The biggest challenge facing Performance Studies over the next decade is to make good on its efforts to truly internationalize. There continues to be a contradiction between the aspiration to be international and the still-largely Anglo-American base of the organization. The many efforts to expand internationally in terms of membership and program have been very good, but as the discussions at the PSi Singapore conference revealed, the colonial and imperial connotations of knowledge production and control in the West are a concern to scholars in other parts of the world. I actually believe this situation has become more acute over the last years as world events, and the U.S. and U.K. roles in them, have turned more violent and disturbing, escalating conflicts and divisions among many nations and peoples.

We should not be surprised, then, if attitudes toward the West and the U.S. in particular stimulate suspicion or resistance to scholarship which has a kind of brand-name, as Performance Studies surely does. Richard Schechner, for example, has been interested and invested in other cultures for his entire career. Yet as the patriarchal figure of PS, he is also an American who can appear to be engaged in a globalizing project of creating Performance Studies franchises. It is not that this is fair to Schechner—I don’t think it is—but it may be symptomatic of the global politics of scholarship at this particular historical moment.

Thus the difficult task ahead may be to continue to develop Performance Studies while de-emphasizing its brand-name. Rather than establishing its normative or nominal prerogatives, it may be more urgent to cultivate multiple sites of scholarship and creative activity identified by many different rubrics or traditions without trying to overtly identify them as PS. One simple thing we might do to foster change is reconsider the alternating years of our conferences between the U.S. and other international locations. The organization that is PSi may now be strong enough to move around annually without the need to return to the ‘fatherland’ every other year. It’s a small change, and a gamble, but seems a worthwhile place to start.

performance studies international – an allegory

A friend in another country sends me some photographs of a performance she is rehearsing, which I shall not be able to attend.1 The photos show some sort of contraption, involving what looks like a slab or table raised about a metre from the floor (one of the photos has someone sweeping up around the device, which gives a sense of scale), with slits of various sizes in the surface of the table that would enable drainage from the surface; or, alternately, allow very thin objects – screens, say, or frames – to rise up from the complex mechanism that is visibly boxed in underneath. To rise and fall, that is, around whatever might be lying on the table – a body, say – inflecting and accommodating the way that body appears, ‘furnishing forth’, giving it to be performed.

Your performance machine looks, I suggest, like something that might have been found by interplanetary travellers, something gleaming enough it could only have been made by thinking creatures, creatures with resources, maybe even creatures like ourselves. We would have to assume that the device has a function, that it does something, although these photographs make no promises as to what that function could be.

Knowing what we know, we may well take it for an image-making machine, forgetting in that instant – or rather, dimly recalling – that the image-making machines are ourselves, and that this is a capacity we carry through the universe like a virus, images sprouting wherever our senses touch: rank, fantastic and intractable blooms. We don’t even need to travel. I can see from here, realising already – too slowly or too quickly – that the performance machine is only a device for processing raw materials, like a still for making alcoholic spirit out of organic stuff. It isn’t the still – it isn’t even the alcohol – that makes us drunk. Our drunkenness is our own capacity for weakness and delirium and transformation: a capacity which, again, we brought with us when we came here, like a blessing, like a flaw running right through our being.

I have recently been involved in a debate in the field of North American queer theory about the importance of futurity. I will not rehearse those same arguments here but I would like to consider what such a debate has taught me about Performance Studies. Performance Studies, at its most interesting and compelling, is a mode of philosophical description and analysis attuned to the futurity of the object. While I stand against much of the Heideggerian grain, my usage of ‘future’ is nonetheless indebted to many aspects of that phenomenological project. The project of understanding all the objects and events that fall under the rigorous and elastic rubric of performance studies should come with a realization that the category itself is laden with an ecstatic temporality that moves beyond presentism or naïve historicism. I do not deny that the historical in Performance Studies is important but many invocations of historical analysis have relied upon reductive understandings of the temporal. Debates about presence and absence, liveness and mediatization, the contemporary and the historical, archival and the corporeal, memory and forgetting have suffered from reductive understandings of space and time. Futurity and performativity are always indelibly linked. The ‘doing’ at the center of J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative is a forward-dawning phenomenon. Put another way, performativity’s time is like Heidegger’s ecstatic time, a tracking of temporality’s motion where it steps out of linear patterns. Performance too is about an anticipatory temporality. Performance should be known as much more than just a mode of historical transmission with its own idiosyncratic non-linguistic vernacular. A performance is most powerful at the moment precisely before it commences. Which is to say what Ernst Bloch would describe as The-Not-Yet-Here. That moment is performance’s most essential charge and value, that of it’s gleaming and ecstatic potentiality.

