The performance of performance research

a report from Germany

Sibylle Peters

pp. 153-167

in: Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms, CJW-L Wee (eds), Contesting performance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Performance as and of research, research as and of performance In his Introduction to Performance Studies — a book that does not refer to any current German scholar — Richard Schechner (2002) begins by claiming that performance studies resists definition as a field, and yet he goes on to provide precisely that. Similarly, in the case of the present volume, which aims to put into focus how performance research has developed beyond its major representation in the Anglo-American academic context, any attempt to draw a map of performance research in a certain country performs itself an act of representation and engages in the construction of an identity or, at least, an entity — in this case that of German performance research. This raises at least two issues. Though performance studies as it is emerging in Germany may not be fully acknowledged as a part of the Anglo-American academic discourse, it certainly does not view itself in opposition to it either. And secondly, the already problematic construction of any kind of national identity is an even more questionable project in the case of Germany, when we take into account its history of nationalism.