Karin Shankar

Priyageetha Dia is a Singapore-based transdisciplinary artist whose
work brings together South-East Asian plantation histories, postcolonial
memory, migration politics, and extractivism as it relates to
both labour and data. The conversation focuses on submerged and
speculative archives of indentureship in Dia’s work. Dia describes
how specific strategies, such as layering archival images, embodying
diasporic Tamil ritual, as well as incorporating CGI and 3D animation
in her moving image installations create a counter archive of
the histories and afterlives of indentureship in present-day Malaysia
and Singapore

This article describes an "Introduction to Performance Theory" course that the authors co-teach to MFA students at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Through the semester, we track genealogies of performance studies, highlighting the ways in which our interdiscipline has been incorporated as an academic field while still remaining sensationally unsettled in its interventions, methods, and objects of analysis. The focus of this article is on the ways we have tailored a performance theory course to serve MFA students-artists and makers across genre and discipline. The article offers our syllabus and ten practice-based assignments to illustrate how we encourage the artists in our class to engage with critical theory and performance studies scholarship in an embodied way. Bringing the studio into the seminar, our MFA students stage performance experiments related to each week's readings. Our syllabus is accompanied by a reflection on co-teaching performance studies as a dynamic couple form that itself constitutes a performance of pedagogy, an enactment of sociality, and an embodiment of theory.

What does a performance studies syllabus instantiate or call into being? As an interdiscipline, performance studies has been incorporated as an academic field while still remaining sensationally unsettled in its interventions, methods, and objects of analysis. Performance studies syllabi may function as performance scores, performative texts, archives of pedagogical practice, and finally, as the material trace of our performance as teachers. Indeed, the classroom, for many of us, is our most
prolific and durational performance site. These iterative classroom performances rely on scripts as well as improvisational practices, with new forms and constellations emerging from the tried and true. The classroom is then a black box: a space for the staging of collective process, of dialogical exchange, and of inquiry itself as a performance form. It is also a black box in another sense: the classroom walls obscure its inner workings, rendering the performance of pedagogy strikingly difficult to represent. How do we document these pedagogical performances and make them accessible in some way to those who were not there?

Our call for proposals for this special issue asked scholars and practitioners to critically reframe the performance studies syllabus. If the syllabus (from its Greek origins, meaning “title,” “slip” or “label”) is a protocol for an experiment, how do we design syllabi to serve radical spaces of knowledge-making and modes of coming to know? How do syllabi create new structures within which to learn, reformulating the dynamics and relationships between the positions of teacher, student, and institution, as well as our engagements with the world beyond the classroom? As professors and teachers, we often informally share syllabi and assignments with one another, but all too rarely do we publicly share our classroom materials. It was clear to us that performance studies as a collective enterprise could benefit greatly from a commons of pedagogical materials. And so, our call invited contributions to an assemblage of the “stuff” of teaching, with the syllabus as a
central object.

Coauthored by: Karin Shankar, U Tong Aeong, Kym Bernazky, Lizbeth Miscles Rivera, Keyu Shen, and Stephanie Woods.

In the Fall semester of 2021, I designed and taught a course on autotheoretical modes of writing and artmaking at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Autotheory, or the commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography, is a “reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing” (Fournier, 2021, p. 69). This is a mode of creating that uses “embodied experiences as a primary text or raw material through which to theorize, process, and reiterate theory” (Fournier, 2018, p. 646). Over several weeks, my students and I studied autotheoretical texts and art objects, including the works of Saidiya Hartman, Narcissister, Wangechi Mutu, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Gloria Anzaldua, Theresa Cha, Paul Preciado, and Maggie Nelson. As we read and sensed the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheoretical methods across the works of these writers and artists, we encountered multiple perspectives on this expansive, embodied, unstable mode of knowing:

The point, if there is one, is to alter the emotional terrain of someone's lifeworld, including my own, by nudging toward the possibility of thinking or feeling differently […].
- Sophie Tamas, 2017, p. 112.

The writer writes so that he no longer has a face.
- TB Jelloun qtd. in Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2005, p. 28.

It’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them.      
- Saidiya Hartman qtd. in Saunders 2008, p. 5

I’m not interested in my emotions. . . in their individual aspects, but rather in how they intersect and overlap with the emotions and experiences of others. - Paul Preciado, 2017, p. 11.

