POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE

JNU Collaboration

Today academics from Warwick's School of Theatre and Performance Studies will be meeting with academics from Jawaharlal Nehru University's School of Arts and Aesthetics. They will be discussing 'History, Memory, Event and the Politics of Performance', encompassing topics such as the politicisation of documentary and engendering performance. The ultimate aim of the JNU collaboration is to document the connections between India and Europe/America by looking at landmark performances.

Academic institutions world-wide are waking up to the fact that online communication is changing the world we live in and noticing that there might be major benefits from embracing the multitude of resulting opportunities. One of the major changes happening across disciplines is an increase in collaborative research. Traditionally academics work on their own projects, within their own institutions, publishing their own work. But as the sheer volume of archival materials to be studied increases it is natural that teams of academics are coming together to pool their knowledge, experience and insight.

The University of Warwick has established a number of relationships with institutions in other countries, one of which is with Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. The first moves towards this partnership were made in 2008, and now work has started on a joint project between Warwick's School of Theatre and Performance Studies and JNU's School of Arts and Aesthetics. Together they have chosen to investigate a period between 1970 and 1990 and are constructing a collection of materials - documents, audio recordings and video footage - from India and the specific sites in the West. They are looking to map out the relationships between socio-political events of that period and the way they were interpreted in theatre, dance and other performing arts. Some of these performances themselves became points of political significance; the team will be looking at how these cultural events were reciprocally significant in the wider social context at that time.

This task of untangling events from their performative interpretations is a complicated one, not least because when performances are occurring in a foreign cultural context it is much harder to understand the nuanced significance of the events. This is where the partnership will really benefit the team's research - working together on the archive they will be able to highlight the local and national memorial markers each need to be aware of. The ultimate aim is to "…show the connections and the developments that flow between/against India and the European-American-world scenario, choosing some landmark performances for close analysis as exemplars."

They have already identified a number of events that have specific meaning in relation to both contexts; the Vietnam War, political assassinations, the rise of the Right and the politicisation of religion during the 1980s, the end of the Soviet state, and the development of new media such as the rise of television in India and the rise of cable and satellite broadcasts in the West. These technological advances ultimately culminated in the invention of the Internet which neatly arrives at the end of the period under study.

This project raises methodological questions though, and there is a clear need to acknowledge the issues associated with interpretative research. They have identified three key challenges:

• How to engage performance comparatively in the East/West without ignoring, on the one hand, or reifying, on the other, colonial/postcolonial history?
• How to conduct national performance research in relation to global politics, local contexts, and across cultural differences?
• How best to research and present the performance history of the recent past in light of contemporary methods of theatre historiography?

The University of Warwick now has an Erasmus Mundus MA in International Performance Research (MAIPR); they are making sure that their experience of working on this archival project will be used to develop an appropriate pedagogy for an international cadre of students from all over the world.

There are a number of other ways in which this relationship is developing; it began with a colloquium in March hosted by JNU looking at 'Research and Documentation in Theatre and Performance Studies: Strategic Locations, Disciplinary Challenges and Critical Dialogue'. This was an opportunity for the academics from both schools to meet and share their research expertise. The talks were organised around three themes: Rethinking the Political, Documenting Performance: Problematizing Methodology and Multiple Modernities, and Historiography. Abstracts from both Warwick's and JNU's academics submissions are available online. This November Warwick is hosting a return colloquium in order to continue discussions regarding the development of the archive.

Today there is a public open afternoon where you can hear from a range of academics working on the project.