This article investigates live performance in the broad geo-historical context of the Anthropocene, a contested term in recent scholarship, but one that offers a breadth of focus on human relations with its coexistent non-human other. These interrelations are examined through a range of theatrical and non-theatrical genres and sites from the Australian parliament's coal theatrics to exemplary performances by Indigenous companies Bangarra Dance Theatre and Marrugeku. It sets the scene with a visit to the Curtain Tree in the rainforests of north Queensland, Australia, arguing that the vitality and display of its root system models a special kind of reciprocity between the performative elements of the environment and the environmental elements of theatre and performance. This is traced through recent short-run immersive works, Hanna Cormick's Mermaid (2020) and Melinda Hetzel and Company's Conservatory (2020), and a rereading of a canonical Australian drama, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

Since the eruption of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the arrival of refugees in Turkey has been unprecedented in the country's history. Theatre practitioners have been slow to address this migratory moment, but an exception has been Istanbul-based Dostlar Tiyatrosu's 2017 production Göçmenleeeer, a translation of Romanian–French playwright Matéi Visniec's Migraaaants. Developed in the context of Europe's own migratory ‘crisis’, Migraaaants is composed of a series of vignettes that critique European refugee policy and the deadly economies that it has prompted in the continent's borderlands. What happens when Migraaaants is produced in a national context where the binary of European ‘hosts’ and non-European ‘refugees’ gives way to another set of political identities? How do we assess the emergence of a shared paradigm of ‘crisis’? And finally, where does crisis stand in relation to our ability to imagine a transnational aesthetics of political resistance to anti-immigration policies?

This article uncovers the connections between the legal and scientific art of searching for human remains and theatrical performances. NAKA Dance Theater, a performance group based in Mexico City and Oakland, California, is at the centre of this intersection of art and forensics. Founded by José Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, NAKA creates theatrical events to configure a claim for social justice where the official legal–scientific terrain has failed to protect victims of state repression. These artists advance a commitment to what I call forensic performances, and their investigative practices revitalize theatrical experience in a time of debilitated democracies. Forensic performances give theatre a role in violent societies where mass graves are woven into life: they carry out some of the work of investigative journalism, without its dangers. Theatre opens up a space to do a forensics that is orthogonal to a state forensics claiming a certain kind of reality and truth that is dangerous for democratic politics.

Held in December 1955, the Baling talks represented a unique attempt to end the Malayan emergency through a negotiated peace between the British colonial government and the Malayan Communist Party, but it also marked the beginning of the Cold War in Asia. This paper focuses on Mark Teh's long-term investigations, as a researcher and theatre director for the Five Arts Centre in Kuala Lumpur, into this historically significant Cold War event and its representation. Teh's performance Baling is examined as an exemplary collaborative project that expands Western definitions of the documentary theatre, while highlighting the continuing efforts of South East Asian artists to contest cultural regionalism and colonial knowledge systems. Drawing on Brechtian aesthetics and postcolonial theory, Teh appropriates diverse forms of politically engaged art in order to question the role of history and the archive in the solidification of nationalist ideologies and identity binaries in the post-war era.

The large-scale theatre exhibitions in Vienna (1892), Berlin (1910) and Magdeburg (1927) contained extensive displays on the history of German-language theatre. This article analyses the pedagogical and epistemological discussions about different ways of mediating theatre history that formed part of the context of the three exhibitions. Curators and scholars used the German term Anschauung to measure the transfer of knowledge in historical exhibitions, reconstruction models and historiography books. This article contributes to the recent scholarship on forms of exhibiting, collecting and archiving theatre, dance and performance. It shows that theatre became an area of focus within the culture of national and international large-scale exhibitions around 1900. This was accompanied by discussions about the appropriate medium to present the history of theatre. Informed by museum pedagogy and humanities hermeneutics, curators and scholars conceived of divergent concepts of theatre history Anschauung.