As the extractive economies of sharing and experience continue to encroach upon and profit from every available form of sociality, what are the prospects for the long-cherished modalities of performance, such as encounter, gathering, congregation and assembly? Post-pandemic, what kinds of affects and effects might be generated by coming together otherwise – or simply to become intimate in unfamiliar ways? Taking meeting as a blurry genre that encompasses a host of ways in which collectivity for humans and the more-than-human are negotiated, this issue brings together reflections on a set of singular places, events, spaces and actions that share a commitment to reparative and regenerative forms of contact. 

We live in a world of unpredictability, fracture and powerlessness. Acts of violence, invasion and oppression, both seen and unseen, pervade all aspects of life and threaten the viability of the planet. Yet, perhaps because of this powerlessness and fracture, this is also a time of solidarity, of acts of resistance both large and small, and of friendship, love and bravery. The contributions to ‘On Invasion’ negotiate in creative and provocative ways this confusing and confounding time and in doing so they ask us to consider the role, value and power of art to intervene, to destabilize, to disrupt and to question the status quo.

This issue of Performance Research examines the mundane as both an analytic of day-to-day performance and as an inspiration and foil for art and performances that have sought to disrupt, disturb and even destroy the mundane and the attendant monotony and conventions of daily life. The fact that, even among the extraordinary events of the past few years, we continue to embrace and even rely on the mundane as an often-invisible structure to our lives and performative practices is striking. This issue aims to take seriously the potential expansiveness of performance to examine that which is so commonplace as to be often overlooked. In this context the editors developed collaborative workshops to consider daily performances across the planet. These theorizations together map an array of performing mundanity. How does, say, crossing the street in Mumbai speak to the same mundane performance in Cairo, Ramallah, São Paulo, Vancouver? What mundane acts are performed each day by a billion people? How might we collectively theorize the shared performances of our often-mundane daily lives? The issue invites performance studies to push the logics of performance through the lens of mundanity.