Search

This article investigates the moral wrongness of joke theft. Working through a trove of real-world cases, and using the sitcom The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as a touchstone, I argue, ultimately, for a pluralist approach, contending that there are several wrongs that may be present in any case of joke theft, but which cannot be reduced to each other and which are collectively irreducible to any sort of “superwrong.”

This article discusses the performance events “Do Not Believe Your Eyes” (2000) and “Ally/Foe” (2010) by Russian artist Oleg Mavromatti in the framework of a single durational event that critiques the sacralization of public space in Russia. The public reception of the performances is mediated by attitudes toward Russian Criminal Law Article 282, the so-called law against religious offenses, in a sociopolitical climate where Orthodoxy is conflated with state patriotism. Through the appropriation of the colloquially resonant behavioral paradigm of the holy fool, the author analyzes how Mavromatti’s performance event critiques the concept of “judgment” (by an Orthodox state and by an Orthodox public) from within a culturally resonant religious tradition. The artist’s intervention calls for a secular separation of church and state, but by doing so from within a religious tradition, it illuminates the function of the postsecular as a mode of engagement in contemporary Russian culture.

In Beckett's Ireland, the practice of censorship was bound up with the workings of literary genre. The fact that printed matter was subject to censorship, while theatre was not, meant that the censor played a role in maintaining the distinction between dramatic and nondramatic writing. Many Irish authors responded to these conditions by remediating censored narratives as theatre. Beckett adopted an alternative strategy, rejecting the legal premises of Irish censorship and crafting his literary style around a critique of the censor's reading practices. Beckett's responses to the Irish censor track his turn from the novel to the drama. Across genres, Beckett's writing in English was shaped by the climate of post-publication censorship in Ireland, the effects of which are legible even in works that were never banned. Beckett's rejoinder to the censor was articulated using terms set out by the Irish Free State's Committee on Evil Literature, which held that censors could prohibit a text based on one ‘indecent’ passage, rather than evaluating that excerpt in the context of the work as a whole. For Beckett, the literary trope of synecdoche—that is, the rhetorical substitution of a part for the whole—became associated with the censor's mode of reading. Beckett harnesses the trope of synecdoche to impugn Irish censorship practices, a pattern evident from the direct address to the censor in Murphy to the dramaturgical evocation of self-censorship in Not I. The use of synecdoche illuminates Beckett's reckoning with his cultural inheritance as an Irish writer and indexes his shift towards a cosmopolitan literary identity.

In this research, we brought together various theories and speculative conceptual connections of otherness associated with liminality especially as seen through one methodological experiment and art-based intervention, namely flash mobs. From our perspective, liminality and liminal spaces are incomplete and always becoming since often they cannot be documented or described through existing language and normative concepts. Moving away from normativity and speaking back from liminal spaces carry risks since complex and intersubjective liminal spaces challenge the authority of the researcher, knowing, and doing in Academia. In this work, we use examples from our flash mob events to bridge theorizing and public performances, actual limit experiences, and twisted forms of (normative) scholarship. We ask what is being produced through art-based interventions, resistance, liminality, and twisted scholarship in the context of inquiry.

The early twentieth century witnessed some of the worst mining disasters the UK has ever seen. Towns and cities leapt to the aid of bereaved families, raising tens of thousands of pounds in aid. Yet, while the effects of disaster funds on the locality in which they were administered have been the focus of scholarly work, little attention has been given to how these funds were created in constituencies outside of the disaster zone. The Barry Urban District Council (UDC) responded to the call for help after the Senghenydd (1913) and Gresford (1934) disasters, opening relief funds to aid the affected. The funds blurred the line between charity and local government, with the Barry UDC reliant on functions of civic society to aid its philanthropic turn. Their reaction offers insights into the charitable role of UDCs, reflecting on how they used these opportunities to further civic activity.

This article analyzes the processes ofbranqueamento(whitening) contained within the ideology ofmestiçagem(racial miscegenation) through the work of Brazilian dancer, choreographer, and dance pedagogue Eros Volúsia (1914–2004) in the context of the establishment of the myth of racial democracy in early twentieth-century Brazil. I argue that Eros Volúsia not only embodied Brazil's allegedly harmonious racial mixture through her stylized “folk” dances, but herbailado brasileiro(Brazilian ballet) in fact choreographed Brazil's modernity and aspirations of whiteness. I compare Volúsia's prominent career as a performer and pedagogue in Brazil with her brief film career in the United States, where Volúsia had the opportunity to follow in Carmen Miranda's footsteps and become the next “Brazilian bombshell,” but instead chose to return to Brazil, where she was able to maintain her white privilege and her status as author and artist.

