Performance Interventions Series Editors: Elaine Aston, University of Lancaster, and Bryan Reynolds, University of California, Irvine Performance Interventions is a series of monographs and essay collections on the- atre, performance, and visual culture that share an underlying commitment to the radical and political potential of the arts in our contemporary moment, or give consideration to performance and to visual culture from the past deemed cru- cial to a social and political present. Performance Interventions moves transversally across artistic and ideological boundaries to publish work that promotes dialogue between practitioners and academics, and interactions between performance communities, educational institutions, and academic disciplines.

Titles include: Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner (editors) AGAINST THEATRE Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (editors) FEMINIST FUTURES? Theatre, Performance, Theory Maaike Bleeker VISUALITY IN THE THEATRE The Locus of Looking James Frieze NAMING THEATRE Demonstrative Diagnosis in Performance Lynette Goddard STAGING BLACK FEMINISMS Identity, Politics, Performance Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (editors) GET REAL: DOCUMENTARY THEATRE PAST AND PRESENT Leslie Hill and Helen Paris (editors) PERFORMANCE AND PLACE D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr and Kim Solga PERFORMANCE AND THE CITY Amelia Howe Kritzer POLITICAL THEATRE IN POST-THATCHER BRITAIN New Writing: 1995–2005 Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms and C. J. W.-L. Wee (editors) CONTESTING PERFORMANCE Global Sites of Research Melissa Sihra (editor) WOMEN IN IRISH DRAMA A Century of Authorship and Representation Performance Interventions Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–4039–4443–6 Hardback 978–1–4039–4444–3 Paperback (outside North America only)

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a stand- ing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above.

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Contesting Performance

Global Sites of Research

Edited by Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms, and C. J. W.-L. Wee

palgrave macmillan Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms & C. J. W.-L. Wee 2010 Individual chapters © contributors 2010 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-00845-8

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28409-2 ISBN 978-0-230-27942-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230279421

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10987654321 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Contents

Acknowledgements vii Notes on the Contributors viii

Introduction: Contesting Performance in an Age of Globalization 1 Jon McKenzie, C. J. W.-L. Wee, and Heike Roms

Part I Institutionalizing Performance Studies 23 1 The Many Lives of Performance: The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics 25 Diana Taylor

2 Interdisciplinary Field or Emerging Discipline?: Performance Studies at the University of Sydney 37 Gay McAuley

3 The Practice Turn: Performance and the British Academy 51 Heike Roms

4 Rhetoric in Ruins: Performance Studies, Speech, and the ‘Americanization’ of the American University 71 Shannon Jackson

5 Performance Studies in Japan 89 Uchino Tadashi and Takahashi Yuichiro

Part II Contesting the Academic Discipline through Performance 107 6 Between Antipodality and Relational Performance: Performance Studies in Australia 109 Edward Scheer and Peter Eckersall

7 Critical Writing and Performance Studies: The Case of the Slovenian Journal Maska 122 Bojana Kunst

v vi Contents

8 ‘Say as I Do’: Performance Research in Singapore 136 Ray Langenbach and Paul Rae

9 The Performance of Performance Research: A Report from Germany 153 Sybylle Peters

10 Translate, or Else: Marking the Glocal Troubles of Performance Research in 168 Lada Caleˇ Feldman and Marin Blaževi´c

Part III The Power of Performance Practice 189 11 Performing Postcoloniality in the Moroccan Scene: Emerging Sites of Hybridity 191 Khalid Amine

