In Performance and the Global City, editors D. J. Hopkins and Kim Solga compile a selection of essays that tackle the complex relationship between spatiality and performance in the global world. Through discussions of mobilization, social justice, theatre and the performance of everyday life, the contributors explore ways in which performance can both reinforce and challenge notions of mobility and urbanization in global cities. The editors’ definition of ‘performance’ and the contributors’ consequential application of the term are broad. Understanding performance as both daily (inter)actions and theatrical productions allows for extensive critical examinations of actor–spectator, citizen–‘immigrant’ and insider–outsider relationships, as dynamic engagements that arise in the spaces between these constructed categories.

This collection emerges out of the preceding volume, Performance and the City, which considered post-9/11 Western theatre and performance. As Hopkins and Solga explain, Performance and the Global City applies many of the first volume's theoretical frameworks and methodologies to international contexts (p. 7). The latest volume complicates a “West-and-the-rest” binary by denaturalizing Western centrality and shifting the focus to other nation states, geographies and landscapes. Identifying the complexities of urbanization, neoliberalism and capitalism, the editors reject simplistic categories and complicate dichotomies that would universalize particular cultures and geographies.

The collection comprises three parts, each focusing on a particular theme. In Part One, the contributors explore how performance may be deployed in uncertain and precarious emerging global cities and urban spaces. Rather than solely focusing on oppressions that marginalized peoples experience in these spaces, the chapters articulate how creative practices can be used as tools for subversion and empowerment. In this way, the book focuses on active reclamation of space and social justice, as opposed to merely exploring spatial disorientation and exclusion. In Part Two, contributors examine relationships among performance, travel and the construction of subjectivities. Considering both spontaneous and planned performances, these chapters explore how performance can perpetuate accepted disciplinary codes, or alternatively destabilize normalized practices.

Part Three, which includes some of the most compelling essays in the collection, addresses embodied experiences of people in cities coping with recent violence, protest and war. Among these essays, Nesreen Hussein's ‘Cairo: My City, My Revolution’ stands out as a gripping personal reflection on ‘participation-at-a-distance’. Confronting both the possibilities and the limitations of performance from afar, Hussein's work destabilizes physical geographies and reveals the inextricable links between performance, identity and space. The concluding essay, ‘Dramaturgies of Crisis and Performances of Citizenship’ by Philip Hager, is also a noteworthy contribution to the volume. Focusing on the performance of protest and citizenship in Athens's Syntagma Square, Hager's chapter considers the capacity for performance to radically re-envision politics, democracy and the neoliberal state. Asking how spaces both shape performance and performatively construct the city and those within it, Part Three excels in part because of the urgency with which it demonstrates how performance can and must institute change.

The notable benefits and impact of this collection arise from the contributors’ insistence on extending and deconstructing spatial explorations of performance onstage and in day-to-day life. With a consistently high quality of theoretical rigour and critical analysis, this text offers valuable insights for both geographers and performance studies scholars interested in performance's capacity to contribute to and spur change in urban spaces.