How does performance studies understand hunger, as somatic experience, performative agency and socially produced cruelty? How can a performance approach help understand voluntary self-starvation and related phenomena? How can it critically engage with artistic representations of hunger? What creative interventions can be made in how hunger appears? Can it be engaged or deployed as well as represented? What can the arts contribute to hunger action?

Following the online Performance Studies international conference #27, ‘Hunger’, based in Manila, Philippines in July 2022, Performance Research and Global Performance Studies agreed to publish concurrent issues on the same theme. The two issues share introductory material and thematic organization; the main content is distinct yet conceptually connected. Both issues contain sections on Hunger Action, Self-Starvation, Representing Hunger, and Creative Interventions. Contents include material developed from conference presentations as well as substantial new work responding to the joint editors’ calls for submissions.

This thematic issue interrogates how art and performance can (re-)activate ‘beginnings’ without defaulting to the erasure of history. Behind each fresh start or spark of discovery, there is a long tradition of effort, search, craft and knowledge production. Activist movements build on repertoires of undoing and exiting the dominant imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, sexist, body-typical and neurotypical ideologies and practices. What does it take to activate a new beginning from within the extant decolonial or queer potentialities? How may new bonds between human and more-than-human actors emerge? How can artists collaborate with institutions to act on collective life but circumvent the limitations of authoritative bureaucracy? How does performance activate the past and the future in the present? What methods, epistemologies and aesthetics would be fit for this task?

The concept of repertoire offers an ambiguous hinge between claims concerning the enduring and the ephemeral – identified with theatre as opposed to performance (rehearsal and repetition, distinct from the improvisational and the singular), and yet also conceived of (with Diana Taylor’s famous categories) in distinction from the archive (as performed rather than documented). From esoteric performer trainings to popular audience fandoms, repertoire manifests the diverse practices of cultural memory – not least, in their contestation (as with the idea of a canon). The articles gathered in the issue – some with a focus on specific acts, others ranging more broadly through theoretical issues – will reflect on performances (both experimental and traditional) from across the world. This diversity of approach, offering its own repertoire of possibilities, attests to the sense that the meaning of a term is, indeed, in its use(s) – including now, it is hoped, among readers of this volume.