SET YOUR MIND TO MISPERFORMANCE!
WELCOME TO ZAGREB! WELCOME TO CROATIA!
No city compares to
No home is more dear to me.
Youthful and fair, my dear hometown,
Forever in my heart you’ll be
Zaaaagreeeb, Zaaaagreeeb, my best wishes go your way,
Zaaagreeb, Zaaagreeeeb, beloved to me you stay.
Thus goes the most popular song about our town, well-known to all who live here, be they native “Agramers” or descendants of recent newcomers from other regions. We wonder if, at the close of the 15th PSi conference, Zagreb’s performance will have matched the wishful thinking of the quoted verses. Not that we are so self-indulgent as to try to rival the world’s metropolises, and far be it that we should find our country flawless; on the contrary, Zagreb and Croatia are the perfect site for our conference precisely because their history and tradition, their everyday life, future projects and even the country’s geography, make them worry constantly about all kinds of misperformance problems.
Croats are proud of their ancient 7th century roots, but as this remarkable history sometimes does not seem dignifying enough, they like to imagine a fantastic Iranian origin, or elaborate on scientific evidence of 24,000-year-old genetic heritage. They are not satisfied with the number of luminaries they have given the world, so they like to invent other, more fabulous ones, such as the 10th century founder of Cairo (go to page http://www.croatianhistory.net/etf/et01.html). The independence of their medieval kingdom did not preserve the country from the uncomfortable fate of willy-nilly turning into a misfitting component of other empires, kingdoms and multi-ethnic states throughout its history.
Until twenty years ago and for half a century, they used to blame socialism for all the unsatisfactory aspects of their life that made them feel inadequate with respect to the free world; now that they enjoy the freedom they had been yearning for, and alongside with it the absence of the abhorred proclamations of social equality, they are not so sure if the free world they had once admired and envied is truly adequate to itself.
After the War of Independence in the 1990s, Croatia is still struggling to perform a double role, that of an autonomous political entity, with its own organization, identity and stable borders, and that of a legitimate member of the European Union, finally allowed to enter the international community. In either case, the outcome depends heavily on the assessment of its abilities in the art of performing – courting the powerful, feigning virtue, coping with greedy pretenses. Its traditional borderline position entails a permanent sense of misfitting. However, the people of Croatia – or at least many of its artists, performers, scholars and intellectuals – have been granted the opportunity to learn that being ‘unsuitable’ involves the benefit of difference, fuelling their urge to strive through the fact that even the best of performances can always be undermined by uncontrollable misfires. Instead of accepting the ’saying’ ironically derived from a verse by which Miroslav Krleža, a major 20th century author, summed up the proverbial passivity and resignation typical of an oppressed mentality – “However we may do, somehow we’ll make do” – we have decided to confront the predicament of misperformance and turn it into an issue that concerns all of us.
Let us paraphrase the Renaissance playwright Marin Držić: “Set your mind to misperformance!”
LOCAL TENDENCIES IN PERFORMANCE RESEARCH
Despite the fact that performance research is now practiced at the Academy of Drama Arts, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, in Croatia it is still a troubled disciplinary field without an institutionally established academic influence. The disciplinary traditions of folklore research, literary theory and theater studies ruling over the reception, translation and implementation of the very terms of performance, the performative and performativity, were variously “imported” and often divergent, if not in direct conflict. It is a folklore researcher, Maja Bošković-Stulli, who gets the credit for first introducing and translating into Croatian the term performance, after having participated at the Helsinki conference on folk narrative research in 1974, where she first came in touch with the approach presented by American folklorists Dan Ben Amos and Alan Dundes.
The notion of performance permeated literary criticism much later, in the nineties: highly influenced by, among others, Austin’s concept of the performative, the theoretical turn led by Vladimir Biti gathered researchers in literary, media and cultural studies, interested precisely in the traces of performative disturbance and the breaching of the borders of the linguistic code by its either undisclosed or unpredictable future modes of embodiment. At the same time, the new generation of performing arts practitioners and theorists, now largely engaged in the Center for Drama Art, strongly reacted against both the current repertoires in major Croatian theaters and the positivist legacy of Theaterwissenschaft, demonstrating a much broader theoretical and methodological horizon, and demanding a recuperation of the marginalized avant-garde, as well as a fuller acknowledgement of the contemporary hybrid performance and theater practice.