This essay examines from an artist-researcher perspective the durational solo dance work Likely Terpsichore? (Fragments), created for and performed at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (UK) in 2018. It asks how dance's presence in the archaeological museum might allow an alternative visibility for ancient female bodies previously rendered only partially visible by history. It makes a claim for dance in the archaeological museum as a subversive act of radical archaeology, in terms of how, by playing on notions of dismembering/remembering histories, it seeks to disrupt received notions of how we view and understand ancient history and culture.

Between 1958 and 1961, Jerome Robbins's Ballets: U.S.A. company toured to European arts festivals with a repertory of new and existing works, most of which remain in performance more than six decades later. Cold War political and artistic imperatives intersected in choreography that circulated visions of “American” innovation and youthful vitality, danced to an eclectic range of scores by a mixed-race cast. Archival documentation of the funding process reveals discussions about aesthetic priorities and the choreographer's responsibility to the US government. Analysis of press coverage of the performances also considers the extent to which diplomatic objectives were achieved.

What if I could use my body-in-motion as a research tool? From the understanding that movement can be a site of knowledge and the body a thinking soma, this article supports a practice of studio laboratory as a somatic method of research, working with Laban’s principles of thinking in movement to investigate the genealogy of Laban practices in Brazil. Based on embodied research perspectives and Rudolf Laban’s praxis that proposes a ‘movement-thinking’ as well as the merging between cognition and action, the laboratory is a way to employ movement practice in the research without focusing on an artistic product but using art as a means of research and not necessarily its end. In this article, I discuss and describe the use of laboratory practice as a method for embodied and somatic research, providing two examples of how this practice was implemented as part of the methodology for drawing the genealogy of Laban practitioners in Brazil.

The Pallaki Seva Prabandhamu is a geya nataka (musical play) in lyrical Telugu language composed in the early eighteenth century by Sahaji Bhonsale II (r. 1684‐1712), the Maratha king of the Tamil-speaking region of Thanjavur. Using its most current iteration, the production of a digital album in 2012, as the locus, the article explores the historical vicissitudes of music construction in Carnatic music. The continuous recasting of old repertoire like the Pallaki illuminates the intangible agencies and exigencies of this process of historical record-keeping in southern Indian music. This article showcases the many historical and epistemic locations through which the Pallaki has passed, in the process exposing some critical gaps and misses in historical writing on the southern Indian musical repertoire. It also proposes an alternative, more direct engagement with musical material, in order to write about historical contexts of music and pushes the historian of music to yield more agency to the musician in co-writing the histories of music. The article raises two methodological possibilities: a critical inclusion of ‘performed repertoires’ as an archive of music history; and the inclusion of publishing, notating and other conventional archival of manuscripts within a larger conceptual framework of performance of text.

Em tempos de quarentena da COVID-19, é essencial explorar ferramentas para enfrentar os desafi os psicossociais provocados pelo isolamento social e pelas novas rotinas, além de buscar formas de satisfazer as necessidades de encontro, aproveitando os recursos tecnológicos. O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar e discutir uma adaptação do Teatro de Reprise com recursos de telepresença. O método desenvolvido foi o de pesquisa-ação. A intervenção específi ca foi iniciativa de um grupo de usuários de um centro cultural, no qual se realiza regularmente Psicodramas Públicos presenciais. A partir do ponto de vista do psicodrama, este trabalho discute as implicações e as possibilidades do uso de uma plataforma tecnológica, os papéis das pessoas envolvidas e a possibilidade de novas sociometrias, em uma intervenção.

Almost as soon as Paris was liberated from Nazi Occupation on 25 August 1944, Yiddish actors took back the stages on which they had once performed. In fact, on 20 December 1944, while war and the Holocaust still raged, a small cohort of actors produced what they advertised in the Naye prese as the “first grand performance by the ‘Yiddish folks-bine.’” This performance was to take place at the four-hundred-seat Théâtre Lancry, a performance space located in Paris's 10th arrondissement, not far from the Place de la République and the Marais. “Lancry,” as it was known, had played host to Yiddish theatre as early as 1903 and, during the interwar years, it was the center of Parisian Yiddish cultural activity: dozens of theatre performances occurred there and it was where the Kultur-lige pariz was based, among other institutions. During the postwar years, it also went by the name Théâtre de la République after 1947 and Théâtre du Nouveau-Lancry after 1951, but many still referred to it simply as “Lancry.”

To understand performance art of the past is to grapple with the fact that this art was designed to be lost. That is to say, it purposefully aspired to the condition of the lost work of art.

