Syllabi for the Future: A Playlist

Curated by PSi Future Advisory Board: Felipe Cervera (National University of Singapore), Shawn Chua (Independent Researcher), João Florêncio (University of Exeter), Eero Laine (University at Buffalo, SUNY) and Evelyn Wan (Utrecht University).

Curatorial Statement

“Syllabi for the Future” consists of a curated playlist of short videos and descriptions of research modules, each accompanied by further reading. Composed by artists and scholars, the videos identify possible and emerging trends in performance research. Collectively, the playlist expands potential horizons of our current academic and performance climates, plotting a chart of trajectories for performance studies from the vantage point of those beginning to shape the field.

This projection of syllabi for the future of performance studies began as an installation that took place as part of PSi #22 in Melbourne. In its inception, contributors were asked to submit a short video that glimpsed the future of the field. The formal parameters of the videos were broad: the style of the videos may be abstract or narrative, and the contributor need not feature in it as long as the videos were approximately three minutes long. They were encouraged to integrate scholarly texts with images, words, and video. Conceptually, the videos would relate to their research, practice, and/or ideas toward potential futures of what performance studies could/should be. For this special section of GPS, contributors were asked to systematize their ideas, and to propose a course module that would contextualize the videos and offer a view of how this proposed “future” subject might be executed as a course of study.

Courses or modules are useful conceptual frameworks for thinking about the future of the field. It actualizes the proposed subjects, and provokes us into considering why this should become an important body of knowledge for future generations. For whom, and under what context, is it crucial to study and research these questions? A reading list simultaneously iterates and produces a canonical list of works, taking historical and current practice and research as a springboard into investigations of the yet-to-be theorised. The videos and course modules we have curated demonstrate both the imagination of pedagogical possibilities, as well as the challenges and limits of prospecting the field.

In “Strategies for/from Ethnography: Alternatives for Assessing the Political in Performance,” Rayya El Zein proposes a methodological intervention in performance ethnography to reconsider its political possibilities. By exploring the sonic heritage that contemporary Arab rap may have with tarab, an Arabic ethnomusicological term describing feelings of ecstasy in listening to traditional Arabic poetry, song, or religious recitation, this module asks whether the current understanding of the politics of performance has a methodological bias towards valuing “resistance” as the unique measure for the efficacy of performance. In what ways, El Zein asks, does academia render resistance attractive if performed by some demographics and threatening or invisible when performed by others?

Linzi Juliano and Kayla Tange continue with the methodological angle in “Media and Performance,” exploring the interstices and overlaps between media and performance studies. Outlining the congruence between both fields, the course seeks to articulate new scholarly languages that merge the conceptual and methodological sensitivities across both disciplines. Juliano and Tange offer three main aspects for this merging to be considered — linguistic architectures, vulnerable vitality, and digital spatiality — and provide key entry points to critically engage with each of these.

Moving on from the methodological and disciplinary propositions of the first two modules, Kristin Flade offers a module that explores the conception of theatre studies in Germany as a field, and juxtaposes this study with a reflection and inquiry into the visual metaphor of conceptualizing an academic discipline as a field. This juxtaposition combines both visual and written materials in a manner that echoes to that for which Juliano and Tange call.

Katherine Brewer Ball and Juan Gallardo continue with the disciplinary reflections in their contribution “Some Notes on Performance Studies And the More Speculative Genres” — a module that is “co-taught and intergenerational.” Brewer Ball and Gallardo’s text is performed as a duet and as an incantation, where education itself is enchanted as spellcasting, with the possibility of bringing forth a world that has yet to exist. This proposition is made by suggesting performance’s divorce from ontology to emancipate the “chance for promiscuity.”

Juxtaposition is frequently employed in the syncopated practice of writing and artistic composition with which performance scholars and artists are engaged. In the next two contributions, juxtaposition is strategically mobilized as a critical method and practice. Amaara Raheem nimbly dances with embodied knowledge in her module “Embodied Knowledge: Inhabiting Twilight Zone(s).” Her course tangoes with space and memory, and invites prospective students to participate in the epistemology that arises from and is produced by dancing. As with all the contributions, we strongly recommend juxtaposing your reading of the course description with the respective video. In Raheem’s module, the video and text perform a graceful and meditative pas de deux.

This course is a performance, Raheem tells us, and this is also the case for Alice Colquhoun’s “Performing Affirmative Velocities.” Colquhoun’s course carries forth a kind of political investment already present in El Zein’s module, and inhabits the emphasis on embodiment that Raheem shares with us. There is urgency to studying the performance politics in a time when the accelerated speed of violence ends the future of many populations around the world, despite international laws that supposedly sanction them. By developing the embodiment of activism through exercises that engage the prospective student’s “fury plexus,” Colquhoun’s course encourages the connection of humanitarian principles with what she calls “affirmative performance acts.” These acts may be juxtaposed with other practices to harness greater momentum. She demonstrates this in her video, “Now it is time for us to do our bit.”

Finally, Augusto Corrieri’s “Performance Without Human Exceptionalism” is a module that consolidates an overview of performance theory in the 20th and 21st centuries, and speculates on its failure to materialise posthuman performance. In counterpoint, Corrieri introduces ideas and practices for approaching performance “as a process that is always already underway, regardless of whether ‘we’ bring attention to it or not,” and pivots the module by reflecting on a piece of dance performed by a dolphin and a woman. Significantly, Corrieri’s module concludes the syllabi by including books that are yet to be written.

How far beyond do performance studies scholars perceive the future? The syllabi forecast speculative futures through an examination of what the present is tending towards. In the curation process, we realize that the modules presented are symptomatic of the brevity and exigency that the term “future” implies in the current enmeshment of political, financial, cultural, and atmospheric climates. The future is now, as it were, and we feel the pressure of the uncertainty about its possibilities closing down on us. How far beyond can performance studies scholars perceive the future? The response gleaned from the modules included in this playlist seems to be: “Not too far — these futures are immanent in the present.”

As the Future Advisory Board of PSi, we remain committed to the idea that shaping the future is an ongoing project, and is a collective investment of the field that is in no way limited to “younger” generations of performance scholars. These modules are but a small sample of what the current climate of performance studies is like from the vantage points and situated knowledges of our contributors. What is missing, in these syllabi, is as important as what is already present. We invite you to revise these modules, dwell in the gaps, challenge the knowledge presented, and propose your courses for the future.

