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Art—or at least the kind we most like to write about—is almost always political, whether it is inter/national or personal; and though TDR has already taken this up in its “War and Other Bad Shit” issue, the topic remains center stage. In his review of Dutch theatre troupe Dood Paard's medEia, Jacob Gallagher-Ross notes the emergence of “a new age of the chorus” in which spectatorship becomes inseparable from paralyzed witnessing and Medea's tragedy is reconceived as a metaphor for the West's tragic relations with the East. Laurietz Seda explores Guillermo Gómez-Peña's recent performance/installation Mapa/Corpo 2: Interactive Rituals for the New Millennium, a fluid piece that, like much of the artist's recent work, addresses the xenophobia and “war on difference” that underlies the US's ongoing War on Terror. The Burmese stand-up trio the Moustache Brothers is the subject of Xan Colman and Tamara Searle's personal account of how performance can be both art and resistance in a contradictory and charged political regime.

Making noisy art for noisy times, New York ensemble Big Art Group's hyper-mediated aesthetic stages the sensory surfeit of modern life. Employing batteries of screens, prismatic live-feed video, and roaring digital soundscapes, the company's experiments with attention and perception create a new model for political theatre grounded in the contested dynamics of spectatorship.

Jacob Gallagher-Ross introduces the text of Big Art Group's SOS, a piece recently staged at the Kitchen in New York City. He analyzes and situates the company's mediatized aesthetic within the context of contemporary consumer culture and the economic implosion of 2008.

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