Interview with André Lepecki (2002)

Diana Taylor: Hello, today’s interview is with André Lepecki, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. André, I wanted to ask you what you understand by performance studies.

André Lepecki: Well, as I guess the viewers of these tapes will see, performance studies is a field in which many, many definitions can be applied for. Some people come through performativity and speech act theories; others would come with an interest in ritual and performance, the intersections between one and the other, performance of everyday life... I think that signifies, perhaps, that performance studies is actually a conceptual point of arrival in academia that enables a mode of being, theoretically and practically, within the field. Which means that, in a way, I see performance studies as a sort of open possibility to think through modes of analyzing artistic practice in particular, because that’s what I do mostly, in ways that actually are dialogical with these practices. So I see it mostly as a point of arrival, a point of convergence.

Diana: I know that your background is also in dance studies, and I wondered what you thought dance studies could bring to performance studies, and performance studies bring to dance studies.

André: Dance studies has traditionally been preoccupied with the notion of movement and how is it that one can capture and interpret movement in different choreographic techniques and compositional practices. Performance studies, I think, opens up the possibility for dance studies to think otherwise about dance. Is dance only about movement, or is dance about many other factors that may or may not be even on stage at the moment of the performance? Thinking in terms of identity politics, racial studies, critical theory, postcolonial conditions, are ways in which performance studies—or modes in which performance studies have been working for a while—that could actually help dance studies or inform dance studies to step a little bit outside this kind of scopic regime established basically by modernism that still, I feel, influences dance studies. The way dance studies actually can contribute to performance studies is, perhaps, by this emphasis on materiality and this understanding from within. Most of dance studies, at least in the United States, is pretty much informed by dancers and choreographers and knowing from the body, how is it that the body can actually inform theory[...] Hopefully we can find a middle ground.

Diana: I know that a lot of your work centers in Portugal and modern dance practice in Europe, and I wonder how you think performance studies work cross-culturally. How do some of the theories that we have developed here in the United States work to illuminate perhaps, or even perhaps to obscure or complicate, some of the practices that you’ve analyzed that have their origins some place else? 



André: That’s a really interesting question, because I think it sort of... To answer that question I have to narrate a sort of biography of how is it that I found performance studies. I found performance studies by chance at a conference in Portugal, where I met Dwight Conquergood from the Northwestern University program. And it was a conference on dance in Europe, contemporary dance, pretty much about dance theater. And Dwight Conquergood and Cynthia Novak were both there, in the beginning of the 90s, and I had absolutely no idea performance studies was actually a field. I was working in anthropology as a junior scholar in a center for sociological research at the University of Lisbon, but I was hanging out with dancers and choreographers a lot, mostly because those dancers and choreographers in particular were interested in certain theories that they did not have the time or full knowledge to engage in. And they had this certain curiosity of thinking about how is it that theory can actually inform performance practices.

So I was hanging out with them, and I went to this conference, and Dwight informed me of this field. I found it an interesting moment because it is not only transnational, but immediately interdisciplinary in the most radical way, which is the moment in which artists actually require from academia to perform for them in order to create something new. So in a sense, I feel that a lot of what’s going on, in Europe—which is where I come from, sort of, becuase I was born in Brazil—a lot of what’s going on has a lot to do with this mode of performance studies, this dialogical conversation between artistic practices, political intervention, and theoretical curiosity.

One of the practices could be seen in the work of Pina Bausch, for instance, that I feel somehow replicates this model of the seminar, which is very much an academic model that we have here in the Department. So I see my pedagogy and my understanding of performance studies very much influenced by the thinking of certain choreographers. So that answers the transdisciplinary aspect of it. Internationally, I feel that the discussion and the scholarship that is being generated in performance studies is very much informing a new generation of choreographers and artists in Europe. I can think of[...] Rebecca Schneider’s book The Explicit Body in Performance I remember talking with certain visual artists in Europe who are reading the books in order to think about their art, so that’s a very interesting moment, in which you have these kinds of affiliations and complicities.

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