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Strategies for/from Ethnography: Alternatives for Assessing the Political in Performance

Rayya El Zein

University of Pennsylvania

Video

Feeling Politics: The Texture of Tarab in Arabic Rap Concerts

Video Caption

This field research explores the dynamics conducted between audiences and performers in live concerts of Arabic rap. Participant observation meditates on how to push past expectations and celebrations of hip hop in the Middle East in the years of the Arab Uprisings. Edited footage here informs a book project that explores how material considerations of concert space in changing cities influence the affective connections built between MCs and their fans. This is designed to deepen political readings of selected lyrics and performer profiles. Specifically, the wider project from which this is excerpted explores how tarab, an Arabic ethnomusicological term describing feelings of ecstasy in listening to traditional Arabic poetry, song, or religious recitation, can also be found in the live performance cultures of the hybrid genre of Arabic rap. Tracking the emergence of tarab in specific concerts, at specific times, and under certain conditions is a political analysis of evolving youth cultures and class in changing Arab cities.

Course Description

This module uses interdisciplinary exploration of strategies of performance ethnography to propose a methodological intervention into performance theory. It argues for a shift from subject-based readings of politics where demonstrable resistance is presented as performative of political agency. Noting debates about the implications of the boom in “resistance literature” across the humanities, we explore the political potential — and the limits — of the range of ideas about resistance. We ask: in what ways is literature about politics in live cultural production and in the performance of everyday life premised on looking for, finding, and theorizing resistance? Can the implicit expectation that agents perform resistance in order to be dynamic political subjects (and subjects of engaged performance study and research) limit the ways in which both politics in process and political processes may be understood? What orientalisms, racisms, and gender biases are reinforced by celebrative interpretations of resistance in performance? That is, in what ways does academia render resistance attractive when it is performed by people of some demographics, and threatening or invisible when it is performed by others?

Incorporating innovation from the spatial, affective, sonic, and the performative turns across the humanities, the module outlines an invigorated approach to performance ethnography that is better able to illustrate the economies of performance in which live concerts and performances take place, illuminating various aspects of overlapping political resonances not reducible to “resistance.” In doing so, we consider what politics in live performance might look like if they were not (only) understood as expressions of resistance and what implications might follow for theorizations of agency, subjectivity, or change.

The course explores theories of sound, affect, and space and their applications in different kinds of recording and writing about performance in order to build new approaches to the ethnography of performance. These reveal the texture of emergent politics that are neither attached to specific political critiques nor tied to particular efficacies or political outcomes. We ask: what might ethnography attuned to the dynamics of live performance reveal instead about politics in process? What might theories of reception, strategies for listening, patterns of call and response, or analysis of the political economy of performance reveal about politics in motion among specific audiences?

The approach in this module — showcased in the attached video — is informed by extended research on the emergent politics in rap concerts in the Arab world leading up to, during, and beyond the creative and political excitement of the so-called Arab Spring. Readings collected in this module are chosen as a constellation of provocations to move discussions past evaluations of success or failure of the short-lived uprisings of 2011-2013 and the reach and efficacy of cultural production associated with them. Imagining performance theory as an engaged commitment to developing social and political strategies, practices of reading and writing explored here seek to move past the singular modes of confidence, nostalgia, hope, or regret associated with specific political movements or exciting political moments and their aftermath. The ethical urgency of performance ethnography thus lies in its ability to record and testify to the texture of political becoming, without prescribing or attributing to those experiences specific political change. Recognizing the critical value of experiences of hesitation, transition, development, apathy, and despair, this module focuses on how to use performance theory and ethnography as a tool to understand political processes as opposed to celebrations of succinct political events and the creative performances with which they are attributed or associated.

As an alternative to the widespread and, we suggest, limiting frameworks of locating resistance as politics, we thus propose that the future of performance research might imagine a politics in live performance that situates itself in the ambiguity of ambivalence, somewhere alongside but not always responsive to the demand for change. Ultimately, this module explores a performance-based analysis of theory and creative approaches to the ethnography of live cultural production in order to push through and past the binds of agency and subject-based politics.

Readings

Abu-Lughod, Lila. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women.” American Ethnologist. 17:1 (1990), 41-55

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2014.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Berland, Jody. “Toward a Political Phenomenology of Listening.” The Sound Studies Reader, Edited by Jonathan Sterne, Routledge, 2012, pp. 40-47.

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell University Press, 2004.

Brown, Michael F. “On Resisting Resistance.” American Anthropologist. 98:4 (1996), 729-749

Collins, John. “Performing Sound/Sounding Space.” Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, Edited by Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, pp. 23-32.

El Zein, Rayya. “Resisting ‘Resistance’: On Political Feeling in Arabic Rap Concerts.” Arab Subcultures: Transformations in Theory and Practice, Edited by Tarik Sabry and Layal Ftouni, I.B. Tauris, 2017, pp. 87-112.

Erlmann, Veit. “But What of the Ethnographic Ear?” Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Berg Publishers, 2004, pp.1-20.

Fisher, Daniel. “Staging the Voice.” The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia. Duke University Press, 2016, pp. xiii-xix.

Gautier, Ana María Ochoa. “On the Ethnographic Ear.” Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 123-164.

Massey, Doreen. For Space. SAGE Publications, 2005.

Quinn, Naomi. “Good Ethnographies Make Good Theories.” Ethos. 38:4 (2010), 441-448

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2002.

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Media and Performance

Linzi Juliano

University of California, Los Angeles

Kayla Tange

Independent Artist

Video

Overload || Babel

Overload || Babel

Video Caption

“Overload || Babel” investigates what virtual sensory overload might look, sound, and feel like. A collaboration among mixed media artists (Peter Kalish, Chris Gibson, and Kayla Tange), a performance scholar (Linzi Juliano), and a game programmer (Chad Wyszynski), the video seeks to layer multiple dimensions: bodies, language, and visual and aural stimulation, as well as overt and subliminal sexual perception. The video begins with an anonymous nude female body lit against the dark background by projected language. The commands projected onto her skin reflect processes from performance and media theorists. The video moves from passive to active as her movement suggests agency within the command structure. Is she a subject, an object, both, or neither? The splicing of random stimuli suggests a larger framework at play, one that doesn’t belong to a theme beyond digital distraction. Her nude body, her sexuality, and the language branding her skin fight for attention amid the distraction; inversely, the chaotic hyper-visuality becomes its own character. Tange eventually takes the camera and confronts the viewer, shifting her focus to the otherwise “transparent” hardware of the camera. As soon as her gaze locks, the screen cuts to an iconic image: the “blue screen of death,” reporting a “fatal” hardware error.

