Letter from the Editor

Abstract

This first issue of Ecumenica’s fifteenth volume pays respect to I Nyoman Cerita. His essay on calonarang performance in Bali was under review, here, when he passed away in late 2021. A respected artist and scholar, Cerita taught at the Institut Seni Indonesia and choreographed performances of many sorts around the world. Cerita has written about the ritual practice of performers in calonarang and encourages us to regard that practice as fundamental to calonarang performers’ art. In this issue we offer his essay, which was co-authored by his friend Kathy Foley, Distinguished Professor Emerita at UC-Santa Cruz and a past editor of Asian Theatre Journal. Foley and I Nyoman Sedana provide a preface to this essay, in memory of I Nyoman Cerita and as an introduction to the art in which he was a true expert.This issue also offers the first of two parts of Kristen Rudisill’s translation of Cho Ramasamy’s play Cāttiram Coṉṉatilai (The Scriptures Don’t Say So). Composed in Tamil, Ramasamy’s comic play dramatizes caste conflict in southern India, where caste and its implications are fundamentally entangled with religion. The second part, completing this first English translation of the play, will appear in this volume’s second issue.The last feature item in this issue is an interview with Moslem Nadalizadeh, professor of Persian Language at Ahlul Bayt International University in Tehran, Iran, who has also been a ta’ziyeh performer from childhood. In this conversation, Nadalizadeh reflects on the history of his family of ta’ziyeh performers and comments on the central features and methods of ta’ziyeh performance.The performance reviews and the book reviews in this issue attend to two specific topics. Readers will find here reviews of separate pastorela performances of this past holiday season. Javier L. Hurtado articulates his experience of El Teatro Campesino’s renowned La Pastorela, as revised and performed in 2021 as a radio broadcast. Aliza Moran looks at The Last Christmas / La Ultima Navidad, performed bilingually by Cazateatro in Memphis, Tennessee. The book reviews in this issue all attend to studies of performance and Indigenous peoples. Taken together, the books in review in this issue cover considerable ground, literally and figuratively, from Mexico City to Wisconsin, USA, and from Pre-Columbian Aztec-Nahua civilization to today’s Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. In surveying these different books, this issue’s review authors—Emily Goodell, Guillermo Avilés-Rodríguez, Neal Anderson Hebert, Sarah Alice Campbell, and Andrew Gibb examine Indigenous philosophy and epistemology, colonial history, tourism, and performative representation.We are entering the third year of global pandemic, or leaving the second year, depending on the point from which a person chooses to look at it. We at Ecumenica express hope for a year that is more free of this threat to our common health. Acknowledging what the pandemic has revealed about all of us, we hope for a year that is more open to performance and to religious practice that renews our global consciousness and our respectful regard for each other as interdependent individuals.