This essay forwards the idea of the transient museum, a theoretical and utopian project aimed at dismantling the visual logics that support the contemporary art museum. Beginning from the premise that such museums are predicated upon colonial and capitalist visual logics, the transient museum imagines ways of being in but not of the contemporary art museum and the economies of circulation it engenders. Its tactics engage visuality but, equally, a politics of the body and of movement. As such, Gwyneth Shanks frames two ways of performing the transient museum, against acquisition and an aesthetics of concealment, analyzing highly performative artworks by artists Rafa Esparza and Nari Ward to explain these categories. She argues that the transient museum names ever-accumulating forces of global and historical crisis—forces to which neither the museum nor contemporary art are immune—as a practice of enacting hope and remaking the contours of contemporary art.

This essay considers what viewing performance as an affective encounter—an embodied experience of sensations and intensities—might mean for applied theatre. Using auto-theory, which joins personal ...

This article describes the application of puppetry to psychosocial support during the Syrian crisis since 2011. After many years of using applied puppetry with vulnerable populations, such as refugees and victims of military actions, the author developed a structured model of intervention, as well as a training programme on puppetry, as a medium of expression and communication for activists (social workers, psychologists, artists), allowing them to work with refugees and displaced people. This model is based on a psychosocial approach aimed at strengthening the resilience of the final beneficiaries. The article includes a detailed description of the training steps and techniques involved, linking them to concepts and theoretical background.

This article explores the connections between puppetry performance practice and the activation of empathy, considering the synergies between puppetry and medical practice where empathy is a key factor in healing. I draw on a consideration of the place of puppetry within ritual transitional and healing practices to develop an examination of contemporary modes of performance, which require deep listening, response and attention. I examine the connections between neuroscience and puppetry, which suggest that attitude-taking engenders empathy, and compare this to my puppetry training practice to suggest that training for and engaging in puppetry practice can encourage and stimulate empathy. This has significance for practitioners of puppetry working in healthcare contexts and for medical practitioners who undertake some form of puppetry, either within their training or as continuing professional development. Although the different forms of empathy are connected in practice, the article focuses especially on affective (emotional), cognitive and social empathy.

This positioning article explores a reimagining within the field of applied theatre where through the medium of puppetry, the art and artist may become one as a way of healing. Building upon conceptual principles of animism, transference and embodiment, it is proposed that puppeteer training be usefully integrated into the higher education applied arts and health curriculum as an extension to existing programmes. Value is given to the metaphorical use of the puppet in both education and therapy. It is proposed that puppeteers may gain value from engaging with cross-disciplinary art-based research as a way to further understand puppetry’s uses and furthering their own practices.

I have been developing a model for how to use animated objects when meeting a palliative care patient and I have noticed that during these animated moments in the hospice, performing objects have represented different sites of humanity. At their best, these moments have created a performance from the patient’s story that has become shared. Moments of animation in the hospice are meetings between me and a person who is in palliative care. I have facilitated our meeting and brought a suitcase full of everyday objects with me. A patient is given a story and then cast in their own story with objects they have chosen. Meetings with patients in palliative care made me think about patients moral agency. A moral agent is a being who consciously puts moral activities into practice. Expressive objects telling stories for a patient is one place where moral agency survives in the hospice setting and where a palliative care patient can act for a while as a member of a moral community. In this article, I share my model of expressive objects related to my practice.

The theoretical turn to object ontologies in the social sciences and the humanities brings puppetry work related to illness, disability and health to the forefront of artistic practice-as-research, disability studies and the medical/health humanities. Articulating chronic illness and disability through the tools and practice of puppetry animation can help form complex embodiment, where the person is empowered to value their embodiment as a site of knowledge. Puppetry pedagogy can train the bodies of medical students and clinicians to develop the capacity for embodied attunement and may decolonize both the knowledge of the body and medical education by reunifying mind, body and imagination. By training to perceive materials both physically and poetically, puppetry allows silenced bodies and histories to speak.

As a real-life figure who was extensively written about in medical journals after his death, but whose voice is entirely absent from the historical record, the character of Tarrare presents the theatre-maker with a number of ethical and artistic considerations. In documenting Tarrare’s life through puppetry and opera, Wattle and Daub engaged in both a literal and a metaphorical act of ventriloquism, wherein we put our own words into the mouths of the dead. Drawing on Levinas’s ethics of the ‘other’ and Salverson’s reflections on the ethics of documentary theatre, this article interrogates The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak as an example of documentary theatre and explores the unique opportunities and challenges presented when using puppetry to represent the historical ‘other’.

This article will discuss how the puppet’s body is the perfect vessel to reclaim the voices of those that have been ‘othered’.1 It examines the history of the fractured puppet and the emergence of disability-affirmative puppet theatre in the twenty-first century, exploring the puppet’s ability to fracture, reform and move in new and exciting ways that allow different approaches of expression; these seek to challenge how the body, the puppeteer and the puppet are viewed. I will examine how puppet plays, A Square World, Meet Fred, The Iron Man and my own show Pupa, represent disability through puppets’ bodies in new and interesting ways. Through the use of the puppet’s body, these shows seek to shine a light on the absurdity of an exclusive world and make us question the cultural constructions around the disabled and puppet body.

