Contemporary Theatre Review currently has two calls open for Special Issues.

All queries and abstracts should be sent directly to the guest editors. Please find further information for both special issues at the bottom of this page.

Florentina Holzinger & Co: Performing Pleasure, Risk and Rapture

Guest Editors:

Dr Charlotte Farrell, University of New South Wales, Sydney: [email protected]

Dr Anna Laura Wieczorek, Mozarteum University, Salzburg: [email protected]

Over the past decade, Austrian performance maker Florentina Holzinger (b. 1986) has risen rapidly to international prominence, garnering critical acclaim for her astonishing, genre-defying work. Born in Vienna and trained at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam, Holzinger has developed one of the most internationally visible and influential bodies of interdisciplinary choreographic work of her generation. Yet no single category or artistic genre can contain her practice. Her work spans formal interrogations of and experiments with ballet, opera, circus, the musical, and site-responsive installation. After early duos with Vincent Riebeek and the prize-winning graduation solo Silk (2011), Holzinger developed Recovery (2014), Apollon (2017) and TANZ (2019), followed by A Divine Comedy (2021), Ophelia’s Got Talent (2022), Sancta (2024) and A Year Without Summer (2025). Alongside these stage productions, since 2020 she has developed different versions of Études – an ongoing series of site-specific performances in public space – which has informed her representation of the Austrian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale with SEAWORLD VENICE, and her creation of Pfingstspiel for the Wiener Festwochen, both in 2026. Her work has toured major European festival and opera-house circuits, as well further afield, most recently in Australia.

Her work has not been without its controversies. In October 2024, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reviewed Holzinger’s Sancta at the Staatsoper Stuttgart with the headline ‘In der Oper gewesen, gekotzt’ (‘Went to the opera, threw up’). Within days, news that some audience members had required first-aid was recycled across the international press as a story about an opera of live sex, lesbian nuns and blood. The Staatsoper increased security; Holzinger received threats; her trigger warnings circulated as screen-shots, legible as either prudent audience care or as further evidence of artistic provocation. The slogan itself – ‘Went to the opera, threw up’ – meanwhile, was promptly reclaimed as merchandise: it is now printed on a t-shirt worn by fans, and on occasion by Holzinger herself. Predictably, the news media reception of SEAWORLD VENICE – a performance-based installation conceived as a half-flooded pavilion theme park meets sewage plant meets sacred site – has been dominated by attention-grabbing headlines such ‘What does a woman swimming in urine tell us about the state of the world? Lots!’ (The Guardian) and ‘These Toilets in Venice Have the Art World Aflush’ (The New York Times).

Controversies aside, the international resonance of her work signals a surging zeitgeist that traverses national and cultural borders, a phenomenon this Special Issue seeks to probe with a level of scholarly and critical depth too often short-circuited by media headlines. The Sancta scandal is a useful pivot for thinking about Holzinger’s work in this way, precisely because it is also a distortion. The press coverage rehearses a familiar grammar of the singular provocateur, and obscures almost everything that makes Holzinger’s practice distinctive: the collectively built rehearsal processes; the cross-disciplinary expertise of stunt performers, opera singers, riggers, BDSM practitioners, magicians, freedivers and body modification artists; the infrastructures of consent, training and care that make extreme stage actions possible without endangering performers; as well as the intergenerational, female and gender-diverse, mixed ability ensemble she works with, including long-term collaborations with figures such as the late octogenarian ballerina Beatrice ‘Trixie’ Cordua (1943-2025).

While there is a rich seam of theatre and performance studies that focuses on ‘Director’s Theatre’, there has also been a shift away from the singular figure of the directorial auteur to an emphasis on theatre directing as collaboration. Holzinger is a particularly telling case for this conversation. Her name dominates the marketing, festival programs and press scandals, and yet the work itself is built by a long-term and evolving ensemble whose specialist skills are inseparable from what audiences see on stage. To write about Holzinger ‘& Co.’, then, is not just to add a list of collaborators to her name; it is to read the work itself through the distributed labour and the specialist knowledges that produce it, as well as the institutions and funding flows that support it.

With the aim to bring voices from performance studies, dance studies, opera studies, queer feminist theory and theatre criticism into dialogue, this Special Issue seeks to focus on the collective dimension of Holzinger’s performances, reading her practice in relation to the divergent cultural contexts that contribute to the reception – and at times, censorship – of her work.