Course Description

This course will explore the topics raised in “Overload || Babel,” including spatiality, sexuality, gender, language, and surveillance. As both media and performance studies are transdisciplinary inquiries, discourse overlaps. Digitizing archives, replicating and predicting affect, and preserving native and indigenous languages and cultures are all important instances of congruency. Here, we will investigate how other artists and scholars have successfully paired media and performance studies. Of prime importance is an inquiry into the role of users or consumers of media. What responsibility do they have in shaping the material and virtual landscape? How might they do so?

Digital Spatiality

As it becomes plain that digital media will not only be a means to socialize, but also the key to relevance, performance scholars must learn to navigate digital cultures for practical and academic reasons. This module emphasizes two overlapping agendas: first, to translate performance theory to media studies; second, to acknowledge how media are integral to contemporary performance. The first agenda rests on the premise that digital interfaces serve as edifices within which users interact, micro-transact, and build archives through their movement. Using the analogy of space, we can understand how such media represent and quantify user behavior and affiliation.

Our first unit will cover different theories of spatialization. As virtual architecture is becoming further entwined with “real space,” it would be useful to use a lens of analysis that sees multiple layers of space, rather than a single, hegemonic, plane. Michel Foucault was among the first to point out the possibility of multiple layers of space, notably ones that demarcate a sense of social otherness. Similarly, scholars like Sandy Stone have also argued that in virtual environments subjectivity is split between realms. Grappling with the concept of a habitable virtual reality, scholars have argued, users are split into two: one occupying the digital realm, the other in the material world. Artists such as Blast Theory have extensively worked through this idea. Others have praised the capacity for the differently-abled to live vicariously through avatars. The stubborn insist on a single body, occupying a single, material, space. Is subjectivity split, or is space somehow mutable, vulnerable to digitality?

Vulnerable Vitality

Technologies that influence behavior, relationships, and emotional health have induced tectonic shifts with how people meet each other, socialize, and date. Here, one shared object of analysis between media and performance studies becomes clear: the act of doing. Software does not run without felicitous language, an Austinian concept, while Butler has argued that bodies reiteratively process social forms like gender. Some performance scholars point out that our bodies are a kind of hardware, capable of modification or physical alteration to more appropriately reflect the self. Micha Cardenás, in her book Becoming Transreal, frees bodies to act and engage, rather than be objectified by more agential algorithms.

Meanwhile, hardware carries material significance. Robots programmed to care, life-extending ventilators in a hospital, or cyborgian modifications blur the boundaries of “life” and “performance.” The boundaries between life and hardware are mutually transgressed. The blue screen of death (BSOD) at the end of “Overload ||Babel” nods towards a history of failure and, in this sense, alludes to what happens to our media when they “die.” Here, we are reminded of the materiality of hardware: the copies of the failed game, E.T., buried in the New Mexico desert; the planned obsolescence of our devices as they slow; or the e-carcasses shipped to sites in Ghana or China where they accumulate and create localized health risks. In this respect, environmental justice will need to be a transnational undertaking. On a bodily level, Tiffany Trenda’s performances, particularly “Body Code,” offer connections among digitality, mortality, and embodiment.

Linguistic Architectures

While the hardware provides physical structure, the languages build relationships between movement and meaning. Grammar monitors, permits, and encourages this, as the program latently mines the users’ browsing, email, and location. The majority of code refers to commands, categorization, and definition — all technical Austinian speech acts. When they function, the code — and the users — are felicitous. Critical code studies and other groups of scholars working with code poetry, for example, consider the linguistic elements of code and how they influence culture. The Torist, an electronic journal accessible only through Tor (incidentally, the gateway to the unregulated “Dark Net”), features such poetry, as well as literature and scholarship on surveillance, networked media, and figures such as Edward Snowden. The Torist suggests restrictive use of architecture (e.g. firewalls and censorship) affects creative, critical output in relation to digital media. Meanwhile, performances such as Jos McKain’s “Grindr Ballet: More Pics Bro” express the anxiety, lust, and disappointment attached to using smartphones as cruising tools.

The objective of this course is to introduce diverse ways of understanding how media and performance overlap materially and semiotically. This course aims to provide scholars from both media and performance studies common ground and new scholars with a strong foundation to participate in future discourse.

Readings

Blast Theory. “Can You See Me Now?” https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/can-you-see-me-now/. Accessed on 13 December 2017.

–. “Day Of The Figurines.” https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/day-of-the-figurines/. Accessed on 13 December 2017.

–. “Uncle Roy All Around You.” https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/uncle-roy-all-around-you/. Accessed on 13 December 2017.

Cárdenas, Micha. “The Transreal: Our Networked Bodies.” TEDxDelMar, 2012. https://youtu.be/3dRZGIsRhQY. Accessed on 13 December 2017.

Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010.

Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics. 16:1 (1986), 22-27.

Halberstam, J. Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University Press, 2005.

Klein, Peter. “Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground.” Frontline World: Stories From a Small Planet. Public Broadcasting Service, 2009. http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/. Accessed 13 December 2017.

Locke, Charley. “The Dark Web Has Its Own Lit Mag.” Wired, 2016.

https://www.wired.com/2016/05/lit-mag-tor/. Accessed 13 December 2017.

McKain, Jos. “morepicsbro 3 channel edit 1.” https://vimeo.com/130045999. Accessed 13 December 2017.

Ruberg, Bonnie, and Adrienne Shaw. Queer Game Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Stone, Sandy. “Split Subjects, Not Atoms; Or, How I Fell In Love With My Prosthesis.” The Cyborg Handbook. Edited by Chris Hables Gray. Routledge, 1995, pp. 393-407.

Turkle, Sherry. “Connected, but Alone?” TED Talk. TED.com, 2012. https://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together. Accessed 13 December 2017.

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The Times of the Field / The Field of the Times

Kristin Flade

Freie Universität Berlin

Video

Im Feld / In the Field

Course Description

June. The tiredness of a summer field. As if a mother to be, a bit slower than these past months of life, catching her breath a little more often, but softly so, grounded with knowing that only so much longer it shall be. I struggle to remember the sounds of the tailwinds of retreating planes. Maybe it is the sight of vapour alone and there was no sound. Birds. Little molehills. Mouse holes. Bees. I offer an apple to one of the horses I stood observing. A fly might have sat on the fruit and disappeared in the mare’s mouth. Her teeth squelching the sugary fruit without reluctance. We look into each other’s eyes, or so I think, and four nostrils flare in goodbye.