The concept of the dithyrambic dramatist – introduced by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the fourth essay of his Untimely Meditations of 1873–76 – is one of the most performance-oriented concepts to emerge out of the nineteenth century in which theatre was often associated with dramatic literature. This article investigates the nature of the dithyrambic dramatist by tracing, in the first instance, the underlying musical perspectives – already evident in The Birth of Tragedy of 1872 – which led Nietzsche to develop the concept. In the second instance, the author articulates what may be considered as its key conditions, namely the visible–audible and individual–collective relationalities. In view of the arguments brought forward, the concept of the dithyrambic dramatist is located as an interdisciplinary element that emerged out of an art form – music – to which Nietzsche was intimately associated in his youth as a composer. The author further proposes that, rather than a metaphor to philological tropes, the dithyrambic dramatist is a concrete manifestation of interdisciplinary and performative foundations that inform Nietzsche’s analytic perspectives.

Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly.

The Remnant Dance Project, Culaccini, developed site-specific dance movement in response to the waters of the Taleggio Valley, Italy, during the Nature, Art and Habitat Residency (NAHR) (2018). The intention was to respond to the Enna River system through documenting dance movement made in the region via film, photography and reflective writing. The practice-led research process was shared on the daily blog, ‘The drop of the day’. At the close of the NAHR, a short dance film, Performing Water, was made to further interrogate the nature of site-specific dance-making in water and the notion of what constitutes ‘site-dance’ in this context. In our journey of water-dance discovery, unique marks have remained on each other, the site and on things we have made, like the traces of a water vessel: culaccini. The dance made for the project was immersive and focused, constructed to invite interpretation through the use of symbolism and imagery. Progetto Culaccini sviluppa un movimento di danza site-specific in risposta alle acque dei torrenti della Val Taleggio, Italia (2018). L’intenzione è quella di rispondere al sistema del torrente Enna documentando il movimento di danza fatto sul luogo attraverso film, fotografia e scrittura riflessiva. Questo processo di ricerca guidato dalla pratica venne condiviso quotidianamente sul blog: La goccia del giorno. Al termine della residenza Natura, Arte e Habitat, la produzione di un cortometraggio di danza ha permesso l’analisi e approfondimento della danza site-specific in acqua e la nozione di ciò che costituisce la ‘danza’ in questo contesto. Nel nostro viaggio di scoperta della danza nell’acqua, segni unici rimangono impressi uno sull’altro, il luogo e le cose che abbiamo fatto, come le tracce di un vessello d’acqua: i culaccini. La danza fatta in questo contesto è stata immersiva e focalizzata; costruita per invitare l’interpretazione attraverso l’uso di simbolismo e immagini.

This article engages disability puppetry as plays of transactional object relations, opening into speculative realms, articulating new alignments of embodied and enminded difference. The examples here range from hospital practices via art/life pain-related somatic explorations to experimental poetics of classroom and gallery installations, and from there to small local theatres working in collaboration with mental health service providers. In all of these sites, disability and puppetry have much to say to one another, offering connection and new forms of meaning-making, using non-realist conventions to make new worlds in which disability stays present.

Artists such as actors and puppeteers in health care face emotional challenges in their work. This article investigates the interpersonal competencies and emotional skills of the artist who uses puppets in their practice in health-care contexts and settings. We present initial findings from phase B of a wider longitudinal study. Phase A focused on actors in hospitals and drama trainees; Phase B uses qualitative research methods with actors, puppeteers and therapists as participants. Content analysis of data reveals that the main competencies the artist needs to deal with emotional incidents in health care are empathy, self- and social awareness, self-care, self-reflection, emotional resilience and active listening. These skills are needed alongside acting and puppetry skills to develop competent and professional artists in healthcare. The study offers evidence to further develop strategies of receiving, processing and communicating emotions safely and effectively within the protection of the artform. This study therefore diverts our attention from traditional training courses that are mainly about learning artistic skills to a cross-disciplinary pedagogical framework that aims to enable artists to observe, reflect and process emotions before, during and after a performance with patients as theatre ‘audience’-participants.

2020 marks the tenth anniversary of the Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade, a large-scale, experimental annual public puppetry event and performance in a small rural town in the Klein Karoo of South Africa. This multifaceted, collaborative puppet theatre-making process, which results annually in the creation of a parade and large-scale original performance, is co-organized by Net Vir Pret (a children’s school aftercare non-profit organisation based in the town of Barrydale) and the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects (LoKO) at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (CHR@UWC). The following conversation between the author (a Theatre Research Fellow at the CHR@UWC and creative director of the parade since 2014) and Sudonia Kouter (the Net vir Pret Aftercare manager and a key artistic contributor in the parade creative and directing teams) explores some of the experiences of meaning-making that arise in such a multi-layered and ambitious project.

