Montažstroj’s Emancipatory Performance Politics confronts us with the necessity of writing and performing theory in a time of permanent global crisis, pandemics, war conflicts, terrorism, economic fractures, and public broken narratives. The starting points are in performance studies and applications to real life forms. Leo Rafolt constantly provokes his reader and interprets, transgresses, reveals potential traps, gives answers, and turns answers into challenges of performativity.

Miodrag Šuvakovic, Singidunum University

Rafolt’s book is an excellent insight in cultural theory and performance relations, open to anyone interested in performance studies and interdisciplinary research in art, since the author, in the manner of Hal Foster, seeks to give the ethnographic method a kind of licentia hermeneutica, the right to interpret the performing art.

Suzana Marjanic, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research

Rafolt’s inspired, theoretically grounded, and detailed analyses represent a significant contribution to performance studies, as well as to the analysis of interconnections between emancipatory regimes in arts and society as such and will be therefore read both for their depth of insights and for the wealth of information they provide.

Zoran Milutinovic, University College London

Rafolt’s latest book has every reason to become an academic classic, in theater and performance studies, cultural studies, as well as Slavic studies. It is a well-written, heavily documented, and theoretically grounded analysis of the contemporary world performatively structured on two dogmas: the free market and liberal democracy. Rafolt weaves a critical tale based on an analysis of the performative production of the internationally renowned group Montažstroj.

Maciej Falski, University of Warsaw

This book captures those elusive folds of performance-with-resistance, reading them against the backscreen of Eastern European and Pan-European political and intellectual histories. It uses a long-standing project to showcase an intricate and fascinating theoretical analysis of performing practices as they play with, within, and against violent capitalist modernities. Students and scholars across the overlapping fields of performance studies, dance studies, post-communist studies, queer studies, European studies, and those familiar with various left-wing traditions of critical theory and intellectual history will find this book to be an elucidating and inspiring contribution to their respective fields.

Aljoša Pužar, University of Ljubljana