Short Abstract

This panel explores how artistic and performative practices—dance, theatre, disability arts, and ethnographic performance—negotiate polarization and cultivate entangled modes of being, creating, and imagining futures across diverse regions.

Long Abstract

In a world increasingly shaped by polarization—political, cultural, and economic—artistic practices offer critical vantage points for rethinking relations beyond imposed binaries. While authoritarian regimes and corporate actors often thrive on oppositional logics, the performing arts foreground collaboration, embodiment, and shared vulnerability.

This panel invites anthropological explorations of performance—ranging from dance and theatre to disability arts and ethnographic performance—as practices that both reveal and resist polarized conditions. We are particularly interested in contexts of conflict and crisis, where temporalities and spaces of creation are disrupted: wartime and post-war rhythms, fragile cultural infrastructures, and artistic spaces marked simultaneously by exclusion and aspiration.

Contributors are invited to consider: How do performance practices challenge polarizing logics while cultivating entangled modes of being and imagining? How do artists negotiate pressures of political alignment while generating spaces of experimentation, solidarity, and hope? What methodological tools—collaborative, embodied, performative—can ethnographers develop to attend to performance in contested times and places?

By bringing together perspectives from disability performance, dance anthropology, and ethnographic theatre across diverse regions—including the Global East and beyond—this panel examines performance as both a site of contestation and an experimental ground.

This Panel has 9 pending paper proposals.
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