Florentín Giménez (1925–2021) stands as one of the most prolific Paraguayan composers. Published in six Cancioneros (‘Songbooks’), his more than 800 canciones populares (‘folkloric or folk-style songs’) testify to his productivity and distinctive approach to this particular genre. Based on the examination of his six published Cancioneros, along with an analysis of Giménez’s musical recordings and personal interviews with the composer, this article first provides biographical context and introduces these songs through a series of representative cultural themes that emphasize some of Giménez’s ideas about musical and extra-musical expressions of cultural identity and Paraguayan nationalism. Following a discussion of Giménez’s vocal compositions, the article focuses on the composer’s self-proclaimed musical advocacy, and highlights three of his most iconic and widely known songs: ‘Así canta mi patria’ (‘Thus My Country Sings’), ‘Ka’aguype’ (‘In the Forest’) in the Guaraní language, and ‘Muy cerca de ti’ (‘Very Near You’). By considering these three Paraguayan folk-style songs, I aim to demonstrate that throughout his career, Giménez’s music has become illustrative of a cultural identity informed by Paraguayan music and socially imagined ideas, including the sentiment of nationalism, which he expresses through a profound admiration for his country.

Adam Maor and Yonatan Levy’s chamber opera The Sleeping Thousand refashions the Palestinian–Israeli conflict as a futuristic science-fiction political fantasy. Adopting a critical and satirical perspective, the opera develops ad absurdum an imaginative state of affairs out of which a utopian and dystopian situation unfolds. My argument is that in The Sleeping Thousand, children are central and, furthermore, that the image construed for them is new to the medium of opera. The image is disconcerting. The child is positioned in a troubled, brutal world and catalyses the portrayal of a violent, cursed, unethical, and estranged world inhabited by adults. Children are not assigned a voice but rather are reported on; in the report, they are said to be possessed by a dybbuk. In The Sleeping Thousand, a dybbuk phenomenon forms operatic children and, through them, infiltrates the opera as a whole.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Henri Verbrugghen founded the first Australian branch of the British Music Society. The BMS – a product of post-First World War cultural renewal – was established in London to ‘champion the cause of British composers at home and abroad’. In Sydney, these aspirations extended to promoting music from Australia, and through affiliation with the International Society for Contemporary Music, music of the rest of the world. This article explores the activities of the Sydney BMS, situating these within contemporary discourses of nationalism and internationalism in the construction of interwar Australian cultural identity. It argues that the sometimes conflicting aims of the society reflect a wider political and social ambivalence about Australia's place in the international landscape. While its primary goal was to champion local composers, this was held in uneasy balance with a desire to promote British music ‘proper’.

This article argues that Hebrew theatre is defined by a hegemonic Ashkenaziness that has been present from its beginning and which continues today. It identifies four main components of this hegemony, each of which is examined in turn. The first two components, Hebrew culture and Eurocentrism, are analyzed in relation to the repertoire of plays presented at such theatres as Habima, Ohel, and Cameri. This repertoire combines Yiddish plays and translations of European plays, while also reproducing Orientalist attitudes towards Mizrahi culture. The third component, privileged citizenship, centres on the privileges afforded to Ashkenazi artists and actors in the theatre when compared to Mizrahi actors, especially in terms of casting decisions. Finally, hegemonic Ashkenaziness is defined by membership of the middle class, which, in the theatre, leads to productions being targeted at an Ashkenazi audience and its cultural capital.

This article examines Shabih’khani, a traditional ritual performance in Iran also known as Ta’ziyeh, in the context of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement. It includes the historical challenges faced by Iranian women in a patriarchal society dominated by politics and religion, augmenting existing research on women’s Shabih’khani through recently discovered documents that show the erasure of feminine symbols within the tradition. The article also explores the theatrical conventions, dramaturgical elements, and historical reasons for the emergence and decline of women’s Shabih’khani, together with factors that contribute to the endurance of men’s Shabih’khani. By drawing connections and comparisons between Shabih’khani and the contemporary ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, it illuminates the factors shaping the movement and offers insights into its potential for success and progress.

