Performing Ends is a four-year international research project funded by FWO. By analysing the work of various contemporary performance makers in The Americas, Europe, and Southeast Asia, the project investigates how after the post-dramatic and posthumanist waves, we can now speak of a ‘posthumous’ tendency in the performing arts as a response to unfolding ecological, political, and technological ends. The project takes its cue from recent theatre and performance scholarship, which has placed ‘end’ as a key theme in contemporary theatre responding to multiple crises. It seeks to push the artistic and theoretical posthumanist perspectives that might still harbour “remnants of humanism” towards the “posthumous” in which human beings are decentred. The posthumous implies a perspective on our time as one “after extinction”, in the literal sense of extinction of humans and more than human beings, but also of cultural and symbolic orders.

Principal Investigators: Felipe Cervera, Kyoko Iwaki, and Eero Laine

Post-Doctoral Researcher: Jonas Schnor

Doctoral Researchers: Luca Domenico Artuso and Theresa Spielmann