CS Issue No 20 Editors

Special Topic

Yun-Cheol Kim obtained his PhD from BYU with his dissertation on contemporary American Drama. He served as President of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) from 2008 till 2014. During his presidency he launched IATC’s journal Critical Stages in 2009. Now he is an honorary president of the Association. He served as artistic director of the National Theatre Company of Korea for four years (from the beginning of 2014 till the end of 2017). He retired from the School of Drama, Korean National University of the Arts in 2015, where he taught for twenty years. He is now its honorary professor. He received the Cultural Order from the Korean government in 2008. Two-time winner of the “Critic of the Year Award,” he has published twelve books, two of which are anthologies of theatre reviews.

Manabu Noda is Professor at Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan. As a theatre critic and researcher, he has written on British and Japanese theatre, acting and theatre history. He is currently editor in chief of the Theatre Arts (IATC Japan) and on the editorial board of Critical Stages (IATC). His English publications include “Immersion as the Inscription of Theatre-Maker’s Reading: Complicite, The Encounter,” in Contemporary Drama and Performative Space: From Playwriting to Immersive Theatre (2018); “Trying to Give Shape to an Unending End: Post-3/11 Theatre in Tokyo,” Critical Stages 6 (2012); “From Articulation to Synthesis: Stage Passions from the Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries in England,” in Aufführungsdiskurse im 18. Jahrhundert (2011); and “The Body Ill at Ease in Post-War Japanese Theatre,” New Theatre Quarterly, 23:3 (2007).

Essays

Yana Meerzon is Professor at the University of Ottawa. She has published on theatre of exile and migration, cultural and interdisciplinary studies. Her books include A Path of the Character: Michael Chekhov’s Inspired Acting and Theatre Semiotics (2005) and Performing Exile – Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film (Palgrave 2012). She has also co-edited several book collections and special issues of journals on these topics. As of this issue of Critical Stages, Yana is the editor of the journal’s “Essay Section”

Interviews & National Reports

Savas Patsalidis is Professor of theatre and performance history and theory in the School of English (Aristotle University, Thessaloniki), the Hellenic Open University and the Drama Academy of the National Theatre of Northern Greece. He is also a regular lecturer on the Graduate Programme of the Theatre Department at Aristotle University. He is the author of fourteen books on theatre and performance criticism/theory and co-editor of another thirteen. His two-volume study, Theatre, Society, Nation (2010), was awarded first prize for best theatre study of the year. His latest book-length study Theatre & Theory II: About Topoi, Utopias and Heterotopias was published in 2019 by University Studio Press. In addition to his academic activities, he works as a theatre reviewer for the ejournals lavartparallaxi, and thegreekplay project. He is currently the president of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics, member of the curators’ team of Dimitria Festival and the editor-in-chief of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics.

Conference Papers

Ivan Medenica (Belgrade, Serbia), works at the FDA as Professor, teaching The History of World Drama and Theatre. He is an active theater critic and has received six times the national award for the best theatre criticism. He was the artistic director of Sterijino Pozorje in Novi Sad, the leading national theater festival in Serbia (2003-2007), to which he brought some important structural changes, especially in the domain of internationalization. From 2001 to 2012, Medenica was one of the main editors of the prestigious journal Teatron. He is a member of the International Association of Theater Critics’ Executive Committee and the Director of its international conferences. He is also member of the editorial board of Critical Stages, the web journal of the Association, and as of October 2015, the artistic director of Bitef Festival (Belgrade).

Performance Reviews

Matti Linnavuori wrote theatre criticism between 1978 and 2013 for various newspapers and weeklies in his native Finland. In 1985, he worked for the BBC World Service in London. Since 1998, he has presented papers at numerous IATC events. In the 2000s, he wrote for Teatra Vestnesis in Latvia. Since 1992, he has written and directed several radio plays for YLE the Finnish Broadcasting Company. In March 2016, his play Ta mig till er ledare (Take me to your leader) premiered at Lilla Teatern in Helsinki.

Book Reviews

Don Rubin is Managing Editor of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques. He is the General Editor of Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre and founding Editor of Canada’s national theatre quarterly Canadian Theatre Review. He is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at York University in Toronto and Founding Director and Former Chair of both York’s Department of Theatre and its MA/PhD Program in Theatre and Performance Studies. His volume Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings is a standard volume on the subject. He is a vice-president and trustee of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship.