Performing the Contemporary Condition
Savas Patsalidis*
At a historical moment marked by war, displacement, fragility of democracy, ecological anxiety, and the increasingly pervasive penetration of technology into every aspect of lived experience, theatre finds itself confronted with a paradoxical condition. On the one hand, performance remains among the last cultural forms grounded in co-presence, embodiment, and collective temporality; on the other, it is increasingly compelled to negotiate the accelerated rhythms, fractured attention spans, algorithmic structures, and mediated realities that define contemporary life. As Hans-Thies Lehmann argues in Postdramatic Theatre, contemporary performance increasingly emerges within “a mediatized civilization” in which theatre can no longer remain untouched by the logics of technological circulation, fragmentation, and simultaneity. Likewise, Paul Virilio reminds us in the “Dromology section” of his Speed and Politics, that acceleration is never merely technical but profoundly political, encapsulated in his claim that “the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck” (10-8).
Theatre today does not simply represent crisis from a reflective distance. Rather, it is itself situated within the crises of our time, affected by them materially, institutionally, technologically, economically and aesthetically. The essays gathered in this 33rd issue of Critical Stages/ Scènes critiques collectively explore this unstable terrain, examining how performance practices across diverse geographical, cultural, and methodological contexts respond to the pressures of acceleration, technological transformation, political fragmentation, and shifting modes of spectatorship. In doing so, they resonate with Erika Fischer-Lichte’s understanding of performance as an “autopoietic feedback loop” (38-43) in which spectators and performers continuously co-produce meaning under unstable and contingent conditions.
The 9 articles that make up the Special Topic section, all dedicated to the theme of Acceleration and edited by Manuel García Martínez and Annita Costa Malufe, approach this concept not merely as a question of speed, but as a wider condition shaping artistic production, embodiment, collaboration, perception, and social experience. Across these essays, acceleration emerges simultaneously as aesthetic strategy, institutional pressure, technological consequence, and existential condition. The contributions move across multiple performance ecologies, from Applied Theatre practices in Uganda and Assamese theatre traditions to Brazilian urban interventions, Portuguese cultural policy, Greek radio drama during the pandemic, Zoom theatre in China, posthuman dramaturgies in the United Kingdom, and digitally mediated scenographic collaboration.
What connects these seemingly disparate studies is a sustained interrogation of temporality itself: how theatre absorbs, resists, reproduces, or critically reframes the intensified rhythms of contemporary life. Here, the issue enters into dialogue with Hartmut Rosa’s influential account of social acceleration, in which modernity becomes defined by “the increase of episodes of action or experience per unit of time ” (Social Acceleration 1-3, 6-8). Yet many of these essays also suggest the possibility of what Rosa calls “resonance,” fleeting moments of human connection that resist the alienating pressures of acceleration (Resonance 60-5).
Several essays foreground the tension between acceleration and exhaustion, suggesting that contemporary performance increasingly oscillates between hyperactivity and collapse. Others explore how digital mediation restructures theatrical temporality, compressing rehearsal processes, fragmenting narrative forms, or transforming spectatorship through online and hybrid modes of engagement.
Particularly striking throughout the section is the extent to which acceleration is no longer treated simply as an external social phenomenon to be represented on stage; rather, it becomes embedded within dramaturgical structures, performative rhythms, modes of collaboration, and sensory experience itself. Theatre here becomes both symptom and critique of a hypermediated world. One is reminded of Jean Baudrillard’s observation that contemporary culture increasingly operates through simulation and hyperreality, where representation no longer reflects reality but produces it (1-7).
Yet beneath these analyses of speed, simultaneity, and technological intensification lies another recurring concern, the attempt to preserve forms of human relationality under increasingly accelerated conditions. Whether through collective creation, participatory dramaturgies, testimonial practices, intercultural encounter, or embodied collaboration, many of the contributions implicitly ask what kinds of social, ethical, and affective relations theatre can still sustain in a world increasingly governed by fragmentation, precarity, and digital abstraction. In this sense, the issue repeatedly returns to theatre’s enduring capacity to create spaces of encounter, even when those encounters are unstable, mediated, temporary, or contested. Such concerns echo Judith Butler’s insistence that precariousness can also become the basis for new forms of collective assembly and political visibility (11-8), as well as Jill Dolan’s conception of performance as offering “utopian performatives,” ephemeral moments in which audiences experience the possibility of a more just and connected social world (5-7, 18-20).
