PERFORMANCE RESEARCH VOL.28 ISSUE 8
ON ACTIVATION

Editor: Eylül Fidan Akıncı,
Christel Stalpaert
Published by Routledge
128 pages
ISSN: 1352-8165 (2024) 28:8
Softcover

Price: 95 lei


This thematic issue interrogates how art and performance can (re-)activate ‘beginnings’ without defaulting to the erasure of history. Behind each fresh start or spark of discovery, there is a long tradition of effort, search, craft and knowledge production. Activist movements build on repertoires of undoing and exiting the dominant imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, sexist, body-typical and neurotypical ideologies and practices. What does it take to activate a new beginning from within the extant decolonial or queer potentialities? How may new bonds between human and more-than-human actors emerge? How can artists collaborate with institutions to act on collective life but circumvent the limitations of authoritative bureaucracy? How does performance activate the past and the future in the present? What methods, epistemologies and aesthetics would be fit for this task?

1 On Activation: Some preliminary notes on weaving a thematic issue together
CHRISTEL STALPAERT

14 Remembering Differently: Activating legacies of violence in the Southern US through soil
SHALON T. WEBBER-HEFFERNAN

24 Unpacking and Enveloping: Béatrice Balcou activating the fragile, the intimate and the vulnerable
LEONIE PERSYN

34 Walking (to) Greenham, Again: Activating feminist heritage
ALEXANDRA KOKOLI

46 Performative Scores for More-Than-Human Swamp Becomings
NINA VURDELJA

52 Recipes for (un)learning to (re)member: Ripples, responses, responsibilities
THE (DE)COLLECTIVE

56 Activation in the Moment of Pausing or Slowing: Queer potentiality in the timeframe of performance/making
JODIE ALLINSON

64 The Queer Archive as Promiscuous Ethics of Care: (Re-)activating transcestor kinship structures in Travis Alabanza’s Burgerz and Tranz Talkz
ELISABETH MASSANA

74 ‘I Have the Need to Never Arrive’: A dialogue with Cherish Menzo
EYLÜL FIDAN AKINCI, ROBERTA DA SOLLER AND JONAS RUTGEERTS

85 Limit(less): A choreographic score for human and robot
MATHIAS HAUAN ARBO AND KAROLINA BIESZCZADSTIE

89 Activations of the Threshold: Rhythms of radical alienness in Aravindan's Thampu
AMEET PARAMESWARAN

98 What Must Be Re-Imagined: Activating through crosstemporal revisitations – Milo Rau’s General Assembly (2017, 2019 and 2024)
LILY MAEVE CLIMENHAGA AND KASIA WOJCIK

109 Breathing out of the University, and into many Schools: Storying abolition as a way of activation
JOACHIM BEN YAKOUB

120 Beginning with Love
AKAE WRIGHT

121 Political Repertoires of Collective Assemblies
RASHI MISHRA

123 A Replica of a Replica: Memory, trauma and monumental repair
STEPHEN GREER