The strategy, tactics, and aesthetics of the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion can serve as inspiration for the theatre and performance community to unleash its creativity in response to the climate crisis.

The premiere of Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad (2019) marks a critical juncture in the history of contemporary British drama. The play is informed by a decolonial dynamic, a longue durée vision, and an evental mode of memory; and renders the museum as a multivalent allegorical space. The complicities of culture, imperialism, and resource extractivism are revealed.

By presenting the supposedly “nostalgic” and “traditional” genre operetta as a genderfuck spectacle, without opera singers and with queer icons and dancers instead, “gay Jewish kangaroo” Barrie Kosky has revolutionized popular musical theatre in Berlin and brought operetta back to its pre-1933 roots.

Bell ringing in Britain has featured in sociohistorical studies, but it has never been analyzed in detail as a variety of mass spectacle. The practice takes especially interesting forms in London, a city where the ringing of church bells has been part of everyday life for centuries. Grounded in physics, economics, and human geography, ringing is a unique kind of immersive site-specific performance, whose significance is best understood through pivoting to topography and history.

Since 2019, the lecture and discussion series Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence at Berlin’s HAU Hebbel am Ufer has been exploring the significance of environmental and climate destruction in the context of contemporary theatre. Combining positions of eco-Marxism and -feminism, black studies, and new materialism, panels examine political and cultural dimensions of the apocalyptic discourses that accompany current ecocatastrophes as well as possible ways out of the socioecological mess.

The transnational circulation of persistent racial types that are attached to Asian/American women have shaped Asian-focused narratives and roles on Broadway. The King and I (2015) and KPOP (2022) exemplify Asian/American women’s performative labor and the tensions embedded in and disruptive of the contested political arena of Broadway musical theatre.

Assuming responsibility and developing the tools needed for self- and political construction are hallmarks of the liberal imagination. A newly emerging subfield of performance studies—call it “performance capital studies”—teaches us what those tools are and how they may be put to use. “Performance” now comes to be seen as an exchange of cultural, legal, and identity capital retailing different forms of knowledge and power in the constitution and regulation of governance.

Three recent anthologies in science and technology studies show how standards for scholarly professionalization are changing. Such changes may facilitate new alliances for theatre faculty plagued by old feuds and the increasingly neoliberal university.

How do we make sense of Asian American racial form as it telescopes across political invisibility and spectacular, hypervisible violence? Three recent works in Asian American performance studies help explore this question through the prism of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The complexity of current ecological crises, such as climate change, calls for new modes of knowledge production. Common Dreams — Flotation School (2017) by the Portuguese, Brussels-based artist Maria Lucia Cruz Correia is a construction site and a pedagogical prototype that challenges the linear transfer of knowledge in scientific research.

Inspired by Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, the short play Homo Sapiens humorously explores whether Homo sapiens caused their own demise or managed to evolve into a new, more enlightened species.

Now that decades-long efforts to convince diverse publics that anthropogenic climate change is real have largely succeeded, but efforts to avoid extreme climate change have not, what comes next? By understanding the performative nature of infrastructure, communities can bring critical and creative attention to physical structures and daily practices that compose normative ecological relations and cocreate more just and livable climates.

How is the climate crisis viewed by workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who reclaim recyclables on a garbage dump — a place long entangled with decay and death? The act of reclaiming waste is a reminder that it is impossible to understand the current crisis without considering its origins in the labor of racial capitalism and in the productivism that capitalism demands. Reclaiming requires staying with degradation, remaking a world that is seemingly always ending.

Understanding the Anthropocene in island environments means looking at the emotional entanglements between island populations and their metropolitan diasporas in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.