Description
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.
READ THE EDITORIAL AND ABSTRACTS ONLINE
1 The Power of the Sad: Performance, bearing with and
compassion
AFTER PERFORMANCE
8 When Melancholia Turns Black
NANA ADUSEI-POKU AND ALHENA KATSOF
14 Emotional Weather Reports: Online performance as
affective practice in the MonoVlogs of Layeta Bucoy and
Olivia Kristine Nieto
OSCAR T. SERQUIÑA, JR
23 Still Resisting Left Melancholy? Chinese New Leftist
theatre’s inheritance and resistance in Che Guevara (Qie
Gewala) (2000–1)
CHAOMEI CHEN
34 ‘It’s Not Because It’s Not There, That It Isn’t There’:
Visibility and invisibility within Black flamenco performance
AMY SCHOFIELD
41 Performing Processions: Premonitions and palimpsests
LAURA BISSELL
50 Why Do I Keep Crying?
MATTHEW DE KERSAINT GIRAUDEAU
58 The Limits of Cis Compassion: The sad trans experience and
its others in contemporary Turkish theatre
A. BERKEM YANIKCAN
67 Transmuting Trauma and ‘Alchemiz[ing] Inherited Wounds’:
iele paloumpis’s disabled, diasporic choreographies of care
KIERA BONO
The Sad Choreography of Systemic Misconduct, from Cause
to Affect
MARTIN AUSTIN
82 Women’s Work: The ‘inescapable presence’ of intimate
partner violence
HEATHER SINCAVAGE
88 Through the Lens of Grief: Re-reading performance through
pregnancy loss
KATHERINE NOLAN
93 Vivacious and Sad Dances: Yala jama and yala paatey as pre and post-burial celebrations of the Ga people in Ghana
TERRY OFOSU
101 Lockdown Theatres of Sadness: Case studies of precarity in
artistic work
ILINCA TODORUT
110 Queer, Brown Dancing Bodies in a White Cube: Refusal and
mourning in Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance
BHUMI PATEL
118 The Revolutionary Mourner, and the Collective Body:
The performativity of grief in the Woman, Life, Freedom
movement
SABA ZAVAREI
122 In Remembrance [Artist Pages]
EMILY O’HARA
……………………………………………………………………………………
REVIEWS
126 Who Embodies Mourning?
HEUNJUNG LEE
127 Performance, Unknown Otherwise
CHRISTINE XIONG
……………………………………………………………………………………
129 Notes on Contributors
