Where do the limits of performance and everyday life intersect? How do performance and life make sense of one another? The articles in this issue focus on the most basic and definitive categories of live performance: music, dance, theatre, performer, director, choreographer and, of course, audience. Taken as a whole, the seemingly disparate articles of this issue offer provocative approaches to understanding how practitioners create performance out of their experiences, and where audiences can connect their own experiences to what they see onstage. In doing so the authors collectively redefine the active relationship of a performance with its audience, and the powerful potential of that relationship.

This essay examines the US tours (2007–13) of Black Watch, a docudrama about the eponymous military unit, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). I argue that the production manifests a ‘banal theatrical nationalism’ when theatrical national signifiers meet quotidian acts of soldiering and the mundane labour required to remount the production at each tour venue. I focus attention on the regimental history recounted through ‘Fashion’, the play's central military uniform dressing sequence, and introduce into my analysis a New York City fashion show, Dressed to Kilt, to interrogate the stakes of fashion, cultural production and visibility. Black Watch materializes what I am calling a ‘Scottish operative’ that acts on behalf of the NTS in securing international attention and potential investment. In order to query the sociopolitical stakes of this production's US success, I identify political, cultural and military links between the US and Scotland.

This article demonstrates the existence of a strong aesthetic kinship between the mise en scène of Robert Lepage and the representational mode of the classical Japanese rock garden. In order to elicit the creative participation of an active spectator, both use such Zen techniques as a radical reduction of scale, or shukukei (miniature landscape); minimalistic material metaphors, or mitate (metaphoric representation); and an asymmetrical, fragmented style, or fusuma-e (fragmented scene). Drawing on the theory and practice of Japanese rock gardening, this article introduces a new critical vocabulary for describing the representational logic, and enlightening effects, of Lepage's approach to ‘setting up stones’ on the stage in Seven Streams of the River Ota and other works.

This paper is about my experience in the ‘Church of Hampshire’ and the ‘Cosmopolitan Church of Hampshire’ (anonymous names) in Hampshire, England, where I wanted to play the dùndún and gángan (see Fig. 1), the two Yorùbá talking drums. For this I shall be adopting the stance of a reflective practitioner. I have played the dùndún in churches in Nigeria and Hungary. It was this experience that encouraged me to attempt to introduce it to the two churches, hoping that they would welcome new possibilities. This paper will analyse how such expectations were unfulfilled. The extracts in italics are taken from my personal journal. The names of the people in this paper are anonymized. I will start by thoroughly describing the position of music within the Yorùbá culture, and the nature of indigenous Yorùbá spiritual practice.

This essay discusses Stanislavski's rehearsal use of images derived from everyday life. This discussion focuses on a relatively obscure chapter of Stanislavski's career, his 1932–3 work on Artists and Admirers, the rehearsal notes of which are unavailable in English translation. The essay contends that everyday images not only facilitated communication between rehearsal participants, but also projected outwards to the highly regulatory political scene of the time. More specifically, the ephemeral nature of everyday images will be identified as a ploy that eluded the Communist Party's appropriation of Stanislavski's work. Michel de Certeau's theories on everyday life, particularly his elaboration on strategies and tactics, will serve as a theoretical framework for such a discussion.

Kaguyahime is one of Kylián's rare narrative ballets. This paper deals with the way in which Kylián reduces the narrative content of the literary tale on which the ballet is based to an abstract form, to adapt the ballet to his narrative–abstract style of choreography. The focus of the discussion is on his method of space composition: first, his practice of arranging and moving dancers around the stage; second, his design of the space, which takes into account the areas beyond the stage. The paper analyses each scene of Kaguyahime and seeks to show that the space is structured on the basis of perpendicular lines across the width and depth of the stage. The contrasting heavenly and earthly worlds which constitute the axes of the original story correspond to the axes of space – this being a device of Kylián's to formulate the narrative by using the space.