The anarchic embrace of difference in the encounters of and variations on Western and non-Western spiritual practices in Martinique reveals ways of disrupting the univocal, linear, and centralizing violence of plantation society. Examining the various techniques of collective ecstasy through song, dance, and other sacramental signs of spirit possession calls attention to anticolonial models of social organization, and presencing.

The East German protest singer, dramatist, and coal miner Gerhard Gundermann came to international attention in 2018 with the release of Andreas Dresen’s film Gundermann. This coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the artist’s premature death in 1998. While the film concentrates on Gundermann’s personal life, his complex relationship with the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) hierarchy in the coal mine, and his controversial entanglement with the Stasi secret police, it glosses over his work as a singer-songwriter and playwright. It says nothing about the numerous productions he wrote and performed with the Liedertheater (song-theatre) group Brigade Feuerstein between 1978 and 1988, nor the extent to which he himself was an object of Stasi persecution.1 Their quite distinctive form of agitprop theatre has been virtually ignored in academia.2 While never published, the written manuscripts and audio recordings of shows such as Geschichten aus dem Koraktor [Tales from the Koraktor], Das große Match [The big match], Eine Sehfahrt, die ist lustig [A sightseeing trip that is fun], Lebensläufe [Paths of life], and Erinnerung an die Zukunft3 [Remembering the future] were collected and stored in the archives of the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin, where they are still available for consultation.4 This article assesses these productions in terms of their use of fairy tales and parables to voice political criticism of dominant SED practice. It observes how, in a climate of censorship, these parables became increasingly direct in their criticism, as Gundermann’s stance gradually changed from that of a loyal singing club member in 1976 to one of a vociferous political critic. Using interviews and Stasi reports, it presents the story of Brigade Feuerstein as an example of the tenacity, cunning, and networking necessary for critical artists to survive in East Germany (i.e., German Democratic Republic [GDR]).

At the end of the musical Fun Home (2015), Alison Bechdel urges her girl-self to keep challenging her father’s gendered expectations, and to take the road not taken, out of the closet and beyond her parents’ lives. She has the musical’s final word, recalling “a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.”1 At the end of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (2014), Carole also soars, to the heights of the music industry as she looks out at her Carnegie Hall audience of 1971 before the failed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. King is solo, center stage at the piano, in her concert debut, and at Carnegie Hall, no less, singing “Beautiful.” This image of an actual American woman, thriving and succeeding, urging her audience to think positively and define themselves from the inside out, is unprecedented. Her twenty-first-century audience sits on the verge of both ovating her success and raising their voices to feel the empowerment of her songs, just as Alison’s audience felt the power of her soaring.

Despite myths of its dematerialization, capitalism continues to deepen its reliance on resource extraction. Performances by Otobong Nkanga and Seba Calfuqueo confront this trend, mapping it onto longer histories of expropriation in Namibia and Chile, respectively. By activating sculptural objects composed of mined raw materials, both artists make visible the colonial and ongoing forms of extractive violence that underpin automation and the socalled green energy transition.

Putting the work of the poet Nathaniel Mackey into correspondence with that of the singer, composer, performance and video artist M. Lamar offers a unique perspective on the complex relationship between automation and possession. Mackey’s Andoumboulou and Mu move in and through M. Lamar so that possession and automation are destabilized and replaced by molecular distintegrations of plantation worlds and the sonic apertures of a Black Afrofuturist Android.

In 2019 British choreographer Seke Chimutengwende began research on a new project exploring horror, haunted houses, and the hauntings of colonial history. It begins in darkness (2022) emerged in collaboration with the dancers who perform each iteration. Working through the figure of the haunted stately home, It begins in darkness excavates—and exorcises—the horror of slavery’s histories through dance.

