Dwight Conquergood; Performance Studies on the move

In Dwight Conquergood’s essay from 1995 Of Caravans and Carnivals: Performance Studies in Motion, Conquergood quotes Gloria Anzaldúa, “the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on a straddling of two or more cultures.” Original coined to describe the future of the planet, Conquergood saw it as relevant to the field of Performance Studies.

Conquergood made use of the metaphor of a caravan to describe the fluid mobile “field” of Performance Studies; as a “…commitment to praxis, to multiple ways of knowing that engage embodied experience with critical reflection… Instead of a stable, monolithic paradigm of performance studies I prefer to think in terms of a caravan: a heterogeneous ensemble of ideas and methods on the move” (Conquergood 1995: 139–140).

D. Soyini Madison, a follower of Conquergood, later expands: “his metaphor of the caravan as a space of radical democracy and difference where fellow travellers are deeply and meaningfully interacting with one another and engaged in highly performative possibilities as they move through borders and journey across vast territories together. I have described the labour of reflexivity elsewhere (2006) as a “dialogical performative” that serves to widen the door of the caravan and to clear more space for Others to enter and ride (p. 321)” (Madison 2011: 129).

By introducing the caravan as a reflexive and kinaesthetic space of Performance Studies in flux, I will take a moment to look at how the field of Performance Studies initially unfolded as an intersection between drama and theatre, and the interest following Turner’s social dramas. It emerged as the interrelation between the social and cultural performances, not only pointing to the beneficial powers of struggles, frictions and conflicts, but also their revealing energies in restoring structures and formations that follow a reintegration of the disturbed social group, or of the social recognition and legitimation of irreparable schisms between the contesting parties.

Dwight Conquergood was an ethnographer and performance theorist. He became an important figure of ‘performance ethnography’ and the emerging movement towards an

‘anthropology of performance’ that developed from the overlapping fields of anthropology and theatre, an intersecting arena embodied by Turner and Schechner and their shared feedback loop of connections and intersections of performance. I would like to follow some threads trailing the work from Turner to Conquergood. In the following short postlude, I will trace a development from Turner´s performing ethnography to Conquergood’s performance ethnography.

Conquergood shared both Turner’s and Schechner’s interest and further developed a

‘performance ethnography’ that centred the political nature of the ethnographic practice. In 1982, just before the death of Victor Turner, Turner & Turner had published their essay

Performing Ethnography. Here the Turners had opened a position of anthropologists as being performers themselves, by reenacting ethnographic fieldwork in order to interpret and analyse rituals in an embodied way and further develop the reflexivity of their analysis and fieldwork. This was an important shift in the position of how the anthropologists positioned their ethnographic work and themselves within research. The younger Turner had applied theatrical models to certain cultural and social episodes in order to analyse and interpret these phenomena. Later, in the beginning of the 1980s, the Turners’ anthropological fieldwork became itself reenacted and performative.

Turner describes this ‘reflexive turn’ to both ‘public and plural reflexivity’ to invite collaborative reflection as “the ways in which a group or community seeks to portray, understand and then act on itself” (Turner 1977: 33). Conquergood points to a move from studying

performance of culture to culture as performance and as a more general appreciation of how anthropology and performance studies had moved beyond the recognition that social life is performative; from studying cultural performances; as the ‘performance of culture’ to the study of

‘culture as performance’. Ethnographers had been starting to apply performance as both the subject and the method of their research. Conquergood, referring to Burke’s Grammar of Motives states: “The shift from thinking about performance as an Act of culture to thinking about performance as an Agency of culture has prompted a reflexive turning back upon the conduct of inquiry itself” (Conquergood 1989: 82). Conquergood also pointed to the progression from performance as a context-specific event to performance as a lens and a method for conducting research, leading to a critique of research presuppositions, methodologies and forms of scholarly representations.

Conquergood followed the Turners’, but advocated an even more radical position by suggesting a more interventionistic and radical research approach. Having conducted fieldwork in liminal locations in refugee camps in Thailand and the Gaza Strip, he returned to the US to develop the Performance Studies program at Northwestern University, conducting research within areas of immigrant, gang-infested Chicago neighbourhoods, and the “lethal theatre”

dealing with the death penalty.

2.3.1.1 Performance as mimesis, poiesis and kinesis

Dwight Conquergood puts performance into motion through his important emphasis on the trajectory of performance from mimesis to poiesis to kinesis. Starting from the early theorizing of performance (or drama) as imitation e.g. through Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theories of performance and Burke’s dramas of living, toward performance as invention; poiesis/making, through Victor Turner’s constructional theories of performance as ‘making, not faking’,

Conquergood later (in 1992 and 1995) elaborates on the turn to kinesis, and puts forward a theory of performance as intervention; as a dynamic “breaking and remaking” quoting Bhabha’s politically urgent view (1995: 138). Conquergood draws from Michel de Certeau (1980/1984) in navigating this “kinetic turn toward process and event in ethnography and cultural studies” (Conquergood 2013: 55), a turn that moves away from structure, stasis, continuity and pattern toward process, change, improvisation and struggle (Conquergood 1998: 31).