As a multidisciplinary group of artists and writers in an art school, we also asked how autotheory and performative writing, as methods, might translate to our artmaking. And so, the texts and artworks on the syllabus served as calls to attentively and carefully make from the material of our own lives. In this essay, authored by my students and myself, we offer brief selections from a cross-media dossier of art objects, written texts, and performative gestures that we have generated over our semester-long-practice of reading, reflection, and making. The selection includes artifacts from the syllabus, “assignment prompts,” (or the stuff of pedagogy), and fragments of “autotheory,” or the stuff of our lives. ​​

The rapidly expanding satellite city of Gurugram, located 30 kilometers south-west of New Delhi, is one of the biggest hubs of outsourcing companies in the world. In the past 30 years or so, Gurugram has grown from a cluster of villages to a “millennial” urban space of over 2 million people. Mainstream accounts of Gurugram focus either on the city’s astronomical rise and private real estate sector-driven planning or on its fragmented infrastructure and the environmental risks of rapid development, but less on the specificities of the new urban intensities here. In this article, I turn to artist Jagannath Panda’s (b. 1972) Gurugram-based artworks to surface critical and creative tools for an “immanentist” reading of Gurugram’s urbanism. In large format acrylics and monumental sculptures, Panda sculpts, paints, collages, and molds the animate and inanimate material of Gurugram in such manner as to provoke sensation and thought about the role of objects, animals, and materials in producing Gurugram. His canvases, sculptures, and assemblages feature construction machinery, high- capacity roads, bricks, sewage pipes, upholstery, glass, birds, dogs, beehives, etc. in new combinations, to point to alternate, as yet invisible, arrangements of Gurugram’s matter. In contrast to the hegemony of urban plans seeking to carve space for the more efficient movement of capital, across Panda’s work, plastic expressions of various becomings reveal that human, animal, plant, thing, are always already fragments of each other in the urban realm. My analysis draws from Deleuzian urban planners to consider how Panda’s works signal that change in a city comes from the unpredictable interactions of its own materials, as connections are made, unmade, and re-made horizontally, immanently, rather than (only) as a result of vertical hierarchies. Making use of materials from Gurugram, Panda’s works expose how the discourses and practices of Global South urban development might be unsettled and expressed in new relation, to indicate a co-present awareness of the world, rather than a world where a “regressive” past gives over to an advanced or developed one. This article offers a view of art in the expanded field of urban policy. I think with art to shed interdisciplinary light on the concept of “immanent urbanism,” in the new urban space of Gurugram; conversely, I draw attention to the ways in which the concept of “immanence” can give important insights into urban artistic practices.

In this article, I offer my experience teaching a course titled “Postcoloniality and Aesthetics,” which I designed and currently teach for Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students, to show how an embodied, performance-based approach to studying postcolonial theory links aesthetic form with anticolonial content in crucial ways, and is a mode of revitalizing
contemporary postcolonial inquiry. In this course, we consider film, dramatic texts, performance, visual art, and theory, by Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Amir Baradaran, Fernando Solanas, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Manjula Padmanabhan, Zanele Muholi, Edward Said, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, amongst others, to understand the legacies of colonialism and sites of exclusion and exploitation created by global capital today. Specifically, we ask how aesthetic tools may challenge binary systems of value (First World/Third World, developed/underdeveloped, center/periphery, masculine/feminine, productive/wasteful, ruins/futurity etc.) I first situate my investment in the titular terms, “postcoloniality” and “aesthetics,” as they relate to embodiment, with attention to the ways in which postcolonial thinkers have explored how the body knows and repeats. Thereafter, I engage critical pedagogical literature around performance-based methodologies to illustrate how a focus on embodiment might enable students to better grasp the multiple effects of colonialism and its afterlives. Finally, I detail an embodied classroom assignment and offer examples of student responses to this exercise. The article concludes with a reflection on how performance-based
pedagogy and students’ own corporeally-informed knowledge-making may call forth an emergent collectivity in the classroom space.

New Delhi-based performer, Maya Krishna Rao’s experimental performances incorporate a variety of forms including kathakali, cabaret, comedy, drag, live music, and video, and draw attention to the performative, political, and ethical potential of gesture. This article traces Rao’s practice as a minor inhabitation of kathakali and everyday gesture. Following performance theorist Erin Manning (2016), I understand the “minor” to be a force that scrambles normative hierarchies of value and organization from within the intervals of the “major.” Rao’s minor practice retools the four-hundred-year-old dance-drama form to produce new sensory-kinesthetic knowledge of quotidian regimes. In works such as The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, Khol Do, and A Deep Fried Jam, Rao straddles kathakali’s mythical economy, conventions, and physicality alongside snippets from contemporary news media, ideologically inflected historical narratives, and socially normative dress and behavior codes, to reveal the extraordinary with/in the everyday, such that we might inhabit the present differently. In distorting, combining, disarticulating, and deterritorializing kathakali’s gestural and expressive vocabulary, Rao invites audiences to partake and follow her into a gestural regime that lies alongside the known. By focusing on the possibilities for affective realignment and queering in a minor register, her experimental and hybrid kathakali-influenced performances impress upon discourses and practices of neoliberal urbanism, national memory, and gender and sexuality in New Delhi today.