February. The same route. The canal, the path along the former Wall around West Berlin. The German Museum of Pigs. Soon after, the horses, the fields. The February sunshine makes their wet soil glisten. Brown glitter. Warm steam from the life below. The tentative green. Four deer run around me, carefully measured distance kept — probably I am the threat that keeps them from entering the nearby woods. A truck passes by, the driver and I, we lazily lift our hands in greeting, in this way that seems perhaps the most universal traffic sign — I see you, you see me, a nod, stir up fingers lightly from the wheel in our hands.

In the summer of 2016, I filmed and recorded a field full of grains. In the winter of 2017, I returned to the field in preparation for the course module I am proposing here: “The Times of the Field / The Field of the Times.”

By juxtaposing the frustration I have harboured about the academic field I am part of — theatre studies in Germany, which we must, for many reasons, assume to be distinct if familiar to a more globally-perceived notion of performance studies — with the naively-assumed innocence of an actual field in different seasons, I learned to see both fields’ beauties, their potentialities — tied and unique, a plea to answer, to attune to with care. Why did it seem easier, perhaps even more worthwhile, to turn my full attention — and over a lot of time — to the intricacies of a random field of grains? Why is it that with such resistance and hesitation I am looking at the academic field I move in and feel I don’t understand where it wants to go? I decided to ask my peers where they saw its future. The module proposed here unfolds these future directions and concerns, hastily captured, but nevertheless indicators of where we might go.

The course module wants to propose as the crucial condition for taking seriously these concerns — taking seriously this world we are a part of — is the obligation to take time, and to give time. Any future becoming requires for us to be there, to be there fully, and fully attentive, so that the kind of “co-performative witnessing,” about which Conquergood speaks, does not only have a time to be, but a place to be as well — in our field and actions.

We will devote a session each to the following positions as they were recorded for the video essay “In the Field,” and will problematize them with readings, suggestions for further engagement.

“I think we all have to concern ourselves with bodies much more.” Which questions can I ask a body if the only time I can give is my limited time that is running short, always? What if the “I”/the body in question lacks empathy or is willing and capable to engage in horrors alone? We will study Judith Butler’s Frames of War and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones as timely reminders of the precarity of empathy, of the ease with which a body ends.
“If we start moving into the field of art history, we will be the lesser art historians. If we start moving into the field of philosophy, we will be the worse philosophers. If we move into media studies… and so on. There is only one way: to take the subject of theatre studies seriously, and to really stand up for it.” Contrasting and/or complimenting this assumption of a more separatist, almost protective disciplinary agenda, we will look at the disheartening structures to which Claire Bishop and Jen Harvie allude in their seminal studies on participatory theatres entrenched in neoliberal machineries.
“I believe that the field of theatre studies is swallowed by the neighbouring field.” Looking into the edited volumes Sensible Politics and Culture Jamming, we will investigate how the neighbouring fields of art and media theory approach a world that demands of them to be involved.
“Yes, it is true, I think we have to open ourselves up. The theatre is doing it, and those are parallel developments.” What do we learn from paying close attention to a world that seems in constant crisis? Tactics and strategies as Practices of Everyday Life might help us look differently at where we stand. And what can Performance(s) in Place of War tell us about where the theatre might go? And to where — subsequently? — our discipline might move?
“The future lies in a globalization. In a wide perspective on theatre, on art, on culture, and how they develop. This should not privilege one perspective, one region, or one continent. It is also crucial to further develop and work on and in interdisciplinary contexts.” Before assuming this position as a future perspective, we must turn back and read up on our privileges: Said’s Orientalism and El-Tayeb’s European Others might guide us through this.
“I hope that the field continues to grow. I also hope for and can imagine stronger ties with practical theatre work, also within theatre studies. In a way, a further opening to the practical field of work in theatres. And this is more clearly connected to our studies. And to our research, too, actually.” Different to performance studies departments elsewhere, theatre studies in Germany often times focuses on theory and the training of theorists. The challenges and opportunities of such an approach form the last part of this course module, and our discussion will be informed by Dwight Conquergood’s Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis.

Readings

Balfour, Michael, Hughes, Jenny and James Thompson, editors. Performance in Place of War. Seagull, 2009.

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. Verso, 2012.

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso, 2010.

Conquergood, Dwight. Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis. University of Michigan Press, 2013.

Kotef, Hagar. Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Duke University Press, 2015.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 2011.

DeLaure, Marilyn, and Moritz Fink, editors. Culture Jamming. Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance. New York University Press, 2017.

El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Harvie, Jen. Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. Palgrave Press, 2013.

Littell, Jonathan. The Kindly Ones. Vintage, 2010.

McLagan, Meg, and Yates McKee, editors. Sensible Politics. The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism. Zone Books, 2012.

Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Penguin Press, 2001.

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Some Notes on Performance Studies and the More Speculative Genres

Katherine Brewer Ball

Wesleyan University

Juan Gallardo

Wesleyan University

Video

Practice More Escape

Course Description

Our future syllabus is co-taught and intergenerational — what follows is an incantation and a duet.

Katherine Brewer Ball (KBB): Artist-curator Jaamil Olawale Kosoko recently told me that making a syllabus is like casting a spell and seeing who shows up for the gathering. In the prompt “What is the future of performance studies?”, we respond by world-making, by saying something together in unison over and over until it changes everything. Isn’t that what a spell is? We call a world into being by close-reading the grains of sand, noting the details as our limp wrists reach out in dialogue. We follow along with Morgan Bassichis, Ali Rosa-Salas, Reina Gossett, and Dori Midnight the variegated work of artists who are also scholars, magicians and activists. Spellcasting becomes a way to call out to the people with whom we want to be in dialogue. So, if words are performatives, if saying is doing, then how do we enact a future hospitable to black, brown, indigenous, and queer lives? The classroom, a place we share, is perhaps one place to start.

Juan Gallardo (JG): The spell is a way to bring into the world something deemed impossible by a hegemonic logic. More specifically, for the scientific/colonial gaze, the spell is a cop-out, a way to bypass what passes for knowledge. But if you’re someone who is not primarily concerned with that gaze — even as you are attentive to its dangers and how, in moments, it can affect you — then the spell becomes a way to think appositionally. If, as you mention, the syllabus can be thought of as a kind of spell, as a way to call others and call forth other forms of knowledge, other forms of life, then the classroom is (potentially) one of the places to work our magic.

