Mundo Quinta is a documentary theatre creation programme for adolescents in Madrid, launched by Espacio Abierto Quinta de los Molinos and directed by the theatre company Cross Border Project. This publicly funded programme started in 2018 and is currently celebrating its sixth season. Each season takes place during the academic year and culminates in the premiere of a new play. This article combines empirical and ethnographical methods with theatre analysis to examine the foundations, artistic vision, and creative process of Mundo Quinta, and to analyze how artistic quality is ensured in the final productions. The research undertaken focuses on the fourth season, and identifies the techniques used to create the verbatim theatre play ¿Me quieres alfileres? (Multiformas de quereres) [Do You Love Me? (Multiforms of Love)] in 2022 with designated young participants.

Is it surprising that three recent publications dealing with women in opera prominently refer to a book from 1979? Maybe not when this book is Catherine Clément's L'opéra ou la défaite des femmes (Opera, or the Undoing of Women, English translation by Betsy Wing, 1988).1 Clément's reading of women characters in the standard operatic repertoire from Mozart to Puccini quickly became a ‘classic’ within feminist opera studies and influenced much of the scholarly debate in the 1980s and 1990s. The monographs by Marcie Ray, Kimberly White and Monica A. Hershberger, all presenting results from their doctoral research and beyond, give revealing insights into where we stand today when dealing with women in opera. Several thematic and methodological approaches in all three books provide indications of the current issues of debate.

This article examines writing about popular music which took place outside the academic sphere in the Czech nation after 1945. This is not just the usual magazine and book journalism. Owing to the censorship of all publishing entities by the state and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia 1948–1989, alternative publishing platforms played a very important role in mediating the professional exchange of opinions and information on topics that were not preferred or even forbidden elsewhere. These included periodicals of various social organisations and interest institutions as well as privately produced and distributed printed matter and manuscripts. The article compares how these activities have evolved over time in the context of political change and reflects on the functions they have fulfilled in society.

Björn Heile's 3 × 10 Musical Actions for Three Socially Distanced Performers features frequent changes in musical material, playing style and instrumental combinations. Throughout a series of short sections, the performers play, sing, speak, conduct and move around, following instructions that appear on tablets. This article reflects on audiences’ experiences of the work and on musical actions more generally. We consider musical actions as short, coherent motion chunks and distinguish between several types of action that appear in the piece: gestures (communicative actions, with or without sound), reactions (where a player responds to another) and interactions (where players mutually coordinate). The musicians’ individual and collective actions create a sense of play: on the one hand, they seem free and depart from standard concert conventions; on the other hand, they seem to be following a set of rules, even if these rules are not explained to the audience. As such, we approach the piece via theories of play and relate it to earlier modernist musical games. Ultimately, 3 × 10 Musical Actions emphasises several aspects of musical actions, as social, functional, expressive, playful and embodied.

Some musics and musical situations seem to invite the audience to participate; others insist that the audience should absorb the events of performance in rapt attention. A slippage between such distinctions can also arise: a moment where an audience might be uncertain as to whether joining in is desired or welcome. In an examination of such a moment of uncertainty or surprise, at the close of Raymond MacDonald's Stolen in a Dreamland Heist (2021), we suggest that such events point towards and perform the particular creative spaces and spacing effects that arise in musical events in ways which draw attention to the affective bodily relationships between performers and auditors. The article takes the form of its own nested dialogue: an interview with the composer forms its central portion, framed within theoretical examination both of that critical moment within performance and the reflections on it the interview reveals.