Current open calls for submissions
Volume 32, Issue 5 - On the Moon
Deadline: 14 September 2026
Issue Editors: Vivian Appler, Maaike Bleeker and Felipe Cervera
This issue of Performance Research asks what can be learned from how theatre and performance makers have engaged with the Moon in plays, performances, dance, installations, video work and other creations. We wish to consider the Moon as a feature of performance works (past and present). How might performance research contribute to studies of activities, imaginations and ways of understanding the Moon across disciplines such as astronomy, astronautics or geology? With this issue, we aim to demonstrate performance studies’ capacity to consider aesthetic, technological, political and communicative actions as vital elements of interdisciplinarity in the space humanities.
Since the Apollo landings on the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, the study of the Moon and its significance has changed drastically, from being generally considered an object of cultural and intangible significance to one of material investigation. Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, a new space race has been underway, which is marked by the privatization of space technology and the opening of private capital to lunar exploration and the territorialization of extraterrestrial resources. Questions about the Moon’s topography, climatological relevance, and geological history have since underscored its re-emergence in popular culture and news media, now as an object to which humankind has access and can therefore exploit and study directly. Access remains a contested point, for while space-faring countries that have since performed soft and hard lunar landings (US, Russia, Israel, China, United Arab Emirates (UAE)) continue to advance the industrialization of Earth–Moon systems, the rest of the world now constitutes a political and economic periphery increasingly dependent on third-party extraterrestrial infrastructure for telecommunications, resource extraction and scientific research. Yet, the Moon is part of many cosmologies, knowledge systems and ways of imagining that are not colonial and whose histories do not necessarily precede but are materially and historically parallel to technological advancements post-Sputnik 1. Technologies and cosmologies alike perform and bring about ways of understanding the Moon.
As space exploration becomes a billion-dollar, global industry, performance studies may critically engage with the creative activities, community praxes, technological performances, political dialogues and corporate power plays that reframe the cultural significance of the Moon in the twenty-first century. An interdisciplinary field of space humanities (SH) is emerging, capable of critically engaging the humanities and arts in ways that go beyond nationalist histories rooted in twentieth-century narratives and Cold War politics. Evidence of the momentum behind SH is the publication of large, edited volumes, such as The Palgrave Handbook of Society, Culture and Outer Space (2016), The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space (2023), Space Feminisms: People, planets, power (2024) and Exploring Ethnography of Outer Space: Methods and perspectives (2025). Our own work has made inroads to bring these conversations into the contexts of theatre and performance studies, observing how astronomical technology and media can unsettle subject positions (Bleeker 2017a, 2017b, 2023), how performance may open opportunities for the revision of astronautical and astronomical histories (Appler 2016, 2019, 2023) and the need to expand the scope through which we consider artistic practices to be relevant for the space humanities (Cervera 2016, 2017, 2023).
This issue of Performance Research contributes to the growing field of SH from the perspective of performance studies. We propose that the Moon has shifted from poetic and scientific metaphor to a more constative position among Earth’s social structures. The Moon as a locus of human cultural production and history renders it an appropriate subject for contemporary cultural critique as well as for the fancies it inspired in the past. We seek contributions that consider how an arts-critical approach to human activity on and about the Moon might shape the future of interplanetary imagination and ethical exploration. We aim to bring together interdisciplinary practitioners and scholars to interrogate human space exploration from the explicit positions of feminist theory, post-nationalism, post-colonialism and anti-coloniality. We invite arts and humanities-centred praxes that expand the use and value of Earth’s Moon beyond techno-science, commercialization and empire-building and towards a pluriversal, anti-colonial and aesthetically diverse performativity of lunar knowledge.
Topics that contributors may find productive include:
•Representational, experiential or material engagements with the Moon
•Extraterrestrial biopolitics, lunar ecologies, terraforming and biodiversity on the Moon
•Lunar economies, New Space, histories of extraction and mineral prospects
•The Moon as a feature of political performance, international legislation and colonization
•Historiographical treatments of the Moon as a subject of choreography, drama and performance
•Performances of/and space travel to and from the Moon
•Ways and modes of knowing the Moon; lunar epistemologies
•The Moon as actant object in relation to other planetary bodies
Questions that contributors might consider also include:
•How have performances of the Moon featured arts and humanities praxes?
•What methodologies are ethical and appropriate to investigate multi-cultural performance histories of the Moon?
•How do twenty-first century media (Hansen 2015), such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual, augmented or experiential (XR) technologies, obscure, clarify or complicate perceptions and knowledges of the Moon?
•How do ground-up researchers continue to contribute to histories of the Moon and other celestial objects in the New Space era?
•Does democracy matter on the Moon? In what ways do nationalist performances surrounding projects such as the Artemis Missions and the International Lunar Research Station – in policy and practice – impact international relations on Earth?