This year, insofar as I’ve been thinking blackness, fugitivity, and escape from the figure of the Human, Octavia Butler’s novel, Wild Seed, has been a fruitful and generative site. Thinking with Sarah Jane Cervenak’s work, Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom, and Hortense Spillers’ 1987 essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” I returned to the turbulent relationship Butler depicts between Anyawu and Doro, a shapeshifter and a spirit respectively, who roam the world in human guise. I love (and am frightened by) the beginning of that book. Anyawu is hanging out, having a life, and Doro, who has been wandering the Earth in search of specimens, hones in on her, observes her, and decides to make her his lover/concubine. There’s a part of me that feels (a little) sorry for Doro — he wants to find people with whom he can have a life, people who, like himself, cannot die — but I abhor the way he goes about looking for and creating that company. Doro wanders the globe because he’s not quite sure what he’s looking for, but he begins to create a form from his confusion; the world becomes a laboratory in his quest to create beings like himself. It’s no coincidence, then, that the temporality of the novel is also the temporality of the slave trade and the colonization of the so-called New World. More important, it is telling that the slave trade lends itself easily to Doro’s project, even though these two movements, while they intersect, are distinct. I am drawn to Anyawu, on the other hand, because once she meets Doro, her movement becomes a continuous practice of escape. By way of Anyawu, Butler demonstrates how dangerous is the bind of the Human-Being, of being (or becoming) Human: in Human form, Anyawu can be tracked by Doro. It is only when Anyawu refuses the Human body that she can escape his gaze, and it is the realm beyond the province of the Human that Anyawu is able to be with others in a way that is not so easily exploited. It’s funny, informative, and unsurprising, then, that Anyawu finds mating rituals to be much more straightforward (and potentially pleasurable) among the dolphins than among heterosexual men. There’s a part of me that likes to imagine Anyawu in dolphin form as a regular to one of the cruising grounds in Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

KBB: I love this image. It feels both child-safe and wildly erotic, like Lisa Frank pornography.

JG: Yes, and that’s exactly the point. Performance studies should be thinking reproduction, insofar as reproduction is not conflated with what the heterosexual imaginary often insist is “sex” and insofar as reproduction is not regulated for the sake of a deferred future whose condition of possibility is a stiff, degraded present and erased past. Following Patricia Holland and Darieck Scott, to name but a few, performance studies can and should think reproduction and desire from the vantage points of blackness/queerness without lending (much) attention to how hegemonic discourse overdetermines those ideas.

One of the things I love about Butler’s novel is how Anyawu’s performance of freedom begins as a performance of escape, but then gives over to something more. Attractive to Doro because she can be one with the object of her desire, Anyawu’s shapeshifting abilities range beyond the province of the Human, and it is in these places where she is able to practice “freedom” in a way that is not violent. Doro is “free” to do/kill as he pleases — no one, at least not until the end of Mind of My Mind, can defeat him. But violence and coercion are the conditions of possibility for his practice and understanding of freedom. For me, the future of performance studies is about future-making forms of knowledge that shuttle back and forth between what is yet to come and what is presumed to be past. The future of performance studies is about imagining and creating genealogies and ancestry in the Ellisonian sense. My version of performance studies would signal a turn to Anyawu and Rhinehart, two characters from different novels who are (in)famous and radical because of their ability to improvise, to break with the fantasy of the Self, and perform a variety of identities.

Performance’s desired break from ontology is a chance for promiscuity, to think from a variety of positions — the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Arctic, as the video suggests — precisely because these always-already externally-imposed boundaries begin to fall away, and emerge as a set of fluid relations negotiated from a variety of subject positions of which the speaker is One but not (and this is crucial) a Single Being. Performance’s departure from ontology makes possible “fantasy in the hold” because she who thinks from the hold is not necessarily the object of the colonizer’s fantasy. To think from the hold is to think what it means to be held, and it is to think the question of freedom — “I am bound for the freedom,” writes Robert Hayden, “freedom-bound.” Like those running, falling, rising, and stumbling in Hayden’s 1962 poem, “Runagate Runagate,” the question of freedom becomes a question of movement, movement that is not necessarily forward-thinking — for the mythic North cannot deliver on its alleged promise — even as it is primarily concerned with black futurity.

Readings

Badger, Gina. “In & Out of Time: An Interview with Dori Midnight.” Nomorepotlucks. http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/in-out-of-time-an-interview-with-dori-midnight/. Accessed 13 December 2017.

Baldwin, James. “Stranger in the Village.” Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press, 1955, pp. 159-175.

Ball, Katherine Brewer. “Morgan Bassichis.” Bomb Magazine. 22 June 2017. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/morgan-bassichis/. Accessed 13 December 2017.

Butler, Octavia. Wild Seed. Warner Books, 1980.

———. Mind of My Mind. Doubleday, 1977.

Cervenak, Sarah Jane. Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom. Duke University Press, 2014.

Delany, Samuel. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York University Press, 1999.

Ellison, Ralph. “The World and the Jug.” Shadow and Act. Vintage, 1964, pp. 107-143.

Gossett, Reina (with Grace Dunham and Tina Zavitsanos), Hampshire College Commencement 2016, Hampshire College TV. https://youtu.be/6fwrJjkxEec. Accessed 13 December 2017.

Hayden, Robert. “Runagate Runagate.” Collected Poems. Liveright Publishing, 1985. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52947/runagate-runagate/. Accessed 13 December 2017.

Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Duke University Press, 2012.

Moten, Fred. “to consent not to be a single being,” The Poetry Foundation, 2010. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/02/to-consent-not-to-be-a-single-being/. Accessed 13 December 2017.

———. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” South Atlantic Quarterly. 112:7 (2013), 737-780.

Muñoz, José Esteban. “Vitalism’s After-burn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta.” Women and Performance. 21:2 (2011), 191-198. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2011.607596

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Stanford University Press, 2000.

Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York University Press, 2010.

Scott, David. “The Re-enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.” Small Axe. 8 (September 2000), 119-207

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Weheliye, Alexander. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Duke University Press, Durham, 2005.

———. Habeas Viscus. Duke University Press, Durham, 2014.

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Embodied Knowledge: Inhabiting Twilight Zone(s)

Amaara Raheem

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Video

Submerged

Course Description

I’ll start with a dream I had this morning. It is one of those dreams from which a stream of words gushes forth and a stream of feelings too. I live in a twilight zone; by this, I mean that my inner-city studio fills with fluorescent light and that, even at 3 am, three layers of curtains cannot block out the street lamp directly outside my bedroom window. Thus, fluorescence is becoming a state of mind no doubt seeping into the scenography of my dreams. When I wake, a distinct phrase floats in my mind — bowing down to the four directions — which reminds me of that movement ritual I learnt several years ago from K.J. Holmes, where we bowed to the four cardinal directions, dancing the different geographical, poetical, psychic associations we had with each of these dimensions. And then only last week I am sitting in that theatre when the queer-coder-artist-writer Judd Morrisey says, “Ok now I want you all to turn. Yeah, that’s right. In your groups — just decide which direction and turn — oh, and keep writing.”

