The Attica Prison Uprising has come to emblematize militant political organization inside prisons, influencing carceral rhetoric and policy throughout the contentious War on Crime. Despite its stigma as a short-lived rebellion that ended in a massacre, the Attica uprising is best understood as a site of prefigurative politics—political organization that aims to produce new social and political relations through their embodiment in the present. Political actors at Attica achieved remarkable success by experimenting with social roles beyond the purview of carceral surveillance and control.

The failed 2020 revolution in Belarus and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 served as catalysts for the creation of the Insulted. Belarus Worldwide Readings Project based on a play by Andrei Kureichik. The project provided the material for hundreds of performances in over 30 countries, while dozens of texts by members of Kyiv’s Theatre of Playwrights formed the core of the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings, a similar project that generated over 660 performances, refuting Russian president Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukrainian culture does not exist.

The work of artist/anthropologist Susan Marie Ossman and her 12-station exhibition in Montmartre in 2020 lends itself to a personal meditation on art and illness during a global pandemic. Walking the neighborhood where the installations were created and assembled, Ossman’s artwork becomes a means of transforming the experience of chemotherapy and suggests how the cancer treatments themselves refl ect on a larger society of illness. Most importantly, in her work Ossman examines the notion of a self-portrait: what it is and how we might understand the genre as well as the self differently.

Nina Simone’s songs are maps that critique racial-sexual violence in the US, while opening up space for “redress” by seizing back sonic excess. Simone’s critical geographic performance practice is part of the tradition of enslaved Africans’ songs as fugitive maps. Throughout her performances Simone insists that geographies of domination, and especially sexual violation, be read in relation to one another, encouraging a new method of spectatorship: “listening as incommensurable practice.”

For Chinese Generation Z fans, the reperformances of musical theatre have empowered them to realize self-transformation while performing in public—without the constraints of formal physical training or special creative ability. By reperforming musicals with the themes of idealism and revolution, these youth re-create song-and-dance gestures as a rite of passage in everyday life, striving for individual idealized identities while playing disciplined social roles under the control of official ideology.

The murder of Jîna Aminî by the Iranian police in September 2022 led to wide-scale demonstrations. Women in Iranian Kurdistan have developed tactics for creating art and literature that empowers them to fi ght for their rights as women and as Kurds. “Doing art” invites them to cross the border between fictional and real, private and public, and to create negotiations with the patriarchal society and legal system that oppresses them.

Mekhrav Numag by the Israeli Ruth Kanner Theatre Group was created in response to the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. This documentary theatre piece compiles diverse verbal reactions to the horrendous event and the subsequent war in Gaza. The work’s postdramatic kaleidoscopic texture and dramaturgy of excess emphasize the complexity of experiences following the attack, resisting confinement to a single voice or a unified perspective.

In Jezebel (2019) and Darkmatter (2022), Dutch choreographer Cherish Menzo activates alternative temporal modes to perform the black body. Inspired by the chopped and screwed hip hop technique that manipulates tempo and pitch in existing songs, she disrupts conventional notions of time as a linear progression. Instead, she unfolds an “Epiphenomenal” temporal framework in which the present no longer appears as a continuation of the past or an anticipation of the future, but rather is a site of temporal experimentation that breaks with the past and cracks open the future.

Two plays by Afro-Spanish playwright Silvia Albert Sopale—Blackface y otras vergüenzas and La Moreneta—illustrate José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification” by which marginalized artists hijack and reshape dominant cultural texts that exclude minority voices. Sopale’s work reframes archives and artifacts to confront historical racial violence and its contemporary legacies. Her strategic use of blackface alludes to alternative revaluations of Black identity, disidentifying blackface itself.

The rise of theatre in Iran during the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) coincided with significant shifts in Iranian society, particularly in the areas of women’s rights, the push for gender equality, and the emergence of nationalism. Theatre served as a platform for, and actively contributed to, these transformative movements. The role of women’s issues in Iran was distinct from their representation in Western perspectives on so-called third world societies.

Unable to perform the perceived demands of his gender—unable to have sex—in 2014 the incel Elliot Rodger devised a performance of ruthless cruelty. His mass murder, a now habituated performance of US American masculinity, was preceded by an autobiographical text. Recounting his pursuit of a consummate manhood, Rodger’s manifesto reveals the consequential movement from narrative to performance, from genre to gender, from a discourse of discontent to a violent dramaturgy of masculinity.

Physical and cognitive disabilities are part of many people’s lives. They are the existential marks some performers carry and emphasize through their art in order to transcend them and embrace disability in a nonstigmatizing way. The performances of Felipe Monteiro, Nicola Fornoni, and Kamil Guenatri claim space for difference and diversity and reject assistentialist, protectionist, and pseudo-inclusive approaches that prescribe and perpetuate stigmas.

Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) is a play in the US-American bloodstream: it was quoted repeatedly by the architects of the American Revolution and was famously performed by Washington’s troops at Valley Forge in 1778. But what does this 300-year-old verse tragedy—with its entangled political, racial, and theatrical histories and implications—have to say to audiences in the present-day US South at the Clarence Brown Theatre, Tennessee, in 2023?

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are not only blockchain-based digital assets; they are theatrical practices taking shape between social bodies. Understanding the theatricality of NFTs provides a way to account for the criticism directed at them. NFT critiques often purport to focus on underlying politico-economic ideologies but, in actuality, reveal deep-seated antitheatrical anxieties recontextualized for the digital realm.

A “figure in the carpet” (as in the Henry James novella) within the choreography and biography of Merce Cunningham can be found in the relationship of his queerness to his choreographic innovations. Cunningham’s philosophies and practices can be seen to reflect multiple responses to homophobia and sexism—defensive maneuvers, circumventions, and interventions.

Purulia, a district in the southwestern part of West Bengal, is popular for the renowned chhou dance. Despite the prevalent notion that chhou is exclusively a war dance, it dynamically incorporates contemporary social and political issues, and has undergone significant changes such as new musical instruments and technologies, lighting, costume transformations, and female performers.

Widely regarded as the most prestigious art exhibition in the world, the Venice Biennale combines art history, politics, and cultural power in a dizzying spectacle. The 2024 exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere,” situates performance as a key medium in contemporary art and art history.

Despite the turn to the right of many national governments, including France, the 2024 theatre festival in Avignon programmed by a new director, Tiago Rodrigues, delivered feminist, internationalist, antiracist, and progressive works. The lineup showed both his courage to defend what he believes in and his support of exceptional artists who share his political passions (Caroline Guiela Nguyen, Mohamed El Khatib, Lola Arias, Marta Górnicka, Séverine Chavrier, Baro d’evel, among others).

Dear San Francisco by the Montréal-based company Les 7 Doigts de la Main takes up mythological symbols surrounding California, particularly through tracing modes of communication—from letters and mail to iPhones. Yet, as a performance ultimately centering on epistolary form, Dear San Francisco finds inspiration in dedication as a uniquely political act of performance address.

Recent works in Black aesthetic and cultural production build on legacies of Black feminisms as they seek to ever-expand scholarly theories and accounts of multifaceted Black life. The four books considered here assemble sites and model methods that bring new dimensions to how performance studies might understand historical and ongoing freedom dreams and the field’s reenergized commitment to understanding aesthetic and cultural production as world-making.