•How might performance studies contribute to ongoing research into the peaceful, humanitarian and ethical study of the Moon and other planetary bodies in our solar system?
•How are processes of scientific research pertaining to the Moon communicated to non-expert audiences?
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References
Appler, Vivian (2016) ‘Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: Imagining a feminist performance of science in Laurie Anderson's The End of the Moon, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 28(2).
Appler, Vivian (2019) ‘Titan’s ‘Goodbye Kiss’: Legacy rockets and the conquest of space’, Global Performance Studies 2(2), DOI: 10.33303/gpsv2n2a5.
Appler, Vivian (2023) ‘SF for many modernities: Hybridity in the worlds of Margaret Cavendish and Donna Haraway’, in Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti (eds) Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance, Volume 1: From the lab to the streets, London: Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama, pp. 33–53.
Bleeker, Maaike. (2017a) ‘Knowing as distributed practice: Twenty-first century encounters with the universe’, in Studies in Material Thinking, vol. 16, www.materialthinking.org/papers/236, ISSN 1177-6234, February, n.p, accessed 14 July 2026.
Bleeker, Maaike (2017b) ‘Who knows? The universe as technospace’, Early Popular Visual Culture 15(2): 247–57, DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2017.1319083.
Bleeker, Maaike 2023), “The Labor of Knowing. On the Performance of Apparatuses” Reti, saperi, linguaggi (ISSN 2279-7777), 2/2023 a. 12 (24) pp. 253–72, DOI: 10.12832/109346.
Boucher, Marie-Pier, Webb, Claire, Bureaud, Anick and Romero, Nahum, eds (2024) Space Feminisms: People, planets, power, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Cervera, Felipe (2016) ‘Astroaesthetics: Performance and the rise of interplanetary culture’, Theatre Research International 41(3): 258–75, DOI: 10.1017/S0307883316000353.
Cervera, Felipe (2017) ‘Naming the Cosmos Death: On performance, astronomy and Katie Paterson’s The Dying Star Letters’, Performance Research 22(5): 28–34, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2017.1383747
Cervera, Felipe (2023) ‘Relacionalidad planetaria: el espacio exterior desde la teoría del performance’, Investigación Teatral Revista de Artes Escénicasy Performatividad, 14(24), DOI: 10.25009/it.v14i24.2748.
Gorbanenko, Jenia, Jeevendrampillai, David (Jeeva) and Kozel, Adryon, eds (2025) Exploring Ethnography of Outer Space: Methods and perspectives, 1st edn, London: Routledge.
Hansen, Mark (2015) Feed-forward: On the future of twenty-first-century media, 1st edn, Vol. 50702, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, DOI: 10.7208/9780226199863
Ormrod, James and Dickens, Peter (2016) The Palgrave Handbook of Society, Culture and Outer Space, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Salazar, Juan Francisco and Gorman, Alice, eds (2023) The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space, London: Routledge, DOI: 10.4324/9781003280507.
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Format
Please send abstracts as per the guidelines below for academic articles of approximately 5,000 words or for shorter articles and provocations, including artist pages, theoretical writing, poetic interventions, fictions and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies.
Proposals
Please submit an abstract (max one A4 page/500 words) and a short biography to info@performance-research.org
Issue Contacts
All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent directly to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.org
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the editors via: fcervera@tft.ucla.edu
Outline Schedule:
Proposals:Submission by: 14 September 2026.
Outcomes:October 2026. Following selection, authors will be asked to develop their full submission for editor review followed by blind-peer review.
First drafts: February 2027
Final drafts: September 2027
General Proposal Guidelines for Submissions:
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Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website – www.performance-research.org – and familiarize yourself with the journal.
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Proposals should be created in Word – this can be standard Microsoft Word .doc or .docx via alternative word processing packages. Proposals should not be sent as PDFs unless they contain complex designs as for artist pages.
-
The proposals should not exceed one A4 page, circa 500 words.
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A short 100-word author bio should be included at the end of the proposal text.
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Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that there is a maximum of five images. If practical, images should be included on additional pages within the Word document.
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Submissions should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere.
Full information is also available on the PR website: bit.ly/prcallsforsubmissions.
Volume 32, Issue 6 - On Invisibility
Deadline: 22 October 2026
Issue Editors: Anne-Lise Brevers, Jasper Delbecke, Kyoko Iwaki, Sarah Lucie and Jonas Schnor
This issue of Performance Research invites contributions that investigate how contemporary performance embraces invisibility. Amidst the current sociopolitical economy that prioritizes optics – where images proliferate faster than attention and visibility become a dominant currency – performance reminds us that not everything that matters can, or should, be seen. This issue turns towards performances that suspend the primacy of vision, moving beyond both the imperative of capitalist representation and limits of human eyesight to activate other perceptual registers: aural, haptic, olfactory, atmospheric, thermal, vibrational, as well as the durational and the temporal. Rather than understanding invisibility through absence, negation, suppression or disappearance, we approach it as a generative force that enables alternative ways of sensing, relating and imagining the world. Based on this thought, the issue editors embrace the invisible as a site of more-than-human performance, where toxins, neurons, heat waves, atmospheric pressures, microbes, radioactive particles, algorithms and cosmic forces continuously perform, relate and transform, regardless of whether they enter the field of human spectatorship.
