"On Perception," special issue of Performance Research

‘On Perception’ raises questions about the perceptual strategies and effects of performance and their implications. The authors are motivated by the potential of performance to affect artists’ and audiences’ perceptual range and to re-sensitize us to connections between environment, human (inter)action and creative thinking. Drawing on varied theories of perception and its embodiment, the included studies derive from the fields of virtual reality design, landscape design, audio walks, theatre, dance, music, performance art, and literature. Topics highlighted include the ethics of proprioceptive manipulation, auditory and embodied attunement, (dis)embodied perception, psychedelic perception, sensory resistance, perceptual deterritorialization, discursive perceptual framing and the perceptual generation of communal Indigenous or Black identities. These topics are examined as effects of performance praxis and spectatorship, dramaturgical strategies or performative theories. Together, they explore, move through and reach beyond bodily and discursive constraints of perception to produce relational connections and enable imagination.