In this writing I offer critical illuminations and diffractions with(in) researching, producing and performing a piece of choreographic practice research titled (in)fertile territories: a performance lecture. I utilize the concept of affective dissonance as x-ray to get closer to feelings and emotional labour as an early-career researcher in an institutional context. The writing is grounded in the cultural politics of emotion, and presents choreographic practice research, feminist critical reflection, and writing as technologies mobilized in the hopes of birthing something anew with significantly personal choreographic material.

Drawing on somatic practice, psychology, philosophy and the dance experience, this article operationalizes Sartre’s ideological response to movement pedagogy. The ‘thisness’ experience of embodiment during traditional dance styles negatively impacts on the realization of our body’s somatic potential. However, Sartre’s ‘body-for-itself’ mode can be stimulated with certain somatic practices, due to the concentration on the inner experience and sensations present in the body. In this sense, the body becomes a learning outcome in itself, through a deep and respectful connection with the dancer’s inner being. Pedagogically, this combination of Sartre’s theory with holistic techniques of the self, specifically the fundamental principles of Feldenkrais and dance literacy, can benefit the realization of individual potential during dance, and optimize positive embodiment. This article discusses initial materializations of the learning experiences of the dance student, informed by Sartre’s thinking on embodiment, and a theoretical discussion of the pedagogical implications of Sartre’s ideas for somatic pedagogy in contemporary dance.

This article deals with the main role played by the theatre in creating sociability during the passage from the Old Regime to the Liberal Revolution. In that time theatre highlighted as a leisure activity and because of that rulers tried to oversee it. They pursued to reinforce public order, but also to take advantage of it, as an educational tool, in order to build a modern society and virtuous people. However, within it were displayed behaviours far away from the ones thought bound first to good serfs and later to good citizens. To some extent, specially in periods of political unrest, theatre also became a place of resistance against the government through the establishment of an emotional community based on fraternity and the longing for freedom., El texto aborda el papel sobresaliente desempeñado por el teatro en la creación de la sociabilidad en el tránsito del Antiguo Régimen a la Revolución Liberal. En esa época el teatro fue un lugar esencial de ocio y por ese motivo las autoridades intentaron controlarlo. Se guiaron por motivos de orden público, pero también por el deseo de convertirlo en un instrumento educativo con el fin de desarrollar una sociedad moderna con personas virtuosas. Sin embargo, ese espacio se reveló como un lugar con comportamientos ajenos a lo que se entendían buenos súbditos, primero, y buenos ciudadanos más tarde. En ese sentido, se convirtió también en momentos de inestabilidad política en un lugar de resistencia al poder mediante la creación de una comunidad emocional, basada en la fraternidad y el anhelo de libertad, Este trabajo ha sido realizado en el marco del proyecto PGC2018-093778-B-100 del Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica e Innovación del Gobierno de España (MICINN-FEDER).

This article responds to the interdisciplinary developments that choreography has undergone in the twenty-first century, in terms of a focus on relationships between dance, architecture, site and cultural heritage. It makes a claim for how choreography within the city manifests itself in the form of a public bodily act, as artistic boundary-crosser and socio-political agent. We explore this through the lens of a central case study: artist Anton Mirto’s Scaffolding (2019), a workshop-performance event for seven dancers sited within The Chapel of Many, an architectural installation by architect Sebastian Hicks and set inside the ruins of Coventry Cathedral (UK) as part of the Coventry Welcomes Festival’s Refugee Week. Grounded in an exploration of dance and architecture in terms of spatiotemporal relations following Rachel Sara’s (2015) framework of a transontology of architecture and dance and Rachel Hann’s (2019) concept of fast architecture, we argue for how the choreographic process of making Scaffolding speaks back to both the architectural space and the urban heritage site in which it is located and addresses a certain experience of temporality, history and memory. In turn, the potential political agency of such a performed conversation between architecture and choreography in the twenty-first century city is revealed.