BARE INTERIOR.

GREY LIGHT.

I TURN TO FACE EAST

I TURN TO FACE A WHITE WALL

I TURN MY BACK ON THE OTHERS

SUDDENLY, AN ATTACK

A BRIEF ILLNESS

I OPEN MY MOUTH AND A SOUND COMES OUT

THIS IS NOT MY VOICE AND THIS IS NOT NOT MY VOICE

AUTHORSHIP

FEVER

FLOOD

UM . . . I CAN’T REMEMBER NOW

I BENT WITH THE CURVE IN THE RIVER

LIKE MAGIC YOU DISAPPEAR

I AM THINKING ABOUT DANCING AND I AM WRITING ABOUT DANCING

IS THIS DANCING?

NOT VERY PRETTY IS IT

The idea of “embodied knowledge” arose from a time in the discipline of dance when dancers, dance educators, dance scholars, and dance writers were concerned with articulating specific and particular “knowledge(s)” or “knowing(s)” that comes from, through, and of the experience of dancing. Embodiment is directly associated with experience — the experience that comes from having a body, with various sensory feelings and motor capacities.

“The process of embodiment,” writes Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, “is a being process, not a doing process, not a thinking process. It is an awareness process in which the guide and the witness dissolve into cellular consciousness. Visualization and somatization provide steps to full embodiment, helping us return to preconsciousness with a conscious mind” (Bainbridge Cohen 57). Working in the 1970s to create an extensive, experiential study known as Body-Mind Centering, Cohen intersected with the work of other seminal dancers who created “new” systems of movement and thought, such as Anna Halprin, Steve Paxton, and Deborah Hay — influencing a range of choreographers working at the time such as Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Robert Morris, and Bruce Nauman. In that historical moment, the aesthetic of dance and the “knowledge(s)” of/in dance shifted. Collectively, the discipline of dance made a turn. Collectively, the discipline of dance shouted, “This is dance! Forget everything you’ve seen on stage until now.”

What is dancing? When are you dancing? So are you dancing now? Whose dance are you dancing?

This course is a performance. It involves a daily practice of moving/dancing/writing. It doesn’t involve learning any steps or sequences. It is not about progression, but it is about accumulation. The dancing will be guided by “task-lines.” In this course, repetition is not about learning and reproducing patterns, but about tackling the same tasks anew. Ultimately, the tasks don’t really matter; its purpose is to notice and value difference. Moving together, we will closely examine this state of identification we call “I” and “We.” This course proposes that “I” — the individual — am not dancing in relation to “We” — the group — with my own history, memory, agency, and self-determination but, rather, that “I” am already “We” and that “We” am already “I” and that, perhaps, I am not even dancing but being danced — by the breeze, the people crossing the street outside, the play of sunlight on the white wall, the mouse that lives under the floorboards, the ghosts of all the dances danced in this room, and so forth; that dancing is not something I make happen but something that happens in, on, of, through, behind, upon, at, against, toward my body in continuous becoming.

A CALL:

The twenty-first century presents dance studies with a huge task: To understand the inherited knowledges and embodied practices of previous eras, while allowing space to imagine different futures and ways of moving and creating […] Discipline can be a gate-keeper, a kind of shame, a pathway to virtuosity and professionalism, a form of sophistication and an application of control and power. Despite the “corporeal turn” of much recent academic discourse, dance studies as a field has produced disciplined bodies persistently subjected to the commands of academic writing (Dempster, 2005; Lepecki, 2006.) — (Call for Papers: Undisciplining Dance Symposium)

A RESPONSE:

To understand the inherited knowledges and embodied practices of previous eras, this course will begin with acknowledging the historical context of “embodiment” as “the body” situated as a shifting site, function, form, and index of “knowing.” We will look at movement studies, practices, and choreographies that situate the body as “container,” examining the ethical implications of this.
To imagine different futures and ways of moving and creating, we will take on Peggy Phelan’s injunction as “score”: “As a philosophical and epistemological injunction ‘movement’ punctures the ideological assumption that the centre is permanent, stable, secure. Thus the task before us is to shift from a consideration of the aesthetic dimensions of movement to a consideration of movement as ethical principle and practice” (Phelan 22).

In regard to disciplined bodies persistently subjected to the commands of academic writing, we will daily practice handstands, headstands, and cartwheels namely to bring great benefits to our endocrine system, and also to practice (conceptual, theoretical, and philosophic) flips; to turn the Mind-Body illusion on its head by seeking not further integration (nor distinction!) but to focus on the hyphen between.

I’ll start with a dream I had this morning. It is one of those dreams in which everyone wears white, smokes shisha, and is watching me watch them. You and I are gliding underwater through some intricate canal system, where a long line of nymphs in silver sequinned shorts are dancing in perfect unison on the bridges above. Suddenly, a burst of fireworks. The dream is like some great big party, where I keep saying yes, YES!

When I wake I slowly let the half-light into my eyes; then I turn to you and whisper, “Utopia is never for one.”

Watchings and Listenings: A List of Video Essays

Bergvall, Caroline. Writing Gestures. What Now Festival, Independent Dance, London, 2014.

Bell, Jerome. Veronique Doisneau 1. Opera National de Paris, Paris, 2009.

Burrows, Jonathan et al. 52 Portraits. Sadlers Wells, London, 2016.

Davies, Siobhan & Hinton, David. All This Can Happen. Siobhan Davies Dance, London, 2012.

Edmunds, Becky. Have You Started Dancing Yet? South East Dance, UK, 2004.

Forsythe, William. Motion Bank. The Forsythe Company, Dresden, 2000-2004.

Gehmacher, Philip, Walk+Talk. SARMA and Tanzquartier Wien, 2013.

Parkinson, Chrysa. Self Interview as Practice. Independent artist video on Vimeo, 2008-2009.

–. Dancer-as-Agent Collection. SARMA and DOCH (Stockholm University of the Arts), 2014.

Le Roy, Xavier. Product of Circumstance. Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, 1998.

Bibliography

Bainbridge Cohen, Bonnie. Thinking, Feeling, and Action. Contact Editions, 2008.

