The Drama Review (TDR)

In early 2024 we issued a call for contributions to a special issue of The Drama Review (TDR), edited by Dhanveer Singh Brar, Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider. We invited potential contributors to write articles responding to the project’s central historical proposition about the relations between performance, possession and automation.

This special issue is available to view here with contributions from Luis Rincón Alba, Emma Bennett, Michael Shane Boyle, Konstantina Georgelou, Vincent Møystad, Ronald Rose-Antoinette, Arabella Stanger, Deborah A. Thomas and Maurya Wickstrom.

This TDR Consortium issue presents research and thinking developed within and around a three-year research project, “performance, possession + automation.” Based in the UK, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and led by Dhanveer Singh Brar, Nicholas Ridout, and Orlagh Woods, the project has brought together academics and artists to investigate, through the practice and study of performance, the resistant power of “spirit” possession and the contemporary rise of automation—and the entanglement of both with histories of colonial slavery. In this special issue, Brar and Ridout are collaborating with Rebecca Schneider, who has been involved in the project from the beginning, to bring out a selection of writing that we hope will give TDR readers a sense of some of the ideas that have motivated us and kept us thinking together, and which we will be looking to carry forward in the coming years.

The issue is open access until 5th November 2025.