Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides’s solo dance Archive investigates the choreography of transgressions performed by Israeli fundamentalist settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. Screening fragments from a video archive documenting human rights violations in the occupied territories, this work invites Israeli spectators to sense the somatic impact of such actions and to consider the corporal resonance of the ongoing violence.

This article explores body–voice entanglements in TikTok through the prism of ventriloquism. It suggests that TikTok is an app of network ventriloquism, that is, an audiovisual technology–based web of dissociations and reconfigurations of users’ bodies and voices. Yiddish serves as a case study for how TikTok’s features build an infrastructure for language, heritage, and cultural activism. We analyze YiddishToks as an instantiation of the ways TikTokers embody actual technolinguistic and ventriloquistic interconnections as well as bond with past generations. YiddishTokers interlace times and spaces and recontextualize Yiddish media history. TikTok’s algorithm participates in this reanimation of Yiddish’s past; it is a transparent, audible director that prompts the network off-stage. TikTok is an algorithmic network ventriloquism app that mediates between human and non-human voices.

This article probes into the performative dimensions embedded in Arnold Van Gennep’s book Les rites de passage. Focusing on the tripartite structure of Van Gennep’s ritual scheme, I argue that its current reigning interpretations underestimate what “Performance Studies” heightens: not the ritual and its consequences, but the dynamic passage—the durational procession—delineates the affiliation of the individual to society and outlines the transformative actions a community must undergo in order to secure its survival through time. Thus, rather than focusing on liminality as the pivot of rites of passage, this article addresses the agency of the passage between the three phases of Van Gennep’s ritual model. I offer three central dimensions essential to Performance Studies, through which performativity in Les rites de passage is re-examined: the incursion of the fictional into the social sphere, compulsive repetition, and embodied dynamics are inextricably interrelated dimensions of the processual formation of a tightly knit community through rituals.

This paper probes into the 1964 Israeli performance of Rolf Hochhuth's controversial drama The Representative. Staged by Habima National Theatre under the direction of Avraham Ninio, the majority of the cast engaged in this production comprised European-born Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors. In its cultural context, the theatrical image of Jewish refugees dressed in Nazi uniforms or, conversely, staging visual, gestural or aural markers of Auschwitz prisoners imbued the drama with political meanings, triggering a debate about agency and forms of social and material participation in the aftermath of calamity. Examining the subterranean world of artists and craftsmen and women whose labour is deliberately obscured from view, I argue that the work of theatre emerges as a creative and generative energy that filters from the staged fiction into the ‘real’ world.

This article introduces our dossier of writings, describing its origins and outlining key themes, concepts and debates. In the spring of , a group of twelve theatre historians with diverse cultural origins and interests gathered at the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlungone of the largest theatre archives in Europelocated in the pictorial mansion Schloss Wahn at the University of Cologne. The purpose was a three-day workshop focusing on alternative approaches and methodologies aimed at rethinking and engaging with props, objects and materials related to theatre and performance historiography. Each day, the workshop opened with a hands-on exploration of selected in-house archival records, such as costumes, theatre maquettes, or scenography. The materiality of these sources served as a starting point for our attempt to understand how objects and materials operate within theatre and performance. Discussions focused on the attempt to tease out the agency encapsulated in lifeless archival objects, and to bring forth their ability to animate the wide-ranging associative and imaginative network that shapes the audiences' theatrical experience. The sensuous probing into artistic vestiges, props and objects underscored the semiotic shifts and perceptual alterations undergone in their meaning and uses after the show is over. This dossier stems from conversations held during this workshop. The attempts to theorize the complex, sometimes conflictive, relationship of theatre and performance studies with staged 'things' often focuses on the ways the theatre industry has interacted with props and costumes, or has considered the status of objects remaining from theatrical events. 1 Our dossier sets out to shine a quizzical light upon the assumptions of current existing approaches to theatre and materiality. The articles collected here foreground the idea that materials remaining after a performance surpass their status of 'flesh and bones' 2-to borrow Rebecca Schneider's apt terminology-and, therefore, cannot be reduced to mere relics that trigger sensuous encounters. Objects and props, we submit, not only represent fictional depictions but also refer to the actual manual and conceptual creation of the theatrical realm. Behind the materiality of the performance and beyond its sensuous affectivity, there resides the untold processes of production and backstage operations that encompass both the labour and the logic of the spectacle which bring the performance into being. In his extensive study Reading the Material Theatre, Ric Knowles advocates for