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This article examines the solo work Lovers (1994) by Teiji Furuhashi, a prominent member of the influential Dumb Type group in Japan's theatre and dance scene from the 1980s onwards. Lovers was Furuhashi's only solo work; he died shortly after its installation at a Tokyo art centre in 1994. The essay examines the work in the context of themes of mobility, migration, and shifting corporealities in Japan across the post-war decades, especially through the key event for art and technology of those decades, which was the Osaka World Exposition of 1970. Lovers was commissioned by the arts laboratory of a Japanese technology corporation, Canon Inc., and incorporated what at the time were innovations in moving-image elements within theatre and dance. But those technologies rapidly became obsolete, and the essay explores the dilemmas about the digital experienced by the curators of the New York Museum of Modern Art in 'upgrading' Lovers to show it in their galleries in 2016–17. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the life and translations of poet Clayton Eshleman, known primarily for translating Surrealist poet Antonin Artaud's work into English. Topics include Eshleman's dedication to translating Artaud's complex writings, his interest in various religious beliefs and rituals, and Artaud's tumultuous relationship with religion, including his oscillation between atheism and a mystical form of Catholicism.

This editorial delves into the concept of disfiguration in relation to performance. It explores how disfiguration can actively destabilize or negate the body, resulting in a transformative entity that challenges its own status. The text features essays and artists' projects that aim to document or explore disfiguration as a process, idea, or imagery. It examines disfiguration in various contexts, including activism, social and corporeal crisis, and the intersection between performance and moving-image media. The editorial also discusses the work of artists such as Richard Hawkins, Tatsumi Hijikata, Ko Murobushi, and VALIE EXPORT, and explores the feminist perspective on disfiguration. It concludes by highlighting the different approaches of Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud to disfiguration. Overall, this text provides a collection of essays that offer insights into the cultural, social, and artistic implications of disfiguration in different performance cultures. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the concept of alternative dramaturgies in performance archives, specifically focusing on the contemporary reworking of archival performance materials and documents in art-museum spaces. The author examines Richard Hawkins' project, Hijikata Twist, which recreates and reconfigures the scrapbooks of Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata. Hawkins' project combines manual collaging techniques with digital interventions to create new scrapbooks that incorporate his own texts and illustrations. The exhibition of these new scrapbooks alongside the original archival materials raises questions about the tension between veneration and subversive appropriation, as well as the transformational dynamics of performance archives. [Extracted from the article]

In this article Stephen Barber investigates performances that take the form of last works by their performers and specifically utilize the distinctive medium of last-gasp monologues which intimate imminent death or unconsciousness. He assesses three such final performances, across theatre and dance – by Ko Murobushi, Antonin Artaud, and Patrice Chéreau – arguing that such performances often engage in a combative manner with processes of representation, and are able to articulate strong currents of memory and anger, often in fragmentary form. These performances also appear prescient for theatrical works today which deal with the vocal evocation of forthcoming calamities, whether corporeal or ecological. Stephen Barber is a Research Professor in Visual Culture at the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture, Kingston University. He is the author of several books on the work of Antonin Artaud, including Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (1993), and most recently Muybridge: the Eye in Motion (2012), Performance Projections (2014), and Berlin Bodies (forthcoming, 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taking as its point of departure Matthews' (2011) ‘Constitutional stretching: Coalition governance and the Westminster model (Commonwealth & Comparative Politics,49(4), 486–509), this article draws on the experience of coalition government in Westminster to review, categorise and consider how power sharing has necessitated a rethink of what is the British constitution. Defining constitutional stretching as being about the sustained operation of two-party government within the Westminster model, it shows that traditional practices around manifestos, collective responsibility and the prerogative have been adjusted since 2010 in order to facilitate functioning administration. The article observes that some stretching is not entirely novel with precedents to be found in earlier single party administrations. It further argues that while conventions have been strained, the Cameron/Clegg government survived, suggesting a need to adjust our understanding of constitutional concepts. Given the likelihood of future hung parliaments, this could mean more permanent constitutional change and the article makes some modest suggestions for updating guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taking as its starting provocation Philip Cowley's ' Arise, Novice Leader!', this article contributes to the discussion of the nature of today's party leaderships. 'Experience', even for political office, should be viewed as 'real-world' work as much as time served in parliament. By quantifying non-political pre-parliamentary experience of post-war leaderships, I show both that current leaders are relatively 'careerless' and that this is not historically unusual. While Cowley's observation is that their parliamentary experience is also limited, by reintroducing 'political experience' into the numbers, I demonstrate that Cameron, Clegg and Miliband are among the most experienced leaders since 1945 in terms of total pre-parliamentary work but further removed from the 'real world' of those they represent. My argument is that in the contemporary context, such grounding at the top of politics partially explains the election of these professional leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An obituary is presented for Donald Richie, a writer, filmmaker, and expatriate American who lived in Japan.

The article examines the unexamined life and works of author Virginia Woolf which centered on the ethical and political problem of freedom, tyranny, brutality, torture, the fall of civilization and end of freedom. It highlights the life of Woolf during the day-to-day unfolding of Europe's political and social history during the 1930s. The article relates that during this period, Woolf used her art to critique these abuses and other forms of power and escape its constraints.

The article reviews the book "The Weather in Proust" by edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Jonathan Goldberg.

In response to the PR issue on ‘Trans/Performance’, this essay explores the multiple dimensions of performances which cross corporealities, topographies, languages, and other sites or locations. To extend this exploration of a performative crossing of unknown and dangerous terrain, the essay examines the journey which the performance theorist Antonin Artaud made to the island of Inishmore, off the western coast of Ireland, in 1937. The journey encompassed a transmutation of Artaud's work from the writing of manifestoes to the writing of letters and magic spells. It also propelled him into an alien and perilous interzone; at the conclusion of his journey, he was arrested, imprisoned, deported back to France and then interned in psychiatric hospitals for nine years. Artaud's letters were always written at speed, and imagine immense conspiracies and apocalyptic world events imminently to take place both in Ireland and France. Many of his letters were lost in the transitional interval between sending and receipt (or were discarded by their recipients), and this essay is based on archival examinations of the surviving letters, often in the form of one surviving page from an otherwise lost letter. Several of Artaud's letters were written to the head of the Surrealist art movement, André Breton, and the essay concludes with a translation of one of Artaud's letters to Breton, taken from a volume of translations - Artaud 1937 Apocalypse - published earlier in 2018 and marking the seventieth anniversary of Artaud's death in 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]