12 Searching for the Contemporary in the Traditional: Contemporary Indonesian Dance in Southeast Asia 207 Sal Murgiyanto

13 Word and Action in Israeli Performance 222 Sharon Aronson-Lehavi and Freddie Rokem

14 Democratic Actors and Post-Apartheid Drama: Contesting Performance in Contemporary South Africa 236 Loren Kruger

Index 255 Acknowledgements

Putting together this collection has taken far more time and effort than we ever imagined it would. Working as editors who live on or near three distant continents, organizing our efforts across disjointed time zones, meeting face-to-face only at far-flung conferences, diners, and coffee shops – all of this has given us grudging respect for the collaborative effi- ciencies of multinational corporations. It has all come together – finally. For this coming together, we wish to thank first of all our authors for their work in meeting all (or most) of the deadlines we posed, for their patience when these deadlines were extended, for their understand- ing when there were misunderstandings, and, most of all, for their fine contributions to this book. We also thank participants and organizers of the academic events that helped shape our work and our thinking, specifically those of the ‘Internationalism and Performance Studies’ symposium held at the 2003 New York meeting of the Association of Theatre in Higher Education; the ‘Glocalizing Performance’ workshop held at the 2004 Singapore conference of Performance Studies international; and ‘The Stakes of Performance Research’ seminar held at the Chicago 2006 con- ference of the American Society for Theatre Research. Special thanks goes to Jessica Chalmers for co-organizing the ‘Internationalism and Performance Studies’ symposium. Along the way, numerous scholars have offered advice, suggestions, and criticisms of this project. We wish to thank in particular Rustom Bharucha, Josette Féral, Ric Knowles, Goenawan Mohamad, Richard Schechner, and Diana Taylor. Special thanks to Caroline Levine for her suggestions and input. Special thanks also to Richard Gough, Stephen Bottoms and Performance Research for supporting the publication of Shannon Jackson’s essay here. Our project received much intellectual encouragement from the Per- formance Intervention series editors, Elaine Aston and Bryan Reynolds. Martin Puchner likewise provided early editorial support and guidance. Our senior editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy, ably kept us going even when things had almost ground to a halt. Penny Simmons, our editorial consultant, provided timely work on the text, and our indexer Joshua Taft came through when things counted most – at the end.

vii Notes on the Contributors

Khalid Amine is Senior Professor of Comparative Literature and Per- formance Studies at the English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Tétouan, Morocco. He is the Founding President of The International Centre for Performance Studies (Tangier), Research Fellow at the Institute for Interweaving Performance Cultures (Free University Berlin, 2008–10), and winner of the 2007 Helsinki Prize of the International Federation for Theatre Research (FIRT). Among his publications is Dramatic Art and the Myth of Origins: Fields of Silence (International Centre for Performance Studies Publications, 2007), and his essays have appeared in The Drama Review (TDR), Critical Survey, and Theatre Journal. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University, Israel. She holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the Graduate Center, City Univer- sity of New York, USA. She is a Fulbright grantee and a winner of a Dan David award for postdoctoral studies. She writes on medieval theatre, contemporary theatre and performance, and Israeli theatre and perfor- mance. Her current research project, Modern Mysteries, focuses on the performance of biblical text in avant-garde theatre since modernism. Marin Blaževi´c is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dramaturgy at the Academy of Drama Arts, University of (Croatia), where he is currently working on the research project Branko Gavella: History, The- ory, and Culture of Theatre. He was editor-in-chief of the performing arts journal Frakcija, editor of the Akcija (Action) book series on performing arts and performance theory, and director of the fifteenth Performance Studies international conference (Zagreb, 2009). As a dramaturg, he col- laborates on theatre projects directed by Oliver Frlji´c.He has published widely on performance analysis, the theory of acting, text–performance- text relationships and contemporary performance and theatre practice, in particular on avant-garde and postdramatic theatre in Croatia. He co-edited Branko Gavella: Teorija glume – od materijala do liˇcnosti (Branko Gavella: Theory of Acting – From Material to Personality) (CDU, 2005), and, with Matthew Goulish, Reflections on the Process/Performance: A Reading Companion to Goat Island’s ‘When will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy’ (Frakcija, 2004/5). He is the author of Razgovori o Novom Kazalištu (Conversations on the New Theatre) (CDU, 2007).

