Performance is a Portal: The Political and Relational Potential of Live Performance Amidst Societal Collapse

This paper presents an analysis of live performance as composed of three structural elements: gathering people for a shared experience, the centrality of imagination, and the performance's creation in real time, which, when prioritized, enable a kind of art capable of facilitating relational and political change. Analyzing each of these three components through the lens of worsening material conditions and institutional fallout in the US, I propose that it is these innate qualities of performance which have and continue to enable its survival as an essential human art form and make it uniquely suitable to collectively addressing the needs of the present.