Cities are live performances. How people behave in the streets, in the parks, in the outdoor markets, in stadiums, and inside buildings gives cities their unique character, ambience, and tone. It is not only what physical spaces and structures signify about urban organization, hierarchies, and aesthetic invention but the imaginative behavior that people perform in and around those structures that is also important for understanding cities. The interdisciplinary field of performance studies can be instrumental in analyzing how cities are produced and performed precisely because the field and its methodological diversity bridges social, political, theatrical, and architectural forms of thought.

In Becoming - Corpus Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya have created a work about the misapprehensions of what appears before us followed by revelations of what we are able to see: illusion without magic or otherworldliness, fantastical imagery linking memory to the lurking presence of the uncanny.

How should we understand the mobile phone images uploaded to the internet during the ongoing Syrian Revolution? Are the broken-up and incomplete images taken by Syrians an extension of their physical experiences? Are mobile phones extensions of photographers' brains, of their bodies, of their beings?

Carol Martin and Rachel Chavkin discuss the intellectual formation and working methods of the young American theatre company, the TEAM—Theatre of the Emerging American Moment.

Documentary theatre is created from archived materials that foreground the nonfictional, even as it uses the literary and theatrical devises of fiction. The extratextual language of the body of the actor separates evidence from testimony, creating a space where the archive is interpolated by the repertory.

The apprehension created by participation in globalization while maintaining local culture and politics has altered our sense of history, identity, and aesthetics. The proliferation of new-millennium identities and epistemologies obliges scholars to know the local in the context of the global and the global in the context of the local. Looking at Japanese performance as one crucible of globalization makes the difficulty of this task apparent.

The founder and director of Daisan Erotica discusses his theatre—its aesthetics, hierarchy, funding, and repertory—with Carol Martin.

From the Meiji restoration of 1868 through the period of Japan-as-colonial-power, to the birth of Japan, Inc. after World War II, the Japanese have responded energetically to the challenges of modernism and postmodernism— no less in theatre than elsewhere.

American feminist theatre theorists have taken to Brecht's “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting”. But what did Brecht know about Chinese acting? Could feminists benefit by looking past Brecht to the Chinese theatre itself?