Touch Workshop is a multimodal set of experiments that untangle the ideological orientation of the senses, organized around proprioceptive sensation and arriving at inverted performances. The project builds on the tactile research of Czech polymath Jan Švankmajer, his response to the censorship of his work in the 1970s. With Covid-19 a pervasive reality, touch is limited and vision dominates. How can the tactile imagination respond in the absence of tactile freedom? How do we transfer and transmit feeling, touching those outside of our time-space?

Having passed the tercentenary of the “Mississippi Bubble” of 1720, the financial fiasco that accompanied the founding of New Orleans, the city continues to risk everything by gambling on the collateral of its dreams. Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, “The City that Care Forgot” is playing out a mortgage melodrama under constant threat of dispossession, dreading the last stop on an itinerary that begins with Desire, changes at Cemeteries, and dead ends in Elysian Fields.

Through the story of Ihsane Jarfi’s murder, Milo Rau suggests there are shades of gray between the actual event and the staged event, and between murder and performing murder. This performance text was developed by Rau and his Ensemble of professional and amateur actors.

Swiss director Milo Rau holds a mirror up to theatre to call into question its assumptions, conventions, and relationship to daily life. Rau’s nonfictional story of the murder of Ihsane Jarfi takes place within two overarching narratives with different timeframes—what happens on the stage now, and what happened beyond the stage then. His dramaturgy cautions against both suspension of disbelief and catharsis and against confusing the fictional with the real.

Nancy Stark Smith passed away due to ovarian cancer on 1 May 2020. Her dedication to contact improvisation for nearly half a century—as a dancer, teacher, writer, and editor—contributed to its development and will continue to inform its ongoing vitality. But much remains uncertain for the future of contact improvisation. Complicated by the challenges of Covid-19, what sort of bodies will result from the practice going forward, and how might the form itself change?

In her conversation with TDR, Hadestown director Rachel Chavkin discusses the development, casting, music, and choreography of the Broadway hit musical—a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus.

A war of history and memory over the Great Patriotic War (WWII) between the Soviet Union and Germany has been raging in Vladimir Putin’s Russia for almost two decades. Putin’s Kremlin deploys all of the mythmaking machinery at its disposal to correct narratives that demonize the Soviet Union and reflect badly on post-Soviet Russia. Victory Day, celebrated annually on 9 May with parades, concerts, films, theatre, art, and music, plays a crucial role in disseminating the Kremlin’s counter narratives.

What does it feel like to dance with a robot? How do you choreograph one? Working with robots during three artistic residencies and two research projects has raised questions about agency and generative processes, revealing how dancing with robots may provoke a more interanimate everyday world.

During the late 1920s and ’30s, performative populism played a major role in the politics of the American Deep South. In the gubernatorial campaigns of three of the most prominent populist politicians of the era—Huey Long, Theodore Bilbo, and Eugene Talmadge—performance skills and entertainment were key strategies for gaining voter support and crafting personas within a popular imaginary.

A violent event in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the loss of a friend created a path for re-engaging with applied theatre and love for the field of applied theatre. In a singularly loveless world, theatre practitioners, performance scholars, and activists need to renew a sense of passion, joy, and commitment to their work.

Online musical performances in the first few months of the pandemic and lockdown in New York City bring to light the sonic and temporal challenges, unique acoustic space, and aesthetic possibilities of performing on Zoom. The social connection gained through these performance events is the key to their efficacy.

Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin’s musical reimagination of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, sidelines the issue of white supremacy in its explorations of economic inequality, environmental exploitation, and collective action.