From the Editor

I invite readers to look at the names and affiliations of the authors of this issue and note that our contributors (many of whom are Association for Asian Performance members) are all over the globe. We are Japanese (Yoshiko Fukushima) or Chinese (Dongshin Chang) who teach in the United States, Indians who teach in the United Kingdom (Arya Madhavan), Italians who have studied in China (Antonio Leggieri), Chinese teaching in Australia (Xiaohuan Zhao), Taiwanese (Yi-Hsin Hsu and Iris Tuan), Filipino (Sir Anril Tiatco), Indonesian (Een Her diani), Greek (Avra Sidiropoulu), or Chinese (Qinghuan Huang) scholars teaching in home countries. We are Americans with teaching experience in Japan (Ruth Forsythe and Jonah Salz) and Taiwan (Catherine Diamond), Portuguese who have studied in India (Filipe Pereira), and Americans studying Indonesian arts (Kristina Tannenbaum). Though ATJ is published in the United States and a good number of the authors may have been educated in the United States or Europe, we are a wide, transnational group. We are a reality of the world today.

At a recent conference on Southeast Asian Shadow Puppetry at SOAS, which was organized by our ATJ Southeast Asia area editor, Matthew Cohen, I found there was much consternation about the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. In the recent US presidential campaign much of the discourse has been about "walls" and othering of those within and beyond our US borders. There is fear abroad in our contemporary world.

When this journal was founded in the 1980s the world seemed to be opening, as today it may seem to be closing down. I find the borders that are being touted are often about limiting imagination, understanding, and empathy—making sure we don't know each other, lest we recognize and implement our commonality. We see governments (I speak of my own at present) that increasingly limit funding to public education, making it expensive, narrow, and "dumbed down."

Many will argue that theatre is passé in a world of technology and give live performance the swipe. Some will question the simplicity of our medium, which needs, in its essence, only the moving figure that is seen and the body that sees. I argue, however, that we theatre makers are increasingly needed to bring people together via that simplicity and directness, to look at aspects of ourselves and understand our differences and similarities. Theatre is live and shared, and changes minds and visions. As the move toward isolationism grows, I hope that each of you who is writing, singing, dancing, or writing your research continues to reach across boundaries; your work dissolves misinformation. Coexistence begins by opening doors.