Who are you with when you are alone? We tend to think of loneliness as a solitary affair, a solo pursuit or phenomenon. But is it? I wonder if, in fact, our loneliness is densely populated, peopled by those we love, loathe, and long for. This is to ask, then, whether loneliness is, paradoxically and necessarily, a social and relational occurrence? Loneliness is also often framed as something that is wrong with you, inside you, the individual. To be lonely is to be failing, to be flawed inside, to lack social capital, to be not getting the project of living ‘right’. Moreover, it is a shameful experience that requires more effective, individual self-management – join a club, volunteer in the community, get a dog. The imperative is clear: connect or else. This article seeks to move beyond pathological and individualistic understandings of loneliness. I argue that loneliness is connected to liberal ideas such as privacy and ethics and ideologies such as gender and work. Through an exploration of the live artist Kim Noble, who turns the private business of loneliness into social and affective performance landscapes, I argue that loneliness demands that we contemplate the politics of sociality. I ask not only what a feeling like loneliness is, but also how it has become pathologised and to what political ends. I propose that by engaging the unavoidably relational condition of loneliness one is able to recognise and critique regimes of liberal individuation in a period of compulsory hyperconnectivity.

This paper sets out to examine whether the racial technology of ‘blackface’ can be reappropriated subversively on the stage. The author argues that Reza Abdoh’ Tight Right White (1993) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), which centre their use of blackface, stage an attempt to undermine the logics of race. By situating blackface alongside whiteface and other forms of racial prosthetics, the performances approach a central problematic of representation – of the mechanisms of blackness, of slavery, and of the technologies of race. Key elements of the performances’ deployment of this visual racial technology include appropriating explicitly adapted material, using hesitancy and hyperactivity to trouble representation, and wielding surrealist shock to create a re-exposure to the concealed mechanisms of power and brutality. Both performances provide fertile ground in which to investigate what role past technologies have in their own critique and the critique of the systems of their production. Framed by Ayanna Thompson’s critical formulation that blackface embodies the claim of blackness as the property of White performance, this analysis seeks to grapple with how and if that ownership can be disrupted.

Since he emerged as an innovative director in the mid-1990s, Bulgarian director Javor Gardev has staged over 50 productions throughout Europe. His theatrical oeuvre unveils and explores the condition of precariousness, a condition of human vulnerability that Judith Butler discusses extensively in recent work. The bare human body, stripped of protective layers, haunts Gardev’s stage- as both predator and prey. This article examines Gardev’s preoccupation with existential vulnerabilities: isolation, a constant threat of violence, various types of imprisonment- and the way these vulnerabilities can be exacerbated socio-politically. In conversation with Gardev, the article explores Gardev’s approach to directing, and the ways that violence, and a generalized threat of violence, but also a longing for contact and connection and the potential for hope, permeate Gardev’s worlds.

This essay asks: What form of attention is sufficient or necessary for politico-aesthetic experimentation in and through live art? If live art threatens to destabilize the force, sense, and values naturalised by racial capital as human destiny, how have especially minoritized communities within live art questioned the production of value regimes and resisted the effects of social and administrative ‘hostility’ undermining the conditions of mental health for ‘surplus populations’? This paper argues that live art practice and organisation in the UK today is undergoing a volatile process of decolonising its forms and practices of attention. Linking the work of Black radical, decolonial and anti-extractivist scholarship to critical affect studies of attention eco-systems, I develop a decolonising genealogy of attention in live art. I consider action research conducted on the routines that constitute the lifeworlds of live art organisations and practitioners. Through decolonial, autonomist, transnational, queer, intersectional, affective, and feminist frames of interpretation in this domain, this essay will creatively encounter some key organisational routines of power, (emergent) leadership models, and structures of governance in UK live art practice. Focusing on narratives from participatory research with an Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) as our main examples, I will show how live art practices are emerging to negotiate the state’s top-down injunction for art organisations to develop diverse, extractive, impactful, entrepreneurial, and financialisable ‘community engagement’.

