In an age of durational and perpetual crises, where corpses – human and more-than-human – pile around us, the boundaries are thin between ghosts and those they might be haunting. This issue of Performance Research revisits ghosts from the perspective of capitalist ruins, corpses of extinct animals and poisoned habitats, phantom narratives, digital selves and expiring planets. Rather than focusing on Derridean hauntology and the historical discourses of vanishing, we revisit ghosts and ghosting from the expanded scope of more-than-human performance and amid the troubled age of the Anthropocene to consider who or what is haunting, especially by going beyond the ghosts of ‘grievable’ humans.

In ‘On Exits and Endings’ contributors explore how rituals, performances and other creative acts negotiate, represent and frame exits and endings, especially when emotional attachment and responsibility are involved. They question what it might mean to exit – from a career, a life, a scene, a situation – to cut ties and move on. To walk away. As well as how exits are understood performatively, how they are analysed, responded to or interpreted. Additionally, they reflect on endings. What happens when something ceases to be, what remains and how might those left behind behave in the wake of this changed situation.

This issue of Performance Research examines coalitions – artistic, political, institutional – and the performances that make them possible. Originally proffered by radical feminists of colour as an alternative to white feminism’s sisterhood, 'coalition' represents a fraught, power-laden process assuming incommensurability. How do we account for differences in collaborative pursuits without deploying a totalizing 'we'? Contributions explore contemporary manifestations of coalitional dramaturgies across micro and macro cosmoses: from institution-building models to leaderless artistic practices, from collaborative methodologies to entangled notions of history, ethics, pedagogy, curation and coalescence.