In the mid 1990s, the Center for Drama Art launched Frakcija Performing Arts Journal. Its founder, Goran Sergej Pristaš, helmed the journal for ten years as editor-in-chief. As a bilingual (Croatian/English) edition since 1999, Frakcija shifted the focus of performance research and criticism to the topical production of postdramatic theater, contemporary dance and performance art.
PSi # 15 is the first instance of these three tendencies of performance research converging on a joint project, the conference and its theme.
PSi # 15 THEME AND RATIONALE
The aim of the fifteenth PSi conference call was to address a spectrum of cultural, organizational, technological and political performances by focusing on the causes and the problems of performance mistakes, misreadings, “(in)felicities”, misunderstandings and misfittings – i.e., those outcomes of performance that are susceptible to provoking disturbances – even deep alterations – within diverse spheres of life: from the private to the social and political, ranging from slips of tongue, via artistic avant-garde and aborted revolutions, to environmental disasters; from ideological distortions and abuses of power to new perspectives and resistance to authorities of any kind.
In determining the conference theme, our intention was to return to performance as the basic concept of our field. While we want to examine performance as a phenomenon, as experience and a function, a process, a complex and a concept, our aim was to approach it from the perspective of failure, non-functionality, futility, and inoperativeness.
Since our broad notion of performance and its possible misfires owe a great deal to Austin’s philosophy of language, rooted as it is in the paradigmatic Western metaphysical dichotomies of play vs. seriousness and success vs. failure, efficiency vs. loss, we are often forced to perceive and value cultural forms and events in terms of binary oppositions. At the same time, modernism embraced the apparently inessential, the misguiding, and the missing as leeway for a new perspective on the very constitution of new cultural systems.
On the one hand, the notions of mistake and infelicity are deeply embedded in modern western thought. From the Freudian slip via J. L. Austin’s misfires, the Girardian and the Derridean pharmakos/pharmakon and the Lacanian misrecognition, to Goffmanian breaches in the construction of social reality, Judith Butler’s failed gender-performances and Homi Bhabha´s inappropriate signifiers and anomalous representations, scholars have evaluated the irregular, the unforeseeable, and the unaccountable – in a word, the mistaken – as essential to rethinking the categories of what is right, correct, true, whole and serious.
On the other hand, by abandoning classical ideas of universality and verisimilitude, modernist art pushed the mistake to its empowering limit. From Futurist evenings and Dada´s cabarets to Action Theater, events, happenings and performance-theater; from performance art to the postdramatic concept of afformance art, performative aesthetic practices not only intentionally exposed themselves to the risk of accident, excess, and contingency, but also managed to harness their liminality as a normative – even marketable – quality.
With a view to exploring linguistic, aesthetic, ritual, cultural, organizational and political performances, the conference wanted to deal with various “misfit” issues in performance studies, performing arts, theater studies, literary criticism, linguistics, cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, folklore studies, cultural and political anthropology, as well as critical theory. Having posed several questions inviting prospective participants to offer their ideas[*], we received panel and paper proposals that surpassed our most daring expectations. What we finally realized was that the outcome of this conference could lead us all into charting some kind of “mis-performance web” – a queered version of Schechner’s seminal systematization – that would trace the refreshing trajectories of the creativity you showed when applying to participate.
This “web” is woven around several nuclear points which irradiate both mutually engaging and clashing energies: first of all, naturally, the performing arts with their “deviant actors” and “challenged audiences”, their “willful mistakes” and unwanted “shutdowns”, their festivals and marketing misplacements, their appearing and disappearing ghosts and dancing collisions; then, only seemingly bordering on performance “liveness”, distortions in film, video and photography, or technology in general, regardless of its manifold uses and abuses. “Is failure an option”? This is the question tormenting aborted ambitions to cross the lines between aesthetic and political practices, there where critical endeavors fail to distinguish artistic effects from activist objectives, being, as they are, linked to the slippery formations of rhetoric. In our conference, the latter range from irony, parody and humor, through lies, pranks and misdemeanors, to standardized public mis-performances of presidential debates, oppositional protests and mis-informed discourses of nation-states, in all their actual hybridizations of democracy, totalitarianism and post-socialist nostalgia. Actuality is, in fact, always already a re-enactment – haunted by history, memory, and trauma as reminders of its failure to appear “new”: in addition to being a stage device, ghosting is also a constitutive condition of performance. Its stage is everywhere, but what interested you was what happens when the space itself – eco-spheres, urban and architectural sites – is labeled with mis-performance, criminalization and catastrophe. Aberrant communal spaces, with their disturbed distinctions of private and public, gather bodies that are themselves aberrant performances of identity: one of our participants almost suffered a heart attack when confronted with the alienating practices of a foreign milieu. Painstaking performances, enervation, fatigue and other kinds of derangement, sometimes leading even to mystical, spiritual or religious experiences, bring the peculiar, illegible body into a new light, to the limit of the human. Research into these phenomena, inevitably re-positioning the notion of subjectivity itself, begs the question of possible errors in theory, introducing the topic of error within theory: and that surely entails the mis-performativity of transmission of knowledge and of its “lecture machine”, of the very academic format of the conference.
