ABSTRACTThe suspension of operations during lockdowns facilitated a new perspective on performance: the absent came to appear as a determining factor of not only the pandemic, but became evident as constitutive of late modern theater cultures. Based on a description of the lockdown performance A Room of Our Own (2021) by the feminist collective Swoosh Lieu, it is shown how contemporary practice is relocating performance within its entanglement with the social spaces of reproduction. Emphasizing the realities of exclusion that the performing arts rest upon, the paper argues against a theory of performance as an enclosed event of participation based on an idealized idea of the social as a homogeneous microcosm. It calls instead for an empirics of assembly, and more generally to question a thinking of performance along the lines of interaction and communication. Adopting Karen Barad's concept of posthuman performativity to Theater Studies, it foregrounds the mediating function of performance in its articulation of the world and proposes to reconceptualize theater as an epistemological apparatus to invigorate a strong program of theater studies that refocuses on the socio-political real of theatricality.

Stephanie E. Pitts’ and Sarah M. Price’s study Understanding Audience Engagement in Contemporary Arts (2021) is seeking stories: stories from audience members that reflect how they navigate the bro...

Performative Topologies is part of Performative Diagrammatics, my ongoing artistic investigation of knowing and its relations to movement. In this report, I first lay out how the overarching framew...

Choreographer William Forsythe calls the work Duo a ‘project’—reflecting the piece’s long history of vicissitudes from 1996 to the present. We attempt to visualize continuity and change over severa...

Using Motion Bank’s web-based annotation and publication tools, dance educator Amelia Uzategui Bonilla engages in remote collaboration with international colleagues in times of Corona. They share a...

Body technologies, such as prostheses and biosensors, are active means of lived experimentation: they enable forms of hybrid embodiment such as the cyborg, whose diverse representations by artists ...