This article explores the work of Israeli conceptual artist Dov Or Ner (1927–2024), whose radical artistic practice consistently challenged the divide between art, life and death. Informed by his experience as a teenage Holocaust survivor whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz, Or Ner’s seven-decade body of work proposed a vision of existence as totality, in which apparent endings become metamorphic phases within abiding continuity. Framing his conceptual practice was ‘The Museum of Museums’, a concept that dissolved boundaries between art and life and proposed a vision of spatial and temporal limitlessness. Acts such as burying artworks and personal objects projected cultural material and meaning into an open-ended future, anticipating what he called ‘future archaeology’. By allowing his work to undergo natural cycles of decay and transformation, Or Ner positioned destruction as a generative force within both ecological and artistic systems, challenging conventional preservation paradigms. The article argues that Or Ner’s view of the end of life is not rooted in religious, scientific or eschatological frameworks, but reflects an idea of existence as continuous metamorphosis. Drawing on Georges Bataille’s philosophy of existence as totality, continuity and immanence, it suggests that Or Ner’s work enacts a concept in which the boundaries between the organic and inorganic, past and future, life and death are transcended.

The intersection of performance art and end-of-life practices introduces a profound dimension to the notion of care during life’s most complex and meaningful moments. Through an exploration of the works and experiences of Victoria Spence, Australian performance artist and death doula, the paper performatively threads the convergence of artistic methodology with the intimate processes of death doula work and argues her practice as an artist is a road map for her role as a death doula. Part dialogue, part scholarly paper, part ritual, this article positions Spence as exemplifying the potential for art to imbue the death, and dying, with dignity and consequence.

What affective resources can performance offer for addressing a post-apocalyptic predicament, and how can it help explore modes of being and feeling beyond hope? This article engages with these questions by examining Simple Action, a participatory dance performance by Yasmeen Godder Dance Company (2016). Described by Godder as an ‘alternative contemporary ritual’, Simple Action is built around a single set of actions repeated throughout the work: the performers approach members of the audience seated around the dance floor, invite them to give their body weight to them, and support them in their slow and gentle fall to the ground. Inspired by Stabat Mater, the work foregrounds the performance of shared vulnerability and care as a timely alternative to uplifting ideals of agency. In my analysis, I juxtapose Godder’s work with the post-apocalyptic rituals developed by contemporary climate movements, showing how it resonates with a mood of helplessness and obstruction by pre-enacting collapse as a corporeal and interdependent experience. By bringing Simple Action into dialogue with feminist thinkers such as Adriana Cavarero, Bonnie Honig, and Lisa Baraitser, I argue that rather than steering us away from politics, the work’s focus on humility and relationality traces pathways for the reinventing the political on a minor scale and adapting it to catastrophic times.

The act of dying can be seen as somewhat ‘irreal’, as Maurice Blanchot wrote, especially so when it occurs in the context of a magic show. In different ways, the performance of magic plays with the levels of reality of theatre itself, whilst at times conjuring the possibility of an afterlife, and communing with the dead. The essay explores the question of theatre and dying by examining UK magician’s Tommy Cooper’s uncanny stage death on live television in 1984, and a seemingly death-defying stunt by Vegas magicians Penn & Teller, featuring a loaded nail gun. Tommy Cooper’s variety act is analysed for its incongruous echoes of a mystical ceremony, and the possibility of journeying to the other side of life: what is proposed is that, however secularized, theatricalized and aestheticized, stage magic retains a link to the mysteries plumbed by mystics and shamanic practitioners. Penn & Teller’s nail gun act is revealed by the magicians themselves to be a sham, producing a kind of ‘critical spectatorship’ (Karen Beckman); yet this familiar sceptical stance can also be read as a form of lucid dreaming: Penn & Teller’s stage antics ultimately dissolve the performance itself, as well as the audience’s attachment to anything deemed ‘real’, thereby aligning themselves with mystics and sages. Ultimately, the essay examines how the instability of the divide between life and death, theatre and ‘reality’, opens up a different way of understanding the art of magic. The magician’s performance is seen to be precariously positioned between two poles: on one hand, the openly acknowledged trickery and deception for entertainment purposes; on the other, the conjuring of other realities and cosmologies, returning us to the possibility of journeying between worlds, and powerfully reminding us of life itself as illusion.