TWO PIVOTAL CHALLENGES OF THE PSI # 15
This PSi conference has taken on two specific challenges.
First, it intends to broaden the interest for performance studies as a field and Performance Studies as an international association in Eastern Europe. The theme “misperformance”, referring to a failed performance with a potentially both regressive, even tragic outcome, and resistant or even transgressive efficacy, is considerably inspired by both the historical contexts and the actual situation in postsocialist societies, culture, arts and politics in a region where a PSi conference takes place for the first time. Therefore, PSi#15 has particularly encouraged the participation of artists and scholars from this part of the world, backing them in various ways and lending them whatever modest financial support it could provide. Moreover, special attention has been devoted to independent artists and scholars, as well as to colleagues from developing countries outside the PSi # 15 target region.
Second, from the very outset in planning the Zagreb conference, one of our key challenges lay in devising ways that would make various forms of actual performance (as opposed to academic paper presentations) an equal and integral part of the conference program. How to co-opt actual performances – with their specific “languages” and residues of their living/performing bodies, irreducible to any language – into the interlacement of communication channels the conference opens up; how to enhance this communication, make it more creative and complex; in other words, how to improve the interaction and mutual reflection between (artistic) performance practice and theory/criticism of (artistic) performance? Those were the questions that led to the introduction of PSi#15 shifts. Shifts cannot be exclusively reduced to panels or working group meetings, roundtable discussions or workshops or lectures, work in progress presentations, public forums, highly contingent interactive events, actions or installations, theatre or dance or performance art, multimedia performances, exhibitions, seminars or interventions: rather, shifts are combinations of those formats and genres, experimenting on their intersections, with their functions and protocols. Above all, shifts are hybrid collaborative platforms inviting both artists and scholars to jointly (mis)perform “in between” conventional or at least recognizable modes of doing a conference, doing art, being an artist or an activist, being a scholar or a curator or… either-or.
While programming the PSi#15 shifts, we were impressed not only by the inventiveness of their formats and structures, the variety of their dramaturgies, but also by the gamut, the rationale, the complexity and pertinence of their themes.
From what can be gleaned from their descriptions, the PSi#15 shifts are shifting attention to the lost, redundant, marginalized, eliminated – in a word, abandoned practices. They intend to establish a whole alternative school named after Sisyphus, with its own institutional apparatus and a one-night-stand curriculum; they chronicle the dissolution of the American dream; they reenact the whole history of (Croatian) performance art through a theatre play; they are concerned with misfired intentions in negotiations on cultural policy; they tackle mis-information and mis-reading of signs and strategies of persuasion in the mass media propaganda; they explore the misunderstandings that might cause reassessment; they problematize the (in)capacity of memory, its fragmentation, active forgetting and the breakdown of the psyche; they experiment with mistakes in performance and their aleatory outcome, as well as with performance techniques that deliberately cause various kinds of failures and abortive efforts; they attempt to affirm the terms which, in the discourse on the performing arts, have negative, or even pejorative connotations or usage; they carry on the discussion on the elusive notion of theatrical presence, on failure of representation, performative sublime (as performance of the unperformable), on erroneous performativity; they attempt to explain and translate the culturally-specific joke…
Random Entrants, Showroom Detours, Shift Drifts, Shifting Shifts, Punishment and Crime, Institute of Failure, Theatre of Mistakes, Via Negativa, BADco., Ganga and Turbo Folk, Strindberg, Kafka and Grotowski, Obama and Kozyra, Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša – these are only some of the namings that suggest affection for misperformance, and only some of the names that the PSi#15 shifts will bring into focus and weigh their potential correlation or the impossibility of any kind of interrelatedness.
