This autobiographical-fantastical work-in-progress animation is about a girl who eats people. Kay Whale, a lovable force composed of many beings, is growing malevolent. Absurdist and depraved, Female Hallucinations is as much about possession as it is about the ways our unexamined traumas can turn into weapons against the world. It is a personal examination of the effects of misogyny, racist privilege, multiplicity, violence, and loss.

A cave bear skull from the Upper Paleolithic is carefully positioned on a modified block in the Skull Chamber of Chauvet Cave. The Skull Chamber, as the culmination of a speleological parcours, has apparently been strategically modified in order to increase its performative potential — an early architectural attempt to reconfigure a space en route towards a theatre.

Through bold political performance acts, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera accesses an untimely variant of utopia whose surplus exceeds Cold War binaries of revolution and exile. Bruguera’s democratic action works build collective self-esteem and challenge the official utopianism of the communist state. In free-speech performances that confront the Cuban state’s censorship apparatus, Bruguera models for her fellow Cuban citizens an inimitable practice of democratic dissensus.

The alpha brain wave sonification inaugurated by Alvin Lucier in Music for Solo Performer (1965) ushered in biofeedback as a new possibility for art and a racialized fantasy of the “Orient.” The “Alpha Orient” encompasses sonic methods equating alpha brain waves with the supposed exceptional “composure” and “silence” of the East. Eunoia (2013-2014) by Lisa Park and Yoko Ono’s 1964 Cut Piece and 1965 Sky Piece for Jesus Christ expose the Alpha Orient as an ableist fantasy of the Asian woman in the remarkable soundness of her self-control.

The Centre for the Less Good Idea, founded by William Kentridge in Johannesburg, inaugurated its first season with four short plays by Samuel Beckett. Beckett is a productive point of reference for Kentridge, especially in his lecture-performances that reflect on the activity of making art in the studio.

Rimini Protokoll’s Do’s and Don’ts (2018) takes spectators on tours through cities in a disused truck to observe contemporary urban life. Commentary from nonprofessional (yet “expert”) performers and video interludes dissect and challenge the rules and norms of the 21st-century metropolis. Lucinda Childs’s 1964 Street Dance frames and historically contextualizes the discussion of performance “in” and “of” the city.

Current debates in the field of socially engaged art dwell on the relational versus antagonist potentiality of performance for social change, while disability scholars and cancer activists call for performance that activates relationalities beyond individual/medical models. oncogrrrls proposes rehearsal as a liquid space for the joint creation of new cancer relations.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s work focuses on adaptability and survival. Kosoko’s April 2020 Chameleon (The Living Installments) exemplifies the importance of an individual artist’s responses to the Covid-19 moment, the historical imperative for hybrid in-person/online performance, how 21st-century liveness functions in performance, as well as political awareness of artist-centered approaches to curatorial practice.

With Covid-19 closure of performance spaces, drag performers were in a unique position due to the historic relationship between queer performance and recorded media, and the history of LGBTQ2+ community building through social media. Rather than — or perhaps in addition to—constituting a moment of rupture, the sudden phenomenon of digital drag presents a vital moment for revealing the relationship among liveness, media, and citational reproduction in drag’s history.

Relaxation, when produced by participating in a theatre-for-one piece, requires work. From March to May 2020, with much of the world under a stay-at-home advisory to mitigate the spread of Covid-19, three performances carved out restorative spaces. These theatre-for-one pieces give participants rules to follow to ostensibly resist the neoliberal drive to productivity; yet those same rules structure acts of rest as productive under neoliberalism.

Focusing on performance that functions outside explicitly theatrical frames, art installations staged in Hong Kong between June and October 2020 progress a broader view of Hong Kong’s complex development as global financial center, creative hub, and meeting point between “East” and “West.” Artists Mark Chung, Nadim Abbas, and Christopher Ho interrogate Hong Kong at a historically definitive moment, allowing audiences to study what constitutes “home” beyond what conventional academic analyses, traditional publishing outlets, and social media allow.

In Kuro Tanino’s play The Dark Master (Daaku Masudaa), a person arrives at a rundown restaurant (yOshokuya) in working-class Osaka and orders typical Japanese comfort food from a crochety old “master.” Kuro’s 2020 VR theatre version of the play, Daaku Masudaa VR, reanimates the atmospheric setting of the restaurant and heightens its grotesque sensibilities. Using the extreme disorientation and intimacy of VR goggles and headphones, he creates threatening feelings of immersion.

In the years between Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution (2013-14) and Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine witnessed an incredible boom in socially engaged performance. One of the most impactful was Class Act: East-West, a series of playwriting workshops for teenagers.