What is Performance Studies?

Diana Taylor, New York University

Marcos Steuernagel, New York University Abu Dhabi

What is performance studies? Is it a discipline, an inter-discipline, a post-

discipline? How has performance studies become institutionalized in
departments throughout the Americas? How do some of these ideas
travel, and what happens to them as they do so? What are some of the
common topics and points of conflict, and what are some of the more
local concerns? This Scalar digital book asks these and other questions to
30 leading scholars from seven different countries throughout the
Americas. As it does so, it addresses its title question not by answering it,
but by providing a multiplicity of voices in the active process of engaging
with an ever-changing and dynamic field from a variety of national,
linguistic, and disciplinary locations.

During the early years of this project, Diana Taylor was Chair of
the Department of Performance Studies at NYU and Director of
the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (Hemi), which she
had co-founded in 1998 with three colleagues from Latin America: Javier
Serna of Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (Mexico), Zeca Ligiéro
of UNIRIO (Brazil), and Luis Peirano of Pontificia Universidad Católica
del Perú. Both Serna and Ligiero had been PhD 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 PhDs 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, Diana Taylor interviewed five colleagues from
Performance Studies at 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 Taylor. 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 Anabelle 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, as anyone who remembers what the Internet could and could not do
back in the early 2000s can confirm, digital circulation was easier
imagined than carried forward. NYU’s Information Technology Services
and Libraries worked with us, and, after a couple of years, we were able to
upload these first interviews into our old “archive” section. In 2002, we
also interviewed the first Latin American scholar for this project, 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 us from
vigorously pursuing the project, though we did not forget about it.

The long time period of this project, with interviews ranging from 2002 to
2013—usually made on-the-go in order to take advantage of other Hemi-
related travel and events—comes through visually when watching the
interviews today. Over the timespan of more than a decade, the access to
high definition video equipment has changed significantly, but so has our
relationship to the performance of recording, uploading, and watching
video online. As Tavia Nyong’o points out in his contribution to this
book, “Performance and Technology,” the act of uploading changes
content as it changes our relationship to it. When we watch some of the
older videos in this book, we can see how much the interviewees have
changed, as their ideas have matured or as they have moved to different
institutions or levels in their academic careers. But we can also see how
we have changed as viewers, since the video-interview-as-performance
has also transformed significantly over this period. To pay attention to
this performance—to the differences in audio and video quality, or even in
compression and resolution—is to contemplate what Nyong’o calls “the
uncanny doubling of the digital archiving and its possible dissemination
into the future,” starting from a time before phones with cameras were
commonplace and before YouTube provided a digital site to post videos.

Back in 2007, when Performance Studies international (PSi) held its 13th
annual conference once again in New York City, 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-Anativia, Associate Director of the Hemispheric Institute,
participated in the project. In the same year, we also interviewed other
guests and visiting faculty such as Daphne Brooks, Kay Turner, and Holly
Hughes, as well as new NYU faculty at the time: Ann Pellegrini, Jill Lane,
and Tavia Nyong’o. Hemispheric Institute events throughout Latin
America allowed for the inclusion of more Latin American scholars,
first Anabelle Contreras in 2007, then Antonio Prieto, Leda Martins, Beth
Lopes, and co-founders of Hemi, Javier Serna and Zeca Ligiéro, in 2011.
That same year we took advantage of visits by Rossana
Reguillo and Soledad Fallabella. Diamela Eltit, a renowned practitioner
and thinker about performance in residence at NYU as Global Professor of
Creative Writing in Spanish, added another major Latin American
perspective. Interestingly, if we had started interviewing these Latin
American scholars earlier, this would have been a very different
conversation—in the early 2000s, the small group of scholars who worked
in performance studies hemispherically had to repeatedly remind
interlocutors that we were not referring to performance art, as
both Antonio Prieto and Zeca Ligiéro mention in their interviews. By the
early 2010s, performance studies was understood as a methodology, a
lens, “as an activity that can accompany life itself, in all its dimensions...”
(see Diamela Eltit).

As a project born out of the Hemispheric Institute and the Department of

Performance Studies at NYU, the matrix of faces in the interviews
page reflects a specific history and network of relationships, a network
that has expanded and developed as the project unfolded throughout
these 13 years. Much more than a claim to a specific genealogy of
performance studies, however, this particular selection reflects our own
history within the diversity of narratives that form this rich field, a
diversity Sue-Ellen Case insists on in her interview. Case’s own addition
illustrates the serendipity of this particular collection, recorded as it was
during a visit of hers to Mexico in 2010. With that in mind, since its initial
stages the interviews in What is Performance Studies? have expanded
outwards to include important scholars who had time to meet with us,
such as Catherine Cole in 2013, and finally Laura Levin, who added a
much needed Canadian voice to the hemispheric dialogue. We hope that
this expansion continues to happen, as our networks and connections
continue to grow. Throughout these years, however, the focus and the
format of the interviews has remained basically the same, producing a
rich patchwork of diverse voices responding to similar issues throughout a
long period of time.