Live art plays an increasingly significant role in Scotland’s ongoing attempts to reckon with the legacies of its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Frequently developed in response to the country’s imperial architecture – paid for through the wealth derived from trade in goods from plantations in the Americas and West Indies – this work challenges the wilful amnesia of contemporary Scotland while also articulating a decolonial project that enables the emergence of alternative historiographies. In surveying recent works by Adura Onashile, Alberta Whittle, Ashanti Harris and Thulani Rachia, this document suggests how such practice might invite a broader assessment of Scottish performance as an expression of public memory.

In this article I explore two intersections with live art as a conceptual and cultural strategy in relation to migrant cultures in and from ‘Eastern’ Europe, with a focus on Romania. Whilst live art is a debated term whose parameters have changed over time, its scope continues to remain strategic, framing a multiplicity of practices with differing and uneasy relationships to categorisation, institutionality and legibility. I am not interested in arguing for an expansion of live art as an art historical frame, but in developing a methodology for the analysis of work whose poetics sits uneasily across borders, in circulation. Through an engagement with ‘vibe’ I build on resonances of live art as they entangle with art histories of performance in Eastern Europe. I locate a radical possibility offered by ‘vibes’ as refusal and circulation of political agency. Taking up the provocation from that disaffection can act as a refusal to feel in the face of white sentimentality, I explore how an anonymous Instagram account called ‘Latifundiar’, which superimposes urban scenes, usually from Romanian towns and cities, against Western canonical art historical landscapes, manifests ‘live art vibes’ – seeking to capture the entanglement between complicity, affective regimes and political accountability in neo-colonial regimes in East and West Europe.

Two key trends stand out within recent scholarship on spectatorship in immersive performance. The first is methodologically driven and falls into the theatre and performance studies sub-field of audience studies and considers individual audience experiences of performance. The second is theoretically driven and uses Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator as an interpretative lens through which to consider audience experience in general, specifically in terms of agency. Here, I argue that the time has come to introduce additional rubrics for the analysis of spectatorship in immersive theatre, to further discussion and to add a new dimension to our understanding of the phenomenon. To do so, I attempt to unify the methodologically driven with the theoretically driven and propose a new rubric for the analysis of spectatorial experience of immersive performance based upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the Apolline and the Dionysiac as articulated in The Birth of Tragedy. I take Punchdrunk’s 2013–14 production The Drowned Man as a paradigmatic example and analyse the co-presence of the Apolline and Dionysiac drives at the point of reception. I utilise a mixed-method approach to surveying the audience experience of three key components of performance, namely scenographic engagement, large-scale, crowd-drawing choreographic sequences, and one-on-one experiences, and suggest that audience records of satisfying moments of performance reflect a balancing of the Apolline and the Dionysiac, whereas frustrating experiences reflect an imbalance. Overall, I argue that by continuing the tradition of developing Nietzsche’s binary to understand contemporary practice we gain an additional tool that holds productive possibilities for unpicking how and why moments of immersive performance might be particularly alluring or, conversely, frustrating for difference audiences.

Simon Stone’s adaptation of Yerma, after Lorca, which premiered at the Young Vic in London 2017, reconsiders Yerma as an anonymous twenty-first-century woman known only as HER. Using Lorca’s play, Stone’s production usefully comments on gender and consumption with the understanding that identities are expected before they are formed. HER seemingly finds professional success and a fulfilling romantic relationship, yet gradually dissents and deviates from expectations because of her unique obsession with maternity. Stone’s adaptation additionally recognizes and deliberately magnifies both modernist and realist aesthetics using a late-twentieth-century genre known as ‘hyperrealism’. I argue that this production’s aesthetics thereby extend what Stone has already popularized as a genre of contemporary hyperrealism to posit a state of hyperreal and, more importantly, hypervisible femininity.