New Zealand critics and audiences in 1903 hailed Tapu (by Alfred Hill and Arthur Adams) as the harbinger of a new ‘national drama’. They thought that the comic opera captured the national essence and would broadcast the nation's advantages to a global audience. Yet the production never made it beyond Sydney, and has since disappeared from the historical record. My analysis of the script and critical reception shows that Tapu faltered in its confused adoption of a wide array of techniques of racial mimicry (borrowed from metropolitan theatres) to represent indigenous Māori and white visitors, but not the native-born settler population. The story of Tapu's failure, I argue, reveals something about the transnational conditions for the constitution of a national public sphere, and the indispensability of race as a supplement to that nation. It attunes us to the force of performance genre and repertoire as vehicles of racial information and affect, pointing to the ways in which conformity, rather than invention, was the ticket to success in the emergent global culture industries. If popular performance, and specifically racial mimicry, operated as a public experiment with the racial properties of citizenship – as a generation of scholarship on race and performance has argued – to what extent was that experiment controlled by the conventions of the global commodity market? This essay reaches insights that will be of interest to scholars of (trans)national performance history, settler whiteness and global indigeneity, and is germane to disciplinary debates on minstrelsy, ethnological show business, and cultural appropriation.

This essay examines parallels between the resolidification of German identity and reconfigurations of German national space and nation-state time. From recurring events (refugee-guided tours) to temporary installations (a private home’s garden memorial), these performances by and about those excluded or conditionally tolerated define an emerging refugee subjectivity. Each performance stages the dichotomy between transience and permanent residence and engages the public in perpetual enactments of democratic deliberation. We argue that these performances force audiences to recognize how they implicitly define their nations and fellow citizens by both their domestic democratic practices and the exceptions at the border: who is deported and kept out, who are permitted to enter and remain. With growing critical interest in performance and performativity in international relations, we consider the impact of individual and collective pro-migrant protest performances on national identity and electoral politics in Germany and their effects on organizing, resistance, and performance “artivism” globally.

Drawing on refugee studies, “Picturing Katrina: The Queer Child and Black Death-Birthing Narratives” explores the transient performance of antiblack and refugee policies and procedures and how this transmutation manifested around Hurricane Katrina. The article focuses on Beasts of the Southern Wild, which is an allegory of Hurricane Katrina, and its black death-birthing narrative— Beasts calls upon a black girl to produce an imagined future grounded in the reproduction of a structure hostile to black life. By positing her as harbinger of a more sustainable ecological future, Beasts’ black death-birthing narrative queers Hushpuppy, a 6-year old living in intense poverty. This article focuses on Beasts to explore the relationship among the watery deaths and depths of Hurricane Katrina, refugee policies, and transatlantic slavery. The article closes with a brief turn to a “real-life” black death-birthing narrative featured in People magazine in order to not only to suggest the breadth of media forms that utilize black death-birthing narratives centering on childhood and disaster, but also to begin to interrogate the material conditions that enable the proliferation of these narratives as well as the narratives’ material effects.

The public video project The Public Library includes the performance of writing field notes and of choreographed dance sequences — which together serve as an ethnographic prompt for discussions about city life in northwestern Canada. The growing presence of crystal methamphetamine in sidewalk life and in the lives of First Nations persons is part of the discussion.

This visual essay explores the creative practice of The Stitchery Collective, which uses costume as a strategy in their participatory works. Inspired by performance artist, queer icon and costume lover Leigh Bowery, The Stitchery Collective has created The Bowery Party, a series of events encouraging radical dress up. These immersive occasions emphasize the significance of costume as enabling joy, community and extravagant social performance. The essay discusses the importance of Bowery as a figure in designing the party in terms of the nature of participant responses, as his legacy provides a subversive approach to costuming the self. The analysis focuses on strategies for and the importance of making and holding space, both physical and virtual, for alternate visions of the body – an empowering ethic that celebrates diversity and inclusivity. The costumes created by the attending public are challenging, often both to wear and to social, gender and body norms. This essay offers a brief example of the costumes created by participants in direct response to Bowery as a radical, slippery and chaotic aesthetic target.

Viewing Nelisiwe Xaba’s Fremde Tänze (2014) in Berlin and Chicago revealed differing levels of meaning in the work. In Berlin the work exposed and parodied the white gaze of the black female dancer, while in Chicago the work vivified the gap between the responses of black and white spectators. The reception of Fremde Tänze in the two cities demonstrates the workings of “cross-viewing,” the moments when spectators from distinct social locations watch one another watching.

