Deep in the Wuling Mountains of southwest Hunan, China, a 3,000-year-old ritual, the huan nuoyuan , is performed by the Miao people. The elaborate event is the conclusion of many years of preparation; it evokes and embodies the mythical forces that are central to the worldview of the politically and ethnically marginalized Miao.

Reading across artistic, political, and legal expressions of LGBT activism in and from Uganda reveals an aesthetics of silence. These moments of silence serve as a strategy of deferral that enables Ugandans on both sides of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill controversy to refuse humanitarian savior narratives, affirm the legitimacy of the postcolonial state, and point the way toward an East African grammar of justice.

The performances of Australian body artist Stelarc have been read as part of the shift in new media towards radical materiality that rejects the traditional self. Stelarc’s art, instead, belongs in a philosophical tradition that affirms the proprioceptive self, one that can only know itself through touch.

The rite of exorcism known as nuo lies at the very heart of the relationship between ritual and drama in Chinese theatre history. Nuo altar theatre exemplifies the relationship between ritual and drama as dynamic and interactive, with ritual engendering theatre and theatre enriching ritual.

The performance of physical transformation poses a methodological challenge for historians of 19th- and 20th-century physical culture: it is primarily the still image that evidences a dynamic, embodied practice. The archive of Stanley Rothwell (1904–1986) — British miner, artist’s model, bodybuilder, boxer, wrestler, writer, and physical educator — reveals the sculpted masculine “ideal” as a performance of becoming, in which the image is constantly trained, constructed, and rebuilt through repetition, allowing for the possibility of difference.

Post–2000, the space of what was formerly socialist Yugoslavia saw the rise of politicized performance practices that interrogate the nation and national identity. The performance works of Grupa Spomenik (The Monument Group), Slaven Tolj, and the three artists who changed their names to Janez Janša all ask what it means to be a citizen, specifically by engaging with commemoration as a paradigmatic act of citizenship.

Black Brazilian theatre constitutes a political and artistic response to the racial discrimination characteristic of Brazilian society. As early as 1944, young members of the recently created black political movement saw theatre as a potential weapon to transform Brazilian society and created the Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental Theatre). This activist theatre continues to this day to pave the way for other black theatre companies.

Fabio Mauri’s performance Intellettuale , set in the context of the opening of Leone Pancaldi’s new building for the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, summed up a life-long collaboration and controversy between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mauri about the fate of Western art after WWII. In the context of Pancaldi’s building, Intellettuale throws into relief the cultural and ideological project of Pasolini’s filmmaking and its relation to the body art of the 1960s–’70s.

Brussels-based theatre Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg (KVS) relocated part of its program to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to collaborate with Kin artists and partners. Experimenting with a participatory curatorial approach, the KVS gradually moved from a model that showcased local artists to an interactive encounter in which sharing and discussing cultural processes became as important as the performances.

Lady Precious Stream is the most globally successful Chinese play in history. A practice-as-research project investigated how Chinese drama aesthetics might have been used in the original production. This revealed that gaps in archival material open up a space where the subjective nature of interpretation can be interrogated.

Juxtaposed against the negative dialectics of digital culture and social media, Casey Jenkins’s performance practice demonstrates the artist’s agency to transmute the destructive potential of digital remediation and social media commentary into a productive and constructive internal and external artistic dialogue, moving beyond the traditional art historical discourse toward a creative practice that embraces the unwieldy culture of the internet.

Despite a recent boom in operetta research and productions in Germany, one stage work that was a sensation in 1932 has been overlooked: the improvisational Hier irrt Goethe (Here Goethe Errs) by the Munich-based student cabaret troupe Die vier Nachrichter. On the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s death, the group burlesqued the conventions of operetta and the authority of literary history. The show launched spectacular careers but also signaled the close of the Weimar Republic.

Funmilayo Ranco was a radical self-proclaimed feminist in 1960s Nigeria. As the only female actor-manager in the professional Yoruba traveling theatre, she upended the conventions of the popular form’s opening and closing glee entertainments to assert her complex gender expression.

Over the past decades it has become less acceptable simply to acquire new musical knowledge and to present it judiciously, wisely, and authoritatively. The presentation, usually in the form of academic writing, is often assessed as much for its subject positioning or authorial tone as it is for its relevance or accuracy of content. How might a system of valuation be established by which sound writing may be sanctioned to be really sound, effective, veridical, ethnographically sensitive?

The event of Shaam-e-Qalandar is a recent addition to Pakistan’s largest Sufi festival and represents an emerging performative religiosity characterized by a mixture of ecstatic devotion, conspicuous consumption, and aesthetic and stylistic inspirations from Lollywood films, wedding celebrations, and pop concerts. Sponsored mostly by small business owners, this new religiosity also reflects a shift in the distribution of power and authority in Pakistan’s religious communities.

Performance studies requires an engagement with Native studies scholarship and settler colonial critiques to be fully accountable to the global stakes of indigeneity and Indigenous performance. An exploration of the legacies of colonialism, scholarly misinterpretation, and the pressures of cultural authenticity reveals the division between performance studies and Native studies and the need for performance studies to engage Native studies scholarship and settler colonial critiques to enrich analyses of Native/Indigenous performance and the field in general.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2016 An Octoroon encouraged Boston theatregoers to hiss and cheer like the audiences for Boucicault’s 1859 The Octoroon , then encouraged them to bid for slaves and scream for a lynching. For some, participation may have encouraged a self-satisfied post-racial bliss; for others, it may have bolstered psychic investments in racism and misogyny. Many, however, were confused: What is an appropriate response to the melodramatic extremes of American race relations?

At playing theatre in the clinic, a stigmatized group of long-term psychiatric patients can strengthen their self-respect. The playing space becomes a space of possibilities. Gradually, playing together becomes more and more of an experiment for an imagined departure from the clinic.

Israeli art of the 1960s–’70s was a thriving scene of performative art practices, of which very little is known to the international community of performance researchers. Evolving gradually in response to new trends on the American and European art scenes, these performative manifestations reacted to and reflected the specific local circumstances that would eventually result in a major change in the country’s life, culture, and art.

The imbrication of issues of nation, class, gender, and religion necessitates a critical revision of the so-called secular postcolonial modernity embraced by Indian nationalists, including musicologists. The life and struggle of Roshan Ara Begum — Pakistan’s first and, to date, arguably greatest singer of classical music — is an instructive example of the complex intertwining of agency, resistance, and resignation in Muslim-identified Pakistan and Hindu-identified India.