Familiar accounts of the intellectual origins of performance theory downplay the ideas inherited from Durkheimian and Marxian social theory by way of British social anthropology. Structural functionalism as taught by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and the Marx-inflected social anthropology of Max Gluckman are key but underappreciated junctures between classical social theory and performance theory. This lineage helps explain the ongoing tension in performance theory regarding the role embodied communicative action plays in maintaining or altering social order. It also casts new light on the use of the language of “action” and “event” to describe performance phenomena.

The term “catastrophe” has a complex history that has become deeply embedded in Western, and increasingly global, cultures. So it is natural enough, when confronted by a phenomenon as harrowing as climate change, to employ the concept and its attendant connotations. But the lens of catastrophe often distorts more than it reveals.

Traditional performance genres are inadequate to represent the climate crisis, whose proper narrative form is the epic. Using epic genres instrumentally can help create the cultural imaginaries that will move people to call for the revolution of our planet-destroying economic system, although at the same time it will be necessary to isolate and neutralize the ways that epic modes in popular entertainment entrench the power of fossil-fuel interests and normalize incipient ecofacism.

Performances and performative instantiations respond to the urgencies of “pressure” and its effects. What is the work of performance when wrung by such pressures as financial constraint, racial subordination, misogyny, and sexism?

The traditional institutional split between theatrical organizations devoted to the “fictional” and mass media devoted to the “factual” is being challenged in German theatre. The move to the “postfictional” involves an institutional shift that affects theatre as a medium, and has provoked political and public resistance.

Reading Ana Mendieta’s Untitled: Glass on Body Imprints (1972), Cassils’s Becoming an Image (2012–present), and Cassils’s Pressed (2018) through Marxian “value theory” makes the gendered body visible as an “artifact”: a result rather than a precondition of the capitalist mode of production. In this reading, Mendieta and Cassils convey a “felt sense” of the relationship between the particularities of sensory embodied experience and the capitalist totality, where gender is produced and maintained through indirect compulsions and direct forms of violence.

Considering correspondences between historical and dramatic imagination, how can we theatre and performance scholars find ways to represent the Capitalocene and offer a vision of a future other than that of decline or incessant growth?

How can we conceive potentiality as the inherent future in any present as well as in any past? Contemporary examples of a “theatre of potentiality” include works by dancer and choreographer Fabrice Mazliah; director Felix Rothenhäusler; and author, performer, director, and theoretician Boris Nikitin, who all share an interest in a-human excess: of things, words, bodies, and fictions.

In the Dirty Southern vernacular medium of the twerk video, performances of eroticized Black femininity by digital performance artist BeTTy BuTT and others knead into traumas of ecological dispossession, sexual vulnerability, and patriarchal violence. As an aesthetic survival strategy forged in the Black sexual economies of the contemporary Dirty South, being-in-blackfeminineflesh occasions a critical reappraisal of the performative labors of contemporary Black feminine figures, how our bodyminds witness them, and how we write about them.

Choreographer and performance-maker Faye Driscoll’s performance installation Come On In (2020) offered spectators an aesthetic experience that included very little physical contact—yet investigated deeply the nature of physical touch. The sensation, artistic implications, and sociopolitical valences of touch provoke a rich and complex set of questions for considering artistic, physical, and gendered forms of control across performance and visual art, including abstract sculpture, a history into which Driscoll’s installation intervenes.

The human species has the ability to understand complex systems such as planetary boundaries. But then it does not take action and destroys its existential basis, its global habitat. Whether the story ends here is up to us. A new relationship between science, art, and activism suggests a new paradigm to support a more sustainable existence.

The controversial performances of Jonathan Meese and the duo Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller uncouple the presumed alliance between fascist politics and aesthetics. Provocatively repurposing fascist iconography and thought, Meese and Vinge/Müller defend art’s autonomy against the contamination of reality and reimagine how contemporary artists grapple with Germany’s past.

Primitive whiteness refers to the atavistic and colonial violence of the appropriation of tattooing in the United States. The radical deviance of the tattooist and their canvas, read through queer forms of pathologized identities, illuminates what happens when this primitive whiteness is indeed queer.

We perceive loss by tracing the contours of what we invent in its place. When a work of art invites spectators to engage with it, it offers them an opportunity to process loss. Such artworks can be theatrical, visual, or architectural—like a public memorial; what unites them is the experience of the spectator. Individual and personal experiences of grief connect with the social expressions of large-scale loss when the one shows up, fractal-like, in the details of the other.