This issue proposes a focus on land/scapes as urgent and productive for discussing, analysing and making performance today. Land/scapes are considered as an active element and as a focal point for understanding emergent practices at the intersection of politics, ecology and performance. To think with/On Land/scapes is to challenge the hierarchies of a linear understanding and the validity of an external point of view. Being in and on land/scapes involves both challenging entrenched modes of domination and instituting modes of doing and thinking that recognize dependencies. By emphasizing dense interconnections, entanglements and interdependencies in land/scapes, this issue explores ways of knowing and studying in and with the body and in relation to shaping and being shaped by the land/scapes we inhabit. 

In recent years, the popular connotation of the word 'decolonization' has slipped from a term denoting radical socio-political movements against diverse forms of systemic oppression to a buzzword for institutional development denoting empty discourse across the political spectrum. Not despite but because of the widespread belief that decolonization, as a scholarly framework, has reached its twilight phase, performance emerges as a critical lens to examine the paradox of decolonization as both empty gesture and transformative act. Through scholarship, artistic practice, and provocation, the issue explores how decolonization is reimagined across sites of knowledge, activism and representation, asking what it means to perform decolonization today.

Mobilized by discussions in which scoring performance was shown to both hold content and give structure, serve as both a conceptual logic for framing performance material and a potential algorithm for decoding and understanding the world around us, we drew on our collective creative, critical lens and arrived at this curated triple issue. The articles included here illustrate ways in which we might consider scoring as both an act and a methodology, a generative process and an iterative process, a way of making and a way of recording. These critical parameters offer a certain sense of liminality that is captured in the different voices present from different perspectives on, around and from within the creative process. Artist pages speak about the act of making work with scores as both a set of rules or evidence and an attempt to break them, and in some cases show scores that can be used by others as a form of prompt. In these cases, one artist’s archive becomes another’s stimulus. The bones of one project’s score become the broth of the next. This issue attempts to capture how artist-researchers are using scores today in making and reading performance and suggests that the skin between performance and live art, the postdramatic and the somatic, music and theatre, may become more porous when scores are involved.