From this starting point, a different set of questions becomes thinkable: How are the boundaries between dance, theatre, opera, performance art, circus, magic, sex work, and stunt being renegotiated by artists working at this scale? What does ‘risk’ mean when the actions on stage are real, but where elaborate infrastructures of training, consent and aftercare are designed precisely to protect performer health? How do trigger warnings, content advisories and audience-care protocols sit alongside the spectacular economies of provocation and the press cycle that has become attached to Holzinger’s work? What queer feminist, anti-religious and decolonial genealogies and politics does the work activate, and how do they sit with the reception of nudity and bodily display in different national publics? This Special Issue seeks responses to these questions, treating Holzinger & Co. as both a singular case and a paradigmatic one. We are particularly interested in reflections on the Australasian reception of her work as well as Europe and North America.

Contributions to the Special Issue might address, among other topics:

• The collective making of the work: the assemblage of specialist knowledges that produces the work, and how the rehearsal room and on-stage presences make this collective process visible.
• Risk, consent and care: how live piercing, suspension, freediving, sex acts, and other extreme practices are made possible by infrastructures of training, medical, pastoral and intimacy direction support vs. audience care, trigger warnings, and the politics of provocation;
• Reworking the dance-historical canon: Holzinger’s work expands, questions and deconstructs received repertoires by moving across – and dissolving the boundaries between – various genres. Topics here include queer feminist adaptation of the Romantic repertoire, intergenerational casting, the figure of the monstrous and grotesque body, and the politics and inversion of bodily ‘virtuosity’.
• Spectacle, institution and market: Holzinger & Co. between biennale, festival, opera house and attention economy; press scandals, moral panic and the cycles of mediatised reception across national publics.
• Genealogies of performance art and historical avant-gardes in the digital age: Holzinger’s relation to body art and the legacy of Wiener Aktionismus – what a Viennese choreographer takes and refuses from these inheritances; how the ubiquity of digital porn, AI companions and the mediatised gaze impact audiences encounters with explicit bodily performance and nudity in Holzinger’s works, and how this may compare with the earlier reception of feminist performance lineages.
• Post-cyberfeminist readings of the technobody: the body-machine assemblages that Holzinger’s productions stage – motorcycles, jet skis, rigging, live cameras, robotics – and the strategies of hacking, glitching and reclaiming that (re)organise both gender and technology in her performances.

For Interventions we seek contributions to the special issue’s focus through the form of performance reviews, as well as practice-led responses to the themes of Holzinger’s work that may include sound, video, performance scores, poetry, photographic essays, and other creative modes of expression.

The timeline for submissions is as follows:

Proposals due:                                     August 14 2026
Authors notified:                                 September 2026
Articles due for peer review:              March 2027
Revisions post-peer review:               December 2027
Publication:                                         Mid-late 2028

Please submit 300-word proposals in English by Friday 14 August 2026 to the guest editors  [email protected] and [email protected]. If successful, full articles of 6000-8000 words as well as pieces for Interventions will be due in March 2027.

Post-Imperial Theatre in the Age of Populism: Temporality, Affect, and Governmental Aesthetics

Guest Editors:

Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, University of Milan: [email protected]

Christina Banalopoulou, University of Milan: [email protected]

As populist regimes and movements proliferate globally, many draw on imperial pasts – reviving symbols, restaging histories, and reorganizing collective memory through theatrical means. Understanding what is at stake in these performances requires moving beyond the assumption that empire belongs to the past and that populism represents a new political formation. In the age of populism, theatre operates as a political technology that organizes time, mobilizes affect, and aestheticizes governance. (Post)imperial imaginations and infrastructures enable theatre not merely to reflect populist power but to participate in the consolidation of political narratives and visions of the future. These processes are also central to the forms of public polarization through which populism operates. Examples such as Hindu nationalist historical dramas celebrating warrior-kings on contemporary Indian stages or neo-Ottomanism circulating across performance genres in Turkey – including public theatre productions as well as promotional videos by trans sex workers – reveal the diverse yet connected ways imperial afterlives unfold under populism.

This special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, rather than treating empire as a settled historical past and populism as a contemporary style layered onto it, explores these dynamics by approaching populism as a post-imperial technology of rule. Populist governmentality intervenes in the imperial afterlives of nation-states, transforming nostalgia, resentment, and suspended futurity into affective and aesthetic resources, while post-imperial fantasies and infrastructures shape political subjectivities and struggles over legitimacy. Just as populist regimes and movements use theatre to consolidate authority amid sovereign instability, so do oppositional and dissident actors draw on theatrical means to contest, reimagine, or reclaim political narratives. Yet these counter-performances are rarely straightforward acts of resistance; they often generate ambivalence and complicity as much as emancipatory promise.

