Forthcoming issues
Volume 28 Issue 4
On the Mundane
Issue editors: Sozita Goudouna, Eleni Kolliopoulou, Eero Laine, Kristen Lewis and Rumen Rachev
Publication date: 29 March 2024
This issue of Performance Research examines the mundane as both an analytic of day-to-day performance and as an inspiration and foil for art and performances that have sought to disrupt, disturb and even destroy the mundane and the attendant monotony and conventions of daily life. The fact that, even among the extraordinary events of the past few years, we continue to embrace and even rely on the mundane as an often-invisible structure to our lives and performative practices is striking. This issue aims to take seriously the potential expansiveness of performance to examine that which is so commonplace as to be often overlooked. In this context the editors developed collaborative workshops to consider daily performances across the planet. These theorizations together map an array of performing mundanity. How does, say, crossing the street in Mumbai speak to the same mundane performance in Cairo, Ramallah, São Paulo, Vancouver? What mundane acts are performed each day by a billion people? How might we collectively theorize the shared performances of our often-mundane daily lives? The issue invites performance studies to push the logics of performance through the lens of mundanity.
Volume 28 Issue 5
On Sadness
Issue editors: After Performance (Felipe Cervera, Alvin Eng Hui Lim, Ella Parry-Davies, Matthew Yoxall)
Publication date: 20 April 2024
This issue is edited by After Performance, a research collective formed in 2015. We invited authors to (re)consider the relationships between sadness and performance, in particular through complicating performance studies’ established focus on efficacy, action and change. We asked instead, how might sadness re-articulate performance as ‘bearing with’ rather than ‘moving on’? Contributions in the issue take up the encounters between performance and sadness, mourning, melancholia, grief, grievance and critical negativity, in particular as they are formed through experiences of race, queerness, disability, decoloniality and the precarity of artistic labour. Together, they explore what sadness makes thinkable or possible when mobilised as a theory or practice of performance.
Volume 28 Issue 7
On Hunger
Issue editors: Laurie Beth Clark, Jazmin Llana and Michael Peterson
Publication date: 12 June 2024
How does performance studies understand hunger, as somatic experience, performative agency and socially produced cruelty? How can a performance approach help understand voluntary self-starvation and related phenomena? How can it critically engage with artistic representations of hunger? What creative interventions can be made in how hunger appears? Can it be engaged or deployed as well as represented? What can the arts contribute to hunger action?
Following the online Performance Studies international conference #27, ‘Hunger’, based in Manila, Philippines in July 2022, Performance Research and Global Performance Studies agreed to publish concurrent issues on the same theme. The two issues share introductory material and thematic organization; the main content is distinct yet conceptually connected. Both issues contain sections on Hunger Action, Self-Starvation, Representing Hunger, and Creative Interventions. Contents include material developed from conference presentations as well as substantial new work responding to the joint editors’ calls for submissions.