Vol. 24 (2024): Culture Crossroads
This special issue is interested in the processes of creating performing arts settings, including spaces for dance, arts festivals, and theatre performances, during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors explore the continuities and changes in the configurations of performing arts settings and ask about their transformative potential. The cultural initiatives in focus are located at the fringes of geo-political complexities: They take place in Cyprus’s Buffer Zone, around a palace in post-Prussian North Poland, within Russia’s Irish dance community, in Latvia’s theatrical community. This issue further ethnographically records and interrogates challenges and odds in making performing art settings during and beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic. It finds that different experiences of “losing touch” and detachment become inseparably linked with practices of entanglement, shaping the possibility of “taking place” in performing arts settings. Methodologically, the authors in this issue bridge the commonly upheld gap between research and practice in the fields they discuss, transgressing the boundaries between ethnography, socio-cultural analysis, and engaged research.
