Designed to preserve and promote western heritage and culture, the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede has become entwined with, and politically and economically expedient for, Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Performances at the Stampede relieve guilt about the expropriation of Indigenous territory and conquest of the natural world, and produce an affective climate of “crude optimism,” an optimistic attachment to fossil fuel production and consumption despite the brutal realities of extractivism.

A statue of 19th-century British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes sat at the heart of the University of Cape Town’s colonial façade until 9 April 2015, when it was removed after just one month of student protests known as the Rhodes Must Fall movement. The material alterations made to the body of the statue by protesting students unsettled the dominant epistemology of the university and public discourse by exceeding the bounds and logics of representational politics.

In 2005, Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo carved the letters P-E-R-R-A (bitch) into her thigh, the same word carved onto the many victims of her country’s feminicide crisis. PERRA urgently asks spectators to defect in the wake of grotesque violence, to refuse easy understanding and instead occupy a position of shared vulnerability. A practice of defecting privileges an ethics of responsibility despite and because of the impossibility for accurate representation.

Ann Carlson’s Picture Jasper Ridge was a performance hike in nature: spectators walked through tableaux vivants based on archival photographs. Carlson’s investigation of the apparatuses of archive, performance, natural preserve, and photography fostered meditative thinking about the phenomenology of performance that unfolded through the experience of performing still.

The empty chairs found in photographs taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are unfillable voids. This major natural disaster transforms the everyday object of the chair, magnified by the medium of photography, into an extraordinary place full of potentiality for the performance of memory, for haunting, and for ghosts.

The arrest of the activist performance collective the VolxTheaterKarawane concretely reveals the discourse of criminalization state authorities used to brutally suppress dissent at the 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy. It is one example of the increasingly common strategy of political elites who promote the perception of political protest as a criminal act, a misapprehension that has profound consequences for the future of democracy and dissent in late capitalism.

Putting black characters in their plays settled some formal debates for the Popular Front's new theatre, but it created entirely new questions about how the movement would involve actual African Americans. Fanny McConnell and Chicago's Negro People's Theatre (1938–1940) offered some answers.

The goal of military training is to match practice to combat. US Army documents on “Warrior Training” point out the increasingly simulacra-like quality of their staged drills. The intention is to make the training so real, so much a total “theatre immersion,” that when soldiers are in real battle they act as if they are still rehearsing, still playing.