Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research
As its title suggests, Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms, and C. J. W.-L. Wee's edited collection invites us to "contest" a monolithic definition of performance studies, looking to "global sites of research" for alternatives to Richard Schechner's approach to performance studies (US PS). The editors argue that, while Schechner's broad-spectrum approach includes the entire globe, it is not the only approach from the entire globe, and to assume that it is promotes intellectual hegemony and cultural imperialism. To be clear, this book is not a critique of Schechner's approach, but, rather, of the central place this approach has assumed in academies worldwide. The volume is divided into three sections, each with contributions from an international mix of scholars: the essays in the first section offer historical overviews of the contested terrain the study of performance occupies within the context of the academy; those in the second section provide accounts of contestations of US PS offered by research sites outside of the academy; and those in the third section outline case studies of alternative methodologies generated by and applied to the study of indigenous performance traditions from diverse locations around the globe. Taken together, the essays question a monolithic definition of performance; query the relationship of performance studies to practice; consider the place of the participant-observer in the study of performance; insist on the necessity of considering indigenous understandings of performance when constructing theories of performance, rather than simply incorporating indigenous examples into the hegemony of US PS; and trace the development of performance studies over time. The editors identify the stakes of this contestation as academic, but also, more importantly, as social and political, given the influence of performance studies upon its objects of analysis. As they aver, a truly global understanding of performance studies promises to generate new ways of understanding cosmopolitanism, locality, and interculturalism.
The chapters in the first third of the book follow a consistent pattern: an institutional history; an explanation of the issues raised by this history (often relative to US PS); and an implied or briefly stated argument about this material. Diana Taylor, for example, traces the origins of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, noting how it has dealt with intractable issues of translation, access to performance, and technological mediation. She argues that these issues are precisely what gives performance studies its value. For her part, Gay McAuley maintains that Australian PS corrects for the US PS's aversion to theatre, while Heike Roms offers a historical account of performance studies in the UK that highlights the artificiality of the researcher/practitioner divide. In her discussion of Northwestern University's oral interpretation approach to PS, Shannon Jackson points to the political ramifications of treating everyday narratives as performance. Uchino Tadashi and Takahashi Yuichiro provocatively contrast the narrow nationalism of Japanese tertiary education with the perceived openness of US PS's international approach.
The second section moves from the history of the academy to histories of nonacademic sites of performance studies, such as an arts journal, an artistic collaboration, and intersections between political activists and artists. The issue of individual and national identity provides a politically charged through-line and a contrast to the poststructuralist concerns of US PS. Three essays conclude with a call for analyzing the evolving relationship between research and performance: Sibylle Peters offers a typology of German PS, suggesting a direct connection between it and German artistic production; Lada Cale Feldman and Marin Blaževic explore Croatian PS through the lens of translation and speech act theory; and Bojana Kunst documents the evolution [End Page 662] performative speech and identity to argue that state-sponsored performances recreate an official identity that, in turn, demands further speech from audience and performer. Edward Scheer and Peter Eckersall explore the ways in which the restructuring of boundaries provided by the "immature and undisciplined" field of Australian PS challenges the traditional binaries of postcolonial studies (119...
