The failed 2020 revolution in Belarus and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 served as catalysts for the creation of the Insulted. Belarus Worldwide Readings Project based on a play by Andrei Kureichik. The project provided the material for hundreds of performances in over 30 countries, while dozens of texts by members of Kyiv’s Theatre of Playwrights formed the core of the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings, a similar project that generated over 660 performances, refuting Russian president Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukrainian culture does not exist.

The work of artist/anthropologist Susan Marie Ossman and her 12-station exhibition in Montmartre in 2020 lends itself to a personal meditation on art and illness during a global pandemic. Walking the neighborhood where the installations were created and assembled, Ossman’s artwork becomes a means of transforming the experience of chemotherapy and suggests how the cancer treatments themselves refl ect on a larger society of illness. Most importantly, in her work Ossman examines the notion of a self-portrait: what it is and how we might understand the genre as well as the self differently.

The murder of Jîna Aminî by the Iranian police in September 2022 led to wide-scale demonstrations. Women in Iranian Kurdistan have developed tactics for creating art and literature that empowers them to fi ght for their rights as women and as Kurds. “Doing art” invites them to cross the border between fictional and real, private and public, and to create negotiations with the patriarchal society and legal system that oppresses them.

In Jezebel (2019) and Darkmatter (2022), Dutch choreographer Cherish Menzo activates alternative temporal modes to perform the black body. Inspired by the chopped and screwed hip hop technique that manipulates tempo and pitch in existing songs, she disrupts conventional notions of time as a linear progression. Instead, she unfolds an “Epiphenomenal” temporal framework in which the present no longer appears as a continuation of the past or an anticipation of the future, but rather is a site of temporal experimentation that breaks with the past and cracks open the future.

Two plays by Afro-Spanish playwright Silvia Albert Sopale—Blackface y otras vergüenzas and La Moreneta—illustrate José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification” by which marginalized artists hijack and reshape dominant cultural texts that exclude minority voices. Sopale’s work reframes archives and artifacts to confront historical racial violence and its contemporary legacies. Her strategic use of blackface alludes to alternative revaluations of Black identity, disidentifying blackface itself.

Physical and cognitive disabilities are part of many people’s lives. They are the existential marks some performers carry and emphasize through their art in order to transcend them and embrace disability in a nonstigmatizing way. The performances of Felipe Monteiro, Nicola Fornoni, and Kamil Guenatri claim space for difference and diversity and reject assistentialist, protectionist, and pseudo-inclusive approaches that prescribe and perpetuate stigmas.

Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) is a play in the US-American bloodstream: it was quoted repeatedly by the architects of the American Revolution and was famously performed by Washington’s troops at Valley Forge in 1778. But what does this 300-year-old verse tragedy—with its entangled political, racial, and theatrical histories and implications—have to say to audiences in the present-day US South at the Clarence Brown Theatre, Tennessee, in 2023?

Purulia, a district in the southwestern part of West Bengal, is popular for the renowned chhou dance. Despite the prevalent notion that chhou is exclusively a war dance, it dynamically incorporates contemporary social and political issues, and has undergone significant changes such as new musical instruments and technologies, lighting, costume transformations, and female performers.

Widely regarded as the most prestigious art exhibition in the world, the Venice Biennale combines art history, politics, and cultural power in a dizzying spectacle. The 2024 exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere,” situates performance as a key medium in contemporary art and art history.

Recent works in Black aesthetic and cultural production build on legacies of Black feminisms as they seek to ever-expand scholarly theories and accounts of multifaceted Black life. The four books considered here assemble sites and model methods that bring new dimensions to how performance studies might understand historical and ongoing freedom dreams and the field’s reenergized commitment to understanding aesthetic and cultural production as world-making.