In September 2019, Marina Abramović's exhibition, The Cleaner , billed as her “European retrospective,” opened in Belgrade. The funding for the exhibit was secured through a direct intervention that came from Serbian prime minister Ana Brnabić. The Cleaner quickly became the center of a vigorous political debate, which exposed hypocrisies of the regime of illiberal democracy currently in power in Serbia.

During his time working with the Berliner Ensemble, Carl Weber observed firsthand Brecht’s techniques as he called out directions to his actors from the 10th row. Weber, groundbreaking theatre director, actor, scholar, and pedagogue, gave a series of interviews during his final years with a group of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students at Stanford University, reflecting on the artistic processes of the Berliner Ensemble and its legacy.

In the decade following 9/11, the Wooster Group staged three landmark 17th-century plays, Phaedra, Hamlet , and La Didone . This turn to baroque theatre is both a comment on American culture of the first decade of the 21st century and a significant departure in the history of the group itself.

In 2007, Routledge published Theory for Performance Studies as part of its Theory 4 series, listing Philip Auslander as author. When, in August, The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that much of the book was lifted word-for-word from the template for the series, Theory for Religious Studies by Timothy K. Beal and William E. Deal, TDR editor Richard Schechner convened via email and phone conversations a “ TDR Forum,” asking leaders in the field to respond to the book and the series. Schechner and other respondents address issues of plagiarism, corporate takeovers of academic publishing, and the dumbing down of performance studies, asking why a notable scholar such as Auslander would undertake such an egregious piece of “scholarship.” Deal and Beal answer some questions put to them by Schechner, and Routledge's Claire L'Enfant and Talia Rodgers offer their perspectives.

From his rise to power in the mid-'80s to his trial 20 years later, Milošević was the focus of powerful social theatricalities. As a public performance, Milošević's trial is inseparable from the mass meetings he organized in Serbia between 1987 and 1989; the political drama of the breakdown of Yugoslavia's federal government; the intense struggles against the opposition fought in the streets; the wars taking place in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo; and finally his own funeral.

The performances in these Critical Acts de-privilege the visual aspect of the performer-audience relationship, instead focusing on the materiality of the encounter. In The City Itself, the performance group Skewed Visions departs from site-specific performance to engage in an examination of the physical and metaphysical properties of various locales; and in The Courtesan Tales, Nicole Blackman tells erotic tales to a bound audience-of-one, challenging