Football as art? Football as culture? The 2010 World Cup supplied an aesthetically galvanizing spectacle and a global performance of South African identity.

The Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch performed Nefés in Wrocław, Poland, only hours after receiving news of their director's sudden death on 30 June 2009. The unique empathic dynamics of the performance offer a window onto the evolution of Bausch's artistic vision and working process over the past three decades.

Janelle Reinelt explores playwright Howard Brenton's return to Britain's national stages after almost a decade's absence, discussing recent productions that address the fraught relationship between religious belief and human conduct. Joshua Chambers-Letson contemplates the queer politics of failure in regard to Nao Bustamante's Hero , which challenges the value of “normality” via the possibility of a communal being-in-failure for queers, people of color, and other nonnormative subjects. Engaging South Africa's 2006 National Arts Festival, Daniel Larlham addresses the country's national transformations through its changing artistic landscape, newly opened to a variety of imaginative, discursive, and affective spaces in which a communal historical consciousness might develop.