The former Yugoslavia was the site of fierce partisan resistance to occupying Nazi forces during WWII and of a vigorous alternative arts scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Recent books on partisan art and New Art Practices make it possible to trace connections between these two seemingly unrelated instances of radical art practices.

With Sámi mythology and storytelling as dramaturgical anchors, Giron Sámi Teáhter uses the key aesthetic elements of yoik (Sámi song) and duodji (Sámi arts and crafts) to revitalize and promote Sámi language and culture. The troupe’s work nourishes pride in young Sámi audiences in their rich cultural heritage, which for centuries was suppressed by settler colonialism across Sápmi, the land of the Sámi people, which stretches across the Northern part of Norway, Sweden, and Finland all the way to the Kola Peninsula in Russia.

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.

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.

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.

“Performing AI” raises new questions about creative labor. Might the mathematical entities called neural networks that constitute much contemporary AI research be expressive and “perform,” thus leveling the playing field between human beings and nonhuman machines? What human societal models do neural networks enact? What bodily, mental, and affective work is required to integrate neural networks into the profoundly anthropocentric domain of the performing arts?

If computer programming languages can be used to control the movement of robots, they can therefore be used as choreographic notations. Weaving, dance, and musical forms can be taken as places of inspiration for this, bringing together patterns, computation, movement, and notation in live telematic performance involving live coding of both audience and robots.

Digitization is taking over every sphere of life—including the arts. Through the process of digital commodity fetishism, major technology companies threaten to efface the very qualities that make creative expression—particularly the performing arts—distinct and meaningful. To resist or even question these forces, we must excavate an invisible digital politics that can displace (and replace) traditional sources of authority in the performing arts. By examining the basic mechanisms of the “creator economy,” this politics can be found and confronted—in the arts and beyond.

At the institutional and individual level, interest is growing in theatre and performance studies digital humanities (DH) projects. Too often, this interest fizzles out in the leap from digital imaginings to production timelines that real people must execute (with real budgets). A thorough understanding of the labor structures that drive such projects is necessary in developing realistic, sustainable models of DH work.

In the 21st century, the performance culture of critique has transformed with the increasing implementation of AI technologies upon which the operative functions of data capitalism are built. Operating within the performance-based culture industry, the works of Trevor Paglen, Gerald Nestler/Sylvia Eckermann, and Vladan Joler respond critically to data capitalism’s modes of data extraction and how the societal performances of capitalism condition people’s physical and digital performances.

Promoted as the first theatrical play written by artificial intelligence, AI: When a Robot Writes a Play (2021) anticipates the post-Anthropocene in both content and form. The machine-generated script problematizes the necessity of human (including dramatic) activities and invites exploration of theatre’s role in the post-anthropocentric condition. AI renders the stage as a transitional site—a potential gateway to other realities.

Reading Ana Mendieta’s Untitled: Glass on Body Imprints (1972), Cassils’s Becoming an Image (2012–present), and Cassils’s Pressed (2018) through Marxian “value theory” makes the gendered body visible as an “artifact”: a result rather than a precondition of the capitalist mode of production. In this reading, Mendieta and Cassils convey a “felt sense” of the relationship between the particularities of sensory embodied experience and the capitalist totality, where gender is produced and maintained through indirect compulsions and direct forms of violence.

From the birth of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) in the 1970s during the rise of fascism in Latin America until his death in 2009, Augusto Boal affirmed his utopian conviction that “another world is possible.” Born at a time that was hardly conducive to utopianism, TO offers us techniques through which to exercise utopianism in our fatalistic times, repairing our conviction that a more livable and just world is possible even as the Right tries to convince us of the opposite.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought with it the criminalization of the free press in Russia and the bullying of independent reporters, exemplified by a red paint attack against Dmitry Muratov, one of the country’s foremost newspaper editors. The paint attack belongs to a cluster of wartime scenarios that make fluid use of “fake” blood and whose primary actors are not Kremlin cronies but antiwar protestors.

For close to four decades, Claudia Bucher’s “scientart” has created myriad experiential habitats for her performing body, while inviting others to join her imaginary leaps. From personifying an outer-space lichen colony to meditating midair as an “anemochore kite,” Bucher demonstrates empathic kinships with other beings and nonbeings, calling forth alternative eco-systems in which sentience thrives as the common denominator for all inhabitants.

The premiere of Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad (2019) marks a critical juncture in the history of contemporary British drama. The play is informed by a decolonial dynamic, a longue durée vision, and an evental mode of memory; and renders the museum as a multivalent allegorical space. The complicities of culture, imperialism, and resource extractivism are revealed.

Dozens of theatres emerge in Yve Laris Cohen’s two performances, Conservation and Preservation, including: the theatre of cruelty, theatrical minimalist sculpture, legal theatres, operating theatres, and spectacular disasters. They provide the groundwork for exploring theatrical redundancy, refuse, excess, violence, speech, and the (im)possibility of repair.

Theatre music has been a key driver of theatrical invention, innovation, and style since 2010 in German theatre and arguably for some years before that. This is evidenced in creative partnerships between individual directors and composers (and sometimes bands), in a strong presence of music in the rehearsal rooms, in musical forms of postdramatic writing, and in forms of acting styles and performance aesthetics where music plays a formative role.

The traditional institutional split between theatrical organizations devoted to the “fictional” and mass media devoted to the “factual” is being challenged in German theatre. The move to the “postfictional” involves an institutional shift that affects theatre as a medium, and has provoked political and public resistance.

The strategy, tactics, and aesthetics of the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion can serve as inspiration for the theatre and performance community to unleash its creativity in response to the climate crisis.