The Attica Prison Uprising has come to emblematize militant political organization inside prisons, influencing carceral rhetoric and policy throughout the contentious War on Crime. Despite its stigma as a short-lived rebellion that ended in a massacre, the Attica uprising is best understood as a site of prefigurative politics—political organization that aims to produce new social and political relations through their embodiment in the present. Political actors at Attica achieved remarkable success by experimenting with social roles beyond the purview of carceral surveillance and control.

The failed 2020 revolution in Belarus and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 served as catalysts for the creation of the Insulted. Belarus Worldwide Readings Project based on a play by Andrei Kureichik. The project provided the material for hundreds of performances in over 30 countries, while dozens of texts by members of Kyiv’s Theatre of Playwrights formed the core of the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings, a similar project that generated over 660 performances, refuting Russian president Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukrainian culture does not exist.

The work of artist/anthropologist Susan Marie Ossman and her 12-station exhibition in Montmartre in 2020 lends itself to a personal meditation on art and illness during a global pandemic. Walking the neighborhood where the installations were created and assembled, Ossman’s artwork becomes a means of transforming the experience of chemotherapy and suggests how the cancer treatments themselves refl ect on a larger society of illness. Most importantly, in her work Ossman examines the notion of a self-portrait: what it is and how we might understand the genre as well as the self differently.

Nina Simone’s songs are maps that critique racial-sexual violence in the US, while opening up space for “redress” by seizing back sonic excess. Simone’s critical geographic performance practice is part of the tradition of enslaved Africans’ songs as fugitive maps. Throughout her performances Simone insists that geographies of domination, and especially sexual violation, be read in relation to one another, encouraging a new method of spectatorship: “listening as incommensurable practice.”

The term “embodied knowledge” is often used as if its meaning is evident, and as if there is clarity about the relations it brings into view. The bodies in motion of the kumina festival Tambufest tell us about the forms of collective world-building that exist outside of but in relation to the juridical structures of sovereignty that govern modern Western political and social life.

For Chinese Generation Z fans, the reperformances of musical theatre have empowered them to realize self-transformation while performing in public—without the constraints of formal physical training or special creative ability. By reperforming musicals with the themes of idealism and revolution, these youth re-create song-and-dance gestures as a rite of passage in everyday life, striving for individual idealized identities while playing disciplined social roles under the control of official ideology.

The murder of Jîna Aminî by the Iranian police in September 2022 led to wide-scale demonstrations. Women in Iranian Kurdistan have developed tactics for creating art and literature that empowers them to fi ght for their rights as women and as Kurds. “Doing art” invites them to cross the border between fictional and real, private and public, and to create negotiations with the patriarchal society and legal system that oppresses them.

Joe Arroyo’s music, specifi cally his carnival compositions, generates modes of solidarity that transcend national and temporal boundaries. His “musical mechanism,” employing the clave rhythm and improvisational structures, facilitates a collective reinhabitation of the past, a redemptive challenging of colonial divisions between the living and the dead. Arroyo’s work, therefore, demonstrates the transformative power of music to forge solidarity across carnival participants.

Mekhrav Numag by the Israeli Ruth Kanner Theatre Group was created in response to the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. This documentary theatre piece compiles diverse verbal reactions to the horrendous event and the subsequent war in Gaza. The work’s postdramatic kaleidoscopic texture and dramaturgy of excess emphasize the complexity of experiences following the attack, resisting confinement to a single voice or a unified perspective.

In Jezebel (2019) and Darkmatter (2022), Dutch choreographer Cherish Menzo activates alternative temporal modes to perform the black body. Inspired by the chopped and screwed hip hop technique that manipulates tempo and pitch in existing songs, she disrupts conventional notions of time as a linear progression. Instead, she unfolds an “Epiphenomenal” temporal framework in which the present no longer appears as a continuation of the past or an anticipation of the future, but rather is a site of temporal experimentation that breaks with the past and cracks open the future.

The anarchic embrace of difference in the encounters of and variations on Western and non-Western spiritual practices in Martinique reveals ways of disrupting the univocal, linear, and centralizing violence of plantation society. Examining the various techniques of collective ecstasy through song, dance, and other sacramental signs of spirit possession calls attention to anticolonial models of social organization, and presencing.

The rise of theatre in Iran during the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) coincided with significant shifts in Iranian society, particularly in the areas of women’s rights, the push for gender equality, and the emergence of nationalism. Theatre served as a platform for, and actively contributed to, these transformative movements. The role of women’s issues in Iran was distinct from their representation in Western perspectives on so-called third world societies.

Two plays by Afro-Spanish playwright Silvia Albert Sopale—Blackface y otras vergüenzas and La Moreneta—illustrate José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification” by which marginalized artists hijack and reshape dominant cultural texts that exclude minority voices. Sopale’s work reframes archives and artifacts to confront historical racial violence and its contemporary legacies. Her strategic use of blackface alludes to alternative revaluations of Black identity, disidentifying blackface itself.

In 2019 British choreographer Seke Chimutengwende began research on a new project exploring horror, haunted houses, and the hauntings of colonial history. It begins in darkness (2022) emerged in collaboration with the dancers who perform each iteration. Working through the figure of the haunted stately home, It begins in darkness excavates—and exorcises—the horror of slavery’s histories through dance.

Unable to perform the perceived demands of his gender—unable to have sex—in 2014 the incel Elliot Rodger devised a performance of ruthless cruelty. His mass murder, a now habituated performance of US American masculinity, was preceded by an autobiographical text. Recounting his pursuit of a consummate manhood, Rodger’s manifesto reveals the consequential movement from narrative to performance, from genre to gender, from a discourse of discontent to a violent dramaturgy of masculinity.

Physical and cognitive disabilities are part of many people’s lives. They are the existential marks some performers carry and emphasize through their art in order to transcend them and embrace disability in a nonstigmatizing way. The performances of Felipe Monteiro, Nicola Fornoni, and Kamil Guenatri claim space for difference and diversity and reject assistentialist, protectionist, and pseudo-inclusive approaches that prescribe and perpetuate stigmas.

Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) is a play in the US-American bloodstream: it was quoted repeatedly by the architects of the American Revolution and was famously performed by Washington’s troops at Valley Forge in 1778. But what does this 300-year-old verse tragedy—with its entangled political, racial, and theatrical histories and implications—have to say to audiences in the present-day US South at the Clarence Brown Theatre, Tennessee, in 2023?

Putting the work of the poet Nathaniel Mackey into correspondence with that of the singer, composer, performance and video artist M. Lamar offers a unique perspective on the complex relationship between automation and possession. Mackey’s Andoumboulou and Mu move in and through M. Lamar so that possession and automation are destabilized and replaced by molecular distintegrations of plantation worlds and the sonic apertures of a Black Afrofuturist Android.