After participating in the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, I felt hopeless because I wanted the capitalist death machine to collapse, but the protests eventually died out. I then learned about 400 pilot whales who died off the coast of Tasmania after being stranded there, and connected whale death to Black death and thought about how the whale bodies feed the ocean when they die.

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Brooklyn, New York, on Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They are on the faculty at Movement Research NYC, Editor-in-Chief of Movement Research Performance Journal, and the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from their life/art/movement work, Improvising While Black. www.improvisingwhileblack.com

Scholarly research on shabih’khani, the Iranian traditional performance generally known as ta’ziyeh, has frequently portrayed creators of this theatrical form as religious devotees with little or no theatrical knowledge and expertise. Yet, newly discovered manuscripts from the Qajar era (1789 to 1925 CE/1168 to 1304 SH) contain annotations and stage directions that can be interpreted as directorial notes and dramaturgical enhancements.

Between 1947 and 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in hundreds of cities on six continents. During that time, almost 200 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with her, performing 166 repertory pieces. Dunham’s expansive work lends itself to digital approaches that illuminate the complex ways history is iterated across bodies, and how the specific questions raised by dance history underpin a visceral approach to the digital humanities.

Maryam Khakipour’s 2004 The Joymakers and its 2008 sequel Shadi form an exemplary site for examining the dissemination and translation of Persian blackface across time, space, and media. The transmediality of sīyāh bāzī reveals a universal familiarity with the practice of blackface comedy that disrupts commonplace assumptions about its geographical and historical itinerary.

German art historian Aby Warburg’s 1895–1896 trip through the southwestern US reexamined in the context of late 19th‐century colonialism interjects the ethical stakes of displacement and replacement into one of Warburg’s key theoretical terms, “survival.” Working through how power differentials in colonialism shape the way images and affects survive in performance, an unremarked‐upon Matachines dance is reinstated in this travel narrative.

Ananya Dance Theatre directs our present‐day concern for racial and gender diversity toward a radical practice. Choreographer Ananya Chatterjea includes white and mixedrace women as well as black male‐presenting artists in her dances that place the global, social justice stories of black and brown women and femmes at their center.

The works of Ideogram Théâtre offer a concrete example of how the Sufi teaching of Anatolia (tasavvuf) might today inspire a distinctive approach to the actor’s art. With actors who are not only doers but also witnesses of the truth behind their actions, Ideogram Théâtre makes visible the Sufi concept of ayn, which considers each human being a mirror of truth for another. Through their work, the essence of the 700‐year‐old ritual performance of semâ lives on the theatre stage.

Ludwik Flaszen was the cofounder and literary adviser of the Polish Laboratory Theatre, and a collaborator of Jerzy Grotowski. This Jewish kaddish and Dionysian dithyramb offers a glimpse of his life and work.

Immersive experiences in theatre and digital games are often characterized by immediacy in space and time, focusing on the imminent action of the here and now. Live action roleplay (larp) practices, by contrast, can encourage reflexivity. Such reflexive play can support the agential capacities of players in participatory performance works to visualize and pursue alternative futures.

As an exemplar of transitional‐justice theatre in Taiwan, Dark Eyes Performance Lab’s Too Many Dreams in One Night aimed to repair a social wound but aroused debates over its use of immersive staging and torture instruments to reenact the political violence of the White Terror. The play foregrounded the impossibility of experiencing historical trauma through theatrical performance and, paradoxically, the necessity of employing metatheatrical devices to highlight such an impossibility.