This article examines the uncanny impact of artificial intelligence in theatre-making by way of China’s first AI–written play, AI: Offending the audience. Drawing on hauntology, spectrality and Mark Fisher’s account of the ‘eerie,’ the article reconsiders AI not as a neutral tool but as a ghostwriter dwelling in the liminal space between mimicry and autonomous creativity, calling entrenched concepts of intent and authenticity into question. It argues that collaboration with AI takes the form of a reciprocal ‘ghost dance’: humans feed the algorithm data and are, in turn, subjected to a process of spectralization, such that authorship becomes a haunted assemblage. With creative work ceded to machines, we risk becoming the ghostly residue of the very systems we have built – an unsettling prospect that requires a critical rethinking of our human identity at the moment when what we write begins to write back to us.

This article, situated within the emerging field of rehearsal studies in transnational contexts, explores how ghostliness and aurality operate as dramaturgical strategies in Immigrant Ghost Stories (2022) by Lima-born, Tokyo-based playwright and director Kamisato Yudai. The four-part play is inspired by ghost stories collected in Okinawa, Thailand, Laos and Bolivia. Drawing on my field notes as an embedded researcher in the virtual and in-situ rehearsals, Kamisato’s writings and my performance analysis, I characterize his work through the notion of dramaturgies of crossing borders involving both physical and aesthetic dimensions. At the centre of my reading is Azuma Hiroki’s ‘tourist principle’ (2017), in which the figure of the tourist and the notion of ‘postal multitude’, a term he coins by combining Hardt and Negri’s ‘multitude’ with Derrida’s ‘postal’, offer a way to rethink assemblies of otherness. Kamisato’s physical-virtual rehearsal model featuring one-to-one sessions across Tokyo, Naha and Brazil, with performers and staff absent or present only via screens, resembled what Azuma calls ghostly or tourist-like meetings: uncanny yet ordinary. Resisting fixity, texts and voices migrated (in)visibly across screens, rehearsal and theatre spaces, translations and languages. Kamisato’s dramaturgy relied on listening rather than seeing. The ghostly presence of the text emerged through sonic materiality of the rehearsal and theatre environments. The work thus transformed theatre into ‘a place of seeing through listening and doing’. In performance, spectators were unsettled by the uncanny sounds just as wars and migrations destabilise everyday lives. I argue that this work stages an assembly of migrant and touristic ghosts that mirrors histories of colonisation, war and military presence not just in Okinawa but the world at large. In doing so, Kamisato redefines listening as a dramaturgical strategy and a political act: a mode of granting agency to (in)visible tourists and migrants and imagining new solidarities across borders.

Through a discussion of the author's experience in designing and putting together a solo programme of medieval music based on the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence, this article sets out to explore how concepts and debates that first arose within the Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement can be expanded beyond matters of style and instrumentation, and into the realm of programming and compiling music to be presented to contemporary audiences. Namely, it builds upon John Butt's discussion of the modernist and post-modernist attributes of the HIP movement (2002) and considers how these can be reflected in programming. While Butt himself has leaned towards a more modernist understanding of programming in his recreation of specific musical events from the Baroque and Classical eras, the paucity of evidence regarding specific musical performances in the Middle Ages made this approach less practicable in the context at hand. I discuss how, instead, I choose a more post-modernist approach aimed, not at simply illustrating the Roman's plot (which would have been, again, impracticable, due to the absence of musical pieces that explicitly address the issue of gender-bending), but rather at exploring a range of binaries that emerge from the text (as demonstrated from scholarship in the last several decades), which exist alongside the gender binary and perhaps enhance of our understanding of it: narrative and non-narrative; musical and non-musical; instrumental and vocal; the court and its Others.