Interview with André Lepecki

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 want 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, and 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 an 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 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 to dance studies.

André: Dance studies has traditionally been preoccupied with movement, and how is it that one can capture and interpret movement in different choreographic techniques and compositional practices. Performance studies 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 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 or inform dance studies to step a little bit outside this scopic regime established by modernism that still, I feel, influences dance studies. The way dance studies can contribute to performance studies is by this emphasis on materiality and this understanding from within. Most of dance studies, at least in the United States, is informed by dancers and choreographers and knowing from the body, how is that the body can actually inform theory, inform an understanding of choreographic practice. What dance studies can give performance studies is a kind of knowing from within. Hopefully we can find a middle ground.

Diana: I know [that] a lot of your work centers around Portugal and modern dance practice in Europe, and I wonder how you think performance studies work cross-culturally. How do some of the theories we’ve developed in the United States work to illuminate perhaps, or even perhaps to obscure or complicate some of the practices you’ve analyzed that have their origins somewhere 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 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 a field. I was working in anthropology as a junior scholar in a center for sociological research at the University of Lisbon, and I was hanging out with dancers and choreographers, a lot, mostly because those dancers and choreographers in particular were interested in certain theories, and they did not have the time or full knowledge to engage in, and they had this certain curiosity of thinking about how certain theories can inform dance practices.

So I was hanging out with them, and I went to this conference, and Dwight informed me of this field. It is 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 the 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, since 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 practice, political intervention, 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 Jerome Bel, who is a prominent French choreographer, telling me about how he studied Peggy Phelan’s book Unmarked and then thought about choreography, and that made him think about choreographing a new… there are other examples, 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.

Diana: Is there anything you’d like to add? Tell us a little bit about the courses you teach, just briefly.

André: I’m trying to teach courses in dance studies that are mostly informed by very literal reading of what could be considered the foundations of dance in the 20th century, which have to do with gravity, movement, the discovery of the unconscious, stillness, and several other very, very literal images that choreographers have been working with, and then trying to explore those as a sort of intertextuality between movement and cultural theory and philosophy, basically. So that’s what I do.

Diana: Thanks, great. Thanks very much André.

Comment on this page