Letters, Etc.

To the Editor:

I would like to congratulate Syed Jamil Ahmed for his excellent essay providing a detailed description and analysis of the Caryā Nŗtya of Nepal. While I appreciate his critique of the lack of appropriate qualification of such key terms as South Asian and India(n) in an essay I wrote nearly 20 years ago (1985), my purpose in writing the essay was to help push my/our scholarship of performance beyond Eurocentric categories into detailed analyses of the psychophysiological principles and processes of embodiment and "action" different from those ofWestern notions of what it means "to become the character." This is precisely what Syed Jamil Ahmed has done in his essay—furthered our ability to understand the specific relationship between a particular "doer" and what (s)he "does" within a Nepalese Buddhist ritual performance context. It is unfortunate that he did not refer to my recent books in which I provide detailed description and analysis of the psychophysical processes and underlying principles which constitute the "that" for Hindus (and northern Kerala Sufi Muslims in the latter case) within kathakali and kalarippayattu—Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play (Routledge, 2000), and When the Body Becomes All Eyes (Oxford University Press, 1998).

—Phillip Zarrilli

To the Editor:

I just read your comment in TDR, "'Women's Work'?" [TDR 47:4, T180, Winter 2003]. I have been having many internal dialogues about the questions you asked. "Do women seek performance studies because it is marginal?" In all honesty, I think that I do. Marginalization happens when those forced to the fringe of the status quo risk upsetting dominant paradigms in politics, culture, and society. Through subtle or overt tactics, the powerful ones must denigrate those people, such as women, who pose threats to a system that serves the same powerful people who make the rules. I am used to being pushed aside as a thinker because of sexism and my inculcated sense of worthlessness because I am not a white man.

Performance studies is a shifting discipline, continually reconsidering how performance manifests; there are few rules set up for how to approach performance studies as a discipline. Being a woman who is so often culturally caged within limits and boundaries to her work and placement, there is a certain freedom to performance studies. Of course in academia, writing, reading, and producing a cohesive thesis is standard.

As I lay in bed last night, I kept having a vision of more and more tenured women professors. How would universities look if the numbers of powerful positions rolled upside down in favor of the marginalized? I remain uncertain whether or not academia is the best place for women to exercise their intellectual powers, but it's a start. Yes, my heart is deeply tied to being an actor and director, but I also recognize that I feel I must learn as much as I can so that if my peers doubt my expertise, I will have plenty of intellectual and practical knowledge to charge through it all. This will take many years to cultivate and that is why earning a PhD is essential to my future as an artist and as a human being.

My hope is that the "worthlessness" I mentioned earlier will be transformed into importance or, even better, into a revolution—a truly new order of power. What frightens me, however, is that to shape my future in performance studies, concepts of success are exemplified through the same paradigmatic consciousness that put me where I am today. Who is to judge the quality of my thought and the thoughts of other women? If a classroom is full of young female scholars, that creates a stir of questions about aptitude. So what if performance studies is seen as a "softer" discipline. The current trends of "hard" technology and scientific advancement seem to promote a world of harsh lights, scalpels, and weapons of mass destruction, over gardens and poetry.

—Heather Barfield
VORTEX Repertory Theatre