Like Turner, who also pointed to this “temporal shift” of postmodernity of how the focus shifted from a “spatialization of process or time” to a “processualization of space, its temporalization” (Turner 1987: 76), Conquergood followed this move by stressing the process of

‘becoming’. As quoted by Madison (2005), he emphasised a turn from spatialized products to temporal process, stressing that human beings are products and producers of culture in an ongoing and ever-changing process of creating the world around us and beyond us: “The ground-of-being of the autonomous Self is displaced by the experience-of-becoming a performing self that enacts its identities within a community of others...Humanity as performer, rather than author, or her own identity, is always historically situated, culturally mediated, and intersubjectively constituted”

(Conquergood 1986a: 6, in Madison 2005: 166).

This turn to a more interventionistic understanding of performance as kinesis becomes important when later, in chapter six: Reenacting, we will explore the political aspects of the reenactments defending the (past and thus the) future of the senior community coined in the public park. Before proceeding into my methodological performative research approach I will therefore end this chapter with Conquergood’s critical view of an activist ethnography and cultural struggle.

Conquergood not only builds on the work of Turner, but points to him as one of the fathers of “the rise of performance” and acknowledges how Turner “subversively redefined the fundamental terms of discussion in ethnography by defining humankind as homo performans, humanity as performer, a culture-inventing, social-performing, self-making and self-transforming creature.(…) The performance paradigm privileges particular, participatory, dynamic, intimate, precarious, embodied experience grounded in historical process, contingency, and ideology.

Another way of saying it is that performance centered research takes as both its subject matter

and method the experiencing body situated in time, place, and history (…) Turner appreciated the heuristics of embodied experience because he understood how social dramas must be acted out and ritualized performed in order to be meaningful, and he realized how the ethnographer must be a co-performer in order to understand those embodied meanings” (Conquergood 1991: 187, emphasis original).

Conquergood thus builds on a performative movement started by Goffman and Turner and developed by Schechner and Fischer-Lichte, but he adds a layer of “kinesis” to also address some of the more political aspects of process, change, improvisation and struggle. Conquergood describes “performance as kinesis” as “a decentering agency of movement, intervention,

transformation, struggle, and change” (Conquergood, 1992: 84) and “movement, motion, fluidity, fluctuation, all those restless energies that transgress boundaries and trouble closure”

(Conquergood 1995: 138).

By this coda of caravanning through multiple theoretical performance perspectives with Homo Performance, from social dramas to performance and theatres, I end this chapter that has described an important foundation for constructing a performative social design praxis as well as the contribution of this thesis to design research.

Summing up this chapter’s first part, I argue that Turner’s concept of social drama,

‘experience’ as the very stuff of drama and the liminoid spaces nesting dramatic process, is relevant for co-design processes. Social designers are able to tune their consciousness and awareness towards the social dramas as the stories of metacommentaries that are able to make meanings of local cultures of communities explicit. I further argue in favour of considering the dramatic structures impregnated within everyday life to be important for co-design as a catalyst motivating a feedback flow between the social dramas and cultural dramas among the partnership engaging innovation processes.

In the second part, I propose that Schechner’s theatre poetics is relevant for co-designers creating processes that are processual and state that design can learn from the theatre practices of co-production as invitations for gathering, performing and dispersing in hedged and somewhat

‘safe spaces’ (even while they are happening within everyday life as experimental environmental theatres, where ‘only’ the time-space sequence can define the transactions between audience and performers). I claim that transformance as transportation and transformation of consciousness of both performers and the audience is as important to co-design as performance, where ‘roles’ are enacted by partners transitioning practices towards slightly changed relations. I argue that ‘actuals’

and the processes of actualization is also important for example when co-producing events that bridge ‘then and now’ as well as the possible and the actual as the subjunctive ‘dream spaces’ of

future communities, with the actual medial relations of the present partnerships. I further explain zSchechner’s restored behaviour as a playing and rehearsing of roles by restoring known strips of behaviour into restored and rearranged scores of professionals and civics interacting their respective practices into whole performance logic, as ‘service’ and care exchanges within practices of communities. I conclude stating that the sequence of aftermath is less described, but that reenactment and re-membering might support this phase of critical responses, archiving and memory.

I explore with Fischer-Lichte how co-designers can learn from the transformative powers of aesthetics, blurring the distinctions between actors and audience as well as designers and users within a co-production of an autopoietic feedback loop. The performative aesthetics defines art as event, thus transforming and reversing roles between who produces and consumes the aesthetic experience. I reason that Fischer-Lichte’s four characteristic qualities of performance is relevant for social designers exploring different aesthetic approaches to design, since Fischer-Lichte outlines the powers of Mediality as the bodily co-presence; the Materiality as the transience of performance; Semioticity as the emergence of meaning; and the quality of Aestheticity as relating to the event-ness as experienced by spectators. As part of these qualities I highlight the concept of a reenchantment of the world where we experience ourselves as embodied minds, engaged with a threshold space of an art of passage, defamiliarization, Utopian Performatives and PRESENCE. I further emphasise the transient materiality of corporality as perceptual mulitstable.

In the final Coda I end by describing how performance engages many forms of social life, as both relating to mimesis, poiesis and kinesis, with Conquergood as pointing to

performance as also related to political struggles for social justice.

From Turner’s social dramas to Schechner’s performance poetics and Fischer-Lichte’s transformative aesthetics, we are now proceeding to some methodological considerations continuing with Conquergood’s interventionistic struggles of Homo Performance and performance as always on the move.

3. A Performative