Editorial Statement

The creation of a new journal is a challenge as great and exhilarating as that of forming a new organization, since both enterprises draw researchers together in addressing important issues of our times. These enterprises also enable us to extend the boundaries of our field of theatre by exploring new initiatives.

A journal is a place for new explorations. It brings together researchers and readers; it is a nexus, a platform for exchanges, an interface. It promotes the diffusion of research, but also inspires that research with new approaches and methodologies. Thus such an enterprise is crucial for the renewal of our disciplinary field.

A journal contributes to re-thinking theatre, to inciting us—researchers, teachers and artists—to go beyond our habitual paths, in order to envision our field in a different light.

It is important for a journal to avoid a one-track vision focused on a single country or language. We know that today we must succeed in preserving the specificities of our research and methodologies while at the same time participating in the encompassing international movement of globalisation. Every country, every culture and every continent contributes a difference and a specificity that somehow must be preserved. We know that today ‘performance studies’ prevails in many countries, with local variations. We also know that certain Latin countries resist this trend, and that aesthetic approaches in these countries remain very strong. These differing evolutions deserve our attention. They invite an in-depth reflection on the evolution of our disciplines, and allow us to stretch our limits.

It is in this spirit of shedding light on our differences and diversities that we have created the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance (EASTAP), an association that is just developing and which, while based in Europe, is open to the rest of the world. At its heart, and in its journal, we hope to address topics that are properly European, in order to shed light on that very particular symbiosis between theatre and Europe, the source of particularly original artistic forms.