Performance Studies Focus Group 11Th Annual Pre-Conference REAL PLAY: Exploring the “Reality” of Virtual Worlds, Games, and Experiences

ATHE Performance Studies Focus Group 11th Annual Pre-Conference REAL PLAY: Exploring the “Reality” of Virtual Worlds, Games, and Experiences

curated by Beth Hoffmann and Barnaby King

SFG welcomes you to its eleventh annual pre-conference, which, taking place in the heart of the US “play Ptourism” market, investigates the paradoxical ways in which various versions of “play” become pressed into service of the “real” and vice versa. This focus on what might be called the authenticities of play serves as a way of linking together critical issues central to very different resonances of the term: the construction of touristic desires; the dynamics of online gaming cultures; and the relationship between play and efficacy in resistance movements.

The “real play” theme was initially inspired by Jane McGonigal’s New York Times bestselling book,Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World(Penguin 2011), in which she argues that “games can be a real solution to problems, and a real source of happiness.” She blends performance studies with her experience as a game designer to break down an assumed boundary between play and reality, advocating a broader social application of the technologies and behaviors inherent to play in order to bring about positive social change. But while McGonigal’s focus is ultimately on making play do certain kinds of work, this pre-conference will take a step back to think about how concepts of “play” and “reality” or “play” and “work” historically have been produced in relation to one another.

As a counterpoint to Reality is Broken, L.M. Bogad’s central participation in the pre-conference will foreground a different conception of play’s efficacy: namely, as a powerful tool for distinctly politicized resistance. Bogad will help us explore what he calls ‘tactical performance,’ which he describes as a conceptualization of “serious play” with the aim of producing “performative, nonviolent images to contest and critique power.”

“Play” has long performed a wide range of structural functions in the field of performance studies, appearing as rhetoric, research method, hermeneutic, theoretical concept, practice, and so on. As a nod to this, the pre- conference likewise makes use of a series of different methods of scholarly exchange to conduct its explorations, including a scholarly roundtable, a practical workshop, and a practice-as-research game designed to unlock the multiple and contradictory potentialities of a massively-scaled theme park.

Thanks for joining us! We look forward to a vibrant dialogue, starting here at the pre-conference and continuing throughout ATHE. Sponsored by the Association for Asian Performance Edited by Kathy Foley

two issues per year Dedicated to the performing arts of Asia, both traditional and modern, print editions available Asian Th eatre Journal aims to facilitate from UH Press the exchange of knowledge throughout the international theatrical community electronic editions for the mutual benefi t of all interested available from Project scholars and artists. Th is engaging, Muse (muse.jhu.edu) intercultural journal off ers descriptive and analytical articles, original plays and back issues older than play translations, book and audiovisual three years availablelable reviews, and reports of current theatrical actactivitiesiiiivities i inn A Asia.sia. F Full-colorull-colo plates and online from JSTORTOR bblack-and-whitelack-and-white photographsphotograp illustrate (www.jstor.org)org) eeachach issuissue.e.e � for more information visit www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/atjw.uhpress.hawaii.edu or contact UHP Journals tel: 808-956-8833808 956 8833 � fax: 808-988-6052808 98 email: uhpjourn@[email protected] University of Hawai‘i Pressessess 2840 Kolowalu Street www.uhpress.hawaii.edu Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822 About PSFG

he Performance Studies Focus Group (PSFG), which has been in existence for over a decade, has changed Tthe shape of the conference as a whole, in both form and content. Since its inception the PSFG has expanded the scope of ATHE’s scholarship, drawing upon interdisciplinary methods, scholars, and ideas to broaden the field. The PSFG has consistently sponsored a wide variety of multidisciplinary panels and has, within the context of ATHE, expanded the scholarship and discussion of the parameters and functions of “performance.” Since 2003, the PSFG has hosted an exciting preconference exploring in depth a variety of PS topics.

PSFG Officers and Members-at-Large 2012–2013

Focus Group Representative Megan Shea

Conference Planner Joseph Cermatori

Treasurer Lindsay Adamson Livingston

Secretary Melissa Wong

Webmaster Raimondo Genna

Graduate Student Representative Gillian Young

Members-at-Large Patrick McKelvey Lindsay Gross Nikki Yeboah Miriam Felton-Dansky Jason Fitzgerald

2013 Pre-Conference Organizers Beth Hoffmann and Barnaby King

Program Design Raimondo Genna

If you would like to learn more about PSFG, please attend our annual membership meetings. See the ATHE program for the times and locations of these meetings. PSFG Pre-Conference Schedule

Wed. 31 July 3.15 pm 9.30 am Vans depart for park from outside hotel lobby. Registration and Tea/Coffee 4.00 pm 10 am - 12 pm Arrive at Universal’s Islands of Adventure Theme Park. We will play an immersive alternate-reality game titled Roundtable discussion on the disciplinary “state of The Theme Park is Broken. play” in performance studies. Participants: L.M. Bogad, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Jill 9.00 pm Dolan, D. Soyini Madison, Bruce McConachie, and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck. Park closes.

