This issue of Performing Ethos ( PEET ) brings together artists and scholars who ask how performance can respond – ethically, materially and with care – to the emergencies of the present, across scenarios marked by pandemic, ecological collapse, war, forced displacement and systemic violence. Performance strikes through not as a symbolic representation or commentary, but rather as a situated practice of ethical exposure that intervenes within infrastructures of denial, erasure and habituation. Studies consider normalcies performed to conceal ecological and epidemiological risks, and the uneven distribution of food and food waste as an embodied critique of extractive consumption. Practice-led reflections dissect the complexities of staging trauma and the untold rooted in geopolitical histories, the implications of witnessing durational suffering and the philosophical stakes of understanding voice and singing as existential practices. Interviews and a video work extend these questions about issues of militarization and occupation. Performance and theatre arise as civic technologies for remembrance, testimony and collective resistance – their ethical force lying in how bodies gather, expose themselves to risk and respond to one another under conditions of crisis. Indeed, to perform is an unresolved endeavour of responsibility, of staying with difficulty to resist normalization, nurturing forms of care that remain politically accountable to the urgencies of the contemporary.
Pagnes et al. (Wed,) studied this question.