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.

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.

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.

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.”

The scenic experiment Silence of the World brought together indigenous leader Ailton Krenak and performer Andreia Duarte. The show deeply explored the perception of time in mythology as a space for reinventing the world and evoked the recognition of humans as just another planetary species alongside so-called nonhumans: animals, rivers, mountains, plants, and everything that exists. Silence of the World drew attention to indigenous peoples who connect with the living organism that is the planet.

A close reading of Yvonne Rainer’s archival papers reveals new insights into the postmodern iconoclast. Revivifying Rainer’s early choreographic practice and verbalembodied explorations, Rainer’s own notes and journals illuminate and challenge reductive interpretations of a writing dance artist’s work over time.

Social practice and dematerialization are often cited as the most radical innovations in Euro-American contemporary art since the late 1960s, but rarely have historians acknowledged the crucial role of experimental pedagogy in this shift of art towards performance, conceptualism, and activism. The practice of Los Angeles–based performance artist Suzanne Lacy radically extended the ideas of her teachers and mentors Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago into revised structures of artmaking towards activist social practice performances driven by conceptual, political, and embodied concerns.

The banana protest, a mass reenactment of Consumer Art (1972), a series of photographs by Natalia LL that was removed from the National Museum in April 2019, was staged as a grassroots protest against this act of censorship and the Polish conservative government’s “decency” policy as well as the underrepresentation of women’s art in museums and galleries.

Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day shifts the boundaries between representing and producing rituals. In 2003, the artist scripted a holiday for a freshly built, suburban-style neighborhood in New York State, which he simultaneously turned into a documentary film and quasi-liturgical participatory installation. Beyond the art world, innumerable new rituals are formalizing and circulating through videos online.

This Is Not a Theatre Company’s Readymade Cabaret 2.0 combines classic Dada dramaturgy with a Covid-era virtual theatre of short vignettes, much like the original Dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire. Character-based dialogue strikes at the same existential questions explored by the Dada collaborators, especially prescient in the context of a global pandemic that has drastically altered our daily lives.

Highland Park Is Here, staged online and centering on community and community engagement, worked to build vital connections between participants and overcome the restrictions of Zoom boxes. The process revealed that when the integrity of a show’s theatre-ness is challenged by moving it online, the piece becomes a placeholder for the live event.