In 2019 British choreographer Seke Chimutengwende began research on a new project exploring horror, haunted houses, and the hauntings of colonial history. It begins in darkness (2022) emerged in collaboration with the dancers who perform each iteration. Working through the figure of the haunted stately home, It begins in darkness excavates—and exorcises—the horror of slavery’s histories through dance.

Unable to perform the perceived demands of his gender—unable to have sex—in 2014 the incel Elliot Rodger devised a performance of ruthless cruelty. His mass murder, a now habituated performance of US American masculinity, was preceded by an autobiographical text. Recounting his pursuit of a consummate manhood, Rodger’s manifesto reveals the consequential movement from narrative to performance, from genre to gender, from a discourse of discontent to a violent dramaturgy of masculinity.

When two black male directors produce university productions of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview in different parts of the country at the same time, they bond over their shared understanding of the white gaze, and how black people are created and viewed in the white imagination, both in the play and in their own lives.

Physical and cognitive disabilities are part of many people’s lives. They are the existential marks some performers carry and emphasize through their art in order to transcend them and embrace disability in a nonstigmatizing way. The performances of Felipe Monteiro, Nicola Fornoni, and Kamil Guenatri claim space for difference and diversity and reject assistentialist, protectionist, and pseudo-inclusive approaches that prescribe and perpetuate stigmas.

Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) is a play in the US-American bloodstream: it was quoted repeatedly by the architects of the American Revolution and was famously performed by Washington’s troops at Valley Forge in 1778. But what does this 300-year-old verse tragedy—with its entangled political, racial, and theatrical histories and implications—have to say to audiences in the present-day US South at the Clarence Brown Theatre, Tennessee, in 2023?

Putting the work of the poet Nathaniel Mackey into correspondence with that of the singer, composer, performance and video artist M. Lamar offers a unique perspective on the complex relationship between automation and possession. Mackey’s Andoumboulou and Mu move in and through M. Lamar so that possession and automation are destabilized and replaced by molecular distintegrations of plantation worlds and the sonic apertures of a Black Afrofuturist Android.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are not only blockchain-based digital assets; they are theatrical practices taking shape between social bodies. Understanding the theatricality of NFTs provides a way to account for the criticism directed at them. NFT critiques often purport to focus on underlying politico-economic ideologies but, in actuality, reveal deep-seated antitheatrical anxieties recontextualized for the digital realm.

Conversational theatre is a medium for facilitating dialog on race, privilege, and discrimination in Swedish society. Du Contrat Social, a performance based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract, demonstrates how theatre can create an interactive space where audience members actively reflect on their social positioning and implicit biases. By guiding the audience through exercises that expose implicit stereotypes and encourage self-reflection, the performance fosters a unique setting for transformative learning.

Akira Takayama’s McDonald’s Radio University (2017) transforms McDonald’s fast-food restaurants into auditory and affective performance spaces for collective reflection and sociopolitical engagement. Migrant “professors,” seated inside, deliver lectures via portable radios. Drawing from Brechtian radio theatre, Takayama foregrounds the ethics of listening, urging audiences to confront vulnerability and marginalization within noisy, unpredictable public spaces devoid of theatre’s protective distance.

Purulia, a district in the southwestern part of West Bengal, is popular for the renowned chhou dance. Despite the prevalent notion that chhou is exclusively a war dance, it dynamically incorporates contemporary social and political issues, and has undergone significant changes such as new musical instruments and technologies, lighting, costume transformations, and female performers.

A “figure in the carpet” (as in the Henry James novella) within the choreography and biography of Merce Cunningham can be found in the relationship of his queerness to his choreographic innovations. Cunningham’s philosophies and practices can be seen to reflect multiple responses to homophobia and sexism—defensive maneuvers, circumventions, and interventions.

Despite myths of its dematerialization, capitalism continues to deepen its reliance on resource extraction. Performances by Otobong Nkanga and Seba Calfuqueo confront this trend, mapping it onto longer histories of expropriation in Namibia and Chile, respectively. By activating sculptural objects composed of mined raw materials, both artists make visible the colonial and ongoing forms of extractive violence that underpin automation and the socalled green energy transition.

Anarchist, Black Liberation Army member, and “Gender Rebel” Kuwasi Balagoon spent a lifetime performing a practice of resistance and autonomy—“freedom as a habit”—given kinetic, embodied form in his Exercise Book. Kuwasi Balagoon’s writings, as well as recollections from friends and comrades, are placed in dialog with James Boggs’s writings on automation to explore the tensions and frictions in the encounter between automation as a social formation and the insistent enactment of freedom as habit.

Widely regarded as the most prestigious art exhibition in the world, the Venice Biennale combines art history, politics, and cultural power in a dizzying spectacle. The 2024 exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere,” situates performance as a key medium in contemporary art and art history.

Nacera Belaza asks a dancer to “be sound.” This is not a metaphor, nor is it a request for the dancer to produce sound, talk, or sing. It is a task given with little explanation but meant to unlock a way of performing without pretending, stirring up questions about the historically racialized possibility of realness, transparency, and transmission, and drawing attention to profound sensory experiences that might never be clear. Here, performing one impossible task (being sound) becomes instructive in doing another (writing dance).

Despite the turn to the right of many national governments, including France, the 2024 theatre festival in Avignon programmed by a new director, Tiago Rodrigues, delivered feminist, internationalist, antiracist, and progressive works. The lineup showed both his courage to defend what he believes in and his support of exceptional artists who share his political passions (Caroline Guiela Nguyen, Mohamed El Khatib, Lola Arias, Marta Górnicka, Séverine Chavrier, Baro d’evel, among others).

Dear San Francisco by the Montréal-based company Les 7 Doigts de la Main takes up mythological symbols surrounding California, particularly through tracing modes of communication—from letters and mail to iPhones. Yet, as a performance ultimately centering on epistolary form, Dear San Francisco finds inspiration in dedication as a uniquely political act of performance address.

Dan Friedman, a cofounder and artistic director emeritus of the Castillo Theatre in New York City, interviews Daniel Maposa, the founder and executive director of Savanna Trust, a politically engaged theatre based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Their conversation covers the history of political theatre in Zimbabwe from colonial times to the present.

ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) names a mysteriously relaxing tingling sensation certain people experience in response to a range of stimuli, including the close, careful attention of others. Since 2010, a form of roleplay video has developed in which the performer addresses the camera/viewer in the guise of a medical or service professional. These relaxing enactments evoke fictional workplaces, raising questions about precarious and exploited labor in a globalized digital economy.

Recent works in Black aesthetic and cultural production build on legacies of Black feminisms as they seek to ever-expand scholarly theories and accounts of multifaceted Black life. The four books considered here assemble sites and model methods that bring new dimensions to how performance studies might understand historical and ongoing freedom dreams and the field’s reenergized commitment to understanding aesthetic and cultural production as world-making.