What is Performance Studies? Introduction
What is Performance Studies?
Introduction
Diana Taylor
Diana Taylor
This collection brings together a series of interviews between 2002 and 2012 featuring various definitions of ‘performance studies’ by some of the leading Americas based scholars in the field. During the early years of this project, I was chair of Performance Studies at NYU and director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics that I had co-founded in 1998 with three colleagues from Latin America: Javier Serna of Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (Monterrey, Mexico), Zeca Ligiéro of UNIRIO (Brazil), and Luis Peirano of Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Both Serna and Ligiero had been Ph.D. students in Performance Studies from NYU with tenured jobs at their universities—a common scenario in Latin America in a moment when universities were eager to increase the number of Ph.D.s on their faculties. Peirano was Dean of the School of Communication and interested in promoting inter- and trans- disciplinary projects. Our conversations at the time focused on how to create what we then referred to as a “corridor” to exchange visual and video materials, share readings, and teach joint courses using a performance studies lens. Performance studies was not by any means a recognized ‘field’ in Latin America back then, so one of the first tasks was to interview recognized scholars who could offer an array of definitions of what the term meant to them and their work.
In 2001 and 2002, I interviewed five colleagues from performance studies ay NYU: Richard Schechner, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara Browning, José Muñoz, André Lepecki, asking them to identify the basic tenets, if any, of performance studies. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett interviewed me. These interviews were short, definitional ‘takes’ on an emergent field, intended to be shared with our Latin American colleagues. The idea was to upload them to the Hemispheric Institute website and continue to expand the series. Books do not circulate easily around the Americas. As Annabelle Contreras notes in her interview, “books are very expensive […] we photocopy books, we clone them, we scan them, and we find ways to circulate knowledge...” Yet, for anyone who remembers what the Internet could do and could not do back in the early 2000s, digital circulation was easier imagined than carried forward. NYU’s ITS and Libraries worked with us, and, after a couple of years, we were able to upload the interviews into our old ‘archive’ section. [link to image] I started interviewing Latin American scholars, the first in 2002 being Jesús Martín Barbero, the major theorist of media and mediations from Colombia. But the technical difficulties of uploading video, combined with the radical instability of our website at that time, dissuaded me from vigorously pursuing the project, though I did not forget about it.
In 2007, when Performance Studies international (PSi) held its 13th annual conference once again in New York, we at Hemi decided to resume the project: Joseph Roach, Tracy Davis, Rebecca Schneider, Patrick Anderson, Bill Worthen and others were in town. Marcial Godoy, Associate Director of the Hemispheric Institute, participated in the project. We also started to interview other guests and visiting faculty such as Daphne Brooks, Kay Turner, and Holly Hughes. New NYU faculty such as Ann Pellegrini, Jill Lane, Tavia Nyong’o and Global Professor Diamela Eltit joined the collection. Then we took advantage of visits by Rossana Reguillo, Soledad Fallabella, and Sue-Ellen Case. A Hemispheric Institute Board meeting held in Costa Rica in 2011 allowed for the inclusion of more Latin American theorists: Antonio Prieto, Leda Martins, Beth Lopes, and for the first time, the co-founders of Hemi, Serna, Ligiéro, and Peirano. Interestingly, if I had started interviewing these Latin American scholars earlier, this would have been a very different conversation—in 2001-2, the small group of scholars who worked in PS hemispherically had to repeated remind interlocutors that we were not referring to performance art (see Antonio Prieto). By 2008, performance studies is understood as a metholodogy, a lens, “as an activity that can accompany life itself, in all its dimensions…” (see Diamela Eltit).
Since the early 2000s, then, the interviews have expanded outwards (and will continue to expand in subsequent editions) even as the focus and the format has remained basically the same: What is Performance Studies? Is it a discipline? An anti-discipline? Post-discipline? How has performance studies become institutionalized in departments throughout the Americas? How do ideas travel and what are some of the major concerns and points of conflict?
