All the world’s a stage: performance and political economy in crisis times

Abstract We have recently experienced multiple and overlapping crises—of financial meltdown and of austerity, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements in opposition to rising racism and sexism, the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the growing climate crisis. We propose a reading of crisis and of political economy through the lens of the performance and politics framework. How are these crises manifested, experienced, and resisted in and through performance? What does the performance lens bring to structural analysis of crises? The performance lens brings an embodied and experiential focus to the reading of the crisis in the everyday that allows us to reflect on how meaning making takes place, different bodies experience crises and their effects differently, how different narratives are amplified over others, and to highlight how both survival and resistance work within dominant regimes of power.