Performance Studies in Canada

Abstract

Performance Studies in Canada Natalie Alvarez Performance studies—variously described as a trans-, inter-, anti-, post-, and pre-disciplinary field of inquiry—came to prominence in the academy in the 1970s. Its originary narratives (in the eastern US, at least) often centre on the collaboration of anthropologist Victor Turner and NYU’s Richard Schechner who wanted to free performance from its derivative relation to the dramatic text (the quaint “string quartet of the 21st century,” Schechner declared [8]1) and turn instead to an investigation of performance as both a mode of inquiry and an object of study. Performance studies was positioned as a “new paradigm,” an optic, and a method of analyzing culture as constituted by performances, practices that are embodied, enacted, hailed, and asserted. But performance studies also offered a way of thinking about performance as an epistemology and a way of knowing,2 one that circumvented a Eurocentric understanding of knowledge as housed in texts toward an understanding of how embodied practices are themselves vehicles of knowledge, history, and cultural memory. When framed as an epistemology, performance studies’ “origins” may more appropriately lie, anachronistically, not at NYU but in pre-colonial indigenous traditions and practices, as both Jill Carter and Susan Bennett’s pieces in these pages remind us.3 Performance studies’ contested status as a discipline is largely due to the diversity of its methods, aims, and subjects of study, which move across the disciplinary boundaries of sociology, anthropology, linguistics, visual arts, and philosophy, to name a few. One would think that its disciplinary inclusiveness would make it a very attractive and viable enterprise in Canadian universities, which often try to differentiate themselves on the basis of new and exciting initiatives in “interdisciplinarity.” But as the pieces in this Views and Reviews section address, performance studies has had little uptake and support by both universities and funding bodies in Canada. What accounts for this limited traction? Does performance studies exist as a field in Canada and if so, what are the contours and characteristics of its discursive practices within our national borders—borders that the field itself belies? This issue’s Views and Reviews reprises, and continues, a conversation initiated by a plenary panel on performance studies in Canada, organized by Laura Levin and Lisa Wolford Wylam, at the sixteenth annual Performance Studies international conference held in Toronto in June 2010. Jill Carter joins panelists Susan Bennett, Erin Hurley, Naila Keleta-Mae, and Ric Knowles to ask after the [End Page 73] state of the discipline in Canada from distinct vantage points, reminding us of how “the history of a discipline changes depending upon where one decides to begin” and “how such investigations can only be done with an awareness of the contingent, slippery, and decidedly contextual nature of knowledge formation” (Jackson 10). I turn the page over to Laura Levin who, as panel chair, begins the conversation and sets the stage for the views that follow. Notes 1. Richard Schechner made this infamous remark during a keynote panel at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education in 1992. His comments were later printed in TDR. See Schechner. 2. I am alluding here to Dwight Conquergood’s invocation of performance “as a way of knowing” in his “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” TDR 46.2 (2002): 145–156. 3. For an incisive overview of performance studies as both a methodology and an epistemology, particularly in the context of indigenous performance in the Americas, see the first chapter of Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (London: Duke UP, 2003). Works Cited Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy From Philology to Performativity. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. Google Scholar Schechner, Richard. “A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy,” TDR 36.4 (1992): 7–10. Google Scholar Copyright © 2012 University of Toronto Press Inc