After years of experimenting with digital publications, from the early “web cuadernos” or notebooks we started in 2000 [LINK], to the tri-lingual peer reviewed journal, e-misférica [LINK] Hemi decided to developing digital books. The breakthrough came in 2009 when we partnered with Tara McPherson at USC. McPherson was developing a Scalar platform to allow scholars to publish their materials digitally, pulling from archives to integrate multi-media materials in various visual formats. Although Hemi originally joined as an archive, it was clear from the beginning that this platform would allow us to publish our books in three languages—English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The videos function as a stable anchor for the three, in the sense that each of the language ‘paths’ have them in common, while the transcripts and subtitles enable access to readers from across the Americas. The tags in this Scalar book function as a kind of index in the digital—they not only identify the key concepts but they take us directly to where they are found in the interviews and their transcripts: Embodiment, Protest, Indigeneity, Behavior, Liveness, Decolonialism. The essays by Tavia Nyong’o, Marcela Fuentes, Marcos Steuernagel, and myself frame some of these issues which can be explored along various different paths.
As technologies change, then, we have found more tools to and work together and link our perspectives. Yet every technological development raises its own new questions. Even a simple navigational structure such as a tag produces significant conceptual stumbling blocks and illustrates the complexity of this seemingly straightforward endeavor. How, for example, do you say ‘embodiment’ in Spanish and Portuguese? Does the fact that ‘embodiment’ does not exist in those (and many other) languages ask us to consider those qualities that prove central to the term—i.e., does embodiment = ‘the body’? (Corps, corpus, corpse?) Or does it refer to a knowing body or a memory body or even a muscle body? Could words such as incarnation (no, rings of Catholicism) or incorporation (too much like business?) replace it? How about a ‘puesta en cuerpo’ or ‘posto em corpo’–a mise-en-body as opposed to mise-en-scene? Does embodiment transcend the body? We can think of Merleau- Ponty’s question of whether the blind man’s body ends with the skin or at the end of the stick. Can ‘embodiment’ extend to intercorporeality? Or the digital? To multiple, simultaneous forms of embodiment (a dream state, a traumatic flashback, spirit-possession)? Has the shift to the digital precipitated the current foregrounding of the term embodiment, asking other languages to adopt this productive multivalence? Like the word ‘performance’ itself, the advantages of adopting the foreign term may far outweigh the impossibilities of translation. Using ‘embodiment’ in English signals not only a cultural awareness of the body, but the awareness too that the lens comes from English. We thus re-enforce or critique a particular history of use. Certainly discussions about translating terminology date way back, but dealing with these issues on the level of tags and databases push technologies as much as they pressure theorists to expand the underlying categories and structures of thought.
The interviews, the framing essays by theorists, and yes, even the tags and translations indicate the many points of dialogue and dis- or inter- connection among us as we consider “what is performance studies?” As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett suggests in her interview, performance studies is an “organizing idea for thinking about almost anything.” We hope this Scalar, digital tri-lingual book opens new paths for thinking through, in, and with performance studies.
In 2001 and 2002, I interviewed five colleagues from performance studies ay NYU: Richard Schechner, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara Browning, José Muñoz, André Lepecki, asking them to identify the basic tenets, if any, of performance studies. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett interviewed me. These interviews were short, definitional ‘takes’ on an emergent field, intended to be shared with our Latin American colleagues. The idea was to upload them to the Hemispheric Institute website and continue to expand the series. Books do not circulate easily around the Americas. As Annabelle Contreras notes in her interview, “books are very expensive […] we photocopy books, we clone them, we scan them, and we find ways to circulate knowledge...” Yet, for anyone who remembers what the Internet could do and could not do back in the early 2000s, digital circulation was easier imagined than carried forward. NYU’s ITS and Libraries worked with us, and, after a couple of years, we were able to upload the interviews into our old ‘archive’ section. [link to image] I started interviewing Latin American scholars, the first in 2002 being Jesús Martín Barbero, the major theorist of media and mediations from Colombia. But the technical difficulties of uploading video, combined with the radical instability of our website at that time, dissuaded me from vigorously pursuing the project, though I did not forget about it.
