The main question we raise with this book is how performance can be political in present day European representative democracy, a system which no longer draws on the live gathering of people.

The main question we raise with this book is how performance can be political in present day European representative democracy, a system which no longer draws on the live gathering of people. Several leading European (mostly female) thinkers analyse artistic practices that have emerged alongside new social movements – such as Solidarity in Greece or Municipalism in Spain – investigating how theatre, dance and performance respond to the new political insights and experiments. It is a context wherein the previously well-known tactics and tools, such as participation, identity politics or spontaneous usage of public space don’t suffice. Thus we must build and learn a new vocabulary of politicality of performance that includes opaque words such as ‘innervation’, ‘preenactment’, ‘prefiguration’ or ‘recreation’.

Part I : What is people’s gathering to democracy? – Isabell Lorey – The power of the presentist-performative: on current democracy movements – Bojana Cvejic – The procedural, the prescriptive and the prefigurative performance: some reflections on the question of time of political action- Bojana Kunst – Performance, institutions and gatherings: Between democratic and technocratic european cultural space Part II : The new politicality of performance: the time of gathering, (re)creative labour and the domestic– Stina Nyberg – A live gathering dictionary– Ana Vujanovic – Performances that matter: from pubLic sphere to creative Labour– Giulia Palladini – on coexisting, mending and imagining: notes on the domestics of performance– Livia Andrea Piazza – Performance and Liveness: A Politics of the meantime– VaLeria Graziano – Recreation at stake Part III : Radiation Patterns of Performance– FLorian MaLzacher – Theatre as assembly: Spheres of radical imagination and pragmatic utopias– Goran Sergej Pristaš – The view from matter– Silvia Bottiroli – An undecidable object heading elsewhere