ABSTRACT This article examines the Living Newspaper 2.0 through its realization as a live performance, Always Present, Rarely Recognized: A Living Newspaper on Misogyny. Developed through Performance as Research, the Living Newspaper 2.0 operates as a contemporary political theatre framework that brings together documentary material, collaborative creation, and digital technologies to address present-day socio-political realities. Rather than focusing on the historical origins or methodological development of the framework – which were discussed in Parts I and II of the study – this article centres on practice, analysing how the Living Newspaper 2.0 functions in rehearsal and performance. Particular attention is given to audience participation, narration, creation method, and projection, examining how these elements operate not as isolated techniques but as interconnected dramaturgical structures that shape political meaning. By reflecting on the outcomes of the performance, this article considers how embodied research, collective authorship, and digital intervention work together to facilitate critical awareness and dialogue. The article also includes access to the final performance, inviting readers to engage directly with the practice-based results of the Living Newspaper 2.0 and to witness how Performance as Research can function as a tool for contemporary political theatre creation.

ABSTRACT The Wild Tenant (2024) by Lucy Gough is inspired by Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), in which Brontë explores with honesty and raw brutality the relationship between protagonists, Huntingdon and Helen. Their relationship reflects Brontë’s own encounters with her alcoholic brother, Branwell. In this curated conversation, Gough discusses with actress, Bella Merlin, the nature of women artists working from a place of seeming savagery and honesty, and the correlation of personal narrative and imagination. The Wild Tenant (in which Merlin played Heledd) toured Wales in the autumn of 2024, produced by Deryncoch Productions and supported by the Arts Council of Wales. Prior to and during this time Gough also created writers’ workshops with participants from a women’s refuge in Aberystwyth, Wales. In the conversation between Gough and Merlin, they explore the writer-actor relationship, drawing upon tools from Stanislavsky’s system. This includes “the Second Level” between text and subtext, and navigating the lines of “physical action” and “verbal action,” resulting in what Merlin calls the “line of emotional resonance.” Gough’s integration of heightened poetry and gritty realism is also explored, in terms of acting choices and audience reception.

ABSTRACT In one of his final works before he died, the Stanislavsky scholar and teacher, Jean Benedetti, published a biography of the eighteenth-century actor David Garrick (1717–1779). Benedetti argues in David Garrick and the Birth of Modern Theatre (2001), that Garrick’s theatrical reforms in the eighteenth century, especially in acting, foreshadowed Stanislavsky’s discoveries and the beginning of the realist tradition in modern theatre. By linking Garrick’s acting to Stanislavsky, Benedetti reclaims a place for Garrick within the modern tradition. This has two effects: first, it reaffirms the “truth” and timelessness of Stanislavsky’s ideas; second, it suppresses aspects of Garrick’s acting and eighteenth-century theatrical culture because they belong to a now discredited “paradigm” of acting. This argument creates a circular logic whereby Garrick was “good” because he acted using techniques later defined by Stanislavsky; techniques which, by definition, constitute “good” acting. Garrick was a great actor, even for some of the reasons Benedetti names, but not because he instinctively discovered the Stanislavsky “system” a century or so before its time. This paper argues it was because Garrick was a master of an actor’s embodied techniques, had an acute dramaturgical sensibility and possessed that ineffable quality, essential to the great actor, charm.

ABSTRACT Stage lighting design is, mostly, referenced and researched in correlation to the scenographic history of theatre, often leaving in shadow the organic impact it has on the human beings involved in the theatre process, both in front and behind the footlights. Light, though, is not just a visual scenographic element; it is living, an orchestrator of the human vision; we still say, “I‘m going to see a play” and not hear a text spoken on stage. The beginning of the twentieth century was a turning point for theatre making, with Stanislavsky being one reference point for future developments. He made valuable remarks about lighting, proving that concentrating attention is an active process that does not happen by accident and that there are tools, like lighting, to facilitate that process. Key to my discussion here will be Stanislavsky’s notion of a light-initiated compartmentalisation and manipulation of stage space, i.e. the identification of specific sections on the stage the limits of which are set by light: circles of attention. Stanislavsky’s circles of attention support the statement that lighting serves as a “magnifying lens” that draws the viewer’s focus to particular areas or actions on stage. This article will elaborate on the potential of Stanislavsky’s circles of attention to the dramaturgy of light, shedding light on various extracts of his writings where the dynamic functions of stage lighting are observed and described in an experiential way.

ABSTRACT Stanislavsky’s latter practice known today as Active Analysis is a powerful tool for quickly integrating the givens of a script into an actor’s body. Learning the tool can be anxiety-inducing for beginning actors as they cannot rely on a script in hand. This essay outlines the scaffolding techniques I’ve developed to serve as stepping stones while students explore the freedoms that Active Analysis offers, curtailing anxiety and streamlining the embodiment of the role. These practices also promote bell hooks' calls for focus on the “self-actualization” of students and help create Stanislavsky’s desired “actor-creators.”

ABSTRACT The connection between Konstantin Stanislavsky and Jerzy Grotowski is often overlooked or underplayed because there are substantial distinctions between them in terms of practices and approaches. In Part I of this essay, I examine Grotowski’s reflections on Stanislavsky’s final experiments, which the Polish director considered to constitute the culmination of the System, as well as the starting point for his own work at the Laboratory Theatre. In Part II, I explore the implications of the Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage and its legacy for contemporary performance research by relating Stanislavsky’s idiosyncratic usage of the term perezhivanie, translated by Martin Kurten as “conscious experience,” to the neuroscientific investigation of embodied experience, discussed by Rhonda Blair, and to Grotowski’s own conception of consciousness as a form of embodied awareness. I then focus on a crucial point of convergence between the Russian and Polish directors’ respective approaches lying beyond the purview of neuroscience, namely, the correlation between the physical and the spiritual, prompting Sharon Carnicke to invent the neologism “physiospiritual.” I infer that the legacy of the Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage consists in an expanded notion of perezhivanie that I relate to philosopher Alva Noë’s phenomenological understanding of the interrelation of consciousness and experience.

ABSTRACT Stanislavsky placed belief in imagined circumstances at the heart of his acting System. As he wrote, “Everything on stage must instill belief in the possibility that it could exist in life as actual feelings and sensations, analogous to those that the artist undergoes while creating.” However, leading proponents of Stanislavsky’s late work rarely mention belief when they write about his last rehearsal technique, named Active Analysis by Maria Knebel. My essay interrogates this puzzling absence through Knebel’s practice, which still positions belief as “the foundation of foundations” in acting, but also sees belief as originating from actors’ active exploration of their roles’ circumstances. For Knebel, there can be no belief in fictional possibilities without the visceral knowledge, acquired through the rehearsal process.