Performance, Cultures and Politics Research Group

Research Seminar Series 2026-27

Brunel University of London, UK

Dear Colleagues, 

I hope this finds you well. You are cordially invited to attend the first seminar in this academic year’s research seminar series of the Performance, Cultures and Politics Research Group. This research seminar talk, delivered by Dr Felipe Cervera, will take place in person and online. Please find the details below. 

Performance, Cultures and Politics Research Group

Research Seminar Series 2026-27

Brunel University of London, UK 

The Performance, Cultures and Politics Research Group is excited to welcome Dr Felipe Cervera who will give an in person and online talk on 15 October at the first event of this academic year’s Research Seminar Series.  

Dr Felipe Cervera 

15 October 2026, 5pm-6pm (BST), in person and online 

Extraterrestrial Actions: Performance and Planetary Politics

In this talk, Felipe Cervera introduces extraterrestrial action as a concept for thinking performance at a moment when outer space is becoming an increasingly consequential site of cultural production, political imagination, and material extraction. Bringing the nascent field of space humanities into conversation with theatre and performance studies, Cervera asks what material, discursive, and aesthetic conditions allow an action to be recognised as extraterrestrial—and what becomes politically possible when we expand those conditions. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic and co-creative research with artists working across the contexts of the so-called New Space race, the talk moves between hypnosis sessions in Mexico to soundwalks in California, decennial performances in Slovenia, and practices of urban remapping in Indonesia. These works suggest that the extraterrestrial demos might not necessarily be assembled only where and once the Earthly one ends, where gravity disappears. Artists and their communities already perform extraterrestrial participation across these sites and others, unsettling, from the ground up, the current wave of unhinged space technoabsolutism. Offering advance sketches from Cervera’s forthcoming book Extraterrestrial Actions: Performance and Planetary Politics, the talk proposes that performance offers the possibility to articulate prefigurative practices as a way of apprehending—and contesting—the emerging politics of planetary life: the privatisation of orbital space, extraterrestrial resources, and even solar light, alongside the production of new and increasingly stratified planetary subjectivities. 

Felipe Cervera is Director of the Centre for Performance Studies and Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at UCLA. His current book project is titled Extraterrestrial Actions: Performance and Planetary Politics, and it 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.). He leads the Planetary Performance Lab at UCLA and is a co-facilitator of the international networks Social Studies of Outer Space and Ends: Collaborative Performance Research. He serves on the Committee for the Cultural Utilisation of Outer Space (ITACCUS) of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), and is the incoming Deputy General Editor of Performance Research. 

To join us in person: Gaskell Building, Room 117, Brunel University of London, Kingston Ln, Uxbridge UB8 3PH

To join us online via Zoom: https://bruneluniversity.zoom.us/j/91061288769  | Passcode: ResSeriesP