viii Notes on the Contributors ix

Lada Caleˇ Feldman is Professor in the Department for Comparative Lit- erature at the University of Zagreb (Croatia), where she teaches drama, theatre, and performance studies. As a former research associate in the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, her areas of interest include also folk theatre, political propaganda, and gender studies. Her publica- tions include Bresanov teatar (Bresan’s theatre) (Hrvatsko društvo kazal- išnih kriti´carai teatrologa, 1989), Teatar u teatru u hrvatskom teatru (Play- within-the-Play in the Croatian Theatre) (Naklada MD, 1997), Euridikini osvrti (Eurydice’s turns) (Centar za ženske studije i Naklada MD, 2001), Femina ludens (Disput, 2005), for which she won the Petar Brecic Award, and, co-authored with M. Cale,ˇ U kanonu (In the Canon) (Disput, 2008). She also co-edited (with I. Prica and R. Senjkovi´c) Fear, Death and Resis- tance – An ethnography of War, Croatia 1991–1992 (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research/Matrix Croatic, 1993) and (with I. Prica) Etnografija domaceg socijalizma (Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2006).

Peter Eckersall teaches in Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His publications include Theorising the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan, 1960–2000 (Brill Aca- demic, 2006), and his edited volume of Kawamura Takeshi’s Nippon Wars and Other Plays will be published by Seagull Press in 2009. Peter’s current research is an Australian Research Council project titled Revolution and the Everyday: Performative Interactions in Art, Theatre and Politics in 1960’s Japan.

Shannon Jackson is Professor of Rhetoric and Professor and Chair of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. She teaches regularly in performance theory, theatre, and the visual arts. Her publications include Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull-House Domesticity (University of Michigan Press, 2000), Professing Performance: Theatre in The Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and numerous essays, published in journals including The Drama Review (TDR), The Journal of Visual Culture, Theatre Survey, Cultural Studies, Modern Drama, The- atre Journal, Theatre Topics, Text and Performance Quarterly, and numerous collections. She is presently completing Supporting Acts (Routledge, forth- coming) and, with Marianne Weems, The Builders Association (MIT Press, forthcoming).

Loren Kruger is Professor of Comparative and English Literatures, African Studies, and Theatre and Performance Studies at the University x Notes on the Contributors of Chicago, USA. She is the author of The National Stage (University of Chicago Press, 1992), The Drama of South Africa (Routledge, 1999), and Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge University Press, 2005), which won the Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature, awarded by the Modern Language Association. Her articles have appeared in many international journals including Diaspora, Frakcija, Journal of Southern African Studies, Poetics Today, Theater, Theater der Zeit, and The Drama Review (TDR). She is a contributing editor of Theatre Research International, and advisory board member for Modern Drama and Scrutiny2.

Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, dramaturg, and performance theoreti- cian. She is a researcher at the University of (), Faculty of Arts’ Scientific and Research Institute, and Assistant Professor at the University of Primorska (Slovenia), where she teaches on the philoso- phy of the body and performing arts. She is a member of the editorial boards of Maska, Amfiteater, and Performance Research, and her essays have appeared in numerous journals and collections. Her books include Impos- sible Body (Maska, 1999), and Dangerous Connections: Body, Philosophy and Relation to the Artificial (Maska, 2004). She also works as a dramaturg and artistic collaborator and leads the international seminar for performing arts in Ljubljana.

Ray Langenbach ([email protected]). Langenbach’s visual art and performances have been presented in the United States, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. His writings on Southeast Asian performance, propaganda, and visual culture have appeared in Performance Research, Afterimage, Oxford Dictionary of Performance, and Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience and Practice of Modern Asian Art (ed. John Clark, Mau- rizio Peleggi, and T. K. Sabapathy; Wild Peony, 2006) among others. He co-convened Performance Studies international’s tenth Conference (Singapore, 2004), Satu Kali International Performance Art Symposium (Kuala Lumpur, 2006), and curated the Performance Art at the 2000 Werkleitz Biennial. Langenbach holds a joint Professorship in Postgrad- uate Artistic Research, Art History, and Theory at the Finnish Academy of Fine Art and at the Finnish Theatre Academy, in the Departments of Research Development and Live Art and Performance. He also serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Performance and Media, Sunway University, Malaysia.

