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: 

  • 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 as for artist pages. 

  • The proposals should not exceed one A4 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.

  • Submissions should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere. 

 

Full information is also available on the PR website: bit.ly/prcallsforsubmissions.