Stage and Beyond. Space and Place in Contemporary Theatre

This issue of Anglistica AION investigates the theatre’s potential to mediate the relationship between human beings and space through analyses of thought-provoking performances which move beyond the limits of the conventional stage in order to elicit the audience’s responses and interactions with the surrounding world. In exploring the forms of theatre involving urban or natural spaces, abandoned or reshaped contexts, or guided paths through unusual delimitations of the performative space, we also take into consideration the recent literary and theoretical debates on the representations of space and place, geopoetical and geocritical approaches as well as the ecocriticism, since they all interweave spatial issues with phenomenological implications and political outcomes in the broadest sense. Those approaches – usually applied to the history of ideas, cultural traditions and narrative and poetical discourses – are potentially fruitful for an analysis of contemporary theatre, one of the most suitable arts where different ways to experience, inhabit, narrate and counter-narrate spaces are formulated and performed.