The issue aligns with Hito Steyerl’s affirmation: ‘Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal’ (2017: 47). Despite the advancement of visual technologies and the explosion of data, we see less and less. In contrast, we increasingly encounter phenomena that evade direct perception although they profoundly shape the conditions of our lives: the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation that transcends human lifespans (Nixon 2011); algorithmic infrastructures that manoeuvre our lives (Chun 2016; Zuboff 2020); macro-performances of planets, waters and dark matter (Sofer 2013; Cervera 2017; Neimanis 2017); microbial ecologies of bacteria, viruses and protists (Radomska 2016); and other more-than-human agencies, from radioactive particles to atmospheric pollutants, that remain imperceptible yet undeniably present (Decamous 2018). Such phenomena remind us that the invisible is not synonymous with non-existent; it is, rather, part and parcel of entangled reality that performance, qua gesamtkunstwerk, is uniquely positioned to sense, attune to and dramaturgically activate.
Further, the issue calls for contributions that examine how performance embraces invisibility as an anti-capitalist strategy. In an output-driven culture, visibility increasingly functions as the primary condition of social value. Across social media platforms, workplace cultures, surveillance regimes and representational politics, subjects are compelled to render themselves continuously available to view. Against this visibility regime, we are interested in performances that cultivate strategic invisibility, collective anonymity and forms of digital or embodied unavailability as clandestine aesthetic and political resistance (Felton-Dansky and Gallagher-Ross 2024). We welcome contributions that explore practices resisting economies of spectacle, disrupting algorithmic attention or embracing imperceptibility as a mode of anti-capitalist world-making.
Theatre, as Maaike Bleeker argues, has long operated as a ‘vision machine’, producing culturally and historically specific modes of looking that shape what comes to count as ‘reality’ beyond the stage (2011: 151). Far from functioning merely as a mirror held up to the world, theatre actively manipulates our perception, cultivating particular modes of seeing. The visible, in this sense, is not simply a medium of representation but a dispositif through which social realities, cultural norms and epistemic assumptions are produced and naturalized. Likewise, since Hans-Thies Lehmann identified ‘visual dramaturgy’ (2006: 93) as the defining characteristic of post-dramatic theatre, optics have frequently functioned as one of the principal organizing logics of contemporary performance. Over the last two decades, as global cultures have become increasingly saturated by digitally mediated images, theatres too have often embraced spectacular or mundane visuality: photogenic aesthetics, livestreams, projections and quotable performances readily pre-packaged for circulation across digital platforms. Yet this proliferation of images has coincided with a growing uncertainty about the authority of the visual. As algorithmic curation, artificial intelligence, and ecological crises, in their varying ways, expose the instability and unreliability of what ‘appears’ before us, vision no longer retains its epistemological authority. We are entering a moment of societal shift in which seeing no longer guarantees knowing, and visibility no longer secures truths.
In addition to more theoretical performance interventions, this issue also welcomes close analyses of specific theatres and dramaturgical practices that engage invisibility in concrete terms. How do contemporary artists compose with what cannot be readily seen, measured or represented? What aesthetic, dramaturgical and sensory strategies emerge when performance no longer privileges vision as its primary mode of encounter? From post-dramatic days to more recent performance practices, artists have persistently interrogated the limits of visibility, experimenting with dramaturgies that resist positivist modes of knowing. In Stifters Dinge (2007), Heiner Goebbels experimented with the absence of human performers, allowing atmospheric and material elements such as wind, fog and water to emerge as star actors within a dramaturgy organized around an ‘aesthetics of absence’. Kris Verdonck similarly works with graphite, mist, dust and light as dramaturgical agents, while sound artists such as Ryoji Ikeda compose at the edges of the average range of human hearing. In 36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013–22), Sarah Cameron Sunde stands in a tidal body of water for a full tidal cycle, allowing the imperceptible force and temporality of the ocean to register ever so gradually as the rising water nearly engulfs her body. Elsewhere, ‘Microperformativity’ (Hauser and Strecker 2020) names artistic practices that destabilize human scales and stage processes beyond ordinary human perception, while ‘bioperformativity’ (Woynarski 2020) turns towards cellular realities, mobilizing performance as an ecodramaturgical mode of enquiry.
