“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?

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.

Africa Day was a practice of elementary school educational performances in kibbutzim, which featured mimetic impressions of Africans by children. As a mode of settler subject formation, Africa Day sustained imagined, “borrowed” indigeneity, while effectively obfuscating Palestinian indigenous existence. As a complex site of simultaneous reiteration and renegotiation of race and racism, the event’s reconstruction brings to the foreground the accumulation of whiteness particular to Zionism, which is not only the violence of racial supremacy, but also the violence of selfish disregard.

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.

Jean Genet’s 1966 epic play The Screens offers a unique insight into Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent devastation of Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces. Seen from this perspective, this is not a local war, but an event that has global significance.

The way robots move often evokes horror. Dance—as an embodied, movement-based art form open to possibility—can expand motion-based Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) beyond popular approaches based on anthropomorphism and late-capitalist efficiency. The “super-machinic” robotic system coopts human-centered movement and perpetuates neoliberal capitalist agendas. Dance offers a provocation for HRI and an invitation to reimagine how we move.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Sino-German coproduction Mouzhong leisi yu wode didong: xinshi pianduan explores the medical process of a heart transplant and its aftermath through the Foucauldian theoretical framework of the “clinical gaze.” The doctors’ “biomedical reductionism” is caricatured for its lack of humanness; patients’ physical and emotional agony denies the possibility of peaceful coexistence of the human self and technology. Cynical irony is one way of coping with the identity loss, pain, and techno-human condition of organ-transplant survivors.

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.

Over-60 seniors in Shanghai have at their disposal arts courses, community activities, and arts education, all geared toward their physical and mental well-being, according to the traditional Chinese theory of “artistic living.” If current university programs for the elderly accurately identify the artistic needs of the elderly, further individualizing curricula and holding more varied events at community centers, it would help to solve elderly people’s anxieties around loneliness and social marginalization, while allowing them to live in harmony with nature.

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.

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.

Written 10 days after the 7 October 2023 massacre, Israeli playwright Maya Arad Yasur’s How to Remain a Humanist after a Massacre in 17 Steps captures the trauma and dilemmas of a woman, a mother, and a writer whose world and worldview have been shattered. Yasur’s work has been produced in theatres in Europe, Israel, and the US.

In 2017, on the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation, Anishinaabe-kwe performance artist Rebecca Belmore set a quartet of listening trumpets entitled Wave Sound on shorelines across Canada’s national parks. Her metallic instruments amplify the water’s frequencies by drawing them in close, inviting visitors to stop and listen to the found sounds. This technology operates on the scale of W.E.B. Du Bois’s rarely considered sci-fi “megascope,” inviting a new mode of listening to the vital and resilient voice of the lands and waters beyond narratives of settler colonialism.

By mid-March 2024, when Bread & Puppet Theater began rehearsals for a new touring show, the State of Israel had killed more than 31,000 people in Gaza over the preceding five months, with the full military and diplomatic support of the United States. The Hope Principle Show: Citizens’ Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide toured in the US during the month of April 2024, with the aim of contributing to the ongoing revolt against the US’ complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza.

The tendency to reduce the movements of performers in media art to data results in a flattening of identities and makes the performers’ essence seemingly insignificant. Two case studies showcase what might be lost through datafication, even as they resist it: Lucinda Childs “walking” in Bach 6 Solo by Robert Wilson, and Michael Jackson standing still at the start of his 1993 Super Bowl Halftime show. The desire to detach the body from aesthetic significance can be traced back to America’s historical racism.

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.