In Oona Libens’s poetic-scientific theatre of objects, nonhuman actors take center stage in a universe that hangs together with wires and projection apparatuses. Her playful lecture performances resonate with ideas from contemporary ecocritical and new materialist debates.

In 1927, Orson Welles directed Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus for the Federal Theatre Project, in an original interpretation of Hallie Flanagan’s dream of a “people’s theatre.” While the available archives allow for an examination of Welles’s experiment in popular classicism and invite comparisons with the work of French theatre-makers, they also call for an awareness of the part played by our imagination in such retrospective research.

For a group of antifascist fans who support Eis Hockey Club Dynamo Berlin, street protest and ice hockey games are both sites of left-wing political intervention. Despite the team’s reputation in Germany as “The Nazi Club,” the group aims to cultivate politically minded crowd action and uplift the atmosphere in the arena in hopes of ridding Germany of representations of its authoritarian past.

An accomplished dancer, acrobat, and physical theatre performer, Hanna Cormick became ill in 2014 with a trifecta of rare genetic conditions that make her severely allergic to pollutants in the air — smoke, detergents, and food particles — and her bones and internal organs prone to dislocation. In January 2020, during Australia’s summer of unprecedented bushfires, Cormick staged The Mermaid, risking her life to make a performance about the climate emergency and how we are all vulnerable bodies at risk in a changing environment.

Between 1947 and 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in hundreds of cities on six continents. During that time, almost 200 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with her, performing 166 repertory pieces. Dunham’s expansive work lends itself to digital approaches that illuminate the complex ways history is iterated across bodies, and how the specific questions raised by dance history underpin a visceral approach to the digital humanities.

Scholarly research on shabih’khani, the Iranian traditional performance generally known as ta’ziyeh, has frequently portrayed creators of this theatrical form as religious devotees with little or no theatrical knowledge and expertise. Yet, newly discovered manuscripts from the Qajar era (1789 to 1925 CE/1168 to 1304 SH) contain annotations and stage directions that can be interpreted as directorial notes and dramaturgical enhancements.

Ananya Dance Theatre directs our present‐day concern for racial and gender diversity toward a radical practice. Choreographer Ananya Chatterjea includes white and mixedrace women as well as black male‐presenting artists in her dances that place the global, social justice stories of black and brown women and femmes at their center.