Abstract
This chapter sets out to map key current understandings of crisis. As feminist sociologist Sylvia Walby notes, crisis continues to "cascade" through society with evolving and undetermined consequences that are unevenly distributed (2015: 14).
Crisis, Will Daddario and Theron Schmidt suggest, produces its own "echo chamber" (2018: 1) that can demobilise ways of reaching beyond the systems it presupposes. Conversely, crisis is widely understood as a catalyst of transformation be it positive or negative. Our overarching concern here is what is the relationship between theatre and crisis? What is gained by considering crisis performatively? What is the potential of critical creativity? And what forms might it take? How does theatrical performance intervene in crisis discourse? With these co-ordinates in mind, this chapter has a two-fold agenda: the first is contextual, theoretical, and interrogative; the second maps the organisational structure, the range of contributions and proposes modes of synthesising their concerns.