Digitally inflected avant-gardisms: reconfiguring performance and subversion in contemporary political theatre

This article examines how contemporary digital performance reactivates and transforms avant-garde techniques to produce politically subversive modes of spectatorship. Through four case studies — Riccardo Reina's Alle Armi (Italy), Rafik Jebali's Le Fou (Tunisia), Einat Weizman's How to Make a Revolution (Palestine), and Nisha Abdulla's How Long is February? (India) — the article analyses how estrangement, montage, mediated embodiment and formal fragmentation are recalibrated through digital media to interrogate militarism, state violence, juridical repression and communal conflict. Drawing on scholarship by Dixon, Bay-Cheng, Causey and Giannachi, it argues that digital performance extends the avant-garde's anti-illusionist project by exposing representational apparatuses and reorganising spectatorship as an act of critical witnessing. Rather than treating these works as instances of technological innovation, the article situates them as culturally specific adaptations of avant-garde strategies that acquire new political resonance in Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and South Asian contexts. It proposes that digitally inflected avant-gardisms constitute a significant mode of contemporary subversive performance, where political force emerges not only from thematic content but from the formal and perceptual disruptions generated through digital mediation.