This edition of Performance Research offers critical examinations of contemporary performances of protest across the globe. Protest can be understood as theatre, and more particularly as a form of public manifestation that draws upon a wide repertoire of representational devices. This edition asks how protest feels, and who is doing the feeling? It considers the performativity of protest. It pays particular regard to the extent to which protest achieves change and the ways in which historical protests help to inform judgements of the conduct, legitimacy and efficacy of current protest actions. What historical instances are invoked to draw comparisons to current forms of activism and resistance? How do contemporary protests draw on historical repertoires of protest that reflect or extend beyond their specific political contexts? Do protest strategies and tactics need to evolve as languages of protest become a default mode of mainstream political discourse?

This special issue critically examines the notion of solidarity from and within the field of performance. Solidarity as a concept is ethically vacuous and in need of a clear ethical and political agenda. This issue specifically addresses questions concerning the ways that solidarity is ‘performed’ and the kinds of contributions the field of performance can make in working towards social equality. Across the various contributions, the issue sketches out the ways that solidarity is practised in and through performance as a potential generative force for social change. In discussing situated practices within various socio-political contexts, it examines a variety of solidary formations and bindings, such as within racial and religious minority groups, as well as solidarity existing across difference. It offers discussions of the ways solidarity is performed in colonial contexts, in post-disaster relief work, as well as in local activist groups.

This issue of Performance Research seeks to expand on and advance ideas and practices of care. During the last decade, the arts have adopted care as a hands-on concept to rethink how work is created and how it relates to its audiences. Increasingly aware that care is a performative practice that also requires imagination (Hamington 2010), artists have investigated what an aesthetics of care could be, and have sought ways to take care of one another during the creative process. Similarly, arts organizations feel the need to take better care of the people and structures they consist of – an act that requires a change to these structures and institutions, which are often already in a state of crisis. How we might think of care now – as an idea, a practice, a politics and/or an actuality that answers to the fluidity of contemporary crises and situations?