Asylum seekers are routinely characterized as in limbo or escaping disaster, characterizations that dangerously dismiss their agency and personhood while rendering them helpless victims of circumstance. However, my devised theatre work with asylum seekers in Washington, DC, has opened up asylee futurism, a political aesthetic characterized by magic, hope, and imagining the future amid the trauma of statelessness and catastrophic loss of homeland.

Lowrider culture in Southern California and within Chicana/o social relations is a powerful example of minoritarian cultural production and an important yet undertheorized aesthetic, political, and gendered cultural object. Linking the lowrider enthusiast’s body and this cultural object—their vehicle—as a continuous signifying spectrum of self-inscription reifıes an alternative understanding of lowrider identities.

Since August 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time of bans against public gatherings and protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu, a hybrid clown-policewoman has attended political and social demonstrations in Jewish West and Palestinian East Jerusalem. Officer Az-Oolay places heart-shaped stickers on people’s foreheads as a radical political act and deconstruction of the coercive force of the Israeli police.

Ventriloquism is marked by an antagonistic intimacy between the ventriloquist and dummy, an antagonism that is rooted in the mechanics of the form. British ventriloquist Nina Conti brings the inherent violence of the ventriloquial conceit to bear on scenes we typically do not think of as contests for naturalized animacy: therapy and pregnancy.

The former Yugoslavia was the site of fierce partisan resistance to occupying Nazi forces during WWII and of a vigorous alternative arts scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Recent books on partisan art and New Art Practices make it possible to trace connections between these two seemingly unrelated instances of radical art practices.

The closure of SITI Company as a producing organization has left the many artists SITI has impacted feeling stranded. Their practice of the Suzuki Method and the Viewpoints must now be self-initiated and self-regulated. In their calls-to-action to form new training circles, these artists reveal different ethics and values in the metaphors they use to describe the importance of the training in their lives. The community-building functions of the Suzuki Method and the Viewpoints are revealed in the “metaphors they stomp by.”

With Sámi mythology and storytelling as dramaturgical anchors, Giron Sámi Teáhter uses the key aesthetic elements of yoik (Sámi song) and duodji (Sámi arts and crafts) to revitalize and promote Sámi language and culture. The troupe’s work nourishes pride in young Sámi audiences in their rich cultural heritage, which for centuries was suppressed by settler colonialism across Sápmi, the land of the Sámi people, which stretches across the Northern part of Norway, Sweden, and Finland all the way to the Kola Peninsula in Russia.

The Judson generation of artists (Rainer, Forti, Childs, Paxton, and others) introduced a conceptual distinction between music and sound that amounted to a soft critique of the institution of music. Dance in the 1960s was a fitting site for this critique due to the generative work of John Cage and the increasingly widespread availability of the technological means for working with sound. These two conditions undermined the institutionalization of musical expertise and opened up the field to amateurs from other disciplines.

Surveillance is gestic, in Bertolt Brecht’s sense: it constitutes and is constituted by a set of practices that police and control the social at the level of gestures. In a surveillant Gestus of the everyday, gestures conscribe bodies as subjects of surveillance, from the touchscreen scroll that operates Amazon’s Neighbors social network to the hands-over-head posture imaged by airport body scanners. Gestures, not digital devices, watch—and enforce—the bounds of a “criminal” human.

Chatbots and natural language processing tools have emerged as a ubiquitous yet exceptional development of algorithmic performativity. The release of ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 signaled a sea change in language-learning technological-performative relations. ChatGPT programs human knowledge as a stylized, computational performance and rehearses the human as technological.

In the 1990s, performative writing and reading attempted to disrupt the rhetorical and ideological structure of scholarly writing. Performative readings helped expose the ways in which scholarly claims to truth-telling—as in Clifford Geertz’s influential essay on the Balinese cockfight—obscured violent or oppressive rhetorical operations. While most performative writing and reading concentrated on the essay form, experiments with public lectures and creative adaptations of scholarly texts were also undertaken. The verve of performative writing and reading tapered off as other issues came to the fore.

A literalist ecological approach to performance studies rematerializes theatre beyond a racist anthropocentricity of metaphorical representation and proposes a path to intersectional environmental justice. Escaped Alone (2016) by Caryl Churchill presents a horrifically accurate report of ecological harm. The Evening (2016) by Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players imagines an extinction of whiteness. Both productions propose new understandings of ecology through reconfiguring the theatrical conditions of representation.

The 2022 anti–zero Covid White Paper protests that erupted in China and its diaspora demonstrated the intertwinement of politics and performance in contemporary China. The symbolic dimensions of blank sheets of A4 paper and other performative tactics used in these demonstrations exemplify the shifting roles of performance art in the field of contemporary Chinese art.

Aaji, an aging, lower-caste storyteller, singer, spirit medium, and rice farmer from a village in northern India, uses her distinctive voice and vocal traditions to engage with the spirit of the seven Devis (goddesses). The careful cultivation of human, more-than-human, and ethnographic relationships over time reveals what multimodal anthropology might entail when collaborating with more-than-human spirits.

“Performing AI” raises new questions about creative labor. Might the mathematical entities called neural networks that constitute much contemporary AI research be expressive and “perform,” thus leveling the playing field between human beings and nonhuman machines? What human societal models do neural networks enact? What bodily, mental, and affective work is required to integrate neural networks into the profoundly anthropocentric domain of the performing arts?

If computer programming languages can be used to control the movement of robots, they can therefore be used as choreographic notations. Weaving, dance, and musical forms can be taken as places of inspiration for this, bringing together patterns, computation, movement, and notation in live telematic performance involving live coding of both audience and robots.

Digitization is taking over every sphere of life—including the arts. Through the process of digital commodity fetishism, major technology companies threaten to efface the very qualities that make creative expression—particularly the performing arts—distinct and meaningful. To resist or even question these forces, we must excavate an invisible digital politics that can displace (and replace) traditional sources of authority in the performing arts. By examining the basic mechanisms of the “creator economy,” this politics can be found and confronted—in the arts and beyond.

At the institutional and individual level, interest is growing in theatre and performance studies digital humanities (DH) projects. Too often, this interest fizzles out in the leap from digital imaginings to production timelines that real people must execute (with real budgets). A thorough understanding of the labor structures that drive such projects is necessary in developing realistic, sustainable models of DH work.

Under lockdown in a boarding school in China, students staged a performance based on poetry written by Chinese migrant workers. The poems guided an exploration of biotechnical interdependencies in and between local and global environments and the composition of the resistance script and movement score of laboring bodies embedded in the poems.

In the 21st century, the performance culture of critique has transformed with the increasing implementation of AI technologies upon which the operative functions of data capitalism are built. Operating within the performance-based culture industry, the works of Trevor Paglen, Gerald Nestler/Sylvia Eckermann, and Vladan Joler respond critically to data capitalism’s modes of data extraction and how the societal performances of capitalism condition people’s physical and digital performances.