Relaxation, when produced by participating in a theatre-for-one piece, requires work. From March to May 2020, with much of the world under a stay-at-home advisory to mitigate the spread of Covid-19, three performances carved out restorative spaces. These theatre-for-one pieces give participants rules to follow to ostensibly resist the neoliberal drive to productivity; yet those same rules structure acts of rest as productive under neoliberalism.

Moving beyond speculation on immediate and mediated interpretations of presence that saturate our field, we drift toward new orientations regarding presence that capture a metered togetherness: a disjuncted assembly emerging from both localized and networked logistics. Presence is not always signaled by the coterminous junction of shared time and space, but as the multiple trajectories that emerge in its wake.

For a group of antifascist fans who support Eis Hockey Club Dynamo Berlin, street protest and ice hockey games are both sites of left-wing political intervention. Despite the team’s reputation in Germany as “The Nazi Club,” the group aims to cultivate politically minded crowd action and uplift the atmosphere in the arena in hopes of ridding Germany of representations of its authoritarian past.

As venues shuttered across Australia, a fervent queer nightlife dreamed up new relations with virtuality, traversing the unstable terrains of memory and trauma. From reflections of sweaty dance floors to the 2020 Zoom-wave of internet performance, the mutual consideration of presence and lack both complexifies and reifies the stakes in reviving queer nightlife cultures.

Focusing on performance that functions outside explicitly theatrical frames, art installations staged in Hong Kong between June and October 2020 progress a broader view of Hong Kong’s complex development as global financial center, creative hub, and meeting point between “East” and “West.” Artists Mark Chung, Nadim Abbas, and Christopher Ho interrogate Hong Kong at a historically definitive moment, allowing audiences to study what constitutes “home” beyond what conventional academic analyses, traditional publishing outlets, and social media allow.

For 100 days in 2015, performance artist Nut Brother dragged a vacuum cleaner through Beijing and formed the collected smog particles into a solid brick. Dust Project brings into sharp relief the harm related to the necessary act of breathing and the effects of anthropogenic climate change. As air quality declines, breathing marks the everyday entanglement with particulate matter and its attendant violences as a performance of endurance.

How can we be present yet not physically in person? Three bed performances in Argentina suggest such a possibility. In a country marked by the disappearance of 30,000 citizens, artists and activists have sought to make the absent present. These bed performances reveal that by mediating presence and expanding it beyond the here and now, what was thought to have disappeared, remains.

Pastoral associates stand in front of huge screens to pray for hundreds of people at the same time. Emmanuel TV Studios, Lagos, Nigeria, 1 June 2021. See “The Healing of Maseko: Live and A-live Presences in the Theatre of the Spiritual” by Abimbola A. Adelakun. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1vRT6imV4o; screenshot by TDR)

In Kuro Tanino’s play The Dark Master (Daaku Masudaa), a person arrives at a rundown restaurant (yOshokuya) in working-class Osaka and orders typical Japanese comfort food from a crochety old “master.” Kuro’s 2020 VR theatre version of the play, Daaku Masudaa VR, reanimates the atmospheric setting of the restaurant and heightens its grotesque sensibilities. Using the extreme disorientation and intimacy of VR goggles and headphones, he creates threatening feelings of immersion.