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?

Corpo Ranfla explored formal aspects of “body-ness” in relation to cruising: lowrider car cruising and gay cruising. Mario Ayala, Tanya Melendez, and I worked my body into a lowrider car by giving it a paint job using an airbrush machine. At the helm of this production was my interest in the history of anthropomorphism, particularly of Mexican-Azteca iconography that illustrates the relationship between humans and nature. Inter Rim is a collage composition that takes on some questions that remain boisterous even after Corpo Ranfla materialized on my body: How can a lowriding body move? What attributes of a car, a machine, might a body take on as its own? What is there to gather about my and other bodies, the street, a neighborhood, one’s city, and the spaces between destinations when becoming a lowrider car?

How can performance help us to think about the problem of climate change and its integral relationships to social and political frameworks? What directions do societies and arts need to take in order to forge different futures? Reflections on the proposals put forward in this installment of the special issue on Peripeteia raise questions toward further conversation.

US theatre suffers from insufficient funding, mass unemployment, and widespread structural inequities. The Green New Deal, with its calls to create millions of highwage jobs and promote equity, offers a solution: establish a Green Federal Theatre. This examination of two historical Federal Theatre Project structures — the National Service Bureau and the Community Drama Program — culminates in a manifesto for a Green Federal Theatre.

“From the ovens we rise with our fists in the air. Now is the time.” My grandfather, Dovid Zisman, was a Yiddish playwright and poet, writing and performing while in the Łódz´ Ghetto and Buchenwald concentration camp. Poetry, song, and performance were his way to speak the unspeakable. A messy assemblage of theories, memoirs, verses, images, and recordings reveal what we can inherit through writing as resistance and through the creative mappings of space and time.

In China, theatre studies has been dominated by Western discourse on serious drama, mostly the theatre of purgation. It is equally important, however, to study popular Western theatre genres, such as musicals, comedies, and relatively uplifting plays, especially in terms of their similarities with Chinese opera—an epitome of theatre of cultivation.

Turning, and turning around, on the Rann does not alter the white horizon. Salt—brilliant under the sun—dazzles the eyes, opens the lachrymal canals. We taste our own salinity as time seasons us.

Some obsessions stay with you for a reason. On its surface, Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl; or, Death at the Wheel, a ludicrously named melodrama peopled with exaggerated heroines and villains, offers an example of the noncanonical, everyday fare that audiences consumed in playhouses throughout the 19th century. But the deeper I dug, the more questions I uncovered.

Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, dramatized the 1811 slave rebellion in a more fully developed manner than historical records authored by slaveholders, incorporating a range of strategies used in other artworks depicting slave resistance, including: elisions, caesura, lacuna, off-screen action, obfuscation, abstraction, redaction, and more. These devices safeguard history from appropriation or commodification on the one hand; and on the other, highlight the way slave resistance is neglected in the historical record and commemorative landscape.

What makes Zora Neale Hurston different as a musical theatre writer is her concern about the creation of safe spaces for black women actors. By looking at the theatrical representation of black women in Hurston and Dorothy Waring’s Polk County, it is possible to see ways in which they resist intersecting oppressions of gender and race. Hurston’s adaptation of the blues and folk music for the musical is also subject to analysis, as is her lasting impact on musical theatre.

Since her creation in 2016, Sophia has become the world’s most recognized humanoid social robot. Gendered female by creator David Hanson, she is a harbinger of a tomorrow world that is here. She performs at events around the planet as a messenger, celebrity, and ambassador representing the human-technological future. Sophia is a symbol, and humans are witnesses to an origin story as much hers as it is our own.

Meyoucycle (2016) was the eagerly awaited result of a collaboration between choreographer Eleanor Bauer and composer Chris Peck. The characters of this dance and song–cycle have developed tactics to withstand the exploitative demands of neoliberal semiocapitalism; the creative team deployed performative and dramaturgical tactics for the same purpose.

More than 80% of Chinese opera performances today are presented by privately run professional folk troupes, mostly in rural areas—Chinese theatre’s best kept secret. These performances are rarely noticed by Chinese theatre scholars. There are more than 30 such troupes in Quangang District, Fujian province, which has a population of 300,000.

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.

In its willingness to expend resources towards the construction of worlds that end, theatre models the possibility of a response to crisis that refuses to make action in the present contingent upon the promise of a future. Three recent works reflect a contemporary metatheatrical preoccupation with this combination of exertion and conclusion, and suggest the need to reimagine conservation and sustainability once we’ve embraced the structuring logic of “the end.”

William Forsythe’s screendance Alignigung (2016) depicts two male dancers, one fair- and the other brown-skinned, in hyperflexible and intimate configurations that vacillate between object and human. Alignigung engages with an egalitarian ethos along the same lines as contact improvisation but further demonstrates an alternative masculinity through movement qualities by reimagining the stereotypical brown body.