41.2 Editorial

Abstract

This is my first editorial as a new editor for Studies in Theatre and Performance. I am grateful to be joining this team at a key moment in re-shaping the priorities of theatre and performance studies in line with or in response to urgent global cultural, economic, and socio-political shifts. Studies in Theatre and Performance has always encouraged a variety of voices and perspectives in theatre and performance studies, and I, too, am committed to maintaining and expanding that through self-reflexive and field-wide reflections on the past, present, and future shape of the discipline as we continue to teach, research, and live through a period of uncertainty. The six articles collected in this issue offer a range of approaches to performance as a social practice that explores the liminal and the transformational. The authors elaborate on moments of pleasure, enchantment, grief, and mourning drawn out by and through performance, offering analyses of plays and performances emerging from navigating the joys and contradictions of everyday life. Matched by their rootedness in the material present, the articles also make connections to shifting historical narratives, reverence to ancestral pasts, the opening up of transformational spaces between the real and the ethereal, and performance’s ontological suspension of the rational. Each touches on the politics of temporality, on cycles of living from childhood, parenthood, illness, death, and beyond, each time returning to the will to life, to survival, and the possibilities in performance of staging life’s intricacies. Gloria Nwandu Ozor, Ciarunji Chesaina, and Masumi Odari’s article focuses on the Odo masquerade ritual of the Umulumgbe – a community in the South Eastern subtribe of the Igbo of Nigeria – representing the return of ancestors to the world of the living and the means through which actors represent the dead through imitation. The authors characterise the work of the Odo according to the division of labour, between those who administer and promote justice, and those who enforce laws, promote peace, and discourage physical conflict. Ultimately, though the focus of the Odo masquerade is on justice, peace, and conflict-resolution, analysed here as a social drama with a civic function, the authors also emphasise the Odo as a death ritual, whereby the dead are reunited with the living, transitioning from the spiritual to the physical. The themes of division, unity, conflict resolution, and community are continued in David Overend and Oliver Heath’s article, which focuses on The Majority, performed at the National Theatre in 2017. Conceived in response to the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016, the audience’s use of voting technology is integral to the play’s structure. Prompted to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a series of propositions ranging from the seemingly mundane to the morally complex, the article focuses on the performance’s use of audience participation – the performance of ‘mini referenda’ – and analyses the data produced. The authors’ discussion of The Majority focuses on the ‘social performances’ of voting, and its connection to the exercising of individual and collective voices STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE 2021, VOL. 41, NO. 2, 133–135 https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1916280