Lunar Performance Studies is a collaborative long-haul research project at the intersection of theatre historiography and outer space anthropology. The project is co-led by Vivian Appler (University of Georgia), Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University), and Felipe Cervera (UCLA).
Seminar: Theater, Moon Studies and Interplanetary Entanglements at Utrecht University
Vivian Appler, Felipe Cervera, Marjolijn van Heemstra, Xiao-Shan Yap, and Maaike Bleeker
3 December 2025
Call for papers: On the Moon, special issue of Performance Research
Deadline: 14 September 2026
This issue of Performance Research contributes to the growing field of SH from a performance studies perspective. We propose that the Moon has shifted from poetic and scientific metaphor to a more constative position among Earth’s social structures. The Moon as a locus of human cultural production and history renders it an appropriate subject for contemporary cultural critique as well as for the fancies it inspired in the past. We seek contributions that consider how an arts-critical approach to human activity on and about the Moon might shape the future of interplanetary imagination and ethical exploration. We aim to bring together interdisciplinary practitioners and scholars to interrogate human space exploration from the explicit positions of feminist theory, post-nationalism, post-colonialism and anti-coloniality. We invite arts and humanities-centered praxes that expand the use and value of Earth’s Moon beyond techno-science, commercialization and empire-building and towards a pluriversal, anti-colonial and aesthetically diverse performativity of lunar knowledge.