12 - 1 pm 9.15 pm Working Groups meet over lunch to plan strategy for Reception. game or to discuss other business. Meet outside the Latin Quarter in Universal CityWalk See program insert for lunch details. and await instructions.

1 - 2.45 pm Thurs. 1 Aug Workshop. 10 am -12 pm On tactical performance, led by L.M. Bogad. Debriefing session and award ceremony. 2.45 - 3.15 pm Break. Preparations for departure. About Featured Guest L.M. Bogad

. M. Bogad (www.lmbogad.com) is an author concerned with creative nonviolent Lprotest and its potential to change the world. He writes, performs, and conspires with mischievous artists such as Agit-Pop, the Yes Men, and La Pocha Nostra. He is a veteran of the Lincoln Center Theatre Director’s Laboratory, and a co-founder of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (www.clownarmy.org). He teaches as a professor of political performance at the University of California at Davis, and is the Founding Director of the west coast branch of the Center for Artistic Activism.

Bogad’s newest performance, ECONOMUSIC: Keeping Score, appeared in NYC at the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics; at festivals in Helsinki and Sao Paulo; and at SF MOMA. His play, COINTELSHOW: A Patriot Act was published by PM Press. He also wrote and produced a documentary, Radical Ridicule: Serious Play and the Republican National Convention.

Bogad’s first book, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, analyzes the international campaigns of performance artists who run for public office as a radical prank. His next book, Tactical Performance: On the Theory and Practice of Serious Play, analyzes and critiques the use of guerrilla theatre/art for human/civil rights, social justice, labor and environmental campaigns.

Bogad has led Tactical Performance workshops in the US, Europe, North Africa, and South America, helping activists create performative, nonviolent images to contest and critique power. Department of Theatre

MFA Programs in Directing and Design/Technology– Costume • Lighting • Scenic • Sound • Technical Direction

BFA Programs in Theatre, Acting, Musical Theatre, and Design/Technology– Costume • Lighting • Scenic • Sound • Technical Direction

Information: www.usd.edu/theatre or 605.677.5418

RENT, Spring 2013 About the Roundtable Participants

ennifer DeVere Brody serves as JProfessor and Chair of the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University where she is affiliated with in the Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). Her essays appear in Theatre Journal, Signs, Genders, Callaloo, Text and Performance Quarterly and numerous edited volumes. Her books, Impossible Purities (Duke University Press, 1998) and Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Duke University Press, 2008) both discuss relations among sexuality, gender, racialization, visual studies and performance. She served as the President of the Women and Theatre Program and on the board of Women and Performance. She held the Board of Visitors Chair at Northwestern University. Her work in queer and race studies has been supported by the Ford and Mellon Foundations as well as by the Monette Horowitz Trust for Research Against Homophobia. Currently, she is working with colleagues on the re-publication of James Baldwin’s illustrated book, Little Man, Little Man and on a new monograph about the intersections of sculpture and performance.

ill Dolan is the Annan Professor of English and Theatre, and directs the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at JPrinceton University. Among other books and articles, she is the author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic, originally published in 1988 and released in 2012 as an anniversary edition with a new introduction and, most recently The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for the Stage and Screen, which will be out this July from Palgrave 2013. Her blog, The Feminist Spectator, won the 2010-2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. She won ATHE’s award for outstanding teaching in 2011. PSFG . Soyini Madison is Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, with appointments in Dthe Program of African Studies and the Department of Anthropology. Professor Madison lived and worked in Ghana, as a Senior Fulbright Scholar conducting field research on the interconnections between traditional religion, political economy, and indigenous performance tactics. Recent books include: African Dress: Fashion, Agency, Performance (Bloomsbury 2013) co-edited with Karen T. Hansen; Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance, 2nd.ed (Sage 2012); Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance (Cambridge UP 2010); and The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies (Sage 2006), co- edited with Judith Hamera.

