Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day shifts the boundaries between representing and producing rituals. In 2003, the artist scripted a holiday for a freshly built, suburban-style neighborhood in New York State, which he simultaneously turned into a documentary film and quasi-liturgical participatory installation. Beyond the art world, innumerable new rituals are formalizing and circulating through videos online.

Through the Peace Ride, the Compton Cowboys, as activists and performance artists within the Black Lives Matter movement, materialized the long legacy of Black men and women riders in the United States. These protest bodies on horseback imagine alternative futures for Black communities through embodied memory and a rewriting of the archive.

What does it feel like to dance with a robot? How do you choreograph one? Working with robots during three artistic residencies and two research projects has raised questions about agency and generative processes, revealing how dancing with robots may provoke a more interanimate everyday world.

Magic Theatre’s San Francisco production of Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady plays with theatrical time to stage a confrontation between the 19th-century American past and the Trump-era present.

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview attempts to implicate white audience members in spectating Black life in order to make room for audiences of color to imagine a story built outside narratives of overcoming. Yet Fairview expects and operates under the assumption that there is a white audience to respond to the work, and leaves audience members of color exposed once more to the white gaze.

This Is Not a Theatre Company’s Readymade Cabaret 2.0 combines classic Dada dramaturgy with a Covid-era virtual theatre of short vignettes, much like the original Dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire. Character-based dialogue strikes at the same existential questions explored by the Dada collaborators, especially prescient in the context of a global pandemic that has drastically altered our daily lives.

During the late 1920s and ’30s, performative populism played a major role in the politics of the American Deep South. In the gubernatorial campaigns of three of the most prominent populist politicians of the era—Huey Long, Theodore Bilbo, and Eugene Talmadge—performance skills and entertainment were key strategies for gaining voter support and crafting personas within a popular imaginary.

Highland Park Is Here, staged online and centering on community and community engagement, worked to build vital connections between participants and overcome the restrictions of Zoom boxes. The process revealed that when the integrity of a show’s theatre-ness is challenged by moving it online, the piece becomes a placeholder for the live event.

A violent event in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the loss of a friend created a path for re-engaging with applied theatre and love for the field of applied theatre. In a singularly loveless world, theatre practitioners, performance scholars, and activists need to renew a sense of passion, joy, and commitment to their work.

Online musical performances in the first few months of the pandemic and lockdown in New York City bring to light the sonic and temporal challenges, unique acoustic space, and aesthetic possibilities of performing on Zoom. The social connection gained through these performance events is the key to their efficacy.

Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin’s musical reimagination of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, sidelines the issue of white supremacy in its explorations of economic inequality, environmental exploitation, and collective action.