The eight works of the Essay section I (edited by Yana Meerzon) expand these concerns through a rich constellation of studies engaging testimony, mythmaking, exile, videogame dramaturgies, folk performance traditions, intercultural adaptation, mixed-media devising practices, and postcolonial performance strategies.
Although methodologically diverse, these essays share a common interest in theatre’s ability to negotiate the relationship between memory and futurity, locality and transnational circulation, intimacy and political discourse. Testimony emerges as a particularly significant mode of contemporary performance practice, not simply as personal revelation, but as a form of civic speech operating against cultures of polarization, disinformation, and ideological simplification.
Similarly, several essays investigate how traditional and vernacular forms are neither preserved as static cultural artefacts nor dissolved within globalized aesthetics, but continuously reconfigured through processes of adaptation, translation, and recanonization. This ongoing negotiation recalls Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of cultural hybridity and the “third space” in which identities and meanings remain perpetually in formation (37-9, 53-6).
The theme of technology again occupies a central position throughout the issue, particularly in the second group of four essays (edited by Nelson Barre and Stephanie Sandberg) and in the Conference section (edited by Hana Strejčková) devoted to technological transformations in performance. Here, the discussions move beyond simplistic celebrations or rejections of digital innovation. Instead, the contributors critically examine how emerging technologies—including AI systems, immersive environments, interactive installations, digital archiving practices, and algorithmic structures—reconfigure embodiment, agency, spectatorship, and liveness. Particularly important is the way many of these studies resist deterministic narratives about technology.
Rather than presenting technological mediation as replacing the human, they reveal increasingly complex entanglements between corporeality, automation, perception, and performative presence. The resulting image of contemporary theatre is neither nostalgically anti-technological nor naively technophilic; it is one of negotiation, instability, experimentation, and continuous redefinition. Such arguments resonate strongly with N. Katherine Hayles’s assertion that “humans become posthuman” not through disappearance, but through evolving relationships with informational systems and technological environments (1-5).
The Inter/National Reflections section (edited by Savas Patsalidis) further reinforces the longstanding commitment of Critical Stages to intercultural dialogue and global exchange. The essays gathered here move across Lithuania, Turkey, Mongolia, China, Hungary, Romania, Italy and beyond, tracing how contemporary theatre practices negotiate questions of identity, alterity, translation, embodiment, national memory, and cultural transmission. Particularly notable is the way these reflections complicate binary distinctions between local and global, traditional and contemporary, national and transnational. Across these contributions, theatre emerges as a site of epistemic and aesthetic negotiation in which cultural forms travel, transform, and become newly legible through processes of estrangement, adaptation, and encounter. In many ways, these essays reaffirm Rustom Bharucha’s longstanding argument that intercultural performance must be understood, not as the seamless fusion of cultures, but as a field marked by asymmetries of power, translation, and historical tension.
Collectively, the 62 contributions in this 33rd issue reaffirm the importance of maintaining spaces for plural, transnational, and interdisciplinary theatre scholarship at a time when public discourse itself is increasingly polarized and fragmented. They also reinforce the editorial commitment of Critical Stages/ Scènes critiques to fostering dialogue across geographical regions, methodological traditions, and artistic practices, bringing into conversation perspectives from both the Global South and Global North, from established scholarly frameworks and practice-based research, and from academic as well as artistic communities. Such plurality is not merely representative; it is foundational to understanding contemporary performance cultures whose conditions are increasingly interconnected, even as they remain unevenly experienced. As bell hooks observed, marginality can function not only as deprivation but also as “a site of resistance,” opening alternative modes of cultural and political imagination (151-53).
Equally essential to the identity of Critical Stages/ Scènes critiques are the journal’s interviews, festival reports, performance reviews, and book reviews, which continue to sustain the publication’s hybrid and multilayered character. These sections do not function as supplementary material to the scholarly essays; rather, they extend and complicate the conversations initiated by them. They document theatrical practice as it unfolds in real time, preserve critical dialogue across artistic communities, and maintain a necessary proximity between scholarship, criticism, and performance culture.
In a historical moment when both academia and journalism often experience pressures toward specialization and fragmentation, the coexistence of scholarly analysis, critical reflection, artistic testimony, and cultural reportage remains central to the journal’s mission. Such a commitment recalls Raymond Williams’s influential understanding of culture as “a whole way of life” (41-2) inseparable from the lived practices, institutions, and social relations through which meaning is collectively produced.
