, and its dramatization of the intersectional marginalization and discrimination endured by a queer family of colour facing AIDS, through the framework of Euripides’ Trojan Women. It does so via three main perspectives: chosen family, normative discriminations and tragic disidentifications. In its changes to the tragic plot, the play reflects on AIDS, exploring criminal infection; hetero-/homosexual, genetic and communitarian HIV transmission; and bereavement. It critiques the offstage intersectional systems of oppression and shifts the status of the community from victimhood to survival, and from the representational periphery to the cultural centre. And She Would Stand Like This appears as a queer communal ritual of poetic empowerment with/through which to pay homage to queer forebears of colour, to celebrate queer lives of colour now and to galvanize those who are to walk a queer futurity of power and liberation.

