Sich waffnend gegen eine See von Plagen (To Take Arms against a Sea of Troubles, 2022) premiered at Germany’s Schaubühne theatre seven months after the start of the war of aggression in Ukraine. The piece comments on the broader significance of the war within Europe, while also zooming in on the protective potentialities of theatre itself, as institution and praxis.

Two Indigenous long-distance walking performances, by the Mother Earth Water Walkers and by the Standing Rock Youth Runners, employ walking as a performance of Indigenous sovereignty, generating tribal knowledge, resistance, and cultural resurgence. What can these acts of long-distance walking tell us about the ways in which Indigenous people create, embody, and perform cultural sovereignty in North America?

A poetic provocation that considers the embodied tone and feel of humans contra machines.

Jogging: Theatre in Progress tells the story of four women, including Euripides’s Medea, who must grapple with what it means to be a woman and how to navigate the roles they take on, both consciously and unconsciously. Lebanese actress, playwright, and director Hanane Hajj Ali’s dark yet comedic one-woman show challenges stereotypes and preconceived notions that affect women in the Middle East and beyond.

The former Yugoslavia was the site of fierce partisan resistance to occupying Nazi forces during WWII and of a vigorous alternative arts scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Recent books on partisan art and New Art Practices make it possible to trace connections between these two seemingly unrelated instances of radical art practices.

Kamisato Yudai’s Immigrant Ghost Stories (2022) evokes past generations that suffered violence yet nevertheless haunt the present as gentle spirits, whether as reincarnated animals, reincarnated people, or repeated patterns of physical gesture and movement. Blurring the borders between fiction and documentary, storytelling and physical theatre, the work stages transnationality as both an economic practice and a sociocultural necessity, encouraging us to acknowledge the heterogeneity of Japanese–Latin American and other Japanese transnational identities.

This critical reflection on the category of locality, which is associated with the performative practice of scaling, is based in the embodied experience of activism on the Polish-Belarusian border. Using the latest texts in the field of object-oriented ontology, locality is presented as a significant challenge to the (inter-/trans-/post-)disciplinary approach and confronted with new materialistic approaches to universality.

Discussion of “digital performance” is preoccupied with themes of fluidity, variation, ambiguity, and resistance to rigid categorization. And yet these themes correspond more closely to analog principles. The digital ethos indicates regularity, precision, and the elimination of ambivalence. The rationalized industrial practices of stage management, blocking and, in particular, lighting cues prioritize the precisely timed and accurate reproduction of stage images through the instant recall of digital memory.

Exploring diverse strategies of process-focused research from historical reconstructions of period practices to staged intimacy coaching, seven new titles offer a representative but not exhaustive overview of the expanding field of rehearsal studies.

While dance has captured attention across platforms and media, remuneration is constrained by copyright issues, a devaluation of dance as a product, and racism. Media coverage of economic, labor, and crediting concerns in popular dance is a critical part of the circuit of creation, discourse, and culture-shifts in online dance. Coverage has an important role in an age of online organizing and the exposure economy, while it simultaneously extracts value from the creators being covered.

Under lockdown in a boarding school in China, students staged a performance based on poetry written by Chinese migrant workers. The poems guided an exploration of biotechnical interdependencies in and between local and global environments and the composition of the resistance script and movement score of laboring bodies embedded in the poems.

The world is going through processes of change that emphasize the role of affect in fueling political mobilization and collective protest. Distinctive geopolitical affects emerge in different territories: Can affect both perform and sustain social change?

In this digital video supplement to the issue, Lisa Müller-Trede restages a 2022 performance in which she hired an actor to deliver her talk and then interrupted “her” talk at a conference on affective computing—an event that bursts open the academic norms that forbid consideration of the violent uses to which AI research, especially when connected to human bodies, can lend itself.