ruce McConachie is Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre and Performance Studies and also the Head of the Certificate BProgram in Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published widely in theatre history, historiography, cognition and theatre, and performance studies. Recent books include: American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War (2003), Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (2008), Theatre Histories: An Introduction (with three co-authors) (2nd edn, 2010), and Theatre & Mind (2013). McConachie is currently working on Evolution, Cognition, and Performance: Toward A Biocultural Performance Studies and an anthology of essays, Teaching Theatre and Performance Studies: A Cognitive Perspective. The co- editor of “Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance” for Palgrave Macmillan, master of arts program in he has guided more than a dozen books to theater and performance studies publication in this series. His service to the profession includes the presidencies of the American Theatre and Drama Society and This two-year master’s program integrates multidisciplinary approaches to the American Society for Theatre Research. performance into an intense study of theater grounded in cultural history, critical theory, and applied practice. In the Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis, students can: ennifer Parker-Starbuck is a Reader in the Department of Drama, Theatre and • Prepare for competitive PhD programs in theater and performance studies by J working with leading faculty in performing arts, as well as art, anthropology, Performance at Roehampton University, classics, dance, film and media studies, English, non-Anglophone languages London. She is author of Cyborg Theatre: and literatures, music, and women, gender and sexuality studies. Corporeal/Technological Intersections • Integrate theory and practice both in coursework and by working on productions with our creative team of directors, designers and choreographers. in Multimedia Performance (Palgrave • Attend symposia focused on debates in contemporary scholarship. Macmillan, 2011), as well as multiple book • chapters and articles. Her work focuses upon Access holdings in the university’s archives and special collections, including drafts of Samuel Beckett’s Play (1963), early writings by historical and theoretical implications of Tennessee Williams, and unedited documentary footage from Eyes on the Prize (1987; 1990). new media/multimedia and its relationship to the body in performance and has Washington University is located in St. Louis, expanded to include work on animality and an accessible Midwestern city that boasts cultural amenities such as a world-class symphony, several the non-human in performance. She serves world-class art museums, historical archives, a as Assistant Editor of PAJ: A Journal of vibrant independent theater and music scene, and many other attractions. For more information please visit pad.artsci. Performance and Art and Associate Editor wustl.edu/graduate. of the International Journal of Performance Please recommend our program to your most promising Arts and Digital Media. students! http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/drama- Application deadline is January 15th theatre-and-performance/ Roundtable Provocation Part I: “Play” and Origin Mythologies of Performance Studies

Victor Turner’s description of play as “a liminal or liminoid mode, essentially interstitial, betwixt-and-between all standard taxonomic nodes,” and as “recalcitrant to localization, to placement, to fixation - a joker in the neuroanthropological act,” served a constitutive role in the foundation of the “antidiscipline” of performance studies (The Anthropology of Performance 167-68). Indeed, in the theoretical debates, conversations, and assertions that founded performance studies in the 1960s and 70s, an optimistic gloss on the nature of “play” is never very far away. Later, Dwight Conquergood pointed to play as a central conceptual tenet in the “performative turn in anthropology,” echoing Turner’s celebratory language in describing play as “innovation, experimentation, frame, reflection, agitation, irony, parody, jest, clowning, and carnival.” Play, Conquergood argued, promotes self-knowledge, critique, and transformation; studying it helps us “understand the unmasking and unmaking tendencies that keep cultures open and in a continuous state of productive tension” (Poetics, Play, Process, and Power 83).

Yet it has also been argued that such exuberant and liberatory formulations of play ultimately risk reifying unhelpful conceptual binaries, such as play vs. work; fun vs. seriousness; indicative vs. subjunctive; and anti-structure vs. structure. While at times play might constitute a subjunctive, liminal space from which to critique the present and imagine a new future, it has also been dragged back into the service of normativity—whereupon, it could be argued, new concepts were launched periodically to take its place as the “reliably” disruptive element in performance.

Part II: “Play” and Future Mythologies of Performance Studies

Revisiting such origin stories begs questions about the contextual specificity of the concept of “play,” and how, more than thirty years later, we currently understand the conceptual work “play” does for the field. The tone of optimism and positivity that permeates Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, the sense that play of different kinds can be harnessed as a means of positive social change, in some ways evokes those early celebrations of play in a nascent performance studies. In that sense, through McGonigal’s vision, mythologized origins are re-emerging as a mythologized future.

For example, regarding games as a particular mode of play, McGonigal advocates that “games can be a real solution to problems, and a real source of happiness” (13, emphasis added). She blends performance theory with her experience as a game designer to break down an assumed boundary between play and reality, suggesting a social application of the technologies and behaviors inherent to computer games 1) to undo the alienating social effects of late capitalism, and 2) to empower members of local communities throughout the world to find their own solutions to various infrastructural, educational, and economic challenges. Indeed, she describes Alternative Reality Games (ARGs) as “antiescapist,” and “small-scale probes of the future,” not dissimilar from what Jill Dolan describes as performance’s ability to “capture fleeting intimations of a better world” (McGonigal 126; Dolan, Utopia in Performance 2).

