Climate change and resultant environmental catastrophes are a growing factor in the increased number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Some end up in Italian prisons where rehabilitation programs emphasize Italian culture production as a path toward inclusion in Italian society. These programs model how to address climate-induced eco-migration and new templates for tackling climate change through prison reform.

Any planet-wide solutions to climate change have to be enforced by nation-states. China and the United States, currently producing the most carbon dioxide, are competing with growing hostility. The interstate hostility, even in a new Cold War era, may push competing nations to implement climate-friendly actions for the sake of national security.

Discussion on environmental sustainability in the past two decades has often engendered more controversy than agreement. The Beijing Olympics in 2008 and 2022 are examples of state bureaucrats and international media outlets upholding polarized viewpoints on achieving carbon neutrality. The “original ecology” folk song of 21st-century China further demonstrates how anthropocentric interests could easily divert people’s attention away from issues critical to planetary wellness.

Whether scientist, politician, or theatre-maker, the challenge one faces in representing climate change is an accompanying epistemic crisis; it is contingent upon and resistant to legibility, and we cannot apprehend it in its totality. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle poses a potential aesthetic and dramaturgical model for this challenge.

Among the species that went extinct in the last 500 plus years under colonial regimes, the ill-fated dodo became an early icon of the Anthropocene Extinction. While much has been written on the biotechnological apparatuses that expedited the extinction of the dodo, it was the complicity of Western European imperialism and early modern aesthetic regimes that were responsible for the ecocide of the Anthropocene (read Eurocene) Extinction.

Maraji, a Nigerian humorist, performatively questions the lingering dominance of men in comedy as she brings humor to the everyday lives of Nigerians. Her work on social media draws audience attention to women’s role in society, shaping the future of comedic presentations in the African digital space.

Like Hannah Gadsby, Dave Chappelle understands the art of quitting. At the end of his 2021 Netflix special The Closer, a show full of jokes about LGBTQ people, Chappelle announces that he is “done” making such jokes “until we are both sure that we are laughing together.” Chappelle’s performance of quitting inverts the politics and structure of Gadsby’s Nanette (2017), in which she infamously quit comedy because it reinforced her marginalization as a gender-nonconforming lesbian.

As the very first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic ebbed in the United States, a new production of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) appeared online. Performed on Senegal’s shoreline, Dancing at Dusk resituates Bausch’s choreography within the beach’s formative histories of racialized violence, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this context, the performance also prompts considerations of the relationships between the enduring histories of racial capitalism and the futures of choreographic economies.

Israeli soldiers dancing to global pop hits in the Occupied Palestinian Territories look like they are having fun, and there is always something entertainingly contradictory in watching army bodies circumventing the military codes. But the choreographic analysis of three viral videos from the 2010s reveals how dancing serves the Israel Defense Forces’ territorializing and necropower strategy.

Scholarly work rarely examines the labor of the contemporary dance artist as a performer. Flexible performativity describes the discrete skill set dancers today must be able to deploy in performance. Flexible performativity and its characteristics of negotiating proximity, autodramaturgy, hyperindividualism, and hyperreferentialism mold the dancer prototypical of the movement logics of the early 21st century.

A key lesson of the Wooster Group’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s learning play The Mother concerns the meaning of ownership in capitalism. Unlike other businesses that moved into SoHo during the wave of deindustrialization that began in the late 1960s, the group of actors that owns a former metal stamping factory at 33 Wooster Street shows that their relationship towards their means of production is not only economic, but also ethical. This is at the foundation of their distinct theatrical aesthetics.