When The Builders Association began working on their Ayn Rand–inspired, technofeudalist-satirizing production of ATLAS DRUGGED (Tools for Tomorrow), the 2024 election was still years away. By the time the show premiered at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in October 2024, it was just around the corner. This dossier—comprising an interview with Richard Schechner, commentary, script excerpts, and a summary of the Builders’ mediaturgy—is a comprehensive examination of the factors that influenced the genesis of ATLAS DRUGGED, and the ludicrous “predictions” made by the sprawling, technologically advanced work that have since come true.

The Attica Prison Uprising has come to emblematize militant political organization inside prisons, influencing carceral rhetoric and policy throughout the contentious War on Crime. Despite its stigma as a short-lived rebellion that ended in a massacre, the Attica uprising is best understood as a site of prefigurative politics—political organization that aims to produce new social and political relations through their embodiment in the present. Political actors at Attica achieved remarkable success by experimenting with social roles beyond the purview of carceral surveillance and control.

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.

Here There Are Blueberries (2018–ongoing), the Tectonic Theater Project’s most recent work, tells the story of a photo album from Auschwitz collected in 1944 by Obersturmführer Karl-Friedrich Höcker, adjutant to camp commander SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. The photos, now at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, show Nazi soldiers, their families, and concentration-extermination camp staff relaxing and socializing. Tectonic not only presents the photos but also investigates curating, memory, and historical responsibility. The interview details the process that brought Here There Are Blueberries into existence.

Nina Simone’s songs are maps that critique racial-sexual violence in the US, while opening up space for “redress” by seizing back sonic excess. Simone’s critical geographic performance practice is part of the tradition of enslaved Africans’ songs as fugitive maps. Throughout her performances Simone insists that geographies of domination, and especially sexual violation, be read in relation to one another, encouraging a new method of spectatorship: “listening as incommensurable practice.”

Through its arrangement of projections, figures, light, colors, sound, and spoken text, Sudden Rise (2019) by Wu Tsang and the collective Moved by the Motion creates a posthuman world, transgressing the boundaries of representation and presence to rethink our civilization in relation to the rest of nature.

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.

For Chinese Generation Z fans, the reperformances of musical theatre have empowered them to realize self-transformation while performing in public—without the constraints of formal physical training or special creative ability. By reperforming musicals with the themes of idealism and revolution, these youth re-create song-and-dance gestures as a rite of passage in everyday life, striving for individual idealized identities while playing disciplined social roles under the control of official ideology.

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.

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.

The postsubjective theatre of Sudden Rise (2019) by Wu Tsang and the collective Moved by the Motion denies human agency, suggesting instead a posthuman world, and brings the theatrical paradox of action and subjectivity to light. Sudden Rise’s hyperaffective timelessness heralds a posthuman world, both in reality and in theatre. Characterized by collectivity, entanglement, and synesthesia, the working mode of Tsang’s team of artists frames and codetermines the theatrical experience.

Mekhrav Numag by the Israeli Ruth Kanner Theatre Group was created in response to the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. This documentary theatre piece compiles diverse verbal reactions to the horrendous event and the subsequent war in Gaza. The work’s postdramatic kaleidoscopic texture and dramaturgy of excess emphasize the complexity of experiences following the attack, resisting confinement to a single voice or a unified perspective.

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.

Contemporary visual artist Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series stages and documents her reparative practice of taking self-portraits in sites around New York City where enslaved Africans lived, died, and are buried. Considering Faustine’s self-portrait series not only as photography but also as performance documentation invites theorizations of memorial practices (rather than monumental objects) and their affordances for liberatory aesthetic projects.

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 rise of theatre in Iran during the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) coincided with significant shifts in Iranian society, particularly in the areas of women’s rights, the push for gender equality, and the emergence of nationalism. Theatre served as a platform for, and actively contributed to, these transformative movements. The role of women’s issues in Iran was distinct from their representation in Western perspectives on so-called third world societies.

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.