Performances and performative instantiations respond to the urgencies of “pressure” and its effects. What is the work of performance when wrung by such pressures as financial constraint, racial subordination, misogyny, and sexism?

In the Dirty Southern vernacular medium of the twerk video, performances of eroticized Black femininity by digital performance artist BeTTy BuTT and others knead into traumas of ecological dispossession, sexual vulnerability, and patriarchal violence. As an aesthetic survival strategy forged in the Black sexual economies of the contemporary Dirty South, being-in-blackfeminineflesh occasions a critical reappraisal of the performative labors of contemporary Black feminine figures, how our bodyminds witness them, and how we write about them.

Primitive whiteness refers to the atavistic and colonial violence of the appropriation of tattooing in the United States. The radical deviance of the tattooist and their canvas, read through queer forms of pathologized identities, illuminates what happens when this primitive whiteness is indeed queer.

South Korea has recently experienced a queer historical turn. Contemporary Korean queer artists have been increasingly reanimating queer pasts in order to imagine queerness as a sense of togetherness. siren eun young jung’s Yeosung Gukgeuk Project (2008–present), one of the most celebrated works of queer art in South Korea, is a queer rendition of yeosung gukgeuk, a genre of all-female Korean opera of the 1950s and 1960s.

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.

With the Iranian protest movement “Woman, Life, Freedom,” public spaces have become scenes of collective performance. As women openly defy the authoritarian and religious powers, theatre artists are faced with a question: What role can we imagine for theatre when citizens themselves perform their struggle to reclaim the public space and sphere of power?

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.

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.

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.

The transnational circulation of persistent racial types that are attached to Asian/American women have shaped Asian-focused narratives and roles on Broadway. The King and I (2015) and KPOP (2022) exemplify Asian/American women’s performative labor and the tensions embedded in and disruptive of the contested political arena of Broadway musical theatre.

How do we make sense of Asian American racial form as it telescopes across political invisibility and spectacular, hypervisible violence? Three recent works in Asian American performance studies help explore this question through the prism of the Covid-19 pandemic.