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.

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.

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.

Climate change and resultant environmental catastrophes are a growing factor in the increased number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Some end up in Italian prisons where rehabilitation programs emphasize Italian culture production as a path toward inclusion in Italian society. These programs model how to address climate-induced eco-migration and new templates for tackling climate change through prison reform.

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?

Among the species that went extinct in the last 500 plus years under colonial regimes, the ill-fated dodo became an early icon of the Anthropocene Extinction. While much has been written on the biotechnological apparatuses that expedited the extinction of the dodo, it was the complicity of Western European imperialism and early modern aesthetic regimes that were responsible for the ecocide of the Anthropocene (read Eurocene) Extinction.

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.

Israeli soldiers dancing to global pop hits in the Occupied Palestinian Territories look like they are having fun, and there is always something entertainingly contradictory in watching army bodies circumventing the military codes. But the choreographic analysis of three viral videos from the 2010s reveals how dancing serves the Israel Defense Forces’ territorializing and necropower strategy.

Any planet-wide solutions to climate change have to be enforced by nation-states. China and the United States, currently producing the most carbon dioxide, are competing with growing hostility. The interstate hostility, even in a new Cold War era, may push competing nations to implement climate-friendly actions for the sake of national security.

How is the climate crisis viewed by workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who reclaim recyclables on a garbage dump — a place long entangled with decay and death? The act of reclaiming waste is a reminder that it is impossible to understand the current crisis without considering its origins in the labor of racial capitalism and in the productivism that capitalism demands. Reclaiming requires staying with degradation, remaking a world that is seemingly always ending.

The term “Anthropocene” is obfuscatory, and as an analytic framework it has a serious blind spot: the conflicts stemming from the uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of the “Age of Man,” which are the very eco-conflicts on which artists in our field should focus. We should be talking about the “Capitalocene,” a term that locates climate change within the history of capitalism and colonialism, and suggests stories that deserve time on our stages.

How can we be present yet not physically in person? Three bed performances in Argentina suggest such a possibility. In a country marked by the disappearance of 30,000 citizens, artists and activists have sought to make the absent present. These bed performances reveal that by mediating presence and expanding it beyond the here and now, what was thought to have disappeared, remains.

Pastoral associates stand in front of huge screens to pray for hundreds of people at the same time. Emmanuel TV Studios, Lagos, Nigeria, 1 June 2021. See “The Healing of Maseko: Live and A-live Presences in the Theatre of the Spiritual” by Abimbola A. Adelakun. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1vRT6imV4o; screenshot by TDR)

As venues shuttered across Australia, a fervent queer nightlife dreamed up new relations with virtuality, traversing the unstable terrains of memory and trauma. From reflections of sweaty dance floors to the 2020 Zoom-wave of internet performance, the mutual consideration of presence and lack both complexifies and reifies the stakes in reviving queer nightlife cultures.

The current theory of “camera presence” derives from ancient and early modern sources in theology, natural philosophy, rhetoric, and eventually science. As music depends on silence, “presence” in these disciplines depends on absence, and authorities framed their understanding of the expressiveness of actors by analogizing their performances to “electrical fire” based on the reciprocal action of positive and negative charges as effected by “phlogiston,” or “the stuff that isn’t there.”

William Hunter, a male midwife, was author of an anatomy atlas that featured pregnant cadavers as specimens. He lived in the building that later became the Lyric Theatre. Through an examination of the Lyric Theatre as a hauntological site, and the experience of psychosis, a proposed paradigm shift for theatre and performance historiography emerges: the phenomenology of dyschronia.

How has presence transformed under recent pandemic conditions and ongoing digital saturation? José Esteban Muñoz’s now classic critique of liveness illuminates the works of several contemporary Black performance artists whose work intervenes against the corporeal burdens of our moment.

Enforced restriction of movement and social distancing regulations during the pandemic pushed a Nigerian-based church with global membership to innovate liveness without co-presence. The church purportedly transcended time-space limits in miracle performances during their Distance Is Not a Barrier digital sessions.

Our understanding of “presence” has made an epochal shift in the past three years. The field of performance studies—never settled, always in flux—is shifting as well on this topic, as what we study expands digitally, contracts physically, embraces new paradigms, and unlooses others. While it is impossible to fix an exact time when attitudes about something as ineffable yet entirely real as presence changed permanently, this issue touches down on several key moments.

In Oona Libens’s poetic-scientific theatre of objects, nonhuman actors take center stage in a universe that hangs together with wires and projection apparatuses. Her playful lecture performances resonate with ideas from contemporary ecocritical and new materialist debates.

In 1927, Orson Welles directed Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus for the Federal Theatre Project, in an original interpretation of Hallie Flanagan’s dream of a “people’s theatre.” While the available archives allow for an examination of Welles’s experiment in popular classicism and invite comparisons with the work of French theatre-makers, they also call for an awareness of the part played by our imagination in such retrospective research.