Editorial

Abstract

After a virally enforced stasis, history's momentum toward the migration and displacement of people, ideas, and cultural practices has once again quickened. Even as refugees and migrants are once more being driven across the globe by war, human rights abuses, socioeconomic issues, and climate changes, live arts audiences, too, flood back into theaters and outdoor/site specific performance events to witness the artistic and aesthetic developments resulting from the influx of the ideas and questions even the most destitute of these refuge-seekers weightlessly carry with them. This rich intermingling and fluctuating co-presence of culturally diverse artistic and aesthetic concepts and practices, however, all too often collides with identitarian notions of cultural heritage as a criterion that, not unlike the equally elusive idea of race, defines clear boundaries between—and articulates one's belonging to—social entities (communities, classes, regions, nations, or even continents).