International Performance Research Pedagogies: Towards an Unconditional Discipline?

Abstract

In his lecture titled 'The University without Condition' (2002), Jacques Derrida puts forward the claim that the public university, and within it, the Humanities, must remain unconditional in their autonomy, free of any national, ideological or economic affiliations, able to profess, set free any thought. Rather than being understood as safeguarding a privilege or entitlement, this unconditionality is formulated as a pledge of responsibility, a status that is affirmed and maintained by a profession of faith. Derrida evokes in this essay three notions that are of central importance to the proposed book: the critical role of the Humanities in the organization of what he terms mondialisation or worldwide-ization; the performative, embodied nature of knowledge production, and the order of the 'as if', the training of the imagination to not only make sense of the present, but also to generate the ferment, from which knowledge that does not yet exist may emerge. This marks a characteristically theatrical perspective in as far as the objects of performance studies are critically tied to the lens through which these objects are constituted as performance. The mode of 'as if' shapes the inquiry in two directions: into new ways of thinking and knowing, and new things to think and know about. In the spirit of Derrida's plea of putting to work the unconditional sovereignty of the Humanities, the proposed volume focuses on the specific contribution of International Performance Research to knowledge production in the field. Concretely, this is addressed through essays reflecting on the experiences of a seven-year long collaborative pedagogical effort in the form of a joint international inter-university collaboration funded by the European Commission, namely, the Erasmus Mundus postgraduate programme in

Performativity of the Memory of Religious Places through Sound and Image

“…It coincides with the idea of exploring what emerges, adding that the process of research through artistic practice transcends and interweaves 'place', 'self', 'body ', 'experience', 'mind', 'sensation', 'analysis', 'articulation', 'memory' and 'argument', often in idiosyncratically created structures. This idea is also reinforced by authors such as Haseman (2006), Barrett and Bolt (2007), Kershaw and Nicholson (2011), Bonnenfant (2012), Leavy (2015) and Bala et al (2017) when they argue that because this artistic practice is individual, unique and particular, these models of research through artistic practice can be adapted using different approaches, as in a process of artistic research all aspects are often in motion and development (Arlander 2012). Thus, there is no general form of research that the researcher-artist can attempt to approximate, just as there is no universally accepted concept of art on which to base art-based research (Arlander 2012).…”

Dekolonisierung der Theaterwissenschaft und Performance Studies

“…Die Dekolonisierung des Wissens zu fordern, bedeutet für mich, die Notwendigkeit zu unterscheiden, wann die Grenzen der Disziplin nützlich sind und wann sie lediglich dazu dienen, den Status Quo von Hierarchien und Hegemonien beizubehalten. Das Versprechen, das Theaterwissenschaft und Performance Studies für mich beinhalten, liegt demnach in dem Gebot des »als ob«, in dem Trainieren der Vorstellungskraft, um nicht nur die Gegenwart verstehen zu können, sondern auch das Gärmittel zu erzeugen, aus dem Wissen, welches noch nicht existiert, wachsen kann(Bala, Gluhovic, Korsberg & Röttger 2017).…”