Reflecting on his research on folk performances in subaltern communities in India, Brahma Prakash, in his article “Archives are a SCAM!”, critically considers the politics concerning structural archival conventions.

17-06-21: Through prose and soundscape, Ramzi Maqdisi reflects on his aural experiences of Palestine in response to the recent violence in Jerusalem.

Winter 2020: Public Health, Politics, and Performance

Photography and memory, ritual and writing come together in Vanessa Damilola Macaulay’s inquiry into racialised experiences of breath and breathlessness, from violent anti-blackness to Fanon’s revolution.

‘You live by charity, you die by charity.’ Brian Lobel, performance maker, curator and author of Theatre & Cancer on the economics of illness narratives and the precarisation of disability justice.

14-12-20: Paul Rae profiles political advisor Dominic Cummings via Oscar Wilde, testing the capacity of performance studies to make sense of a present that seems increasingly fictional.

Spring 2020: European Performance in Troubled Times.
Editorial by Aneta Mancewicz

Katia Arfara examines Brett Bailey’s Sanctuary, the research-based installation she curated in Athens in 2017 to discuss the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Europe and the return to identity politics.

Diana Damian analyses Manuel Pelmus and Alexandra Pirici’s Public Collection at Tate Modern in 2016, which addresses artistic labour and mobility to showcase Europeanness in contemporary performance.

Azadeh Sharifi draws on Anta Helena Recke’s Die Kränkungen der Menschheit at Münchner Kammerspiele in 2019 to expose the exclusion of ethnic groups and migrants from the discourse on German identity.

Agnieszka Jakimiak confronts sexual abuse and mobbing in European theatre institutions looking at selected examples and her own theatre show, nosexnosolo from 2019 that focuses on Jan Fabre’s case.

21-09-20: An excerpt from Andrei Kureichik’s Insulted. Belarus(sia), written in real-time to the events unfolding around the 2020 Belarus election. Translator John Freedman introduces the piece and the worldwide reading project.

Editorial by issue editor Eleanor Roberts, with Ella Parry-Davies, Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Poynton, and Broderick Chow

Giulia Palladini theorizes the musical ‘prelude’ as a temporal structure that actualizes possible futures in the present.

Asif Majid reexamines Octopus from “Entangling the British Muslim Woman” through the personal lens of minoritarian positionality, and the exhaustion it can produce specifically for Muslim artists.

Charlotte Cooper’s video and text documents a process of exploring ‘queer feminist fat sensibility, experience and possibility’, which challenges exclusionary and ableist notions of dance.

In the context of Hong Kong protests and her installation & performance in Leipzig, Wir sind das Volk! (December 2019), wen yau reflects on the power of a peaceful revolution and the fragility of freedom.

Fuad Musallam reflects on the post-17 October 2019 Lebanese uprising. Tracing its rhythms through changes to the materiality of downtown Beirut, the affects and expressions of political times emerge.

Editorial by Broderick Chow, Aneta Mancewicz, Ella Parry-Davies, Bella Poynton, and Eleanor Roberts

In the context of her work with Cyrff Ystwyth, a dance-theatre company, Margaret Ames examines kinaesthesic action as an affective and cultural tool that challenges hegemonic distribution of inclusion.