From the Editor

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• From the Editor
• Siyuan Liu

This issue starts with Christina Sunardi’s “Speaking of the Spiritual: An Exploration of Knowledge and Pedagogy in Performing Arts in Malang, East Java,” which examines ilmu or spiritual knowledge Sunardi’s teachers imparted or encouraged her to obtain during her fieldwork on gamelan music and dance in east Java. Viewing their practice as pedagogy, Sunardi methodically documents the ways her teachers conceptually and physically transmitted or prepared her to receive ilmu, whether through ascetic practices and ceremonies or helping her to interpret dreams and encouraging her to ask spirits for permission or blessings. In addition to performance pedagogy, Sunardi also contends that the emphasis on ilmu as “part of performers’ cultural work to maintain local culture and ways of knowing, teaching, learning, and doing the arts despite the influences of Western and Middle Eastern cultures that have been aspects of globalization and urbanization.”

The other article on Southeast Asian performance, “Celebration and Remembrance in Kalibo’s Ati-atihan: Mythmaking, Devotion, and Cultural Memory” by S Anril Tiatco, studies the Philippine Ati-Atihan festival in Kalibo on Panay Island, which both honors the town’s patron saint, Santo Niño (The Child Jesus), and commemorates the original settlers of the island, the dark-skinned Atis. As such, the festival both predates the Spanish colonialism and is fused with Christian meaning. As a juror of its 2020 competition, Tiatco examines the festival’s three components, a dance drama reenacting the Borneans’s initial encounter with the Ati people and purchase of the island, an improvised street dance, and a cultural dance competition. He argues the festival is “a concatenation of entanglements: devotion and entertainment, utopia and nostalgia, and history and mythmaking.”

Moving on to South Asia, Gérard Toffin’s “The Past in the Present: The Religious and Royal Dimension of Newar Traditional Dance Theatre, Nepal” focuses on a geographic site rarely covered in Asian [End Page iii] Theatre Journal. A social anthropologist with decades of fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley, Toffin makes a case for the strong relationship between contemporary dance theatre of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley and theatre of the Malla dynasty between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, largely thanks to the geographical seclusion of the valley and appreciation of the form by the region’s subsequent rulers. He focuses on two notable aspects of the performance, namely its religious and kingly dimensions. At the same time, he also notes that while these features are still strong even after the abolition of the monarchy in 2008, the event has shifted the patronage system from the royal court to the government and private sectors, resulting in more reliance on NGOs, UNESCO, and foreign embassies that may affect the future of “[t]his dance theatre [that] is too heavily shrouded in religious notions to be easily transmuted into a secular spectacle.”

Toffin’s work is followed by two other articles on South Asian theatre; the first is Qaisar Abbas’s “Decolonizing and Producing Working-class Theatre in Pakistan: The Poetics and Politics of Sangat Theatre’s Chog Kusumbhey Di (Picking Safflower).” Against the backdrop of rise (in the 1980s) and fall of political theatre in contemporary postcolonial Pakistan, Abbas focuses on the case of the all-voluntary Sangat Theatre as pioneering an alternative aesthetic reality in the new millennium. The essay zooms in on one of the theatre’s productions, Chog Kusumbhey Di (Picking Safflower), which is inspired by a seventeenth to eighteenth century classical Punjabi kafi poem, about the exploitation of seven female agricultural workers and their resistance efforts; it has been performed more than 200 times in non-theatrical venues. Based on extensive fieldwork, the article examines the politics of the play’s content and staging as “a journey from the tragedy of the laborer women to their jubilant dance of refusal,… [which] excites the audience to take action in the face of an unresolved issue reaching its climax.”

In the final article on South Asian theatre, “Ethos of Yajña Ritual: Mapping Girish Karnad’s The Fire and the Rain,” Sangita Patil provides a welcome study of another important work by the prominent Indian playwright Girish Karnad, known in the English...