This article re-reads Beckett’s play Not I (1972) in the light of the ‘Mother and Baby Homes Report’, published in January 2021. Beckett interrogates what James Smith, Clair Wills, and others have referred to as Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’. Mouth, ‘brought up … with the other waifs’ in a mother and baby home, absorbed religious notions of sin and punishment. Through a close reading of selected passages, the article considers to what extent Not I can be read as a ‘survivor’s testimony’ such as those given to the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes.

This article discusses the continuity of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s pedagogy directly to his disciple Vasily Toporkov, and from him to his students Oleg Yefremov and Oleg Tabakov. Toporkov joined the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) as an actor eleven years before Stanislavsky’s death, which allowed him to participate in the final phase of Stanislavsky’s life’s work and his development of the method of psychophysical actions. Struck by Stanislavsky’s authority, scrutiny, and caring attitude towards all actors, as well as other co-workers of the theatre, Toporkov transmitted this legacy, together with the practical knowledge that he had gained, to Yefremov and Tabakov, recounting vivid stories and anecdotes about Stanislavsky. The article traces the professional development of both men: each founded his own theatre, Yefremov the Sovremennik, and Tabakov the Tabakerka. Thus, whether or not they set out to do so, both Yefremov and Tabakov followed Stanislavsky’s life example, when he founded the MAT. Their decision to follow Stanislavsky’s example was a logical consequence of this great teacher’s life-affirmative, spiritual, material, and intellectual legacy, which is on a par with the most significant humanistic writings. The key spiritual-physical aspects of Stanislavsky’s legacy have been passed down in a straight line from Stanislavsky to his students, from them to their students, and so on, from one generation of the Moscow Art Theatre to the next, until the present day.

Eugenio Barba first defined ‘theatre anthropology’ as the study of the human being in an organized performance situation in a lecture in Warsaw in May 1980. The first session of ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology) was held in October 1980 and the last to date in 2023. This article gives a personal account of ISTA’s history from its origins, rooted in Eugenio Barba’s interest in Asian classical theatre techniques and the founding of Odin Teatret in Denmark, to the most recent experiences, which include the intercultural production of Anastasis/Resurrection at the 2023 Theatre Olympics in Budapest. It identifies masters of given ISTA sessions and their invaluable contribution to the School’s emphasis on, and understanding of, craft, as well as the distinguishing characteristics and points of change and development of selected ISTAs.

Valery Galendeyev seemed immortal, so steady was his demeanour, so light his ample frame. We knew that he had had serious Covid early in the pandemic but his habitual warmth and gentle irony belied his health’s decline as he continued to work as if it would never stop. He understood, though, that, sooner rather than later, his growing ill heath, which he discreetly set aside, would stop him.

During the past five years the cultural world in Germany has been shaken and divided by a series of controversies involving contemporary works of art charged with being anti-Semitic. Obviously, with the Holocaust continuing to occupy a major position in modern German consciousness and history, sensitivity to anti-Semitic expressions is particularly keen here. This sensitivity has been increased by a number of recent developments, including the growing visibility of far-right political groups, the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) protesting Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and the official politicization of these tensions by a parliamentary ruling in 2015 restricting the activities of the BDS. The conflict between legitimate criticism of policies of the Israeli state and legitimate censorship of ethnically offensive material has recently become increasingly bitter in Germany. This article discusses the dynamics of three of the most significant recent examples: the conflict involving Germany’s most prestigious arts festival, the Kassell documenta in 2020; the withdrawal in 2022 of the European Drama Award, the continent’s largest award, from British dramatist Caryl Churchill; and the withdrawal from the Munich stage of the most recent play by Wajdi Mouawad, who has been widely heralded in Germany as the most significant contemporary dramatist.

Using GDR dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as a point of departure, this article explores the role that ‘revolutionary’ South America and its musical corollary, the Nueva Canción, played in expressions of inner-communist critique in 1970s East Germany. Biermann's critique was Janus-faced. Lyrically, the ‘Chilean’ allegory of his ballad, in which a cameraman is murdered by a soldier, expressed support for the Allende administration while simultaneously destabilizing Soviet Bloc rhetoric. Musically, references to Nueva Canción music such as that of singer-songwriter Daniel Viglietti represented the anti-imperialist Other while simultaneously rejecting GDR-style socialist realism. On the one hand, Biermann's inspiration in South America can be heard as a colonizing gesture; on the other, it can be understood to reflect a provincialized East German society looking to the Third World for alternative sociopolitical – and musical – models.