Performance offers the chance to break through dead ways of being. Only by harnessing our longing can we unshackle from forms that no longer nourish us. Making performance means creating conditions where we can sense new possibilities for how we show up for our lives. Let the old structures shatter.

Hope Mohr is a choreographer, writer, and advocate. She performed with Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. In 2007, she founded Hope Mohr Dance. In 2010, she founded The Bridge Project, now Bridge Live Arts, which creates and supports equity-driven live art that centers artists as agents of change. www.hopemohr.org

the space between the riot and i is a solo performed by Majesty Royale that uses movement and sound to investigate alternative modes of existence, memory, and ghostly inhabitance. The work exposes the physical body and sensorial landscape to rigorous transformation located in the liminal space between “here-now” and “then-there.” Majesty becomes a channel to emergent mythologies of the underworld with ritual practices derived from Black southern culture: sampling, chanting, sermon-ing, and marching.

Majesty Royale is a dancer, shaper, sound explorer, and ghost. Majesty grew up in the land of the Eno and Occaneechi peoples (Durham, NC) and is based in Lenni-Lenape land (Philadelphia, PA). Majesty is a graduate of the University of the Arts (BFA Dance), 2020 Pina Bausch Choreography Fellow, and 2021 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist. https://www.glitterboiwonder.com/

After participating in the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, I felt hopeless because I wanted the capitalist death machine to collapse, but the protests eventually died out. I then learned about 400 pilot whales who died off the coast of Tasmania after being stranded there, and connected whale death to Black death and thought about how the whale bodies feed the ocean when they die.

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Brooklyn, New York, on Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They are on the faculty at Movement Research NYC, Editor-in-Chief of Movement Research Performance Journal, and the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from their life/art/movement work, Improvising While Black. www.improvisingwhileblack.com

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.

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.

The Great Game of the 19th century was the struggle between Russia and the British in Afghanistan to control India. The Ukraine war is a new version of the Great Game. In the 1930s to defeat the Japanese, an existential threat to China, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek postponed their civil war. Climate change is the world’s existential threat. Let’s postpone all wars to deal with climate change.

TDR’s correspondent writes about Moscow after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The city is not saturated by military symbols; the main institutions are functioning; there is no mobilization. The new cage is being built smoothly and gradually.

Interweaving first-person narratives, archives, autobiography, film, and live music, Lola Arias shifts her audience’s attention towards the nature of memory, revealing the inadequacy of binaries such as fact and fiction, truth and imagination. Arias’s major works explore the construction of collective and personal memory in relation to the economic, social, cultural, and psychological influences of the military dictatorships on contemporary Argentinian and Chilean societies.

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.

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.

Maryam Khakipour’s 2004 The Joymakers and its 2008 sequel Shadi form an exemplary site for examining the dissemination and translation of Persian blackface across time, space, and media. The transmediality of sīyāh bāzī reveals a universal familiarity with the practice of blackface comedy that disrupts commonplace assumptions about its geographical and historical itinerary.

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.

Iranian theatre director Zahra Sabri’s dramaturgy layers performers and puppets, puppets and puppeteers, collapsing distinctions between the inanimate and the animate in ways that allow spectators more freedom to interpret her work. Her 2012 Count to One enacts the creation, animation, and destruction of clay puppets while telling a story of three soldiers who refuse to follow orders to bomb a foreign city.

Our understanding of “presence” has made an epochal shift in the past three years. The field of performance studies—never settled, always in flux—is shifting as well on this topic, as what we study expands digitally, contracts physically, embraces new paradigms, and unlooses others. While it is impossible to fix an exact time when attitudes about something as ineffable yet entirely real as presence changed permanently, this issue touches down on several key moments.

Theatricality in music performances is often regarded as extraneous, but avantgarde toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan exploits the intermediality between theatricality and musicality to demonstrate how theatrimusicality is imperative to the creation and reception of her music. Curios (2015) is one example in which the work’s structure of meaning and the experience of the carnivalesque are evoked through such a theatrimusical dramaturgy.

How has presence transformed under recent pandemic conditions and ongoing digital saturation? José Esteban Muñoz’s now classic critique of liveness illuminates the works of several contemporary Black performance artists whose work intervenes against the corporeal burdens of our moment.

German art historian Aby Warburg’s 1895–1896 trip through the southwestern US reexamined in the context of late 19th‐century colonialism interjects the ethical stakes of displacement and replacement into one of Warburg’s key theoretical terms, “survival.” Working through how power differentials in colonialism shape the way images and affects survive in performance, an unremarked‐upon Matachines dance is reinstated in this travel narrative.

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.