Gay McAuley is an Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She taught Notes on the Contributors xi theatre and film in the French Department before establishing Perfor- mance Studies as an interdisciplinary center in 1989. Her book Space in Performance (University of Michigan Press, 1999) examines the many functions of space in the theatre experience; she then extended her exploration of spatial semiotics to site-based performance practices, with particular reference to the relation between place and memory (Unsta- ble Ground: Performance and the Politics of Place, Peter Lang, 2006). Her current research concerns creative agency in the rehearsal process.

Jon McKenzie is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), where he teaches courses in performance the- ory, new media, and civil disobedience. In addition, he is currently heading a major initiative there in digital humanities involving new media studies, studio-based practices, digital learning, and quantitative humanities research. McKenzie is author of Perform or Else: From Disci- pline to Performance (Routledge, 2001), and such articles as ‘Democracy’s Performance,’ ‘Global Feeling: (Almost) All You Need is Love,’ ‘High Per- formance Schooling,’ ‘StudioLab UMBRELLA,’ and ‘Abu Ghraib and the Society of the Spectacle of the Scaffold.’ His work has appeared in such journals as The Drama Review (TDR), Performance Research, and Parallax, and has been translated into numerous languages, including Croatian, French, German, Polish, and Portuguese. He recently co-edited a spe- cial issue of the performance journal Frakcija on the topic of security, visibility, and civil liberty.

Sal Murgiyanto is Associate Professor of Dance and Performance at the Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan, and the Jakarta Institute of the Arts, Indonesia. He earned his BA (1975) from ASTI National Dance Academy of Indonesia in Yogyakarta; his MA (dance, 1976) from the University of Colorado; and his PhD (performance studies, 1991) from New York University, USA. He is the founder and on the artistic board of the Indonesian Dance Festival (1992–), and also the founder and on the board of the MSPI Society for the Indonesian Performing Arts. Recent publications include: ‘Sardono: Dialogues with Humankind and Nature,’ in Dance Human Right, and Social Justice (ed. Naomi Jackson and Toni Shapiro-Phim; Scarecrow Press, 2008); ‘From Village to Theatrical Stage and Back,’ Asia-Pacific Forum 39 (2008); and ‘Reinventing Tradition: New Dance in Indonesia,’ in Shifting Sands: Dance in Asia and the Pacific (ed. Stephanie Burridge, Ausdance National, 2006).

Sibylle Peters is a researcher, director, and performer. She studied cul- tural studies and philosophy, and worked as researcher and lecturer xii Notes on the Contributors at the Universities of Hamburg, Munich, Berlin (Germany) and Bale (Switzerland). Her current research, undertaken in the context of the research program ‘Interactive Science’ at the University of Gießen (Germany), investigates the academic lecture as performance. As a free- lancing director she has realized performance projects that are concerned primarily with questions of participation and collective research, often in cooperation with performance collective geheimagentur. Peters founded the Forschungstheater im FUNDUS THEATER in Hamburg, a place where children, artists, and scientists meet. Recent publication include Szenen des Vorhangs – Schnittflächen der Künste (co-edited with G. Brandstetter, Rombach, 2008).

Paul Rae is Assistant Professor in the Theatre Studies Program at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Theatre and Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and his work on cosmopolitanism, mobility, and contemporary Southeast Asian performance has appeared in journals such as The Drama Review (TDR), Contemporary Theatre Review, and Performance Research. He is the co-artistic director of spell#7 (www.spell7.net), and, in 2004, worked with other Singapore-based artists and critics to host the tenth annual conference of Performance Studies international (PSi).

Freddie Rokem is the Emanuel Herzikowitz Professor for Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Art and teaches in the Department of Theatre Studies at Tel Aviv University (Israel), where he served as the Dean of the Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts (2002–06). He is also a per- manent Visiting Professor at Helsinki University, Finland. He has been a visiting Professor at the Universities of Munich and Stockholm, Stanford University, the Free University in Berlin, and the University of California, Berkeley. He is editor of Theatre Research International (2006–09). Rokem’s book Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contempo- rary Theatre (University of Iowa Press, 2000) received the ATHE (Associa- tion for Theatre in Higher Education) Prize for best theatre studies book in 2001. Strindberg’s Secret Codes was published by Norvik Press (2004) and Philosophers and Thespians is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