In this paper, I reflect on the body–landscape relationship based on my experience with directing and choreographing my dance film Human Habitat in which a dancer takes us on a journey from a sustainable to a destructive relationship with the Arctic landscape. I outline the background and thoughts involved in producing a dance film in the Arctic and analyse the characteristics of the dancer’s bodily interventions with the landscape. I investigate the properties of being embedded in a processual landscape and examine the consequences of these properties for choreographing movement in a landscape. I further outline how the film evokes kinaesthetic empathy and therefore fulfils my intention of bringing the Arctic into people’s awareness. My examination has a phenomenological approach, and I draw on processual theories of landscape, material specificity and kinaesthetic empathy. I denne artikkelen vil jeg reflektere over forholdet mellom kropp og landskap basert på min erfaring med å regissere og koreografere dansefilmen min Human Habitat. En danser tar oss med på en reise fra et bærekraftig til et destruktivt forhold til det arktiske landskapet. Jeg skisserer bakgrunnen og tankene om å produsere en dansefilm i Arktis og analyserer egenskapene til kroppslige intervensjoner med landskapet. Jeg undersøker egenskapene ved å være innebygd i et prosessuelt landskap og undersøker hvilke konsekvenser disse egenskapene har for å koreografere bevegelser i landskap. Jeg skisserer også hvordan filmen fremkaller kinestetisk empati og derfor kan oppfylle intensjonene mine om å bringe Arktis til folkets bevissthet. Min undersøkelse har en fenomenologisk tilnærming, og jeg trekker på prosessuelle teorier om landskap, materialspesifisitet og kinestetisk empati.

This article discusses philosopher Richard Shusterman’s artistic collaboration with Yann Toma which entails the use of costume, photography and public performance. The project advances the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics and raises questions about conventions of professional philosophy, including what philosophers conventionally wear and how philosophical inquiry is advanced. Aspects of costume theory and contemporary movement performance are used to analyse Shusterman’s autobiographical methodology and the project’s performative aims.

Nelisiwe Xaba’s Fremde Tänze opens up questions of contemporary implications of dance history. Situated within the cultural politics of dance in Germany, especially funding programs such as Tanzfonds Erbe (dance funds heritage), Xaba’s work and the curatorial frame of the Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum project contest the notion of “cultural heritage” from a postcolonial perspective.

The idea of the “Anthropocene” is rapidly gaining currency as an ecocritical lens through which to view theater and performance. But as a lens for critical analysis, the concept of the “Anthropocene” is problematic, primarily because it fails to differentiate among humans, many of whom are in conflict precisely because the benefits and costs of the “Age of Man” have been distributed unevenly. Neo-Marxist critics take such conflicts into fuller account in their argument that a better nomenclature and concept for our epoch is the “Capitalocene,” a term that captures the fact that our ecological crises have been precipitated not by humans in some undifferentiated and generalized way, but more specifically by the global spread of capitalism and its socio-economic-ecological injustices. These are also conflicts at the heart of many plays, both historical and recent. This essay offers an overview of a number of works that might productively be categorized as “Tragedies of the Capitalocene,” insofar as they dramatize stories that trace the dynamics of “Capitalocene” exploitation of both human and nonhuman resources. Plays considered include Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992), Rahul Varma’s Bhopal (2001), Kia Corthron’s A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick (2010), Annabel Soutar’s Seeds (2012), Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle (1991), and Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole (2017).

This essay looks at how four contemporary South African plays use performance to render, address, and acknowledge personal and national trauma. By staging acts of cruelty that happen as “ordinary” experience, as perpetual pain, or as representation of life-in-crisis, these plays not only question and complement the national narrative by telling stories that have not found a stage or a listener before, but they also inform and speak to topical societal issues in South Africa such as that of apathy to violence and the question of complicity. Yael Farber and Lara Foot employ a distinctly South African theatre language that draws on theatrical concepts of the European avant-garde, especially those of Antonin Artaud, as well as on the tradition of oral storytelling and ritual to render cruelty as the “ordinary” and crisis as an ongoing condition in the sociohistorical context of apartheid and the apartheid-influenced post-1994 world. By excavating, tracing, and acknowledging “ordinary” cruelty as experienced personally and collectively, the plays explore revelations about the human condition, open up a discussion on the nature of memory or (collective) amnesia, on trauma, complicity, and the crucial role of the witness.

This article discusses how in Howard Barker’s recent work the idea of the subject’s crisis hinges on the introduction of an impersonal or transpersonal life force that persists beyond human agency. The article considers Barker’s metaphorical treatment of the images of land and stone and their interrelationship with the human body, where the notion of subjective crisis results from an awareness of objective forces that transcend the self. In “Immense Kiss” (2018) and “Critique of Pure Feeling” (2018), the idea of crisis, whilst still dominant, seems to lose its intermittent character of singular rupture and reveals itself as a permanent force of dissolution and reification. In these plays, the evocation of nonhuman nature in the love relationships between young men and elderly women affirms the existence of something that goes beyond the individual, which Barker approaches with a late-style poetic sensibility.

Since the British EU Referendum in 2016, there has been an ongoing media narrative of division: Remain voters against Leave voters, experts against ordinary people, the capital rich against the capital poor, and metropolitan centres against regional peripheries. This article explores the way in which theatre might offer a response to the perceived failure in understanding between these entrenched positions, using the lens of place. Making an argument for an ideological and dramaturgical shift from questions of voice – which have so far dominated theatrical critical discourse in response to Brexit – to place, I explore the potential of this change in focus and scale in relation to Matt Hartley’s play Here I Belong (2016) which toured with Pentabus Theatre – a professional rural touring company from the Midlands – to rural communities across England in 2016 and 2018. It is through this contact with rural communities that I propose that theatre can make a critical intervention: telling smaller stories about local places offers a way to reconnect with such communities during this crisis of communication.

