Familiar accounts of the intellectual origins of performance theory downplay the ideas inherited from Durkheimian and Marxian social theory by way of British social anthropology. Structural functionalism as taught by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and the Marx-inflected social anthropology of Max Gluckman are key but underappreciated junctures between classical social theory and performance theory. This lineage helps explain the ongoing tension in performance theory regarding the role embodied communicative action plays in maintaining or altering social order. It also casts new light on the use of the language of “action” and “event” to describe performance phenomena.

Reading Ana Mendieta’s Untitled: Glass on Body Imprints (1972), Cassils’s Becoming an Image (2012–present), and Cassils’s Pressed (2018) through Marxian “value theory” makes the gendered body visible as an “artifact”: a result rather than a precondition of the capitalist mode of production. In this reading, Mendieta and Cassils convey a “felt sense” of the relationship between the particularities of sensory embodied experience and the capitalist totality, where gender is produced and maintained through indirect compulsions and direct forms of violence.

Choreographer and performance-maker Faye Driscoll’s performance installation Come On In (2020) offered spectators an aesthetic experience that included very little physical contact—yet investigated deeply the nature of physical touch. The sensation, artistic implications, and sociopolitical valences of touch provoke a rich and complex set of questions for considering artistic, physical, and gendered forms of control across performance and visual art, including abstract sculpture, a history into which Driscoll’s installation intervenes.

We perceive loss by tracing the contours of what we invent in its place. When a work of art invites spectators to engage with it, it offers them an opportunity to process loss. Such artworks can be theatrical, visual, or architectural—like a public memorial; what unites them is the experience of the spectator. Individual and personal experiences of grief connect with the social expressions of large-scale loss when the one shows up, fractal-like, in the details of the other.

Insect metamorphosis fascinated Greek philosophers, bewildered Christian theologians, affirmed the beliefs of Chinese moralists, and continues to mystify science. Yet dramas representing human-animal transformations rarely involve insects. When they do appear, they usually serve as metaphors satirizing human flaws, but are also demeaning to the insect in their simplistic representation. In some 21st-century performances, however, that approach is evolving to better appreciate the multifarious intricacies of insect life.

Promoted as the first theatrical play written by artificial intelligence, AI: When a Robot Writes a Play (2021) anticipates the post-Anthropocene in both content and form. The machine-generated script problematizes the necessity of human (including dramatic) activities and invites exploration of theatre’s role in the post-anthropocentric condition. AI renders the stage as a transitional site—a potential gateway to other realities.

At the height of the pandemic, Vice President Leni Robredo’s supporters served lugaw to the starving people of the Philippines as a symbol of her grassroots leadership—despite detractors who disparaged the lowly porridge. State agents antagonized citizen-led community pantries and food banks, which persisted through the contributions of ordinary Filipinos. Filipinos came together to lead these various embodied practices to provide nourishment and ignite political action.

From the birth of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) in the 1970s during the rise of fascism in Latin America until his death in 2009, Augusto Boal affirmed his utopian conviction that “another world is possible.” Born at a time that was hardly conducive to utopianism, TO offers us techniques through which to exercise utopianism in our fatalistic times, repairing our conviction that a more livable and just world is possible even as the Right tries to convince us of the opposite.

At the 2022 Sharm El-Sheikh International Theatre Festival for Youth, Saudi women performed in a public square without hijab. Al-Enezī’s al-Sujanāʾ al-ahrār (Free Prisoners) is not only about art and liberty, it enacts it.

Bell ringing in Britain has featured in sociohistorical studies, but it has never been analyzed in detail as a variety of mass spectacle. The practice takes especially interesting forms in London, a city where the ringing of church bells has been part of everyday life for centuries. Grounded in physics, economics, and human geography, ringing is a unique kind of immersive site-specific performance, whose significance is best understood through pivoting to topography and history.

Assuming responsibility and developing the tools needed for self- and political construction are hallmarks of the liberal imagination. A newly emerging subfield of performance studies—call it “performance capital studies”—teaches us what those tools are and how they may be put to use. “Performance” now comes to be seen as an exchange of cultural, legal, and identity capital retailing different forms of knowledge and power in the constitution and regulation of governance.