Bucking band-culture expectations, the Lisps have added a nontraditional project to their recording and touring schedule: making a musical. The band prioritizes spectacle over, say, shoegazing, but their work FUTURITY is still “a musical made by people who don’t make musicals.” The group’s Sammy Tunis and César Alvarez weigh in on why they chose this form and how it kept their band together.

“If we compartmentalize the environmental question, the whole earth burns, so we might as well get everybody in any way that we can,” says Marc Bamuthi Joseph, whose new Walker-commissioned performance examines issues of environmental justice. red, black & GREEN: a blues uses hip-hop, spoken word, and audience participation to expand the discussion about how to define that “environmental question.”

Theaster Gates doesn’t use the word activism. “I grew up thinking that my politics would be more in my hand and in my body and in labor,” he said. This month the Walker presents an exhilarating work by Marc Bamuthi Joseph that features Gates’ sets and addresses environmental justice. He and Bamuthi recently discussed the project and the question, “Is my hand needed more in this situation, or my voice?”

Given the tumult in the Middle East, it’s no surprise that Lebanese theater-maker and visual artist Rabih Mroué is interested in revolution. But he doesn’t see his work as activism. Eschewing the term “political theater,” he says, “If there’s a revolution, it’s revolution against myself, to provoke myself.”

The six performers onstage in Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show could scarcely be more exposed. In a move to “de-objectify the performers,” all actors wear no clothing or makeup. But beyond that, they work without a script, without dialogue. In a recent interview, Lee discusses these choices as well as her strategy of building each show as “a trap” for audiences.

How does the Walker’s Out There series reflect or reject broader performing arts currents in the Unites States and around the globe? Walker staff writer Julie Caniglia tests the waters surrounding the quartet of theatrical freethinkers appearing at this 24th annual festival of adventurous performance.

Performance is by nature slippery—the work exists only in the moment of its enactment; later, as something remembered or recounted in stories, it’s filtered through someone’s lens. So, if you’re a museum like the Walker that “collects” performing arts, where does this leave you? With plenty of questions and access to top thinkers in the field.

Video projections, a beer-swigging Herakles, a sample from the movie His Girl Friday: Big Dance Theater’s Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar discuss the choices they made in adapting Euripides’ 438 BC tragicomedy Alkestis to give it resonance today.