From Poland to the USA and Israel, from Singapore to Bosnia, from the streets of Belgrade to the streets of Zagreb, the PSi#15 shifts are re-examining hegemonic narratives and investigating issues related to war, oppression and death; they honor the struggle and resistance of women dis/mis-placed in the wake of ethnic conflicts and wars, religious repression, poverty, and gender discrimination; they document paramilitary operations illegally practiced by a group of distinguished citizens; they explore the (il)logics of torture and research tourism to sites that memorialize historical trauma…
In the end, the PSi#15 shifts raise a question: What are we left with after the genocide in Srebrenica?
[*]
What determines the success and what is the role of “mistake” as an unavoidable (demystifying) element, not only in the realization of a performance but also in its being perceived, appreciated, understood, and interpreted as performance?
Are there “good” and “bad”, humorous and tragic, ethically and/or aesthetically “acceptable” and “unacceptable” performance mistakes?
The misconstrued, the misinterpreted, the misread, the misunderstood – are these culturally fertile or a threat, a pernicious vehicle of ideological distortions and abuses of power, or a royal road to new perspectives and even to resistance to power?
How do bodies fail to perform not only the heterosexual norms of sex/gender identity, but also their very humanity (malformed, sick and disabled bodies, for instance) in art and life?
How do misapplications of forms hybridize cultural gaps (for instance, in the westernization of the post-socialist East and vice versa)?
How to treat revolution as a performative: hence, what could be termed as a failed revolution – a mis-revolution or a missed revolution?
If we take into consideration Virillio’s idea that “new technologies convey a certain kind of accident, one that is no longer local and precisely situated [...] but general and affecting the entire world,” can we look at new global technologies of power in the light of accident? What is the role of accident and mishap in the new notion of war?
In what ways are previously misfit, liminal, resistant, or counter-performances being appropriated by the art market and institutions, as well as by the academy and the discursive power of theory?
How does misreading contribute to the queering and, moreover, the “evaporation” of a theory?
Performance is intimately related to humor precisely though misperformance. Bergson defined the comic as the effect of mistake, failure, and quite literally, of slippage. What is the place of the comic in contemporary performance practice?
WELCOME TO ZAGREB! WELCOME TO CROATIA!
No city compares to
No home is more dear to me.
Youthful and fair, my dear hometown,
Forever in my heart you’ll be
Zaaaagreeeb, Zaaaagreeeb, my best wishes go your way,
Zaaagreeb, Zaaagreeeeb, beloved to me you stay.
Thus goes the most popular song about our town, well-known to all who live here, be they native “Agramers” or descendants of recent newcomers from other regions. We wonder if, at the close of the 15th PSi conference, Zagreb’s performance will have matched the wishful thinking of the quoted verses. Not that we are so self-indulgent as to try to rival the world’s metropolises, and far be it that we should find our country flawless; on the contrary, Zagreb and Croatia are the perfect site for our conference precisely because their history and tradition, their everyday life, future projects and even the country’s geography, make them worry constantly about all kinds of misperformance problems.
Croats are proud of their ancient 7th century roots, but as this remarkable history sometimes does not seem dignifying enough, they like to imagine a fantastic Iranian origin, or elaborate on scientific evidence of 24,000-year-old genetic heritage. They are not satisfied with the number of luminaries they have given the world, so they like to invent other, more fabulous ones, such as the 10th century founder of Cairo (go to page http://www.croatianhistory.net/etf/et01.html). The independence of their medieval kingdom did not preserve the country from the uncomfortable fate of willy-nilly turning into a misfitting component of other empires, kingdoms and multi-ethnic states throughout its history.
Until twenty years ago and for half a century, they used to blame socialism for all the unsatisfactory aspects of their life that made them feel inadequate with respect to the free world; now that they enjoy the freedom they had been yearning for, and alongside with it the absence of the abhorred proclamations of social equality, they are not so sure if the free world they had once admired and envied is truly adequate to itself.