If one overarching question traverses this issue, it may be this: how can theatre continue to function as a meaningful space of human encounter under conditions of accelerated historical change? The answers offered here are necessarily partial, provisional, and at times contradictory. Yet together, these works suggest that theatre’s relevance today lies precisely in its ability to inhabit contradiction, between speed and slowness, embodiment and mediation, intimate interaction and political exchange, local specificity and global circulation, memory and futurity. At a time when social and political realities increasingly appear unstable, theatre remains uniquely capable of exposing instability itself, not as paralysis, but as a condition for critical thought, collective reflection, and imaginative possibility.
My warmest thanks go, first and foremost, to the guest editors of the issue’s special topic, Manuel García Martínez and Anita Costa Malufe, who worked tirelessly for many months to bring together this rich body of material, which clearly constitutes a significant contribution to international theatre scholarship. I am equally grateful to the authors who responded to their call and generously shared their research, ideas and insights.
My thanks also go to the two guest editors of the second essay section, Nelson Barre and Stephanie Sandberg, who generously shared their reflections on Dramaturgies of Interstitiality.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all contributors to the present volume who entrusted Critical Stages/Scènes critiques with their work and intellectual engagement. This issue, like every issue of the journal, is the result of an extraordinary collective effort sustained by generosity, dialogue, and shared commitment to international theatre scholarship and criticism. None of this would have been possible without the tireless dedication of my close collaborators—Yana Meerzon, Hana Strejčková, Matti Linnavuori, and Katayoun Salmasi—who devote countless unpaid hours to maintaining the journal’s scholarly rigor, editorial integrity, and international scope.
I am equally indebted to those who ensure that the language of the journal remains not only syntactically precise but also stylistically nuanced and accessible: Ian Herbert, Linda Manney, and Michel Vais. Their meticulous editorial care contributes immeasurably to the clarity, consistency, and readability of every issue.
We are currently preparing the Winter 2026 issue (#34), dedicated to the timely and widely debated topic Performing the Politics of Peace: Locational Dramaturgies and the Public Space, guest edited by Maria Konomi and Avra Sidiropoulou. This forthcoming issue seeks to explore the richness, complexity, and diversity of contemporary international performance practices that engage with public space as a site of political imagination, civic encounter, and performative negotiation around the urgent question of peace in an increasingly fractured world.
Finally, if you have any questions regarding the journal or its editorial processes, please do not hesitate to contact me at spats@enl.auth.gr.
In closing, I would like to wish our readers in the Northern Hemisphere a restful and restorative summer, and those in the Southern Hemisphere a mild, peaceful, and pleasant winter.
Photo: Simulating the Future: Cyborg Woman, from PxHere (CC0). Photo by Richard Reid, Public Domain. Reproduced from Richard Jordan’s article, “ ‘Bridget is there’: Accelerating the Cybernetic Subject in Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman’s More Life,” published in this issue.
Bibliography
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, U of Michigan P, 1994.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. Wesleyan UP, 2000.
Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, Pluto Press, 1979.
Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard UP, 2015.
Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. U of Michigan P, 2005.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain, Routledge, 2008.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. U of Chicago P, 1999.
hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. South End Press, 1990.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby, Routledge, 2006.
Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Translated by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, Columbia UP, 2013.
———. Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Translated by James C. Wagner, Polity Press, 2019.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke UP, 2003.
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Translated by Mark Polizzotti, Semiotext(e), 2006.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780–1950. Columbia UP, 1983.
*Savas Patsalidis is Professor Emeritus in Theatre Studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he taught at the School of English for nearly thirty-five years. He has also taught at the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece, the Hellenic Open University, and the graduate programme of the Theatre Department of Aristotle University. He is the author of fourteen books on theatre and performance criticism/theory and co-editor of thirteen more. His two-volume study Theatre, Society, Nation (2010) received the First Prize for Best Theatre Study of the Year. His recent books include Theatre & Theory II: About Topoi, Utopias and Heterotopias (2019) and Comedy’s Encomium: The Seriousness of Laughter (2022), both published by University Studio Press. He has also written extensively as a theatre critic. He serves on the Executive Committee of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics, is a member of the curatorial team of the Forest International Festival and is Editor-in-Chief of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics.
