Remapping Theatre in an Era of Sociopolitical Uncertainty
Savas Patsalidis*
The contemporary world is currently experiencing a convergence of crises: war and displacement, a weakening of institutional norms, climate change and its detrimental impact on the environment, the resurgence of authoritarianism, historical revisionism, and the normalization of political violence enabled by the complicity of the media. These forces have defined an era marked by social fragmentation and ethical disorientation; under such conditions, theatre can appear as a marginal or even powerless institution.
Precisely for this reason, however, theatre demands renewed critical attention. While it cannot halt violence or reverse political collapse, it can influence how the world is perceived, remembered and contested. When grounded in ethical awareness, historical consciousness, and clearly defined aesthetic principles, theatre realigns our attention, influencing how we see, how we listen, and how we encounter others. It does not offer solutions, but it insists that agents are identified and are required to take responsibility.
This understanding, which resonates throughout the present special issue of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, recognizes theatre as a social force which assigns responsibility instead of granting redemption. The issue approaches theatre as a microcosm of the public sphere, a heterotopic site in which conflict is exposed rather than concealed, otherness engaged rather than silenced, and memory activated rather than erased. Meaning emerges not as abstraction, but through encounter, between bodies, voices, histories, and spectators.
Historically, theatre has assumed this critical function at moments of political and ethical rupture. Greek tragedy confronted power by granting voice to the defeated and the dispossessed; Shakespeare’s plays interrogated sovereignty amid dynastic instability; modern theatre, from Ibsen to Brecht, challenged social roles and ideological manipulation, often under conditions of censorship or repression. At such crossroads, theatre did not redeem history but questioned it instead, articulating anxieties, contradictions, and contested values after dominant narratives had already crystallized as dogma.
From this broader perspective, the present issue turns decisively toward the question of remapping Asian theatres. The emphasis here is not solely on crisis, but also on creation: how theatrical knowledge is produced, circulated, and authorized within global performance studies. For much of the twentieth century, Asian theatre was filtered through Western epistemological frameworks that rendered it static, ritualistic, or timeless, positioned as the aesthetic Other to a supposedly dynamic Western modernity. Such perspectives exoticized difference while denying contemporaneity, agency and internal diversity.
Increasingly, these reductive models have been challenged by scholars and practitioners committed to decolonizing theatrical thought and rethinking intercultural exchange. Remapping Asian Theatres, as proposed in this issue, is not concerned with adding new territories to an existing map; rather, it involves questioning the map itself, its coordinates, hierarchies and blind spots. It requires a shift from representational inclusion to epistemological repositioning, acknowledging Asian theatre practices not as peripheral or derivative, but as producers of theory, method, and aesthetic innovation in their own right.
The contributions gathered here, which foreground a range of practices, from Japanese Noh and Kabuki to politically engaged theatres in Turkey, and the Philippines, from contemporary performance practices in Korea, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and beyond, all resist cultural homogenization without retreating into essentialism. The return to tradition is not nostalgic but strategic, a way of reactivating memory, form and embodied knowledge under contemporary conditions.
Central to this remapping is the notion of disconnection. In a world dominated by connectivity, speed and global circulation, many theatre practices deliberately refuse dominant modes of production and consumption. This refusal does not signal withdrawal or isolationism; rather, it asserts cultural autonomy, the right to define aesthetic priorities, temporalities and modes of address without submitting to the flattening logic of global spectacle. Such practices challenge the expectation that non-Western theatre must be immediately legible or validated through Western critical frameworks, proposing instead a form of cultural citizenship grounded in locality, language and embodied memory.
The focus on Asian theatres in this issue is therefore not merely a curatorial choice; rather, it constitutes a political and intellectual intervention aimed at restoring cultural polyphony and recalibrating the position of theatre in a global context. It asks not only how Asian theatres are seen, but also how critical positions themselves are implicated in systems of visibility, authority and interpretation.
Theatre may not change the world, but it can change the conditions under which the world is perceived. It can return voice to anguish, duration to memory, and value to listening. At a moment when apathy often functions as a survival mechanism, such gestures are crucial.
This special topic does not claim to offer definitive answers. Instead, it opens a space for conversation about how theatre operates as a site of public thought, and how performance can transform observation into participation. In doing so, it affirms the stage as one of the few remaining spaces where silence can still be contested and attention reclaimed.
Alongside the thirteen studies included in the Special Topic section and four contributions to the Inter/National Reflections section, the present issue foregrounds a wide range of themes and geographies. Fifty-eight works in total by sixty-seven authors, nine of them co-authored, engage perspectives from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Representing twenty-six countries and cultural contexts, the issue presents a polyphonic panorama of scholarship that seeks not to simplify the world we inhabit, but to make it more legible.
My warmest thanks go, first and foremost, to the guest editors of this special topic, Walter Jen-Hau Hsu, Deniz Başar, and S. Anril Tiatco, who worked tirelessly for many months to bring together this rich body of material, which clearly constitutes a significant contribution to international theatre scholarship. I am equally grateful to the authors who responded to their call and generously shared their research, ideas and insights.
I would like to express my sincere appreciation to all contributors to the present volume who entrusted Critical Stages/Scènes critiques with their work. None of this would have been possible without the tireless commitment of my collaborators, Yana Meerzon, Don Rubin, and Matti Linnavuori, who devote countless unpaid hours to maintaining the journal’s high standards of quality. I am also deeply grateful to those who ensure that the language of the journal is both syntactically accurate and stylistically appropriate: Ian Herber, Linda Manney, and Michel Vais.
We are currently preparing the summer issue (#33), dedicated to the timely and widely debated topic Acceleration in Theatre, which considers how acceleration is represented across diverse cultural contexts, edited by Manuel García Martínez and Annita Costa Malufe. Prospective contributors interested in submitting articles, reviews, interviews or case studies are encouraged to contact the relevant section editors. For more information, visit this page.
Finally, if you have any questions about the journal or its editorial process, please do not hesitate to contact me at spats@enl.auth.gr.
In closing, I wish you all a happy and creative New Year, a year of peace, compassion and engagement.
Cover photo: From “Through Foreign Eyes: Reflecting on the Bucharest National Theatre Festival (2025),” by Savas Patsalidis. Photo: Albert Dobrin and Cosmin Kleiner Stoian
*Savas Patsalidis is Professor Emeritus in Theatre Studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has also taught at the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece, the Hellenic Open University, and the graduate program of the Theatre Department at Aristotle University. He is the author of fourteen books on theatre and performance criticism/theory and co-editor of thirteen more. His two-volume study Theatre, Society, Nation (2010) received first prize for Best Theatre Study of the Year. In 2022, his book-length study Comedy’s Encomium: The Seriousness of Laughter was published by University Studio Press. He serves on the Executive Committee of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics, is a member of the curators’ team of the Forest International Festival (organized by the National Theatre of Northern Greece), and is editor-in-chief of Critical Stages, the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics.