In 2007, when Performance Studies international (PSi) held its 13th annual conference once again in New York, we at Hemi decided to resume the project: Joseph Roach, Tracy Davis, Rebecca Schneider, Patrick Anderson, Bill Worthen and others were in town. Marcial Godoy, Associate Director of the Hemispheric Institute, participated in the project. We also started to interview other guests and visiting faculty such as Daphne Brooks, Kay Turner, and Holly Hughes. New NYU faculty such as Ann Pellegrini, Jill Lane, Tavia Nyong’o and Global Professor Diamela Eltit joined the collection. Then we took advantage of visits by Rossana Reguillo, Soledad Fallabella, and Sue-Ellen Case. A Hemispheric Institute Board meeting held in Costa Rica in 2011 allowed for the inclusion of more Latin American theorists: Antonio Prieto, Leda Martins, Beth Lopes, and for the first time, the co-founders of Hemi, Serna, Ligiéro, and Peirano. Interestingly, if I had started interviewing these Latin American scholars earlier, this would have been a very different conversation—in 2001-2, the small group of scholars who worked in PS hemispherically had to repeated remind interlocutors that we were not referring to performance art (see Antonio Prieto). By 2008, performance studies is understood as a metholodogy, a lens, “as an activity that can accompany life itself, in all its dimensions…” (see Diamela Eltit).
Since the early 2000s, then, the interviews have expanded outwards (and will continue to expand in subsequent editions) even as the focus and the format has remained basically the same: What is Performance Studies? Is it a discipline? An anti-discipline? Post-discipline? How has performance studies become institutionalized in departments throughout the Americas? How do ideas travel and what are some of the major concerns and points of conflict?
After years of experimenting with digital publications, from the early “web cuadernos” or notebooks we started in 2000 [LINK], to the tri-lingual peer reviewed journal, e-misférica [LINK] Hemi decided to developing digital books. The breakthrough came in 2009 when we partnered with Tara McPherson at USC. McPherson was developing a Scalar platform to allow scholars to publish their materials digitally, pulling from archives to integrate multi-media materials in various visual formats. Although Hemi originally joined as an archive, it was clear from the beginning that this platform would allow us to publish our books in three languages—English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The videos function as a stable anchor for the three, in the sense that each of the language ‘paths’ have them in common, while the transcripts and subtitles enable access to readers from across the Americas. The tags in this Scalar book function as a kind of index in the digital—they not only identify the key concepts but they take us directly to where they are found in the interviews and their transcripts: Embodiment, Protest, Indigeneity, Behavior, Liveness, Decolonialism. The essays by Tavia Nyong’o, Marcela Fuentes, Marcos Steuernagel, and myself frame some of these issues which can be explored along various different paths.
As technologies change, then, we have found more tools to and work together and link our perspectives. Yet every technological development raises its own new questions. Even a simple navigational structure such as a tag produces significant conceptual stumbling blocks and illustrates the complexity of this seemingly straightforward endeavor. How, for example, do you say ‘embodiment’ in Spanish and Portuguese? Does the fact that ‘embodiment’ does not exist in those (and many other) languages ask us to consider those qualities that prove central to the term—i.e., does embodiment = ‘the body’? (Corps, corpus, corpse?) Or does it refer to a knowing body or a memory body or even a muscle body? Could words such as incarnation (no, rings of Catholicism) or incorporation (too much like business?) replace it? How about a ‘puesta en cuerpo’ or ‘posto em corpo’–a mise-en-body as opposed to mise-en-scene? Does embodiment transcend the body? We can think of Merleau- Ponty’s question of whether the blind man’s body ends with the skin or at the end of the stick. Can ‘embodiment’ extend to intercorporeality? Or the digital? To multiple, simultaneous forms of embodiment (a dream state, a traumatic flashback, spirit-possession)? Has the shift to the digital precipitated the current foregrounding of the term embodiment, asking other languages to adopt this productive multivalence? Like the word ‘performance’ itself, the advantages of adopting the foreign term may far outweigh the impossibilities of translation. Using ‘embodiment’ in English signals not only a cultural awareness of the body, but the awareness too that the lens comes from English. We thus re-enforce or critique a particular history of use. Certainly discussions about translating terminology date way back, but dealing with these issues on the level of tags and databases push technologies as much as they pressure theorists to expand the underlying categories and structures of thought.
The interviews, the framing essays by theorists, and yes, even the tags and translations indicate the many points of dialogue and dis- or inter- connection among us as we consider “what is performance studies?” As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett suggests in her interview, performance studies is an “organizing idea for thinking about almost anything.” We hope this Scalar, digital tri-lingual book opens new paths for thinking through, in, and with performance studies.
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