“Call for Submissions: Undisciplining Dance Symposium.” Choreographic Research Aotearoa. University of Auckland, 2016. https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/creative/schools-programmes-centres/dance-studies/CRA/ud_calldesign_format02.pdf. Accessed 13 December 2017.

Dempster, Elizabeth. “Undisciplined Subjects, Unregulated Practices: Dancing in the Academy.” Conference Proceedings: Dance Rebooted: Initializing the Grid, Ausdance National, Canberra, 2005.

Hartley, Linda. “Chapter 1.” Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives, Edited by Amanda Williamson, Glenna Batson, Sarah Whatley, and Rebecca Weber, Intellect, 2014, pp. 9-33.

Lepecki, Andre. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. Routledge, 2006.

Phelan, Peggy. “Moving Centres.” Move: Choreographing You: Art and Dance Since the 1960s. Edited by S. Rosenthal, MIT Press, 2010.

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Performing Affirmative Velocities

Alice Colquhoun

University of Roehampton

Video

Affirmative Velocities

Video Caption

An example of an “Affirmative Velocity” method used by artist in 2015. Students will notice politician Hillary Benn in a speech to make the case for air strikes on Syria. The velocity experienced by the world after this action was at an extreme high speed and caused much death and debris from the force of it. The “Affirmative Velocity” method was by an activation of the “Fury Plexus.” The artist chose to read out the Geneva Conventions “on prisoners of war” as she had foresight that prisoner of war conditions would ensue soon after Benn’s speech.

Course Description

This course is for students who wish to connect with humanitarian principles through performance. It promotes the transformative potential in the education about human rights through affirmative performance acts. The course will act as a springboard to an effective understanding of where violent power has overridden principles of life-sustainment. It will also behave as a diving bell to generate deeper terrains for students to locate response, authenticity, and creativity within a knowledge of war and violence, promoting the notion that human rights are narratives that belong to our stories should be embedded in our practices and read aloud alongside the classics.

The Geneva Conventions were founded in Europe in 1887 to protect individuals in conflicts. In our contemporary era, much has changed in how global conflicts are fought, but the deep desire to protect individuals remains. Although these documents have been accepted as law, there is little vigor in referencing them when known injustices are committed. In this course, students will revisit the texts of the Geneva Conventions and workshop them through their own practices. We do not encourage binary thinking on this course, but we do believe in taking a stand on how we feel humans should and should not be treated. We find ourselves working with some clear oppositions by using the frame of the Geneva conventions, founded upon humanity and neutrality, to inform our knowledge base. It is through these guidelines that we are then able to identify what are called “Violent Velocities,” which are powers that kill and inflict suffering upon human beings through contemporary wars and conflict situations. “Velocities” are traditionally defined as the magnitude and direction of speeds; “Violent Velocities” are called so as they are increasingly understood as inflicting suffering at such speeds there is little ability to grasp their tremendous affects in real time.

Students will learn the performance method of “Affirmative Velocity.” The act of creating as a response to violence is an affirmative act, and behaves as an “affirmative velocity.” To “affirm” is an individual process and each student’s “Affirmative Velocity” will be different and reveal itself through their responses. Students will also develop their “Fury Plexus” — a tool for affectively responding to difficult violent topics. The body as a sentient source is important here, through building our physical and emotional faculties for an engagement with the world and with life-sustainment. We employ our bodies and voices in a communication to become prone to important defense against indifference to a world ill at ease. Students may respond to themes in any artistic medium and through various practices. We hope that this course will act as the beginning of a long line of hybrid performance courses to inspire artists to work with local and international rights and treaties.

This course is not a “direct action” course, and students must note that while the themes of this course fall into a political domain, contact with political decision-makers is not facilitated. It is instead a course that reaches to performance to revive tired, humanitarian text. We may call it direct action for the spirit, and we hope that the outcomes will bleed into student’s wider creative work, promoting empowered arts practices.

We are living in times where many other species and causes are in urgent need of advocacy. We do not wish to discount these. Ultimately, we are concerned with building a type of performance literacy for life-sustainment across many contexts. However, in our shaky fight for peace, we feel that we must be courageous and declare that, amongst other species, every human being deserves protection from violence and murder. Our reasoning for working with the Geneva Conventions is that we remain curious by their existence: we are intrigued that inked in them are worldwide protective values for human beings. We are excited by the idea that students may be able to resuscitate them in the performance space, to find out if they hold value past their perceived failure, and to do so before they are left to gather dust.

Core One: Locating Velocities

We explore our positions as inhabitants of a complexly-connected world in conflict. Students are to select text from chosen articles of the Geneva Conventions. We use this time to do a close reading of our theses in an open forum, sharing thoughts on the language and our wider interpretations of conflicts and violence, and reflecting on frustrations, art, making, uttering, failing, fury, connecting, textualities, movements, impossibilities, and disorientations.

Core Two: Passions, Rhythms, Intuitions — The Fury Plexus

Students workshop their “Fury Plexus” to harness their connections to chosen “Violent Velocities.” The “Fury Plexus,” located deep in the stomach, has been oppressed by the civil sphere. It holds our passion for life, our intrigue for the world and for others. It is an absolute identification of what fizzes underneath our surfaces, and has gone through a process of abstraction through invisible, technological warfare and fragmented images that fray our understanding of justice for ourselves and other individuals. When located, the “Fury Plexus” can emit a powerful social belonging and a wild connectedness in all sentient beings.

Evening Session: The Tango

The Tango will be used as a tool for an embodied reflection and to promote strength, communication, and a deep flair for responsive action. Dance simultaneously stokes and stabilizes the fire in the pit of the stomach through sculptural offerings that are not easily assimilated into verbal language. The Tango is a partner dance, and it works as a series of utterances into the atmosphere, to galvanize what is submerged and raw — the destruction, the eggshells, the need for contact with others, the undercurrent of what roars and is encapsulated so fully by the presence, the sway and click of the body, a fierceness, some high fidelity that seems to reach itself to all. (Students to bring changes of clothes on Thursdays).

Readings

Bloch, Nadine. “The Day They Levitated the Pentagon.” Waging Nonviolence, 2012. https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/the-day-they-levitated-the-pentagon/. Accessed 13 December 2017.

“The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols.” International Committee of the Red Cross, 2014. https://www.icrc.org/en/war-and-law/treaties-customary-law/geneva-conventions/. Accessed 13 December 2017.

Harbin, Amy. Disorientation and Moral Life. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns: Second Edition. War Resisters’ International, 2014. https://www.wri-irg.org/en/pubs/NonviolenceHandbook/. Accessed 13 December 2017.