After the War of Independence in the 1990s, Croatia is still struggling to perform a double role, that of an autonomous political entity, with its own organization, identity and stable borders, and that of a legitimate member of the European Union, finally allowed to enter the international community. In either case, the outcome depends heavily on the assessment of its abilities in the art of performing – courting the powerful, feigning virtue, coping with greedy pretenses. Its traditional borderline position entails a permanent sense of misfitting. However, the people of Croatia – or at least many of its artists, performers, scholars and intellectuals – have been granted the opportunity to learn that being ‘unsuitable’ involves the benefit of difference, fuelling their urge to strive through the fact that even the best of performances can always be undermined by uncontrollable misfires. Instead of accepting the ’saying’ ironically derived from a verse by which Miroslav Krleža, a major 20th century author, summed up the proverbial passivity and resignation typical of an oppressed mentality – “However we may do, somehow we’ll make do” – we have decided to confront the predicament of misperformance and turn it into an issue that concerns all of us.
Let us paraphrase the Renaissance playwright Marin Držić: “Set your mind to misperformance!”
LOCAL TENDENCIES IN PERFORMANCE RESEARCH
Despite the fact that performance research is now practiced at the Academy of Drama Arts, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, in Croatia it is still a troubled disciplinary field without an institutionally established academic influence. The disciplinary traditions of folklore research, literary theory and theater studies ruling over the reception, translation and implementation of the very terms of performance, the performative and performativity, were variously “imported” and often divergent, if not in direct conflict. It is a folklore researcher, Maja Bošković-Stulli, who gets the credit for first introducing and translating into Croatian the term performance, after having participated at the Helsinki conference on folk narrative research in 1974, where she first came in touch with the approach presented by American folklorists Dan Ben Amos and Alan Dundes.
The notion of performance permeated literary criticism much later, in the nineties: highly influenced by, among others, Austin’s concept of the performative, the theoretical turn led by Vladimir Biti gathered researchers in literary, media and cultural studies, interested precisely in the traces of performative disturbance and the breaching of the borders of the linguistic code by its either undisclosed or unpredictable future modes of embodiment. At the same time, the new generation of performing arts practitioners and theorists, now largely engaged in the Center for Drama Art, strongly reacted against both the current repertoires in major Croatian theaters and the positivist legacy of Theaterwissenschaft, demonstrating a much broader theoretical and methodological horizon, and demanding a recuperation of the marginalized avant-garde, as well as a fuller acknowledgement of the contemporary hybrid performance and theater practice.
In the mid 1990s, the Center for Drama Art launched Frakcija Performing Arts Journal. Its founder, Goran Sergej Pristaš, helmed the journal for ten years as editor-in-chief. As a bilingual (Croatian/English) edition since 1999, Frakcija shifted the focus of performance research and criticism to the topical production of postdramatic theater, contemporary dance and performance art.
PSi # 15 is the first instance of these three tendencies of performance research converging on a joint project, the conference and its theme.
PSi # 15 THEME AND RATIONALE
The aim of the fifteenth PSi conference call was to address a spectrum of cultural, organizational, technological and political performances by focusing on the causes and the problems of performance mistakes, misreadings, “(in)felicities”, misunderstandings and misfittings – i.e., those outcomes of performance that are susceptible to provoking disturbances – even deep alterations – within diverse spheres of life: from the private to the social and political, ranging from slips of tongue, via artistic avant-garde and aborted revolutions, to environmental disasters; from ideological distortions and abuses of power to new perspectives and resistance to authorities of any kind.
In determining the conference theme, our intention was to return to performance as the basic concept of our field. While we want to examine performance as a phenomenon, as experience and a function, a process, a complex and a concept, our aim was to approach it from the perspective of failure, non-functionality, futility, and inoperativeness.
Since our broad notion of performance and its possible misfires owe a great deal to Austin’s philosophy of language, rooted as it is in the paradigmatic Western metaphysical dichotomies of play vs. seriousness and success vs. failure, efficiency vs. loss, we are often forced to perceive and value cultural forms and events in terms of binary oppositions. At the same time, modernism embraced the apparently inessential, the misguiding, and the missing as leeway for a new perspective on the very constitution of new cultural systems.
On the one hand, the notions of mistake and infelicity are deeply embedded in modern western thought. From the Freudian slip via J. L. Austin’s misfires, the Girardian and the Derridean pharmakos/pharmakon and the Lacanian misrecognition, to Goffmanian breaches in the construction of social reality, Judith Butler’s failed gender-performances and Homi Bhabha´s inappropriate signifiers and anomalous representations, scholars have evaluated the irregular, the unforeseeable, and the unaccountable – in a word, the mistaken – as essential to rethinking the categories of what is right, correct, true, whole and serious.