Academics are bound upon the wheel of the future. Just as the present moment grows to delicious fullness, the email arrives, “we need your course description for 2009”. So, performance studies and the future? I will answer with the present.

Politically speaking the triangle of Western countries I inhabit physically or by absentee ballot have over these last years been remarkably impervious to action by their citizens, with the partial exception of Italy where change is indeed in the wind. What then must we do?

The dance of the perfectly imagined theoretical and the improvisationally made pedagogical/staged is fine training, I propose, for continued political action. Paradox arms us for this struggle in which our activities seem not to have any calculable effect. That calculation marks the difference in intent – polls versus minds, legislation versus behavior.

But the greatest challenge for me, for all who seek to express their politics through their art/pedagogy/scholarship, is the greatest paradox: to be consistent in our ephemeral actions. To go again and again into the fray encouraging each other not with the proof that our actions ‘work’ on the first, second, third attempt, but rather to strengthen one another with the certainty of another kind of evidence: that we will be present again and again. That we will spell each other when tired. That we will be in place making work that by its reiteration insists on visibility and by its willingness to disperse and regroup insists on flexibility. Working in this paradox allows for respectful distance and solidarity, making temporary universal cause against injustice, creating consistently, again and again, the space for the numbers to finally count.

At this point in its history, performance studies might usefully pause to take stock of the increasing visibility of performance in art institutions in the first few years of the 21st century. Taken alongside what Jon McKenzie identifies as a general turn to performativity within corporate operation and academic enquiry, it is hardly surprising to note that issues of performativity have come to the fore within discourses of contemporary art, and that museums – who once passed over performance in silence – are now falling over themselves to accommodate it within their schedules: whether in terms of gallery exhibitions, live art seasons, or conferences. Such a move would make it difficult now for anybody to suggest that performance art be deemed the “the runt of the litter of contemporary art” as Peggy Phelan was able to do in the early 1990s. Whilst this museological turn is, in many ways, a desirable opening out of curatorial practice to live art and performance more broadly, we might also wish to be mindful of the terms upon which performance art ‘enters’ the museum. If this institutional embrace demonstrates that performance is latterly being taken seriously by art institutions, it might be increasingly important at this time – despite such a welcome embrace – to (re)remember performance’s pejorative histories: how it has been variously and widely approached as a sign – perhaps a paradigmatic sign – of non-serious, or value-less activity. By embracing such histories, as well as by attending to delegitimated forms of performance in the present – whether by dint of genre, venue, location, or the identity of their producers – we may come to appreciate differently the value of putatively non-serious activity and thought. This is not in order to simply revalorise, for example, the purportedly trivial or insignificant as important, but rather to rediscover the promise of performance in its odd or queer approaches to so-called ‘serious’ subjects and forms of attention. The challenge to performance studies today, then, might be to rethink and embody the differing ways in which we take something to be of importance; perhaps even risk not being taken seriously itself in its bid to recognise, and respond to, its objects.

We understand performance as “an essentially contested concept,” as Marvin Carlson puts it.

But it’s not essential that we contest it every day.

Pleasurably and a bit surprisingly, in repeating this year two PS classes from earlier terms, I found a Performance Studies that felt less anxious than it seemed previously, at least about its disciplinary identity. Many of my new undergraduates, in a theory-practice “Intro to Performance Studies,” want to major in theatre or other performance, and ‘interdisciplinarity’ was a playful way in, and a place to consider multiple artistic practices. The graduate students in my seminar on “Theatre and Performance Studies” were encouraged to develop playful ‘performance studies’ research projects, yet most of their work would without doubt be happily supported by the rest of the faculty in Theatre Research.

For the grads, this was in the context of studying recent formulations and critiques of PS and the concept of performance, and looking at the pushback in recent years advocating for theatre and theatricality. Interesting, of course, but the most challenging and energizing work we read sat quite comfortably on the conjunction of our course title. And the research projects for the most part used PS to do the work we cared about—on national cultures, race and history, ethnic community and festive culture, sexuality and the state, even the trope of performance in popular media—with only scant concern for the supposed genre of the scholarship.

Given, among other things:

the plenitude of emergent cultural forms

the performance of terrorism, the security state, and state terror

the politics of pleasure (and of fun)

the local body in global movement(s)

the essential question seems less whether we’re living up to some model of PS, but rather if our work is adequate to the world.