Whether scientist, politician, or theatre-maker, the challenge one faces in representing climate change is an accompanying epistemic crisis; it is contingent upon and resistant to legibility, and we cannot apprehend it in its totality. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle poses a potential aesthetic and dramaturgical model for this challenge.

Among the species that went extinct in the last 500 plus years under colonial regimes, the ill-fated dodo became an early icon of the Anthropocene Extinction. While much has been written on the biotechnological apparatuses that expedited the extinction of the dodo, it was the complicity of Western European imperialism and early modern aesthetic regimes that were responsible for the ecocide of the Anthropocene (read Eurocene) Extinction.

Maraji, a Nigerian humorist, performatively questions the lingering dominance of men in comedy as she brings humor to the everyday lives of Nigerians. Her work on social media draws audience attention to women’s role in society, shaping the future of comedic presentations in the African digital space.

Like Hannah Gadsby, Dave Chappelle understands the art of quitting. At the end of his 2021 Netflix special The Closer, a show full of jokes about LGBTQ people, Chappelle announces that he is “done” making such jokes “until we are both sure that we are laughing together.” Chappelle’s performance of quitting inverts the politics and structure of Gadsby’s Nanette (2017), in which she infamously quit comedy because it reinforced her marginalization as a gender-nonconforming lesbian.

As the very first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic ebbed in the United States, a new production of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) appeared online. Performed on Senegal’s shoreline, Dancing at Dusk resituates Bausch’s choreography within the beach’s formative histories of racialized violence, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this context, the performance also prompts considerations of the relationships between the enduring histories of racial capitalism and the futures of choreographic economies.

Israeli soldiers dancing to global pop hits in the Occupied Palestinian Territories look like they are having fun, and there is always something entertainingly contradictory in watching army bodies circumventing the military codes. But the choreographic analysis of three viral videos from the 2010s reveals how dancing serves the Israel Defense Forces’ territorializing and necropower strategy.

Scholarly work rarely examines the labor of the contemporary dance artist as a performer. Flexible performativity describes the discrete skill set dancers today must be able to deploy in performance. Flexible performativity and its characteristics of negotiating proximity, autodramaturgy, hyperindividualism, and hyperreferentialism mold the dancer prototypical of the movement logics of the early 21st century.

A key lesson of the Wooster Group’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s learning play The Mother concerns the meaning of ownership in capitalism. Unlike other businesses that moved into SoHo during the wave of deindustrialization that began in the late 1960s, the group of actors that owns a former metal stamping factory at 33 Wooster Street shows that their relationship towards their means of production is not only economic, but also ethical. This is at the foundation of their distinct theatrical aesthetics.