Bodies in possession and in revolt are often framed as being “caught” by some other entity—a spirit, a force, or a memory. Cases of rebellion involve a loss of intentionality of movement, unlike a subject who wills and decides. What is the political significance of the illegibility of such movements, before they are consigned to taxonomies and diagnoses that render them pathological, criminal, or demonic? What thinking about dance might this permit?

In March 1830, travelling troupe director Henri Delorme staged the local premiere of Daniel Auber’s grand opéra La muette de Portici in the northern French town of Valenciennes. The production marks a turning point in the circulation of operatic repertoire across France, kickstarting a thriving but as yet unacknowledged phenomenon of touring grand opéra that persisted into the 1860s and beyond. In this article, I reconstruct the artistic and working practices of this phenomenon, and demonstrate how the arrival of the genre in the northern touring circuit allowed local individuals, such as the director, theatre-goers and local critics, to voice their expectations – in musical, dramatic and staging terms – of the appropriate artistic parameters for the emerging genre when seen from a provincial perspective. I suggest that grand opéra’s adjusted scale, status and performance practices on tour had the potential to reconfigure the genre’s meaning for nineteenth-century French audiences and theatrical performers as local agents negotiated shifting sets of centre–periphery dynamics, at once seeking operatic imitation of the capital and rejecting it in favour of locally defined practices and values.

In 1987, LeAnn Fields acquired Lynda Hart‘s Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. By the time Fields retired in 2024, she had built a list of more than 280 books in the field of theatre and performance studies at the University of Michigan Press. Hart’s Making a Spectacle is a foundational and still radical book of critical essays on gender, the body, and spectatorship, topics that continue to chart and reverberate among the many intellectual commitments of our field. Like nearly all the books that Fields acquired for University of Michigan Press, Making a Spectacle drew from and responded to another interdisciplinary field of study, women’s studies, as it simultaneously broke new ground in theatre and performance studies. In this special section, thirteen authors discuss the ways in which Fields encouraged the development of their work and our field. These author accounts are followed by an interview with Fields by Jill Dolan, in which Fields describes how her work as an acquisitions editor began and how it changed, how she navigated the press boards and changes in technology and staffing, and how, from her perspective, our field fosters a unique sense of community. The author accounts and interview offer an invaluable collection of personal histories that trace the development of our field over the past four decades to our vibrant present.

In fall 1970, Njoki McElroy taught the first university-level “Interpretation of Black Drama” course in the United States, which she designed and offered as a graduate student earning her doctorate in the Department of Interpretation at Northwestern University (NU). Her course curricularized epistemic commitments and selections from the Black Arts Movement (BAM) repertoire, bringing its theoretico-aesthetic project and its plays to a unit that was trying to reimagine itself beyond performance conventions resembling those of nineteenth-century platform reading and a pernicious lacuna in its analytical infrastructure. By braiding BAM commitments and texts together with the practices and purposes of oral interpretation in her teaching, McElroy expanded the “intellectual geographies”1 of the former to include the classroom and the intellectual genealogies of the latter into what would ultimately become performance studies.

The term “embodied knowledge” is often used as if its meaning is evident, and as if there is clarity about the relations it brings into view. The bodies in motion of the kumina festival Tambufest tell us about the forms of collective world-building that exist outside of but in relation to the juridical structures of sovereignty that govern modern Western political and social life.

Joe Arroyo’s music, specifi cally his carnival compositions, generates modes of solidarity that transcend national and temporal boundaries. His “musical mechanism,” employing the clave rhythm and improvisational structures, facilitates a collective reinhabitation of the past, a redemptive challenging of colonial divisions between the living and the dead. Arroyo’s work, therefore, demonstrates the transformative power of music to forge solidarity across carnival participants.

ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) names a mysteriously relaxing tingling sensation certain people experience in response to a range of stimuli, including the close, careful attention of others. Since 2010, a form of roleplay video has developed in which the performer addresses the camera/viewer in the guise of a medical or service professional. These relaxing enactments evoke fictional workplaces, raising questions about precarious and exploited labor in a globalized digital economy.