On hybridity

Abstract

We write this editorial in summer 2020, at a time when most of us have had to adapt to a different way of seeing and doing things. By the time you read this issue of Performance Research on the theme of hybridity, the COVID-19 viral strain, which ‘jumped’ species, will have spread even further, merging and fusing tighter the boundaries of reality and its representation, in the process hybridizing the multiple facets that constitute it. Something similar can be said of the other major event in 2020 that had global repercussions: the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing worldwide protests of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which foreground histories of intermingling, oppression and privilege as much as the urgency of seeing and doing things differently. Although these events occurred after this issue’s Call for Proposals and the subsequent selection of contributions, the discourses of genus, mixture and transmission, as well as of diversity, equality and activism that come with the realities and imaginaries of COVID-19 and BLM resonate in more ways than one with the theme of this volume. [excerpt from text]