On the other hand, by abandoning classical ideas of universality and verisimilitude, modernist art pushed the mistake to its empowering limit. From Futurist evenings and Dada´s cabarets to Action Theater, events, happenings and performance-theater; from performance art to the postdramatic concept of afformance art, performative aesthetic practices not only intentionally exposed themselves to the risk of accident, excess, and contingency, but also managed to harness their liminality as a normative – even marketable – quality.
With a view to exploring linguistic, aesthetic, ritual, cultural, organizational and political performances, the conference wanted to deal with various “misfit” issues in performance studies, performing arts, theater studies, literary criticism, linguistics, cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, folklore studies, cultural and political anthropology, as well as critical theory. Having posed several questions inviting prospective participants to offer their ideas[*], we received panel and paper proposals that surpassed our most daring expectations. What we finally realized was that the outcome of this conference could lead us all into charting some kind of “mis-performance web” – a queered version of Schechner’s seminal systematization – that would trace the refreshing trajectories of the creativity you showed when applying to participate.
This “web” is woven around several nuclear points which irradiate both mutually engaging and clashing energies: first of all, naturally, the performing arts with their “deviant actors” and “challenged audiences”, their “willful mistakes” and unwanted “shutdowns”, their festivals and marketing misplacements, their appearing and disappearing ghosts and dancing collisions; then, only seemingly bordering on performance “liveness”, distortions in film, video and photography, or technology in general, regardless of its manifold uses and abuses. “Is failure an option”? This is the question tormenting aborted ambitions to cross the lines between aesthetic and political practices, there where critical endeavors fail to distinguish artistic effects from activist objectives, being, as they are, linked to the slippery formations of rhetoric. In our conference, the latter range from irony, parody and humor, through lies, pranks and misdemeanors, to standardized public mis-performances of presidential debates, oppositional protests and mis-informed discourses of nation-states, in all their actual hybridizations of democracy, totalitarianism and post-socialist nostalgia. Actuality is, in fact, always already a re-enactment – haunted by history, memory, and trauma as reminders of its failure to appear “new”: in addition to being a stage device, ghosting is also a constitutive condition of performance. Its stage is everywhere, but what interested you was what happens when the space itself – eco-spheres, urban and architectural sites – is labeled with mis-performance, criminalization and catastrophe. Aberrant communal spaces, with their disturbed distinctions of private and public, gather bodies that are themselves aberrant performances of identity: one of our participants almost suffered a heart attack when confronted with the alienating practices of a foreign milieu. Painstaking performances, enervation, fatigue and other kinds of derangement, sometimes leading even to mystical, spiritual or religious experiences, bring the peculiar, illegible body into a new light, to the limit of the human. Research into these phenomena, inevitably re-positioning the notion of subjectivity itself, begs the question of possible errors in theory, introducing the topic of error within theory: and that surely entails the mis-performativity of transmission of knowledge and of its “lecture machine”, of the very academic format of the conference.
TWO PIVOTAL CHALLENGES OF THE PSI # 15
This PSi conference has taken on two specific challenges.
First, it intends to broaden the interest for performance studies as a field and Performance Studies as an international association in Eastern Europe. The theme “misperformance”, referring to a failed performance with a potentially both regressive, even tragic outcome, and resistant or even transgressive efficacy, is considerably inspired by both the historical contexts and the actual situation in postsocialist societies, culture, arts and politics in a region where a PSi conference takes place for the first time. Therefore, PSi#15 has particularly encouraged the participation of artists and scholars from this part of the world, backing them in various ways and lending them whatever modest financial support it could provide. Moreover, special attention has been devoted to independent artists and scholars, as well as to colleagues from developing countries outside the PSi # 15 target region.
Second, from the very outset in planning the Zagreb conference, one of our key challenges lay in devising ways that would make various forms of actual performance (as opposed to academic paper presentations) an equal and integral part of the conference program. How to co-opt actual performances – with their specific “languages” and residues of their living/performing bodies, irreducible to any language – into the interlacement of communication channels the conference opens up; how to enhance this communication, make it more creative and complex; in other words, how to improve the interaction and mutual reflection between (artistic) performance practice and theory/criticism of (artistic) performance? Those were the questions that led to the introduction of PSi#15 shifts. Shifts cannot be exclusively reduced to panels or working group meetings, roundtable discussions or workshops or lectures, work in progress presentations, public forums, highly contingent interactive events, actions or installations, theatre or dance or performance art, multimedia performances, exhibitions, seminars or interventions: rather, shifts are combinations of those formats and genres, experimenting on their intersections, with their functions and protocols. Above all, shifts are hybrid collaborative platforms inviting both artists and scholars to jointly (mis)perform “in between” conventional or at least recognizable modes of doing a conference, doing art, being an artist or an activist, being a scholar or a curator or… either-or.