Lastly, as issue editors, we acknowledge the rich body of scholarship that has theorized invisibility in relation to marginalized identities, particularly through concepts such as opacity, fugitivity, ephemerality, disappearance, refusal and illegibility within Black, queer, feminist, Indigenous and decolonial performance traditions. These interventions have fundamentally reshaped how theatre and performance studies understands the laws of optics and the ethical stakes of remaining unseen. However, with this issue, we propose an expanded ecology of invisible agents that goes beyond representational and identity-based frameworks. Our aim is not to displace these scopes, nor to diminish the political urgency of making the historically marginalized visible. Rather, we seek to situate invisibility within a broadened field of more-than-human and non-visual agencies.
The Performance Research issue ‘On Invisibility’ welcomes single-authored essays, co-authored contributions, artistic interventions, short provocations, critical reports and other materials interrogating the topic of invisibility.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
•Sub-sensory and sub-visual performances
•Durational and scalar performances beyond human perception
•Invisible agents in theatres – air, light, smell and sound
•Non-visual dramaturgies such as aural and haptic
•Performances in darkness or blinding glare
•Poetics and politics of vibrations
•Performances of heat waves, polar vortex, and atmospheric pressures
•Performances of avian vision, amphibian visions and deep-sea vision
•Invisible processes in rehearsal rooms
•Performances created by and for blind audience and artists
•Dark matter and imperceptible planetary performances
•Invisible performances by radioactive nuclides, viruses and toxins
•Undetectable degenerative diseases
•Death becoming invisible through regulated vision
•Embracing invisibility against capitalist representation
•Strategic invisibility and collective anonymity
•Resisting beauty norms in hyper-visible culture
•Undetectable performances of operational images
•Artificial intelligence (AI) systems as epistemological invisibility
•Beyond-visible performances such as climate change
•The failed spectatorship of multi-scalar extinctions
•Invisible infrastructures manoeuvering human actions
•Invisible yet intensifying environmental grief
•Leaving zero trace of humans in eco-humility
Selected References:
Bleeker, Maiike (2011) ‘Limited visibility’, in Mieke Bal and Miguel Hernández-Navarro (eds) Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, resistance, and agency, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 143–59.
Cervera, Felipe (2017) ‘Naming the Cosmos death: On performance, astronomy and Katie Paterson’s The Dying Star Letters’, Performance Research 22(5): 28–34.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyon (2016) Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual new media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Decamous, Gabrielle (2018) Invisible Colors: The arts of the atomic age, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Felton-Dansky, Miriam and Gallagher-Ross, Jacob (2024) ‘Interface theatre: Watching ourselves disappear’, Modern Drama 67(1): 1–24.
Hauser, Jens and Strecker, Lucie (2020) ‘On microperformativity’, Performance Research 25(3): 1–7.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, London and New York, NY: Routledge.
Neimanis, Astrida (2019) Bodies of Water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology, London: Bloomsbury.
Nixon, Rob (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Radomska, Marietta (2016) Uncontainable Life: A biophilosophy of bioart, Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press.
Sofer, Andrew (2013) Dark Matter: Invisibility in drama, theatre, and performance, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Steyerl, Hito (2017) Duty Free Art: Art in the age of planetary civil war, London: Verso.
Woynarski, Lisa (2020) Ecodramaturgies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zuboff, Shoshana (2020) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The flight for a human future at the new frontier power, New York, NY: PublicAffairs.
Format:
Please send abstracts as per the guidelines below, including a 100-word author bio, for academic articles of approximately 5,000 words, or for shorter articles and provocations, including artist pages and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies.
Issue Contacts:
All proposals, submissions and general einquiries should be sent directly to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.org
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:
Anne-Lise Brevers (anne-lise.brevers@ap.be), Jasper Delbecke (jasper.delbecke@luca-arts.be), Kyoko Iwaki (kyoko.iwaki@uantwerpen.be), Sarah Lucie (slucie@wpi.edu), or Jonas Schnor (jonas.schnor@uantwerpen.be)
Schedule:
Proposal deadline: 22 October 2026
Proposal outcomes: November 2026
First drafts: March 2027
Final drafts: December 2027
Publication: summer 2028
General Guidelines for Submissions:
•Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website – www.performance-research.org – and familiarize yourself with the journal.
•Proposals should be created in Word – this can be standard Microsoft Word .doc or .docx via alternative word processing packages. Proposals should not be sent as PDFs unless they contain complex designs re artist pages.
The text for proposals should not exceed one page, circa 500 words.
•A short 100-word author bio should be included at the end of the proposal text.
•Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that there is a maximum of five images. If practical, images should be included on additional pages within the Word document.
•Proposals should be sent by email to info@performance-research.org.
•Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send.
•Please include the issue title and number in the subject line of your email.
•Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
•If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On final acceptance of a completed article, you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work to be published in Performance Research.
