The inter-Asia Performance Studies working group unites scholars, practitioners, and artists to explore how Performance Studies intersects with an inter-Asia framework. The working group aims to decenter Western knowledge production in research, artistic practice, and pedagogy while critically intervening in the Cold War framework of “Asian performance.” While inter-Asia cultural discourse has grown over two decades, the specific contributions of theatre and performance to this field remain underexplored, prompting questions about how “inter-Asia Performance Studies” might emerge as its own theoretical intervention. The group seeks to foster epistemological kinship and solidarity by engaging performance as both a method of social inquiry and an ethic-making practice — one that confronts legacies and ongoing impacts of colonisation, authoritarianism, militarisation, marginalisation of indigenous communities and people in precarity, and other ongoing crises across Asia and its diasporas.
We invite scholars, practitioners, and artists to our official launch at PSi#31 in Jakarta as a Working Group to explore shared research interests and/or practices in the many Asias and their diasporas. Following a year of online reading groups and a roundtable at PSi#30, our Jakarta session will use speculative fabulation to co-imagine the future of this field. Together, we will map out theoretical frameworks, methods, pedagogies, and case studies while discovering our intersections, creative frictions, and solidarities. Moving forward, our goals include building networks and collaborative writing, and a culture of mutual support for our research, pedagogy, and artistic practice.
Please see this link for details and sign-up. You are welcome to join our mailing list and WG even if you cannot make it to Jakarta.
bruce.barton