PSi # 15 Conference: PRELUDE PANEL
FRIENDLY FIRE: Theatre Studies and Performance Studies
The PSi#15 Prelude Panel will take place on the opening day of the conference (June 24), bringing together some of the most prominent Performance and Theater Studies scholars. The panelists are invited to engage in a discussion about different approaches to the study of theater and performance within the disciplines of Theatre and Performance Studies. This is not a new issue. It had been at the center of vigorous debates in American academia at the time of the emergence and the subsequent institutionalization of Performance Studies. As Performance Studies expands into continental Europe the difference between these approaches acquires a new meaning. The purpose of this debate is to bring together European and U.S. scholars from the fields of Performance and Theater Studies, giving them an opportunity to address some of these disciplinary, methodological, and political questions on a new terrain, in a new context, and with a renewed sense of urgency.
06/24/2009
Zagrebačko kazalište mladih / Zagreb Youth Theatre
1st session: 10:30 – 12:00
30 min. break
2nd session: 12:30 – 14:00
Participants:
Jill Dolan, Janelle Reinelt, Richard Gough, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Patrice Pavis, Joseph Roach, Nicola Savarese
Moderators:
Lada Čale Feldman, Branislav Jakovljević
Session 1
1) To what extent does Theater Studies comply with the institutional norms of higher education, while Performance Studies, arguably, challenges them? Can one argue that the discipline of Theater Studies belongs to the nation-state, with Performance Studies belonging to a corporate and transnational model of organization? In other words, is Performance Studies only a new scholarly paradigm or a new academic business model as well? How does a local culture determine the study of theater and/or performance? What gets lost in translation into a global – language? Would it be fair to say that Performance Studies is to globalization what anthropology was to colonialism?
2) Does Theater Studies privilege the text (even when it lets it migrate into the syntagm “performance text”), while Performance Studies privileges the body (even when it lets its irreducible materiality yield to discursive practices)? What are the new models of textuality and embodiment offered by these disciplines? Is Theater Studies more concerned with the aesthetic implications of the performing body (its trained “expressivity” and semiotic value), in contrast to Performance Studies’ preference for dealing with the body’s ethico-political resonance and resistance to its own cultural, ideological and medical shaping and control? Are the concomitant issues of subjectivity, as well as of racial and gender identity, to be placed along this line of demarcation, or is the unequal emphasis they have been given within the two fields due to different contexts and traditions of the emergence of the two paradigms?
Session 2
3) What is the relationship between theory and practice in Performance and Theater Studies respectively? Arguably, the continental model of Theater Studies is oriented towards theatrical production, while Performance Studies is geared towards the performative process and a broader cultural analysis. To what extent is the model of transdisciplinary approach in Performance Studies perceived as threatening to the academic and art institutions in European theater culture? And conversely, to what extent has transdisciplinarity, with its dispersion of interests, weakened the transgressive potential of performance and the resistant potential of its studies?
4) Questions from the audience