On Fast and Slow Editing

On Fast and Slow Editing This issue marks the end of my custodianship of Theatre Research International, so it is time to look back and reflect.It feels as if I have been in this role for a long time, yet the time has passed quickly.It was a joy to read the submissions, to work with authors from different parts of the world, to see the articles develop and to learn along the way.And when an issue is complete and articles seemingly unrelated to one another enter into a dialogue, the editor's pleasure is akin to finishing a creative journey.Yet it has also, in many ways, been a time out of joint.My tenure started as we were slowly emerging from the COVID- pandemic, very fragile, but perhaps with a faint hope that the virus might have been 'a portal', as Arundati Roy intimated, to finding a better way to be in this world.This glimmer of hope soon diminished with the war in Ukraine, followed by the genocide in Gazaboth ongoing as I write these lines in the shade of yet another unusually scorching summer in various parts of the world, while the ecological costs of wars for entire ecosystemshuman and non-humanare not even on the agenda.And these are just the biggest catastrophes of the moment, with the smaller unfolding on the peripheries.In Serbia, where I was born, people all over the country, with several theatre and film actors at the forefront, are taking to the streets to protect their land from the deal the government has made with Rio Tinto to open lithium minesa company known for labour-rights and environmental violations worldwide.While the extraction of lithium spells ecological disaster for a large part of a small country on the margins of Europe (not currently accepted in the European Union), its export deals with Western Europe will no doubt benefit the green goals of those most powerful countries.It is the old capitalist extractive logic in its many neocolonial variations.The question is, how to do, teach and research theatre and performance in the time of extreme ethical relativism, where corporations, billionaires and political and economic interests are placed above human life (the environment being part of it too)?How to edit a theatre journal in the time of genocide and ecocide?These have become vexing questions for me, to which I do not have satisfactory answers.As the articles for a TRI issue came together, whatever their historical, thematic and methodological varieties might have been, I often could not resist a journalistic impulse to frame them within the contemporary moment, despite knowing very well that a few months will pass between signing the issue off for production and its publication.This impulse comes, I believe, from two sources: one being theatre itselffrom its paradox of always unfolding in a here and now and of always already being in the past.Theatre and performance are strongly linked to space and time; they always take place in someone's here and nowand as we research and write we look into that past (long gone or just a theatre research international vol.