In ‘On Exits and Endings’ contributors explore how rituals, performances and other creative acts negotiate, represent and frame exits and endings, especially when emotional attachment and responsibility are involved. They question what it might mean to exit – from a career, a life, a scene, a situation – to cut ties and move on. To walk away. As well as how exits are understood performatively, how they are analysed, responded to or interpreted. Additionally, they reflect on endings. What happens when something ceases to be, what remains and how might those left behind behave in the wake of this changed situation.

This issue contends that state violence is not an aberration or outlier but is intrinsic to the state's nature. Contributions use decolonial, feminist, queer and Marxist perspectives to examine the role of 'performance', broadly conceived, in relation to law enforcement, criminal justice, the military, surveillance, censorship, borders, racialisation, gender policing, and welfare. 'On State Violence' reconsiders the discipline's approach to state violence and asks how the field might act, critically and creatively, amid its enduring presence in an age of globally resurgent authoritarianism.

This issue of Performance Research examines coalitions – artistic, political, institutional – and the performances that make them possible. Originally proffered by radical feminists of colour as an alternative to white feminism’s sisterhood, 'coalition' represents a fraught, power-laden process assuming incommensurability. How do we account for differences in collaborative pursuits without deploying a totalizing 'we'? Contributions explore contemporary manifestations of coalitional dramaturgies across micro and macro cosmoses: from institution-building models to leaderless artistic practices, from collaborative methodologies to entangled notions of history, ethics, pedagogy, curation and coalescence.