Abstract: A new genre of hybrid artworks involving elements of performance, conceptualism, sculpture, and installation practices evokes complex art experiences that are performative yet exist in various material forms — including, implicitly or explicitly, that of the artist’s laboring body. These works call for new ways of engaging that do not dwell on final objects or celebrate “authentic” presence but understand the relational tensions and seductions between human and nonhuman.

Abstract: Assemblage theory provides a framework for registering the active roles played by nonhuman entities in the creation of theatrical events. In particular, it enables a greater appreciation of how technical and other theatrical production elements inform performance analysis. In the Wooster Group’s House/Lights, people and things make equal attentional demands upon the audience; appropriately, a documentary on installing the production makes this most apparent. Additionally, the National Theatre’s Frankenstein performs these animating forces as a theatrical virtue.

Abstract: During rehearsals for the 1973 British premiere of Beckett’s Not I, actor Billie Whitelaw collapsed. The actor’s affective experience archives the sensory approach of Beckett’s compositional innovations and demonstrates the collaborative nature of working with this sensation-depriving dramatist.

Abstract: Robotic and virtual figures have become increasingly visible in live performance. How these figures/performative agents come into the discussion of dramaturgy is considered in reference to recent works by Hirata Oriza and Kris Verdonck.

Abstract: The performance of Senga Nengudi’s sculptural work R.S.V.P ., as part of the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art , explores the limits of sculptural form, while also submitting idealized representations of the black body in contemporary performance to abstract interrogation.

Abstract: What happens to theatre in an algorithmically driven world, and what becomes possible when algorithms and the software they constitute are put to work to make theatre? A Piece of Work by Annie Dorsen considers this question an exigent problem to be solved—algorithmically and theatrically.

Abstract: In the former home of Dr. Josephine English, the first African American woman to have an OB/GYN practice in New York and founder of the Paul Robeson Theatre in Brooklyn, the unique confluence of forces created in this space through divergent types of labor honored the architecture by adding to its historicity. Simone Leigh and organizers were constantly negotiating the overlapping issues of identity, visibility, labor, interdisciplinarity, artistic practice, and care in this clinic-installation.

Abstract: Opened in Warsaw in April 2013, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews tells the story of the thousand years of continuous Jewish presence in this part of the world, a history largely overshadowed, understandably, by the Holocaust. While the exhibition avoids a master narrative, it enacts a theatre of history founded on 12 metahistorical principles outlining POLIN’s curatorial, pedagogic, and performative storytelling strategies.

Abstract: The effectiveness of any haka performance is measured by the performers’ ability to elicit an emotional and psychic response in the spectator: to incite ihi. The (re)action of US pop star Beyonce to an impromptu haka sparked vigorous online debate. Stripping back preconceptions regarding tradition, gender, and ethnicity, this spontaneous performance is read as an unbound moment where reciprocal awe and respect invoke a powerful tripartite performative energy, the wana.

Abstract: Contemporary critical work in the field of new materialism, whose practitioners take seriously the concept of nonhuman agency, has largely neglected the genres of theatre and performance. African American author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston’s folk revues of the 1930s offer an opportunity to examine the intersections between contemporary new materialist theory and the stage, revealing that black Atlantic performance practices have long explored concepts of nonhuman agency in the service of a cultural and racial politics.

Abstract: As an investigation into the dramaturgy of algorithms themselves, “algorithmic theatre” conveys a different relationship to digital technologies than typical multimedia performance: the ways algorithms order the world, the particular kinds of meanings they make, the types of narrative structures they imply. The primary collaborators on Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (2013) participated in a group self-interview on the day of the final performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Abstract: “At the time and in the place of the action.” This is the tagline of a series of opera broadcasts transmitted live on European television. Each is shot in the locations depicted in the opera, its broadcast staggered so that each act airs at the time of day specified in the libretto. What are the material and performative implications of this overdetermined authenticity of time and place, this mediatized encounter between opera stage and reality TV?

Abstract: In early modern Europe, anatomists elaborated theoretical discourses concerning the role of the senses in the acquisition of scientific knowledge. This “sensorial program” gave birth to spaces of public demonstration — anatomy theatres — specifically designed to orchestrate an audience’s attention toward the actions and gestures of anatomy’s scientists. These public performances of scientific knowledge in turn influenced the conception, construction, and uses of the theatrical stage.

Abstract: A post-psychophysical theoretical and practical framework for performer training is evolving in response to sociological theories of material and immaterial labor, the formulation of “dynamic hybridity” from the field of human geography, and contemporary posthuman thought.

Abstract: In contrast to much new media performance, Kris Verdonck’s ACTOR #1 does not attempt to accelerate time or to enhance the spectatorial experience by juxtaposing theatrical elements. Instead the work presents a three-phase meditation that strips back the tools and techniques of theatre to allow, or perhaps even compel, spectators to focus on a single element, to inhabit one state, or to consider a single idea at a time.

