This article examines the relationship between the performing arts and Amerindian peoples, specifically the Araweté, Juruna/Yudjá and Kamayurá peoples, which belong to the Tupi branch, whom I met as part of postdoctoral research carried out from February 2018 to January 2019, at the University of São Paulo (USP). It analyses the conjuncture of the fight of Amerindian and riparian peoples before the destruction of the forest and rivers of the Amazon, based on case studies of two theatre performances: Altamira 2042, a scenic ritual instauration triggered by listening to the testimony of the Xingu river about the Belo Monte dam, and Os Um e Os Outros (The One and the Others), loosely based on The Horatians and the Curiatians by Bertolt Brecht.

This conversation paper examines the visual, sonic and corporeal entanglements that inform the work of the Vietnamese-American-Japanese artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. It explores the corporeal and aural qualities that are central to an understanding and sensorial experience of the artist's installations and visual practice. In paying attention to breath, sound and motion in visual art production, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's works reveal how corporeality and sonicity can dismantle the ocular-centrism of visual art. The discussions between Jun and Prarthana map the varied traumatic histories of racial colonialism, war and forced migration that haunt Vietnam's present, and bring to the surface the artist's aesthetic and political concerns around art, performance and cultural memory.

The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he began measuring the acoustic properties of a premodern performance space in the mid-1990s, and has been building ambisonic microphones since the early 2000s in order to carry out his project in further locations. Bringing together writers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, field recordists and sound designers, A Slightly Curving Place is an exhibition that responds to Umashankar's practice and proposes possibilities for listening to the past and its absence which remains. Umashankar asserts that we cannot just look for theatres in landscapes of the past; we must listen for them. In this dossier, contributors to the exhibition extend the notion of listening to an archaeological site to include practices of listening to text, textures, technologies, the body and the fields of recording.

This article seeks to reflect on how theatre presents itself as a fabular medium allowing for the emergence of performances that create and re-create stories and identities. In particular, it examines how theatre allows for the development of epistemologies that enhance our understanding of black bodies, knowledge, traditions, subjectivities and desires.

This article summarizes recent transformations in the field of performing arts in Brazil, with attention to feminist theatrical production. It provides a description of the context of this branch of Brazilian political theatre, between the civil–military coup of 1964 and the present, focusing on 2015, a period named the Brazilian ‘Feminist Spring’. This historical arc of almost sixty years celebrates groups and artists which represent the dissemination of feminist discussion and poetics in all kinds of performative events in the theatrical field, as well as revealing the backlash represented by the anti-feminist policies of the Bolsonaro government, elected in late 2018.

Reassembled, Slightly Askew (RSA) is an audio theatre work which takes the audience through the visceral and embodied experience of Shannon Yee (Sickels) as she lives through a catastrophic brain infection and surgery, and eventually (as the title indicates) reassembles herself, and familiarizes herself with her acquired brain injury. Audience members experience RSA lying in hospital beds, wearing eyemasks and headphones. Sonically you, as audience member, are situated within the body of Shannon. Your focus is directed to the corporeal experience as told through sound and spoken text, providing a first-person perspective on the experience of acquiring an invisible disability. The project broke new methodological ground for the interdisciplinary artistic team, requiring a high level of collaboration and interweaving of the artists’ respective expertise: writing, directing, choreography, sound design and dramaturgy. Throughout the process of exploration and making, a seamless relay happened naturally as to which art form was leading in the discoveries and decisions. In this dossier, the artists replicate this relay to share insights from their own perspective in the creation of the project and its particular challenges in developing a highly visceral and corporeal experience through sound.

Unsettling Sound examined the at once destabilizing and liberatory experiential dimensions of sounding through three dialogue-events, opening up possible meanings, sensations, ideological and bodily potentialities of the sonic, and the sonic potentialities of bodies. This series of conversations, co-devised by Sara Jane Bailes and Arabella Stanger, took place remotely and online. Here, traces of the events are gathered into print. Alexandrina Hemsley reflects on their exchange with Seke Chimutengwende and Xana in the midst of creating an audio version of the stage show, Black Holes (2018). Rajni Shah and Royona Mitra share voice letters on the impossibilities of anti-racist institutions and dreaming new worlds. Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste shares a new conceptual score, Étude for Not Knowing #1 (2021).

This article analyses how the political circumstances of the extermination of transgender people in Brazil aggravates the vulnerable conditions of performing-arts production. Cisgender dominance in theatre is presented as a neoliberal and colonial factor that maintains trans people in structural danger within artistic processes. While whiteness produces an ethnocentrism in Brazilian arts, cisgenderness causes an ‘ethno-cis-centrism’. For trans people, ‘gender bioterrorism’ represents an alternative strategy for navigating performing arts and society.