Jackson, Naomi M., and Toni S. Phim. Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion. Scarecrow Press, 2008.

Kolb, Alexandra. Dance and Politics. Peter Lang AG, 2011.

Neal, Lucy. Playing for Time: Making Art as If the World Mattered. Oberon Books, 2015.

Sacks, Oliver W. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Picador, 2015.

Spero, Andrea McEvoy. This is a Public Record: Teaching Human Rights Through the Performing Arts. Dissertation, University of San Francisco, 2012.

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Performance Without Human Exceptionalism

Augusto Corrieri

University of Sussex

Video

Dolphin and Borges

Course Description

“We are not just with the earth, with the stars, with ground, with blood, with skin. In advance, and without our even being informed, everything is already ordered-classed according to a scale which gives primacy to one element over another. And power to one thing, or to one being over another. All the time. And in an unfounded manner” (Cixous 11).

This module introduces ideas and practices for approaching performance as a process that is always already underway, regardless of whether “we” bring attention to it or not: performance as something that is happening between different and differing agents, entities, scales, species, bodies, materials, and non- (or quasi-) materials. We will borrow Karen Barad’s difficult concept, the “intra-agential,” and see how it might make sense outside of quantum theory. We will consider “older” ecologies for the ways they proposed direct and pointed understandings of the world as a more-than-human assembly: for example, when asked about the infamous falling tree making a sound if nobody is there to hear it, ecologist Gregory Bateson replied that yes, indeed, for there are other critters in that forest, as well as nonhuman entities and modes of existence. Nature writer Annie Dillard found a different solution to the riddle by rewriting the question: “What if I fell in a forest: would a tree hear?” (Dillard 93).

That riddle, like so much of our philosophy and culture, can be understood through the “Leibniz fallacy,” as popularised in the 1930s by a team of neuroscientists, after a Leibniz quote: “There are hundreds of indications leading us to conclude that at every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or reflection” (Leibniz 53). As we now know, human beings are compelled to only recognise that which already corresponds to existing schemas of thought and perception. Most of what is occurring, inside and around us, is not only filtered out, but is actively considered as non-existent, and, furthermore, when we speculate (as Leibniz did) the existence of unperceived or unacknowledged phenomena, we in fact reproduce the same exceptionalist standpoint, merely with the added pathos of speculative proximity. How to get out of our own cage?

Declensions of Performance

Performance has variously been understood through different lenses: to list the most recognisable, there was the social/anthropological (Turner and Schechner), the psychoanalytical/philosophical (Phelan), the lens of gender and sexual identity (Butler), and the post-disciplinarian “performance paradigm” (Deleuze, McKenzie). The first two decades of the 21^st century saw an explosion in studies of the “nonhuman,” featuring novel subfields such as animal studies, multispecies studies, extinction studies, new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and others. Despite these promising theoretical developments, the concept and general practice of performance remained largely unaltered: the possibilities offered by a concept such as “distributed agency” remained mostly untapped, and the project of a radical questioning of human exceptionalism fell flat. Beyond the confines of academic speculation, “posthuman performance” failed to materialise.

In this module we revisit that body of theory, but with the intention of trying to use those ideas to restructure our understanding of what performance can be. We begin with a simple amateur YouTube video in which a teenager in an aquarium performs cartwheels for a dolphin, much to the latter’s amusement. Slowed down and with the audio removed, we will consider the video as an example of multispecies and cross-kingdom encounter: to help us with this, we will look back at the work of Belgian philosopher of science Vinciane Despret, who famously studied the ways ethologists study animals, and who proposed that in order to discover something new we must ask questions that allow for surprises. Encounters with nonhumans are often pre-scripted, and, so, without realising it, the ways we approach nonhuman others are decided in advance, step by step, look by look, touch by touch.

We will consider how the dolphin video can be “read” in parallel with theatre and performance histories: up to the early and mid-20^th century, theatrical dynamics were thought to be a one-way traffic, from the (active) stage to the (passive) auditorium, until avant-garde and other experimental approaches opened up the possibility of a two-way encounter, the power relation shifting and malleable. Similarly, the “culture-nature” binary has been conceived along the same lines of active-passive, doer-receiver. How can we apply experimental theatrical understandings to the stultified dynamics that regulate interactions between humans and nonhuman critters, entities, and materials? And what are the limits of such a pursuit? In other words, when does the theatrical lens have to be replaced by different, provisional understandings, metaphors, and practices for figuring the relations between beings?

BATS

As well as various readings (see the bibliography below), the module follows a simple structure to modulate and experiment with. It takes the four basic components of performance, easily remembered by the acronym BATS — Body, Action, Time, Space — and for each one proposes multiple iterations outside, or alongside, a human exceptionalist framework.

Week 1
Body: What counts as a “body”? What replaces the anthropocentric concept of “embodiment”? We will consider composite and boundaried bodies of different matter, volition, sentience, and organicity, including bacterial bodies, synthetic bodies, animal-machinic bodies, astral bodies, and celestial bodies.

Week 2
Action: What counts as event and occurrence, and what doesn’t, and why? We will examine the multiple animations of inertia, stillness, and inactivity, and seek an understanding of reality as intrinsically processual, after Whitehead and Massumi.

Week 3
Time: We will work from Einstein’s general theory of relativity to consider the multiple and alternate temporalities that shape a post-quantum universe.

Week 4
Space: Without the Euclidean matrix, space turns out to be no longer a container, but rather a felt, lived, and unlived reality, constantly in the making.

Readings

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and The Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, 2010.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.

Corrieri, Augusto. We have never been (modern, human, or posthuman). Penguin, 2021.

Cixous, Hélène. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Routledge, 1997.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of The Inhuman. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Despret, Vinciane. What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. Harper Collins, 2007.

Leibniz, Gottfried Willhelm. New Essays on Human Understanding. Translated and Edited by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennet, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press, 2015.

Massumi, Brian. What Animals Teach Us About Politics. Duke University Press, 2014.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at The End of The World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at The Edge of Extinction. Columbia University Press, 2014.

Back End

Syllabi for the Future: A Playlist

Contents

Syllabi for the Future: A Playlist

Curatorial Statement

Strategies for/from Ethnography: Alternatives for Assessing the Political in Performance

Media and Performance

The Times of the Field / The Field of the Times

Some Notes on Performance Studies and the More Speculative Genres

Embodied Knowledge: Inhabiting Twilight Zone(s)

Performing Affirmative Velocities

Performance Without Human Exceptionalism