Abstract: It doesn’t matter if the actor is a robot; the virtual context of art and theatre is a site where a “vibrant materialism” might offer useful insights on the status of the actor, the object, and especially the robotic object, in an expanded dramaturgy.

Abstract: The Kremlin’s assertion of Russia’s identity as a representative democracy relies for its effect on the skillful manipulation of the media by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s actor-in-chief. It seems clear from reviewing Putin’s annual, televised town hall meetings that it’s the Russian President’s enigmatic charisma that keeps his poll numbers high even as he curtails citizens’ rights.

Abstract: In Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20, and 29 (2003) Sharon Hayes recites the declarations made by Patty Hearst on four audiotapes that were delivered to underground radio stations in 1974. By changing Hearst’s statements from auditory announcements to textual transcripts to a visual performance in front of an audience, Hayes’s work explores not just the rhetorical and performative affects of political modes of address, but also the importance of transmission and circulation processes in the formation of publics.

Abstract: The significance of Reggie Wilson’s research-to-performance method within the canons of American dance arises from the way his distinctive approach confounds critical categories, blurring the divide between Black Dance and black postmodernism. Is his work too postmodernist for advocates of Black Dance and too Black for advocates of postmodernism?

Abstract: Extensive research memos written for choreographer Reggie Wilson informed the making of Moses(es). The excerpts here encompass such topics as writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, Wilson’s relationship with his early mentor Ohad Naharin, anthropological literature on the possession ritual Zar, and Nubia as a crossroads in Africa.

Abstract: “Gangnam Style” remains an unparalleled pop phenomenon. The music video’s “universality” inspires questions about attributes that have resulted in such a crosscultural contagion. The visual and musical qualities of the “Gangnam Style” video exemplify conditions of liquid modernity and society’s obsession with speed.

Abstract: The repatriation of indigenous remains and cultural patrimony can trigger anxiety among the settler majority. Performing as surrogates for the Americas’ un-grieved genocidal past, these remains, and the mourning performances that accompany their sometimes-embattled repatriation, illuminate the continuous violence against indigenous people that infiltrates even settler societies’ most reparative laws.

Abstract: After a pilgrims’ walk in Christchurch, New Zealand/Aotearoa, on the anniversary of the deadly quakes, A Different Light Theatre Company, comprised of people deemed to have cognitive difference, creates their own small public intervention: a Christchurch masquerade.

Abstract: Germany’s FIDENA puppetry festival’s provocative offerings, with shows drawn from visual arts and dance, without traditional puppets at their center, prompts reflections on the shifting boundaries of puppetry arts, the new notion of “material performance,” and, within this new rubric, the continuance of elements essential to puppetry.

Abstract: Despite John Cage’s well-recounted distance from Stravinsky, the composer of Le Sacre du printemps used a systematic methodology to generate empty structures when composing his 1913 masterpiece. Both composers’ connection to dance accounts for this shared interest in a super-sensorial platform of counts upon which diverse materials can be positioned.

Abstract: What do the delineations of consciousness owe to disease? Might we see, in the earliest examples of performative art, traces of dis-ease giving rise to performance and art itself? And what do we make of recent discoveries that certain modes of disease can influence our states of mind, our beliefs, consciousness itself? Does our development as human beings—from distant past to present day—owe far more to disease than we might imagine?

Abstract: PREMIERE (2013) by Maria Hassabi presents ontological challenges to dance spectatorship and scholarship by foregrounding micro-choreographies that emerge through slow-paced movement and extended duration. Kinesthetic attunement and duration are posed as critical concepts, despite evidence that both are undertheorized as choreographic strategies for premiering new bodies and subjectivities.

Abstract: Beginning in December 2011, The Freedom Theatre began using Playback Theatre in villages, refugee camps, and Bedouin communities throughout the West Bank of Occupied Palestine. In the South Hebron Hills, various ethical imperatives came to the fore — including the need to honor the integrity of the narrator’s subjective experience and avoid the replication of oppressive power dynamics — as the group simultaneously attended to the realities of staging stories.

Abstract: Rustom Bharucha dedicates the first chapter of Terror and Performance to Jean Genet and the last to Mahatma Gandhi. In this way, his rich series of reflections is bookended by a literary criminal and political saint, a (former) small-time crook and a (former) lawyer, a champion of stateless nations and a nation-builder, a traitor and a martyr... It seems that oppositions between them could go on forever. Even when Bharucha finally mentions them in the same sentence towards the end of the book, it is to illustrate their opposition, not similarity: here, one G stands for theatrical irony, and the other for sacrificial Truth (165). What brings Genet and Gandhi together is their queerness in relation to the world of letters and the world of politics, respectively. Their simultaneous position of marginality and excess in relation to their own historical and institutional situations came from their unique capacities for self-renunciation, so rare and precious in the contemporary world of literature, politics, and especially theatre. In Bharucha’s book, the route from Genet to Gandhi winds through the treacherous world of contemporary international politics and performance. This itinerary takes the reader away from the beaten paths of scholarly discourse on the two key terms indicated in the book’s title.