Can one bring an 80-year-old film to life? Can one resurrect a dead culture? Der Dybbuk 1937–2017 , a live performance based on the 1937 Yiddish film Der dibuk raises these questions, juxtaposing past and present through live Yiddish dubbing, live music, and contemporary editing.

Holot Legislative Theatre (HLT) is a mixed group of African asylum seekers and Israeli allies. Through continuously evolving, modular, interactive performances, the ensemble presents social dilemmas created by Israeli state policy towards refugees and asylum seekers. Based on testimonies and personal stories, HLT offers a rereading of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.

#ChangeTheClap, a 2017 social media campaign aimed at combatting stigma towards Pakistan’s marginalized transgender communities, draws upon the distinctive hijra clap, even as it erases the embodied clapping hijra. The changing hands of the clap across almost a decade of activism gestures to the neoliberal limits of the trans rights movement in Pakistan and attempts to contain hijra identity.

The Explode! queer dance festival was a continuation of the ongoing multimedia project that is Queer Dance , comprising a 2012 conference, the 2015 Confetti Sunrise dance series in Ann Arbor, MI, and the 2017 volume Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings with its associated video archive. The festival of 12 performances by 9 artists or groups revealed queer dance as embodied action, at once opaque, evocative, and deeply imbricated in the social.

In Famous Deaths , spectators experience the final moments of a celebrity’s life (John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Whitney Houston, Lady Diana, and Muammar Gaddafi) through only sound and scents — from inside a morgue drawer. The site-specific piece is an example of what I call aromatheatre, which is apprehended through the olfactory system.

A renowned gender theorist and a female drag performer move language and gestures as they trade stories and share bodywork. A gender-ambiguous performer and a trans and queer scholar volley moments of physical intensity and textual analysis in a lecture-demonstration format. These were just some of the ways that the fall 2017 Bridge Project’s Radical Movements festival challenged performance models for dialogic exchange and what constitutes a radical body in motion.

Carole McCurdy’s ((waver)) illuminates the cross-cultural histories of the butoh and tango dance forms that inspire it and approximates the sometimes harmonious, sometimes contradistinctive structuring rhythms of the two dance forms. In staging the impossible yet omnipresent desire to unite self and other, McCurdy and her cast perform the limitations of intimacy.

How does hospitality look and feel at a performed hanging? On a nightly basis, Japanese performance artist Hangman Takuzō would hang himself in his Tokyo garden. For a small fee, audience members witnessed the hangings, but were also welcomed as guests, invited to share refreshments, eroding the border between morbid performance ritual and everyday gestures of fellowship.

Soomi Kim performed as Asian political radical Kathy Change in the Staging Asian America performance/lecture series at Harvard University in spring 2017. Kim’s performance provokes timely political questions about stereotypes of gendered Asian docility and suggests that the ephemerality of Asian and feminine dissidence is all but erased in official institutional spaces. Performance, then, is the medium through which Asian feminine presence persists and survives.

Yehuda Duenyas’s virtual reality performance piece CVRTAIN , which premiered at Performance Space 122’s Coil festival in January 2017, challenges the distinctions between the live and the mediated. Ultimately, CVRTAIN helps to cultivate something more important and relevant to our digital age — an ethics of care.

Starting from the ineffable brutality of the Syrian Civil War, and the larger world of war and empire, dancer/performers and cocreators Keith Hennessy and Jassem Hindi draw on Arab Futurism, queer politics and aesthetics, and Donna Haraway’s conception of Science Fiction, embracing and queering the SF imagination to create “speculative friend/ships.”

The Locus project commissioned 10 Bay Area artists from multiple disciplines to learn Trisha Brown’s Locus and respond by creating their own pieces. It was the first time that the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) had allowed one of Brown’s dances to be transmitted beyond the company for the explicit purpose of inspiring new works.

Hands Up: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments is a performance inspired by the events of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Composed of seven monologues by Black playwrights, Hands Up explores the experiences of being Black in America in a context of racialized violence and institutionalized racism.

The 10th International Street Theatre Festival in Mariwan, Iran, featured performances by both local and international companies, along with workshops on Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.

Alison Jackson’s pre-election photographs of Donald Trump’s “private moments” utilize a look-alike to envision Trump in a number of compromising positions. In ways that exceed the artist’s intention, the photographs’ play of the recognition of misrecognition fosters “ugly feelings” of ressentiment that might enable resistance not only to Trump but also to reactionary Republicans and neoliberal Democrats.

Part of FinnFest 2015, Pia Lindman’s A Kalevala Duo, Playing Bones rubbed the history of Kalevala bone-setting against the grain by putting this otherwise private healing practice on a public stage at Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, New York.

Sam Gold’s production of Othello explores the interrelated themes of war and the cultural construction of identity by foregrounding the play’s encounters between Christianity and Islam. Instead of focusing solely on Othello’s race, Gold’s political and ethical reevaluation of Shakespeare’s Othello examines the many facets of blackness, from a color assigned to people to the epistemological state of being in the dark.

What happens when the fabled Théâtre du Soleil takes on Islamic terrorism and its own creative doldrums? Improvisation, the horrors of daily news reports, a residency in India, and the specters of the world’s theatrical traditions come together in a raucous kaleidoscope that fills the titular “room in India” with an overflow of anxiety and fellowship.

Skam , a Norwegian television series, uses social media accounts that purport to represent the world of the characters to integrate the drama of the series with the lived reality of the audience. This makes for a unique aesthetic experience that enquires into the role that social media plays in the lives of young people in the Western world, and how the dominance of this mode of interaction forces a reevaluation of our understanding of reality and fiction.

Christopher Chen’s Caught in the Play Company’s 2016 production at La MaMa provokes its spectators by denying them easy access to “truth,” either in the theatre or in the social life that theatre represents. By investigating the situation of dissident artists in today’s China, Caught engages questions about truth in and beyond art. In Caught very little turns out to be what it seems.