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.

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.

In this digital video supplement to the issue, Lisa Müller-Trede restages a 2022 performance in which she hired an actor to deliver her talk and then interrupted “her” talk at a conference on affective computing—an event that bursts open the academic norms that forbid consideration of the violent uses to which AI research, especially when connected to human bodies, can lend itself.

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.

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.

Promoted as the first theatrical play written by artificial intelligence, AI: When a Robot Writes a Play (2021) anticipates the post-Anthropocene in both content and form. The machine-generated script problematizes the necessity of human (including dramatic) activities and invites exploration of theatre’s role in the post-anthropocentric condition. AI renders the stage as a transitional site—a potential gateway to other realities.

From the birth of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) in the 1970s during the rise of fascism in Latin America until his death in 2009, Augusto Boal affirmed his utopian conviction that “another world is possible.” Born at a time that was hardly conducive to utopianism, TO offers us techniques through which to exercise utopianism in our fatalistic times, repairing our conviction that a more livable and just world is possible even as the Right tries to convince us of the opposite.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought with it the criminalization of the free press in Russia and the bullying of independent reporters, exemplified by a red paint attack against Dmitry Muratov, one of the country’s foremost newspaper editors. The paint attack belongs to a cluster of wartime scenarios that make fluid use of “fake” blood and whose primary actors are not Kremlin cronies but antiwar protestors.

For close to four decades, Claudia Bucher’s “scientart” has created myriad experiential habitats for her performing body, while inviting others to join her imaginary leaps. From personifying an outer-space lichen colony to meditating midair as an “anemochore kite,” Bucher demonstrates empathic kinships with other beings and nonbeings, calling forth alternative eco-systems in which sentience thrives as the common denominator for all inhabitants.

The premiere of Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad (2019) marks a critical juncture in the history of contemporary British drama. The play is informed by a decolonial dynamic, a longue durée vision, and an evental mode of memory; and renders the museum as a multivalent allegorical space. The complicities of culture, imperialism, and resource extractivism are revealed.

Dozens of theatres emerge in Yve Laris Cohen’s two performances, Conservation and Preservation, including: the theatre of cruelty, theatrical minimalist sculpture, legal theatres, operating theatres, and spectacular disasters. They provide the groundwork for exploring theatrical redundancy, refuse, excess, violence, speech, and the (im)possibility of repair.

Theatre music has been a key driver of theatrical invention, innovation, and style since 2010 in German theatre and arguably for some years before that. This is evidenced in creative partnerships between individual directors and composers (and sometimes bands), in a strong presence of music in the rehearsal rooms, in musical forms of postdramatic writing, and in forms of acting styles and performance aesthetics where music plays a formative role.

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.

The strategy, tactics, and aesthetics of the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion can serve as inspiration for the theatre and performance community to unleash its creativity in response to the climate crisis.

Understanding the Anthropocene in island environments means looking at the emotional entanglements between island populations and their metropolitan diasporas in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.

Climate change was the defining issue in the 2022 Australian federal election. As a new administration takes power, all sectors, including the performing arts, need to keep up the pressure. An iconic moment of “coal theatrics” in Parliament House, so labeled by the Australian media, stands in contrast to artistic performances that continue to put pressure on the framers of political and cultural policy.

Whether scientist, politician, or theatre-maker, the challenge one faces in representing climate change is an accompanying epistemic crisis; it is contingent upon and resistant to legibility, and we cannot apprehend it in its totality. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle poses a potential aesthetic and dramaturgical model for this challenge.

Like Hannah Gadsby, Dave Chappelle understands the art of quitting. At the end of his 2021 Netflix special The Closer, a show full of jokes about LGBTQ people, Chappelle announces that he is “done” making such jokes “until we are both sure that we are laughing together.” Chappelle’s performance of quitting inverts the politics and structure of Gadsby’s Nanette (2017), in which she infamously quit comedy because it reinforced her marginalization as a gender-nonconforming lesbian.

As the very first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic ebbed in the United States, a new production of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) appeared online. Performed on Senegal’s shoreline, Dancing at Dusk resituates Bausch’s choreography within the beach’s formative histories of racialized violence, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this context, the performance also prompts considerations of the relationships between the enduring histories of racial capitalism and the futures of choreographic economies.