While programming the PSi#15 shifts, we were impressed not only by the inventiveness of their formats and structures, the variety of their dramaturgies, but also by the gamut, the rationale, the complexity and pertinence of their themes.
From what can be gleaned from their descriptions, the PSi#15 shifts are shifting attention to the lost, redundant, marginalized, eliminated – in a word, abandoned practices. They intend to establish a whole alternative school named after Sisyphus, with its own institutional apparatus and a one-night-stand curriculum; they chronicle the dissolution of the American dream; they reenact the whole history of (Croatian) performance art through a theatre play; they are concerned with misfired intentions in negotiations on cultural policy; they tackle mis-information and mis-reading of signs and strategies of persuasion in the mass media propaganda; they explore the misunderstandings that might cause reassessment; they problematize the (in)capacity of memory, its fragmentation, active forgetting and the breakdown of the psyche; they experiment with mistakes in performance and their aleatory outcome, as well as with performance techniques that deliberately cause various kinds of failures and abortive efforts; they attempt to affirm the terms which, in the discourse on the performing arts, have negative, or even pejorative connotations or usage; they carry on the discussion on the elusive notion of theatrical presence, on failure of representation, performative sublime (as performance of the unperformable), on erroneous performativity; they attempt to explain and translate the culturally-specific joke…
Random Entrants, Showroom Detours, Shift Drifts, Shifting Shifts, Punishment and Crime, Institute of Failure, Theatre of Mistakes, Via Negativa, BADco., Ganga and Turbo Folk, Strindberg, Kafka and Grotowski, Obama and Kozyra, Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša – these are only some of the namings that suggest affection for misperformance, and only some of the names that the PSi#15 shifts will bring into focus and weigh their potential correlation or the impossibility of any kind of interrelatedness.
From Poland to the USA and Israel, from Singapore to Bosnia, from the streets of Belgrade to the streets of Zagreb, the PSi#15 shifts are re-examining hegemonic narratives and investigating issues related to war, oppression and death; they honor the struggle and resistance of women dis/mis-placed in the wake of ethnic conflicts and wars, religious repression, poverty, and gender discrimination; they document paramilitary operations illegally practiced by a group of distinguished citizens; they explore the (il)logics of torture and research tourism to sites that memorialize historical trauma…
In the end, the PSi#15 shifts raise a question: What are we left with after the genocide in Srebrenica?
[*]
What determines the success and what is the role of “mistake” as an unavoidable (demystifying) element, not only in the realization of a performance but also in its being perceived, appreciated, understood, and interpreted as performance?
Are there “good” and “bad”, humorous and tragic, ethically and/or aesthetically “acceptable” and “unacceptable” performance mistakes?
The misconstrued, the misinterpreted, the misread, the misunderstood – are these culturally fertile or a threat, a pernicious vehicle of ideological distortions and abuses of power, or a royal road to new perspectives and even to resistance to power?
How do bodies fail to perform not only the heterosexual norms of sex/gender identity, but also their very humanity (malformed, sick and disabled bodies, for instance) in art and life?
How do misapplications of forms hybridize cultural gaps (for instance, in the westernization of the post-socialist East and vice versa)?
How to treat revolution as a performative: hence, what could be termed as a failed revolution – a mis-revolution or a missed revolution?
If we take into consideration Virillio’s idea that “new technologies convey a certain kind of accident, one that is no longer local and precisely situated [...] but general and affecting the entire world,” can we look at new global technologies of power in the light of accident? What is the role of accident and mishap in the new notion of war?
In what ways are previously misfit, liminal, resistant, or counter-performances being appropriated by the art market and institutions, as well as by the academy and the discursive power of theory?
How does misreading contribute to the queering and, moreover, the “evaporation” of a theory?
Performance is intimately related to humor precisely though misperformance. Bergson defined the comic as the effect of mistake, failure, and quite literally, of slippage. What is the place of the comic in contemporary performance practice?