What is Performance Studies?, however, is much more than a collection

of video interviews; its format as a Scalar digital book allows for the
multiplicity of voices to form an argument about the diversity of the field.
After years of experimenting with digital publications, from the early web
cuadernos we started in 2000 to the trilingual peer-reviewed journal e-
misférica, Hemi decided to develop digital books. The breakthrough came
in 2009 when we partnered with Tara McPherson at the University of
Southern California. McPherson was developing the Scalar platform to
allow scholars to publish their materials digitally, pulling from archives to
integrate multimedia materials in various visual formats. Although Hemi
originally joined as an archive (offering Scalar authors the possibility of
pulling video directly from the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video
Library), it was clear from the beginning that this platform would allow us
to publish our books in three languages—English, Spanish, and
Portuguese. Translation has always been at the heart of the Hemispheric
Institute, a network of over 40 institutions speaking three colonial
languages (now four, with the addition of French) in addition to native
languages from throughout the Americas. Since our very first Encuentro,
held in Rio de Janeiro in 2000, our capacity to come together, share work,
and build relationships of collaboration and exchange has depended on
each individual’s ability to self-express in the languages that best capture
the nuances of his or her thought and action. Academic books, on the
other hand, tend to have a hard time crossing national and linguistic
barriers. The possibility of not only publishing a digital book, but also
making it simultaneously available throughout the Americas spoke
directly to our mission of being a collaborative, multilingual, and
interdisciplinary network of institutions, artists, scholars, and activists
throughout the Americas. What is Performance Studies? is not only
translated into three languages, it is a truly trilingual book. Each of the
interviews, which were originally recorded in English, Spanish, or
Portuguese, have been fully transcribed, subtitled, and translated into the
two other languages, and the subtitles can be dynamically changed in both
computers and tablets.

Beyond the benefits of a trilingual publication, the tags in this Scalar book
also function as a kind of index in the digital—they identify the key
concepts concepts of performance studies being discussed in each
interview and are accompanied by anchors in the transcript, which offer
the reader a visual guide to the exact moment when these concepts are
first
discussed: embodiment, protest, indigeneity, behavior, liveness, (post/de)
colonialism, et cetera. Each of the transcripts also includes full references
for books and essays cited in them, as well as links to institutions or
artists that are mentioned throughout. These links offer a digital version
of the networked nature of the work of the Hemispheric Institute,
continuously opening up new possibilities to follow the genealogies of
performance studies that the interviewees describe. These online
networks are particularly relevant for performance studies, a field so
deeply invested in the live presence of the body. In her contribution to this
book, “Performance, Politics, and Protest,” Marcela Fuentes describes
how, as protest performance travels online, it challenges “scholars to
rethink their notions of embodiment beyond the biological body” and to
“expand the ways in which performance is redefined as an embodied, live,
and in-situ event.” This is just one example of how the four essays
included provide critical entry points to these interviews from different
yet complementary perspectives. The multiplicity of ways of navigating
this book replicates its argument for a continuously expanding genealogy
of the field.

As technologies change, then, we have found more tools to 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 translate the tag "embodiment” into Spanish and Portuguese?
Does the fact that “embodiment" does not have an exact equivalent 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 we use incarnation (no—rings of Catholicism)
or incorporation (too much like business) to translate it? How about a
“puesta en cuerpo” or “posto em corpo”–a mise-en-body as opposed to
mise-en-scène? 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, as the protest performances discussed by
Fuentes? 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? Much of the
vocabulary in performance studies comes from English. This poses a
fascinating issue for multilingual books. Not only “embodiment,” but the
word “performance” itself, so central to theorizations of corporeal practice
in the English-speaking academy, are not native to the other languages we
work with. Of course, as Marcos Steuernagel points out in his contribution
to this book “The (Un)translatability of Performance Studies,” “‘teatro’
and ‘dança/danza’ were once Portuguese and Spanish words trying as
hard—and failing as bad—to grasp what we would now call performance
practices of the pre-Conquest world.” So how far back do we have to go to
say that performance studies is more “gringo” than, say, “Brazilian
theater, or Colombian dance?” And are these words, then, necessarily,
redundant? Or do they help expand our thinking to include the many
ways that the “body” is itself a product of social regimes and
performativity?

The advantages of adopting foreign terms such as "performance" may far

outweigh the impossibilities of translation, so here we have rendered the
tag “embodiment” as “corporeidade” and “corporalidad,” even if these do
not capture all the possibilities of the English word. This usage signals not
only a cultural awareness of the body, but also the awareness that the lens
comes from English. We also, however, translate the tag “performático,”
which Diamela Eltit uses in her interview in Spanish, to “performatic,” a
use that, as Diana Taylor suggests in her contribution to this book “Acts of
Transfer”(from The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural
Memory in the Americas), signals the “performatic and visual fields as
separate from, though always embroiled with, the discursive one so
privileged by Western logocentricism.” We thus reinforce 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 pushes technologies as much as it pressures theorists to expand the
underlying categories and structures of thought.

The cover of the book, then, reflects three different ways of entering it.
Any of the three languages will include both original interviews and
interviews in translation. But this also reflects the general purpose of the
book, since as Steuernagel writes in his essay, “to ask the question in
Portuguese or in Spanish is to ask it differently.” By doing so, What is
Performance Studies? is able to reflect a multiplicity of voices and create
a conversation among people who haven’t necessarily met, but who are
thinking about similar issues in very different contexts. Finally, the book
offers yet another instance of this multiplicity, an extensive (though by no
means exhaustive) bibliography of different ways in which performance
studies has been thought of and conceptualized throughout the Americas.

The interviews, the framing essays by theorists, the bibliography, and, yes,
even the tags, anchors, transcripts, translations, and subtitles 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
trilingual book opens new paths for thinking through, in, and with
performance studies in the Americas.