While providing critical insights into performance and politics, the literature on theatre and performance under populism is largely shaped by broader trends in the field. The continuing power of methodological nationalism has limited connective and comparative approaches, which are vital given how populist regimes and movements do not simply share characteristics; they build formal and informal alliances as they actively learn from one another. Existing approaches often miss how theatre and performance operate through complex negotiations with power, more often creating ambivalence, complicity, and failure than clean resolution – a complexity this special issue takes as its starting point. The urgency of our contemporary moment has occluded the thematic as well as infrastructural connections between empire and populism. At a critical time when populist regimes and movements continue to consolidate power globally, our special issue addresses the pressing gaps in the literature by facilitating dialogue among a globally diverse group of scholars. We will employ empirically grounded and theoretically informed frameworks to explore the post-imperial substrate on which populist performance and performativity so often rests.

We foreground temporality, affect, and governmental aesthetics to move beyond both reductive accounts of propaganda and romantic narratives of resistance that dominate the literature. We aim to examine ambivalence, complicity, and failure as constitutive features of post-imperial theatre under populism. The issue understands “post-imperial” capaciously, encompassing post-colonial, post-Soviet, and post-hegemonic formations, and is interested in how these varied afterlives of empire interact with and enable populist governance in structurally distinct ways. We welcome close analysis of specific contemporary productions and dramatic texts as sites of inquiry, particularly as they engage with broader theoretical, methodological, and historiographical questions.

The issue will bring together articles of 6,000–8,000 words, alongside contributions to CTR’s Documents and Interventions sections.

We invite contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following thematic areas:

• Temporality
  How post-imperial pasts are activated, contested, and made to bear on the present and future under populism – including archival reactivations; transformed repertoires; the politics of (post-)memory; promised as well as foreclosed futures; contested worldmaking; duration; and interventions in the present.
• Affect and Embodiment
  How theatre mobilizes feeling and stages bodies as sites of political claim-making under populist conditions – including affective economies; senses of belonging; negotiations of abjection; stagings of the national body as well as its gendered, racialized, queer, and broader minoritarian Others.
• Governmental Aesthetics
  How theatrical form and infrastructure participate in the exercise, legitimation, and contestation of post-imperial power – including dramaturgies of geopolitical power; entanglements of political economy, institutional infrastructure, and aesthetic strategies; translation, transliteration, and the politics of language; commemorative and ceremonial productions; festivals, diasporic performances, and soft power; techniques for staging legitimacy, authority, and moral hierarchy.
• Value
  How value is produced, assigned, refused, and redistributed in post-imperial theatrical ecologies under populism – including discredited, banned, and recycled repertoires; emerging genres; distribution of resources; reconfigurations of theatrical labour; digitization and artificial intelligence; the politics of failure; and performances that repurpose, awkwardly inhabit, or endure populist imperial scripts without fully resisting or affirming them.

The special issue welcomes contributions engaging a wide range of post-imperial contexts – post-Ottoman and post-Habsburg states in Central and Southeastern Europe, postcolonial contexts such as India and the Philippines, post-Soviet formations, as well as states navigating post-hegemonic transitions, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, and populist movements globally. We thus aim to offer a critical rethinking of how post-imperial power is performed and rendered sensible under contemporary populism. Practice-based research and artist-led inquiry are particularly welcome across these thematic areas, as are comparative and connective perspectives.

The timeline for submissions is as follows:

Proposals due: 15 July 2026

Notification of acceptance: August 2026

First draft due: February 2027

Final drafts due: August 2027

Publication: February 2028

To express interest in contributing to this special issue, please email an abstract of no more than 300 words to both editors by 15 July 2026. Please indicate the type of submission in your email subject line (e.g., “Research Article – Post-Imperial Theatre in the Age of Populism”). We welcome proposals for research articles (6,000–8,000 words including notes), for the Documents section (production notes, designs, manifestos, and interviews with theatre-makers), or for Interventions (multimedia and experimental formats published on the journal’s online platform).

To submit an abstract or if you would like further information, please contact the special issue editors:

Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, University of Milan: [email protected]

Christina Banalopoulou, University of Milan: [email protected]