Over the past years, the accelerated changes in our lifestyle have come to some extreme and irreversible points, “points of no return”, which are situated in a more conventional field defined as “real”, but, at the same time, in realms less identifiable as such, that cause quite concrete consequences in our lives (the fall of existential certainty, for example). The COVID-19 pandemic was a global catalyst of already existing forces in different spheres (social, academic, economic, etc.). We underwent rearrangements of our values and the exhaustion of ways to see the world and life itself, ways to feel and perceive, desire, plan, construct and share social structures and connections.

            The predominant images of the end of the world are formed by explicit catastrophes in an old-fashioned apocalypse that might be caused by global warming, unexpected plagues, or the coordinated rise of all smart machines. However, we should extent our understanding of the term “world” beyond the viewpoint of the Earth as the material habitat of all human race and the living things we know. It is striking how our emotional structure, our beliefs, our solutions to deal with the world, our current arrangements of social relationships, have not been able to respond to the demands of being alive in a minimum viable way. Different worlds are in process of collapse.  

            In the field of arts, in the second half of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, styles of expression tried to explore the margins between the real and the fictional, thus defying (each time less efficiently) current ethical and aesthetic parameters. As a broader phenomenon in this context, performativity, considered in a concept more circumscribed to the philosophy and drama fields or put in a highly acclaimed position among the gender studies, has become an instigator of a major diversification of behavior and corporality in the daily routine and in the different social and hegemonic media. At the same time, the political turbulence and the intensification of reactionary movements, situation in which we still are, compromised the margins between what is perceived as true or false, right or wrong, in a disturbing complexity that few or any fictional work has ever done or even suggested.

            In a paroxysm of changes in perception since the beginning of the twentieth century, we are immersed in the audiovisual world and in the online gatherings, or even, in the metaverse and the augmented reality, which rearrange how we live our time and space as much as our notion of relationship and presence. Nowadays, everyone accepts as an inevitable resource the smartphones (protheses used for every single body thus turning us into undeniably cyborgs), which gather and materialize all of these modifications that have been alarming us on a daily basis with an unprecedented intensity of alterations in our attention. These new forms of perception question the very fabric of reality in a magnitude certainly never seen before, perhaps never even ambitioned for any aesthetic movement, and challenge our parameters related to what should and can be a drama class or a cultural action in theater.  

            Concerning to the Artificial Intelligence, AI, which since its baptism has been intimating us with the central matter of imitation and the resulting substitution of human beings, we observed the rising omnipresence of machines that make decisions for us. Even though some positive predictions try to reduce the apprehension before the rising control over our lives and the precariousness of work, AI will certainly turn us obsolete, from the viewpoint of labour exploitation, unless we establish other parameters able to compete with the culture of efficiency and competence so relevant to capitalism. If traditionally theater education was proclaimed as a promise to develop ethical values, nowadays it has been haunted with the possibility of being captured as a training for non-replaceable human resources: the so-called soft skills.

            Strangely, economic sectors seem to be interested in occupying, in a risky predatory way, a space that might not have received our proper attention:  to put into action a conception proposed by Nietzsche and discussed since decades ago according to which art and life are imbricated, in a radical and broader expansion of the notion of aesthetics. Concerning to theater education, for a long time, we have had elements to create a wider vision of its pedagogical practice and to touch the perception frames that regulate our relationship with reality – the aesthetics of and in our lives, the theatricality of everyday life.

            In this perspective, we might be able to create broader relationships between Theater Education with all of these social transformations of finitude, ruin, exhaustion, instability, drastic changes, and deterritorialization. Therefore, in this special issue we aim texts that approach the relationship between Theater Education and themes that one way or the other symptomize or characterize the end of the world in different dimensions.