Of course, a decontextualized endorsement of gaming-as-form fails to consider problems such as who has access to game- playing technology and who benefits from its restricted access, or the kinds of gendered, classed, raced, and sexualized stereotypes that are reinscribed by commercial video games, such as Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. In that sense, McGonigal’s uncannily familiar optimism clearly comprises a challenge to the critical norms of contemporary performance studies. But perhaps for that very reason, Reality is Broken serves as (yet another) prompt to think differently about how we come to recognize the distinction between “resistance” and ideological complicity under the conditions of performance; in the context of play and contemporary gaming practices, it provides a fresh opportunity to gain insight into that which is unpredictable and finally indeterminate in the field of the political. In other words, Reality is Broken challenges us to consider how play operates as a transformational practice without (to use Stuart Hall’s phrase) “guarantees”: comprising subversive, critical, and counter-cultural elements, while at the same time drawing upon popularity, accessibility, and articulation into “mainstream” or hegemonic cultural and economic practices to leverage sufficient power to bring about far-reaching, positive social change. PSFG Part III: Questions

1. In Performance Studies: An Introduction, Richard Schechner acknowledges the perspectival nature of play (i.e., the same act can be “play” for me, “work” for you). What might the unstable ontology of “play” help us understand about the sometimes contradictory conceptual work that “play” has performed for the field of performance studies, both in the accounts of its pasts and in our imagination of its futures? If play is inherently ontologically unstable, how can we avoid the trap of valorizing its disruptive effects while de-emphasizing its normative effects and vice versa? Likewise, how can we avoid an unsatisfactory “have-it-both-ways”-style deferral of the issue?

2. To what degree does the alignment of “play” with different research methodologies (e.g. neuroscience, ethnography) constitute an a priori claim about the ontology of play? If play is, as many theorists have argued, an autotelic, prelingual, precultural human activity, does this status foreclose the possibility of a politics or an ethics THE INSTITUTE FOR COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND SOCIETY (ICLS) Columbia University of play? How does this relate to debates about the efficacy of play especially in subfields such as applied performance and “gaming for good”? The Institute for Comparative Literature (ICLS) and Society at Columbia University brings together the humanities and the social sciences, with law, 3. McGonigal argues that commodification architecture and the and arts, places questions of translation and comparativism at the center of its mission. The work of the Institute is fully and capitalist alienation require making historical in its range. Of particular interest to the is Institute the -‐ post Cold War work more like play to mitigate capital’s rethinking of area studies paradigms in relationship to new developments in the discipline of comparative literature itself. anti-humanist effects. What, then, ICLS organizes a range of events open to the public is at stake in any attempt to enforce a distinction between “labor” and , and houses the undergraduate and graduate programs in Comparative Literature and Society “play?” Similarly, what are the risks at Columbia University, as well undergraduate as the program in Medicine, of proclaiming the world-changing Literature, and Society, and the graduate certificate in Psychoanalytic Studies. potentials of gaming, while ignoring its explicit alliance with venture capital, In our curriculum, as well as in our conferences, lecture series and workshops, video game industries, and global we bring a literature-‐focused study of language and to culture the area studies as they rethink their mandate; and, conversely, we try to give substance and finance institutions such as the World recognition to those directions in comparative literature that can benefit from Bank? What are the risks of refusing the breadth of knowledge produced by a reshaped area studies. In this effort, to engage gaming’s world-changing we work collaboratively with the social sciences. The name of our endeavor — potential because of these affiliations? Institute for Comparative Literature and — Society acknowledges that goal.

4. In The Tourist,Dean MacCannell ICLS’s engagements with the arts extend beyond literature to include performance, film, music and plastic forms, as well as art history and aesthetic famously argued that touristic desire theory. Past events with artists, filmmakers and musicians include can be understood as the desire for performances, screenings and conversations with: Toni Morrison and Richard authentic experiences (i.e., the desire Danielpour (about the opera ‘Margaret Garner’); Assia er Djebar (about h opera for something “more real” than tourism ‘The Daughters of Ishmael’); Joe Diebes; Mieke Bal; William Kentridge; and Daniel Barenboim. itself). How does this hold true for play tourism to such locations as Disney World? To what degree do these parks provide an authentic experience, as opposed to an escape from reality? Akin to commodification, does the “Disneyization” of public spaces mean there is no “outside” of the theme park? In a touristic context, then, what is at icls.columbia.edu stake in calling “play,” real? For more information, www.facebook.com/ICLSColumbia please visit:

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Performance studies at NorthwesterN UNiversity

The Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University lives at the sprawling intersection of personal narrative, literature, culture, technology, and performance theory. We value the study and practice of performance: examining and enacting literary texts, analyzing and theorizing on cultural rituals, public identities, and political positions. Our students and faculty are vibrant scholars who question cultural assumptions and influence national performance scholarship and production.

dePartment faculty Programs of study Joshua Chambers-Letson D. Soyini Madison, chair MA/PhD in Performance Studies Paul Edwards Ramón Rivera-Servera BA/BS in Performance Studies Marcela A. Fuentes Carol Simpson Stern E. Patrick Johnson Mary Zimmerman