Brian Lobel and Hannah Maxwell assess The Sick of the Fringe, a Wellcome Trust-funded programme of talks and events exploring the relationship between medicine and the arts at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Special Issue: Theatre, Performance and Activism: Gestures towards an Equitable World
Edited by Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry
The latest print issue combines scholarly articles with contributions from artist-activists to explore the theatrical gestures of protest: gestures that traverse the private and public realms, gestures that manifest the labour of care, gestures of migration and movement, and gestures of solidarity.

This issue of Interventions is focused on activism and performance and accompanies the print journal’s special issue ‘Theatre, performance and activism: gestures towards an equitable world’.

Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry reflect on a collectively authored blogging project on activist performance, in which ‘domestic gestures’ emerged as one of its core themes.

In this interview Shane Boyle and Larry Bogad reflect on the relationship between performance and protest through a critical exploration of the ‘irresistible image’.

Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A and Robert Leach contribute to a reflection and celebration of Irish writer and performer Margaretta D’Arcy’s ongoing activism.

‘How do we imagine something other than what there is?’ This short film is an edited version of an interview with the vacuum cleaner, an ‘art activist collective of one’.

Special Issue: Electoral Theatre
Edited by Stephen Bottoms and Brenda Hollweg
This edition of Contemporary Theatre Review is timed to coincide with the UK General Election of May 2015. It deals in part with theatre about electoral politics, but also considers electoral politics as a kind of theatre, taking an interdisciplinary approach to affective dimensions of voting, dramaturgical strategies of address, and critiques of broadcast media.

Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager compile a ‘lexicon’ on acts of voting, presenting contributions from 26 scholars who explore the ambitions, achievements and economies of voting in Europe.

A short film by Laura Bissell and David Overend on theatre, performance, and the Scottish Referendum, featuring interviews with Christine Hamilton and Scottish theatre-makers.

The Politics, Processes and Practices of Editing, guest-edited by Maria M. Delgado & Joanne Tompkins
This special issue brings together 33 short essays offering critical reflections and commentaries on the myriad practices, problems and provocations of editing. It is a conversation about how – as editors in formal and informal capacities – we write, how we curate, how we fashion and formulate, how we shape and feedback, and the changes and challenges that the digital era has introduced.

Various participants reflect on a recent ‘edit-a-thon’ that sought to redress the invisibility of feminist Live Art practices within Wikipedia.

This forum, curated by Charlotte Bell, offers five different views from postgraduates and early-career researchers on the shifting landscape of academic publishing.

NOTA, a collection of unedited responses produced and ‘archived’ in real-time, collapses the distance between performance and critical response.

‘So what is Performance if it includes this?’ asks Yelena Gluzman, editor of the deliberately non-selective compendium Emergency Index.

In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Contemporary Theatre Review, the current editors have hand-picked a selection of articles from the archive that reflect something of the breadth and distinctive character of the journal.  The articles will be freely available until the end of 2015, and are introduced by the members of the editorial team.

A Controversial Company: Debating the Casting of the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao, edited by Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe. The storm surrounding the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) 2012-13 production of The Orphan of Zhao brought to the fore issues of racial-ethnic theatrical representation in casting. This Special Issue brings together material from all sides of the debate, from the RSC and British East Asian (BEA) actors, from practitioners and academics, to offer a series of documents on what could become a decisive, and positive, moment in the history of BEA performance in Britain.

Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe, co-editors of the special issue debating the casting of the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao, introduce the online features that accompany the print issue.

In ‘Orphan à la Crouching Tiger‘, Daphne Lei reports on a production of The Orphan of Zhao in La Jolla, California, featuring an all-Asian American cast.

To accompany his analysis of why the casting of The Orphan of Zhao became so contested, Ashley Thorpe provides a critique of the marketing of the RSC production.