This article examines short plays as a political aesthetic of crisis using examples from Black Lives, Black Words (2015–2017) at the Bush Theatre, London, which respond to concerns arising from the #BlackLivesMatter movement about Black deaths in police custody. I focus on Black women playwrights’ portrayals of Black mothers’ anxieties about protecting their sons, and of Black mothers and sisters grieving the loss of sons, brothers, and fathers in incidents where excessive force is deployed by the police. I consider how Black Lives, Black Words connects to the radical aesthetics of the 1960 s Black Arts Movement by promoting the use of theatre for activist purposes. I argue that the politicising potential of the Black Lives, Black Words initiative is accentuated by the use of a short play format as a political Black aesthetics for responding to contemporary crises. By analysing pivotal moments in a sample of the fifteen-minute plays, I demonstrate how the content of the plays combines with their performance styles to maximise the potential for audience empathy despite their short playing times.

Over the past decade, ‘immersive’ has arguably been one of the most overused terms to describe theatre productions that aim to involve audiences in unconventional ways. With the mainstream success of specific ‘immersive’ productions, this trend goes beyond the theatre and arts industry. From games distributors to Westfield shopping centres, just about every organisation seems to be discussing how ‘immersive’ events can give their product an edgier public profile or increase sales. The need for a post-immersive manifesto comes from an assumption that the use of the term immersive is not helpful. And, in many ways, the use of the word ‘immersive’ to describe theatre productions can often be detrimental to the contract of expectations set up with audience members, guests, players, participants. This experimental manifesto is the result of five years of partnership between Technoculture, Arts & Games (Concordia University, Montréal) and ZU-UK (G.A.S. Station and MA in Contemporary Performance at University of Greenwich, London).

As a genre, the gothic deals frequently in loneliness, isolation, and paranoid orientations toward others. These characteristics make the gothic a productive lens through which to explore the effects of neoliberalism, particularly the way neoliberalism structures intimate human connection. I analyse three plays by Jen Silverman, demonstrating how her use of gothic conventions illuminates the promotion of isolation within neoliberal discourse as well as the exchange of emotional intimacy for public intimacy and the commodification of intimacy within the attention economy. By reframing familiar gothic tropes, Silverman draws parallels between the rebellious nature of gothic villains and the hyper-individualism promoted by neoliberal discourse. She further reworks the gothic heroine’s struggle against patriarchal authority, utilizing it to interrogate the role of family life within neoliberalism. Through these techniques, Silverman highlights the anxious tension that lies at the heart of neoliberalism: between fearing others and needing them to affirm our existence.

Staging a queer methodological provocation, this essay brings together Julia Kristeva’s abject and Michel Foucault’s genealogy, formulating the concept of “abject genealogy.” By doing so, it argues for pursuing combinations—of ideas, individuals, language, and methodologies—that do not necessarily “fit” with each other. In order to make this theoretical argument, the essay dwells on the figure of Kenneth Halliwell, the boyfriend and eventual murderer of the British playwright, Joe Orton. It examines archival materials in order to construct a microgenealogy of Halliwell, and of particular interest are the library books that Halliwell and Orton defaced in the early 1960s. This essay contends that these artworks dramatize the queer methodological provocation described above. In the spirit of Halliwell and Orton, this essay uses their abject genealogical collage method to think through the political and intellectual potential of the improper, queer, and conflictual juxtapositions their artistic practice enacts.

Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County uses Native-American culture and food production to examine the sources and symptoms of white middle-class dissipation in twenty-first-century America. Specifically, the economic need and cooking skills of Johnna, the housekeeper, become emblematic of the historical exploitation of Native Americans. Her employers, the Weston family, may praise Johnna’s traditional “American” meals – from biscuits and gravy to apple pie – but these foods merely reflect a nostalgic desire to view the country in cliché terms of bounty, progress, and community. Letts’s portrait of the Westons suggests the opposite. Like this broken family, America is buckling under economic inequity, racism, and the environmental harm caused by modern food production. Its history of injustices also exposes the country’s profound moral failure to care for others and the planet. Beginning with a discussion of the decolonial food movement, this article examines Letts’s use of food – particularly the tensions between home cooking and processed foods, between vegetarianism and meat-eating – to explore the legacy of Native-American genocide and to critique culinary injustice as emblematic of the forces that continue to exploit non-whites and the environment.