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.

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.

Enforced restriction of movement and social distancing regulations during the pandemic pushed a Nigerian-based church with global membership to innovate liveness without co-presence. The church purportedly transcended time-space limits in miracle performances during their Distance Is Not a Barrier digital sessions.

In a concert of two sound worlds, one acoustic and the other electroacoustic, it is difficult to balance both sonically. When texts, lights, gestures, and movements from different artistic domains such as theatre, dance, or cinema combine with the music this coexistence creates, the result is a new language: the language of Constança Capdeville.

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.

The works of Ideogram Théâtre offer a concrete example of how the Sufi teaching of Anatolia (tasavvuf) might today inspire a distinctive approach to the actor’s art. With actors who are not only doers but also witnesses of the truth behind their actions, Ideogram Théâtre makes visible the Sufi concept of ayn, which considers each human being a mirror of truth for another. Through their work, the essence of the 700‐year‐old ritual performance of semâ lives on the theatre stage.

The work of Brooklyn-based theatre company Fake Friends, always obsessed with screens, the self, and theatrical presence, gained a new following when they adapted their work for livestream during the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time these adaptations, which transformed the company’s practice from “screens-on-stage” to “staged-for-screen,” reinvigorated debates around absence, presence, and alienation in the Zoom era.

Seated between art and academia, the lecture performance is a hybrid and playful genre that questions the norms and forms of lectures. Often highly reflexive, discursive, and pedagogical, it draws attention to the structures of how knowledge is produced, distributed, and received. It stages and costumes knowledge; makes it wearable or movable.

The current theory of “camera presence” derives from ancient and early modern sources in theology, natural philosophy, rhetoric, and eventually science. As music depends on silence, “presence” in these disciplines depends on absence, and authorities framed their understanding of the expressiveness of actors by analogizing their performances to “electrical fire” based on the reciprocal action of positive and negative charges as effected by “phlogiston,” or “the stuff that isn’t there.”

Ludwik Flaszen was the cofounder and literary adviser of the Polish Laboratory Theatre, and a collaborator of Jerzy Grotowski. This Jewish kaddish and Dionysian dithyramb offers a glimpse of his life and work.

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.

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.

Immersive experiences in theatre and digital games are often characterized by immediacy in space and time, focusing on the imminent action of the here and now. Live action roleplay (larp) practices, by contrast, can encourage reflexivity. Such reflexive play can support the agential capacities of players in participatory performance works to visualize and pursue alternative futures.

Labyrinthe Royal de l’Hercule Gaulois triomphant (Avignon, 1601) documents a ceremonial performance that happens more in the time of reading than a historical moment. Focusing on discrepancies between a vivid image of elephants and a description attesting that there were none reveals how this document makes the festival “present” by suspending the reader between allegory and history, representation and performance, and most importantly, the presence and(/as) absence of racialized “Mores” driving the fictitious pachyderms.

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.

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.

William Hunter, a male midwife, was author of an anatomy atlas that featured pregnant cadavers as specimens. He lived in the building that later became the Lyric Theatre. Through an examination of the Lyric Theatre as a hauntological site, and the experience of psychosis, a proposed paradigm shift for theatre and performance historiography emerges: the phenomenology of dyschronia.

As an exemplar of transitional‐justice theatre in Taiwan, Dark Eyes Performance Lab’s Too Many Dreams in One Night aimed to repair a social wound but aroused debates over its use of immersive staging and torture instruments to reenact the political violence of the White Terror. The play foregrounded the impossibility of experiencing historical trauma through theatrical performance and, paradoxically, the necessity of employing metatheatrical devices to highlight such an impossibility.

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.