South Korea has recently experienced a queer historical turn. Contemporary Korean queer artists have been increasingly reanimating queer pasts in order to imagine queerness as a sense of togetherness. siren eun young jung’s Yeosung Gukgeuk Project (2008–present), one of the most celebrated works of queer art in South Korea, is a queer rendition of yeosung gukgeuk, a genre of all-female Korean opera of the 1950s and 1960s.

Monster Truck’s performances reproduce power dynamics that are at once painful and hurtful. By staging the representational process of dehumanizing black bodies, Monster Truck applies a different strategy than other Freie Szene groups: shining a bright light on dark discourse, selling the audience’s own willing consumption of neocolonial power relationships back to them as art.

Insect metamorphosis fascinated Greek philosophers, bewildered Christian theologians, affirmed the beliefs of Chinese moralists, and continues to mystify science. Yet dramas representing human-animal transformations rarely involve insects. When they do appear, they usually serve as metaphors satirizing human flaws, but are also demeaning to the insect in their simplistic representation. In some 21st-century performances, however, that approach is evolving to better appreciate the multifarious intricacies of insect life.

The term “Anthropocene” is obfuscatory, and as an analytic framework it has a serious blind spot: the conflicts stemming from the uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of the “Age of Man,” which are the very eco-conflicts on which artists in our field should focus. We should be talking about the “Capitalocene,” a term that locates climate change within the history of capitalism and colonialism, and suggests stories that deserve time on our stages.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought with it the criminalization of the free press in Russia and the bullying of independent reporters, exemplified by a red paint attack against Dmitry Muratov, one of the country’s foremost newspaper editors. The paint attack belongs to a cluster of wartime scenarios that make fluid use of “fake” blood and whose primary actors are not Kremlin cronies but antiwar protestors.

Promoted as the first theatrical play written by artificial intelligence, AI: When a Robot Writes a Play (2021) anticipates the post-Anthropocene in both content and form. The machine-generated script problematizes the necessity of human (including dramatic) activities and invites exploration of theatre’s role in the post-anthropocentric condition. AI renders the stage as a transitional site—a potential gateway to other realities.

A recent trend in Black German theatre engages with fantasy and posthumanism to criticize German racism and nationalism. In Krieg der Hörnchen (War of the Squirrels), Simone Dede Ayivi combines posthumanism and postnationalism, using German fears of invasive gray squirrels taking over the habitat of native red squirrels to reimagine xenophobic and racist debates about migration.

How might performance contribute to a reversal of the social values and political systems that have produced climate chaos, plunging countless species into crisis and catastrophe? What recognitions would such a reversal require? What misrecognitions must it defeat?

With the Iranian protest movement “Woman, Life, Freedom,” public spaces have become scenes of collective performance. As women openly defy the authoritarian and religious powers, theatre artists are faced with a question: What role can we imagine for theatre when citizens themselves perform their struggle to reclaim the public space and sphere of power?

At the height of the pandemic, Vice President Leni Robredo’s supporters served lugaw to the starving people of the Philippines as a symbol of her grassroots leadership—despite detractors who disparaged the lowly porridge. State agents antagonized citizen-led community pantries and food banks, which persisted through the contributions of ordinary Filipinos. Filipinos came together to lead these various embodied practices to provide nourishment and ignite political action.

Theatre music has been a key driver of theatrical invention, innovation, and style since 2010 in German theatre and arguably for some years before that. This is evidenced in creative partnerships between individual directors and composers (and sometimes bands), in a strong presence of music in the rehearsal rooms, in musical forms of postdramatic writing, and in forms of acting styles and performance aesthetics where music plays a formative role.

Using “climate change” to name a recent, unnatural, and rapid process of warming that is the result of pollution conceals the causal order of events. Those who generate this semantic confusion are in the service of those who produce the global warming at the root of accelerated climate change. Theatre can pass judgment on them, as a virtual, possible, and probable Areopagus of our age.

Two very different points of entry reflect on the issue of performance and climate change. The Covid-19 pandemic, though not directly related, looms as the unavoidable condition from which to rethink eco-cosmopolitanism.

For close to four decades, Claudia Bucher’s “scientart” has created myriad experiential habitats for her performing body, while inviting others to join her imaginary leaps. From personifying an outer-space lichen colony to meditating midair as an “anemochore kite,” Bucher demonstrates empathic kinships with other beings and nonbeings, calling forth alternative eco-systems in which sentience thrives as the common denominator for all inhabitants.

Like most of Yael Ronen’s theatre, Roma Armee complicates notions of identity. It presents a world in which representation simultaneously blinds and illuminates. Ronen’s use of stereotypes deconstructs prevalent images of Roma and Romani Travellers to start a process of healing and reconciliation that recognizes actual experience.

From the birth of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) in the 1970s during the rise of fascism in Latin America until his death in 2009, Augusto Boal affirmed his utopian conviction that “another world is possible.” Born at a time that was hardly conducive to utopianism, TO offers us techniques through which to exercise utopianism in our fatalistic times, repairing our conviction that a more livable and just world is possible even as the Right tries to convince us of the opposite.

With his reinvention of absurd farce, Herbert Fritsch has become one of the most celebrated directors in the German-speaking world. Most remarkable are Fritsch’s original pieces, which he also designs, composed in collaboration with actors and musicians. These defy generic categorization and allow audiences to rethink what is possible to see and hear onstage.

Climate change was the defining issue in the 2022 Australian federal election. As a new administration takes power, all sectors, including the performing arts, need to keep up the pressure. An iconic moment of “coal theatrics” in Parliament House, so labeled by the Australian media, stands in contrast to artistic performances that continue to put pressure on the framers of political and cultural policy.

At the 2022 Sharm El-Sheikh International Theatre Festival for Youth, Saudi women performed in a public square without hijab. Al-Enezī’s al-Sujanāʾ al-ahrār (Free Prisoners) is not only about art and liberty, it enacts it.

Dozens of theatres emerge in Yve Laris Cohen’s two performances, Conservation and Preservation, including: the theatre of cruelty, theatrical minimalist sculpture, legal theatres, operating theatres, and spectacular disasters. They provide the groundwork for exploring theatrical redundancy, refuse, excess, violence, speech, and the (im)possibility of repair.