Introduction Maryrose Casey and William Peterson

The co-editors had a hunch when they agreed to take on the task of coconvening the 201 1 ADS A Conference that there would be more than enough current research to support both a conference and a specially themed issue of the journal on the topic 'Transcultural; Transnational; Transformation: Seeing and Writing Across Cultures'. Given the increasing importance of extending our critical frameworks beyond the domains of the 'inter-' and 'intra-' cultural in our own research and the work of others whom we admire, we felt that the time had come for the journal to revisit a topic that has not been explored in-depth since the 2006 issue on Theatre, Emotions and Interculturalism' edited by Peta Tait and Jung-Soon Shim. Over the last decade, the frameworks that emerged in the 1990s from scholars such as Patrice Pavis, Erika Fischer-Lichte and Christopher Balme have been critiqued, revised and continually expanded - to the point where it seems that they can no longer keep up with contemporary practice. To many of us, the kinds of cultural flows identified by sociologists and social-anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai, Ulf Hannerz and Jan Nederveen Pieterse seem to provide a more useful way to map out the cultural complexities of work being created both locally and transnationally than do these older models that require constant updating. Furthermore, mapping out the 'trans-' aspects of these flows across, between and within cultures and nations opens us up more broadly to consider the transformative capacities of these exchanges. Indeed, the three 'Trans-es' are inextricably linked in much of the work explored in this issue: flows that cannot be contained by cultures or nations create the potential for new kinds of transformations in and through performance.The other half of the theme, 'Seeing and Writing Across Cultures', seeks to extend that critical practice further by opening the cultural space to examine some of the thornier and often more contested aspects of conducting this kind of research. Recognising and writing about cultural complexity can be difficult enough, but an even greater challenge is recognising and interrogating one's own position with respect to the work that one writes about or finds oneself embedded in. Thus we asked for submissions that sought to 'explore, bring together and/or set in opposition cross-cultural receptions, visions, borrowings, understanding, practices, theories and ethical ponderings'. As submissions started pouring in, we wondered initially if we had not set too wide a field, if the issue would have coherence, especially given the increasingly narrow frames set up as themes for international conferences that seek to shape and contain similar discourses. But in the end, we found that we had an issue which did precisely what we had hoped for: one where the articles do indeed engage in a conversation with one another, where the writing reflects a deep sense of ethical engagement, and where practices, theories, receptions and understandings are set in opposition in ways that move transculturally and transnationally through flows that are multiple rather than singular.The issue falls into three sections, with groups of three or four articles talking back to one another in ways that are sometimes sequential and often cumulative. Indeed, we would encourage the reader to consider abandoning the practice of reading only the articles that sound appealing and to read the issue from front to back. The first four articles extend from some of the key foundational questions set forth by Ayshe Jenkinson, recuperating important historical performance work that variously frames indigeneity. The second set of articles, bookended by the contributions from Hilary Halba and Rua McCallum and from William Peterson, set out new ways of knowing crossculturally, challenging the position of the cross-cultural researcher and practitioner at sites in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Philippines. The final three articles take us back into the traditional spaces of Western theatre, where work that circulates transnationally requires new forms of crosscultural adaptation, while the issue concludes with a consideration of identity construction in Canadian and Australian multicultural theatre that returns to the dramatic text. …

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