Musical-theatrical Global South roundtables: Selected excerpts

In January 2024, Masi Asare and Emilio Méndez convened three Zoom conversations with artists and researchers from around the globe on the topic of the ‘Musical-Theatrical Global South’. Below are excerpts from these conversations, lightly edited for clarity. These excerpted comments are collectively organized around five themes that recurred across the roundtables: (1) the relevance of the term musical in Global South contexts, (2) language and translation, (3) Indigenous and popular musical elements, (4) migration and transnational travel and (5) forms of musical-theatrical performance. This last theme, about form, can be understood to directly respond to and expand upon the first theme about terminology and ways of defining ‘the musical’.