Heike Roms teaches Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK. Originally from Germany, she moved to Wales in 1995 and became the first administrator of PSi (Performance Studies international) (1998– 2001) and co-organizer of the fifth Performance Studies Conference at Aberystwyth in 1999. She has published widely on contemporary per- formance, in particular on work emanating from Wales, for publications Notes on the Contributors xiii such as Performance Research, Frakcija, Inter, Cyfrwng, Ballett/Tanz, and a number of collections. She is a contributing editor of Performance Research and serves on the editorial boards of Frakcija, Inter, and Topia. Heike’s current research project, ‘Locating the early history of performance art in Wales 1965–1979’ (www.performance-wales.org), focuses on the histori- ography of performance art and is supported by a research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Edward Scheer is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Perfor- mance and Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick, UK. He is a founding editor of the journal Performance Paradigm with Peter Ecker- sall. His study of duration in Mike Parr’s performance art, The Infinity Machine, is forthcoming from Schwartz Press. He has edited two books on Artaud – 100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud (Artspace and Power Publi- cations, 2000) and Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader (Routledge, 2004). He is co-editor with Peter Eckersall of The Ends of the 60s: Performance, Media and Contemporary Culture (Performance Paradigm, 2006) and with John Potts of Technologies of Magic: A Cultural Study of Ghosts, Machines and the Uncanny (Power Publications, 2006). He served as chairman of the board of directors of the Performance Space in Sydney from 2005–07. Scheer is the current President of PSi (Performance Studies international).

Takahashi Yuichiro is Professor of Performance Studies in the Depart- ment of Tourism and Transnational Studies, Dokkyo University, Japan. Takahashi is the author of Shintai-ka Suru Chi (Embodied Knowldege; Serica Shobo, 2005). His articles have been anthologized in Alternatives: Debat- ing Theatre Culture in the Age of Con-Fusion (ed. Peter Eckersall, Uchino Tadashi, and Moriyama Naoto; P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2004) and A Kabuki Reader (ed. Samuel L. Leiter; M. E. Sharpe, 2002) and have appeared in The Drama Review (TDR). His translations (into Japanese) include books, articles, and poems by Richard Schechner, Paul Bowles, Jack Kerouac, and Alice B. Toklas.

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Stud- ies and Spanish at New York University, USA. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (University Press of Ken- tucky, 1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (Duke University Press, 1997), and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), which won the Outstanding Book from ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize xiv Notes on the Contributors from the Modern Language Association. She is founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Uchino Tadashi is Professor of Performance Studies in the Depart- ment of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan. He received both his MA in Amer- ican Literature (1984) and his PhD in Performance Studies (2001) from the University of Tokyo. His research interest includes contemporary Japanese and American theatre and performance, and his publications include: The Melodramatic Revenge: Theatre of the Private in the 1980s (in Japanese; Keiso-shobo, 1996); From Melodrama to Performance: The Twen- tieth Century American Theatre (in Japanese; University of Tokyo Press, 2001); Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium (Seagull Press, forthcoming); and Perspectives from the Stage: Tokyo/New York 1995–2005, two volumes (in Japanese; Renga- shobo Shin-sha, forthcoming). He is a contributing editor for The Drama Review (TDR), and an editor for Performing Arts (Kyoto University of Arts and Design) and the Journal of American Literature Studies in Japan.

C. J. W.-L. Wee is Associate Professor of English in the National Insti- tute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has held Visiting Fellowships at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, and at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell Uni- versity, USA. Wee is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (Lexington, 2003) and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capi- talist Development, Singapore (Hong Kong University Press, 2007); he is also the editor of Local Cultures and the ‘New Asia’: The State, Culture, and Capitalism in Southeast Asia (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002). His essays have appeared in journals such as Public Culture, Crit- ical Inquiry, The Drama Review (TDR), and positions: east asia cultures critique. His present research interest is in the contemporary arts, lit- erature, and the culture industries in East Asia, and the relationship between questions of the postcolonial, modernity/modernism, and the contemporary/postmodernism.