Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (review)

Heike Roms begins her essay in this volume, "The Practice Turn: Performance and the British Academy," with the following sentence: "It is spring of 2007 and although this chapter has not yet been written, I already know it will be published too late" (51). Her self-reflexive statement refers to the fact that the article will not count towards her battery of work for the UK's Research Assessment Exercise in 2008, which determines funding for British universities based on faculty "output." Yet this lateness also references the delay between the volume's conception in 2005 and 2006—in the midst of the debate about whether or not performance studies is imperialist (see McKenzie 2006; Reinelt 2007; Schechner et al. 2007)—and 2010, when the volume was published. Contesting Performance has been served rather than slighted by this delay because its critique of neoliberal institutional culture is more crucial and more legible now than it would have been a few years ago.

Originally conceived as a series of reports from the field about global sites of research in the face of performance studies gone global, the volume is broken into three parts: "Institutionalizing Performance Studies," "Contesting the Academic Discipline through Performance," and "The Power of Performance Practice." The first set of essays includes Diana Taylor's retrospection about the creation of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Gay Macauley's essay about the genesis of performance studies in Australia, Roms's analysis of the emergence of practice as research within the British academy, Shannon Jackson's brief history of "oral interpretation" in the US, and Uchino Tadachi and Takahashi Yuichiro's survey of performance culture in Japan, which includes a section on the influential work of Sato Ayako. Ayako's mode of performance studies is one that foments performative competence in a globalized economy, mimicking the market modalities that the anthology itself decries. Although diverse in subject matter, these essays share a genealogical approach to their sites of research, which are often their academic or geographical home bases. Many of the authors also offer trenchant critiques of "bottom line" thinking within their home institutions.

The essays in the second section of the book tease out many of the tensions between local and global frames of contesting performance while promoting the contributions of nonacademic institutions to the development of performance studies. Theorizing Australian performance as relational (and regionally imbricated) rather than as antipodal to US and European practices, Edward Scheer and Peter Eckersall's essay rethinks Australian performance outside of traditional postcolonial paradigms; Bojana Kunst reveals the role of performance theory as a "material practice" in Slovenia's art scene as it has been documented and developed in Maska, a 100 issue old publication (130); Ray Langenbach and Paul Rae survey how Singapore has been "performatively produced," (137) while arguing against Singaporean exceptionalism; Sibylle Peters's chapter on the setbacks faced by performance research (and performance as research) in the German academy points toward innovations in dance studies, practice, and participatory research; and Lada C+ale Feldman and Marin Blaževic;'s essay reveals that interest in performance studies in Croatia came from scholars in folklore studies, underscoring the diversity of disciplinary investments in the academic field. Each of these essays takes on national as well as local interests, proposing ways for nonacademic and nontraditional institutions to open up some of their more rigid operational structures and disciplinary boundaries.

The last section of the book is composed of essays about particular performances rather than institutions. Khalid Amine's essay on Al-Halqa traces the complex legacy of performance in Morocco, complicating notions of hybridity; Sal Murgiyanto looks at particular collaborations between Indonesian choreographers trained in classical and modern modes, authorizing collaboration as a contestatory mode; Sharon Aronson-Lehavi and Freddie Rokem's essay on the role of theatre in articulating the performativity of the Hebrew language in Israeli theatre as a form of...