This essay is a poetic reflection on how the history and practice of Khayal, an improvisatory North Indian vocal form, provides lessons on being-with an Other. This submission is a form of autotheory and is based on the author's musical practice, revived via online lessons during the pandemic.

P[art]icipatory urbanisms (please also visit www.part-urbs.com) is a web publication interrogating the “participatory turn” in contemporary urban studies, performance studies, and art practice. The bracketed [art] in the title of this publication refers to participatory urban aesthetic practices which could include community, social, or relational art initiatives, but also more general claims by city residents, city workers or activists on the visible and sensible aspects of public space. Bracketing the [art] in ‘participation’ also suggests a blurring of the conventional separation between the aesthetic and the political dimensions of urban participation.

The publication has two components. The first, is an interactive platform of interviews featuring the praxes of twenty participatory urban practitioners and collectives in the cities of São Paulo, Brazil and New Delhi, India. The interviews map the multiple and disjunctive ways in which ‘participation’ is enacted—from mobile performances of poetry and theater, to citizen journalism on gentrification in Sao Paulo’s old city center, to radical neighborhood pedagogical initiatives in Savda Ghevra, a New Delhi resettlement colony, and in Grajau, a southern periphery neighborhood of São Paulo. The interviews trace how urban actors create politico-aesthetic ruptures; experience and experiment with the material and affective force of participation; and potentially reshape the urban imaginary. The interviews also speak to the limits of participatory working processes in the face of small budgets and divided spaces. The cities of São Paulo and New Delhi were chosen as sites for this project for the comparisons that their similar size and positions in global urban imaginations and political economy enable, and for the enduring histories of participatory urban activity in both spaces.

A second element of this publication is a peer-reviewed anthology of twenty articles expanding methodological and theoretical debates around the themes of urban participation and its entanglement with state power, aesthetic praxis, racialized and queer spaces, citizenship, temporality, publics, and infrastructure. Contributions to the anthology span a broad range of disciplines and engage research from diverse geographic and temporal sites–from the occupation of a theater in Athens amidst the Greek economic crisis, to agonistic politics and participatory video art in a New Delhi urban village, to the cartographic interventions of a Harlem mailman in Jim Crow-era America. The form of writing extends beyond traditional scholarly articles to include ethnographic reflections, case studies, and photo essays.

P[art]icipatory urbanisms is a web publication (please also visit www.part-urbs.com) interrogating the “participatory turn” in contemporary urban studies, performance studies, and art practice. The bracketed [art] in the title of this publication refers to participatory urban aesthetic practices which could include community, social, or relational art initiatives, but also more general claims by city residents, city workers or activists on the visible and sensible aspects of public space. Bracketing the [art] in ‘participation’ also suggests a blurring of the conventional separation between the aesthetic and the political dimensions of urban participation.

The publication has two components. The first, is an interactive platform of interviews featuring the praxes of twenty participatory urban practitioners and collectives in the cities of São Paulo, Brazil and New Delhi, India. The interviews map the multiple and disjunctive ways in which ‘participation’ is enacted—from mobile performances of poetry and theater, to citizen journalism on gentrification in Sao Paulo’s old city center, to radical neighborhood pedagogical initiatives in Savda Ghevra, a New Delhi resettlement colony, and in Grajau, a southern periphery neighborhood of São Paulo. The interviews trace how urban actors create politico-aesthetic ruptures; experience and experiment with the material and affective force of participation; and potentially reshape the urban imaginary. The interviews also speak to the limits of participatory working processes in the face of small budgets and divided spaces. The cities of São Paulo and New Delhi were chosen as sites for this project for the comparisons that their similar size and positions in global urban imaginations and political economy enable, and for the enduring histories of participatory urban activity in both spaces.

A second element of this publication is a peer-reviewed anthology of twenty articles expanding methodological and theoretical debates around the themes of urban participation and its entanglement with state power, aesthetic praxis, racialized and queer spaces, citizenship, temporality, publics, and infrastructure. Contributions to the anthology span a broad range of disciplines and engage research from diverse geographic and temporal sites–from the occupation of a theater in Athens amidst the Greek economic crisis, to agonistic politics and participatory video art in a New Delhi urban village, to the cartographic interventions of a Harlem mailman in Jim Crow-era America. The form of writing extends beyond traditional scholarly articles to include ethnographic reflections, case studies, and photo essays.