“Theater, Moon Studies, and Interplanetary Entanglements” – Vivian Appler, Felipe Cervera, Marjolijn van Heemstra, Xiao-Shan Yap, and Maaike Bleeker

August Strindberg, 1893-94. Celestograph XIII. Part of: National Library of Sweden, Collection of Manuscripts, Strindbergsrummet. Via: The Public Domain Review. Source: arkinkopia.

This session of the TiM seminar brings together four scholars and one artist/writer for a collaborative exploration of performance-oriented research into the histories and futures of Lunar exploration and exploitation. Informed by diverse backgrounds and practices, we have, each in our own way, developed research that engages with the entanglements of earthly and outer space in (among others) space travel, earth-space sustainability, and space-technology. During this seminar session, we will each briefly introduce these perspectives, identify resonances, connections, and intersections, and explore their potential for further collaborative performance-oriented approaches to understanding interplanetary entanglements.

Prof. Dr. Vivian Appler is the Kay Parker Professor of Theatre and Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Georgia. She is the co-editor of the collection, Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance, Volume 1: From the Lab to the Streets (2022) and Volume 2: From the Curious to the Quantum (2023). Her areas of expertise include feminist performance, early modern drama, science-integrative performance, practice-as-research, and physical theatre. Publications have appeared in Comparative Drama, Theatre History Studies, PARtake, The Routledge Companion to Jacques LeCoq and others. She is a former fellow of the Huntington Library and Fulbright International. She has acted, devised, directed, and created puppets and masks for the Dell’Arte Players Company (Blue Lake, CA), Enchantment Theatre Company (Philadelphia, PA), Gas and Electric Arts (Philadephia, PA), Lunatique Fantastique (Oakland, CA), and elsewhere. Her current devised and PaR projects encounter questions pertaining to S.T.E.A.M., access, and equity. Full-length devised works about science include Particle Play: A Romance for Quarks, Strings, and Other Things and the solo show, In the Still of the Night: Andromeda’s Dark Stuff, which premiered in 2013. Her research has been supported with grants from the American Society for Theatre Research, NASA’s SC Space Consortium, the South Carolina Arts Commission, SC Humanities, and other organizations.

Dr. Felipe Cervera is Director of the Centre for Performance Studies and Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at UCLA. His book project, provisionally titled Celestial Acts: Performance and Planetary Politics, is an ethnography of space artists and examines the politics of doing space art and performance in the context of what is often called the New Space Race. Previous work has been published in English, Mandarin, and Spanish in Theatre Research International, Performance Research, Text & Performance Quarterly, Theatre, Dance & Performance Training, among other journals and edited collections. Forthcoming work includes ‘Theatre, Ecology, Outer Space’, in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Ecology (Carl Lavery, ed.), and ‘Performing Lunar Climates’ in Climate Theatres (Eckersall et-al, eds). He facilitates the Planetary Performance Lab at UCLA and is a co-facilitator of the international network Social Studies of Outer Space. He serves on the Committee for the Cultural Utilisation of Outer Space (ITACCUS) of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF).

Marjolijn van Heemstra is a poet, journalist, researcher, and theatre maker with a long-term fascination for outer space. She created theater performances about it, wrote poetry for NASA and scientists at the James Webb telescope, was poet-in-residence at the European Space Agency (André Kuipers even took one of her poems with him to space), and published books about the relationship between humans and the universe. Her essay “What is space worth?” (2023) draws parallels between past colonial mining and future mining on the moon. This essay also informed her theater performance Maankoorts.

Dr. Xiao-Shan Yap is Assistant Professor of Innovation and Global Governance at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University. She is the Principal Investigator of the PlanetStewards Project supported by the European Research Council (ERC), which pioneers the research agenda on Earth-Space Sustainability.  She is also Co-Chair of the EU COST Action ‘FOGOS’ (Futures-oriented Governance of Outer Space), Co-Convener of the Taskforce on Earth-Space Governance at the Earth System Governance (ESG) Project, and Senior Policy Advisor to EPFL Space Center in Switzerland. Additionally, Xiao-Shan is Lead Scientist in the project ‘Equitable access to outer space’, supported by the Geneva Science-Policy Interface in collaboration with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). She is also the lead author of Chapter 8 in the 2024 OECD Report on ‘The Economics of Space Sustainability’.

Prof. Dr. Maaike Bleeker is a Professor of Performance, Science & Technology in the Department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University. She studies the performance of humans and technology, on and off stage. She is also an experienced dramaturg in theatre and dance. In her work, she combines approaches from the arts and performance with insights from philosophy, media theory, and cognitive science. She was the PI of Acting Like a Robot: Theater as Testbed for the Robot Revolution and currently leads Dramaturgy for Devices: Developing Sustained Relationships with Robots and Smart Objects, both funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). She is the author of Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (Palgrave, 2008) and Doing Dramaturgy: Thinking Through Practice (Palgrave, 2023). She (co)edited several volumes, including Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre (2008), Performance & Phenomenology (Routledge 2015), Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance (Routledge, 2016), Thinking Through Theatre and Performance (Bloomsbury 2019), and the Routledge Companion for Performance and Technology (forthcoming). From 2011 to 2016, she served as President of Performance Studies international (PSi).

This seminar is supported by a Co-sponsored Events Award from The American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), a U.S.-based professional organization that fosters scholarship on worldwide theatre and performance, both historical and contemporary.

You can register to this seminar here.

This session is part of the Transmission in Motion seminar (2025-2026): “Navigating Entanglements.”
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