WAKE is a queer postcolonial ritual centering grief, healing, and solace through movement within the collective. Created by choreographer Jay Carlon with collaborator and vocalist Micaela Tobin, alongside a live electronic musical score, WAKE is a meditative performance imbued with images, sound, and objects derived from Carlon’s Filipinx heritage and dedicated to those born in the wake of US imperialism.

Writers and readers cocreate books. Over time, certain readings, even if they are misreadings, come to summarize the book so thoroughly that the book gets transformed into a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence. While chapter 7 of Unmarked, “The Ontology of Performance,” is the most frequently cited, the Afterword’s meditation on misunderstanding may be the most hopeful for future scholarship.

In the 1990s, performative writing and reading attempted to disrupt the rhetorical and ideological structure of scholarly writing. Performative readings helped expose the ways in which scholarly claims to truth-telling—as in Clifford Geertz’s influential essay on the Balinese cockfight—obscured violent or oppressive rhetorical operations. While most performative writing and reading concentrated on the essay form, experiments with public lectures and creative adaptations of scholarly texts were also undertaken. The verve of performative writing and reading tapered off as other issues came to the fore.

AI and AR do not merely coexist with the archive and repertoire as modes of transmission but profoundly alter them and prove profoundly anti-archival. “Live” transmission from body to body is radically altered by digital technologies that simulate presence. “Feeling truly present with another person,” Mark Zuckerberg stated, “is the ultimate dream of social media.” He aspires to create an avatar that can simulate an emotion that he cannot express—and make him more human. Are we being led back into Plato’s cave? Artists and humanists must be centrally involved in the epistemic, ontological, and political changes that accompany these new and evolving forms of transmission.

The Judson generation of artists (Rainer, Forti, Childs, Paxton, and others) introduced a conceptual distinction between music and sound that amounted to a soft critique of the institution of music. Dance in the 1960s was a fitting site for this critique due to the generative work of John Cage and the increasingly widespread availability of the technological means for working with sound. These two conditions undermined the institutionalization of musical expertise and opened up the field to amateurs from other disciplines.

The 2022 anti–zero Covid White Paper protests that erupted in China and its diaspora demonstrated the intertwinement of politics and performance in contemporary China. The symbolic dimensions of blank sheets of A4 paper and other performative tactics used in these demonstrations exemplify the shifting roles of performance art in the field of contemporary Chinese art.

Aaji, an aging, lower-caste storyteller, singer, spirit medium, and rice farmer from a village in northern India, uses her distinctive voice and vocal traditions to engage with the spirit of the seven Devis (goddesses). The careful cultivation of human, more-than-human, and ethnographic relationships over time reveals what multimodal anthropology might entail when collaborating with more-than-human spirits.

Surveillance is gestic, in Bertolt Brecht’s sense: it constitutes and is constituted by a set of practices that police and control the social at the level of gestures. In a surveillant Gestus of the everyday, gestures conscribe bodies as subjects of surveillance, from the touchscreen scroll that operates Amazon’s Neighbors social network to the hands-over-head posture imaged by airport body scanners. Gestures, not digital devices, watch—and enforce—the bounds of a “criminal” human.

A literalist ecological approach to performance studies rematerializes theatre beyond a racist anthropocentricity of metaphorical representation and proposes a path to intersectional environmental justice. Escaped Alone (2016) by Caryl Churchill presents a horrifically accurate report of ecological harm. The Evening (2016) by Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players imagines an extinction of whiteness. Both productions propose new understandings of ecology through reconfiguring the theatrical conditions of representation.

Chatbots and natural language processing tools have emerged as a ubiquitous yet exceptional development of algorithmic performativity. The release of ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 signaled a sea change in language-learning technological-performative relations. ChatGPT programs human knowledge as a stylized, computational performance and rehearses the human as technological.

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.

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.

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.