2004 PSi10 "Perform: State: Interrogate" account by Paul Rae

Organised by an independent consortium of Singapore-based artists, writers and administrators (including The Substation, TheatreWorks, The Necessary Stage, spell#7, and numerous individuals), the conference took place at Singapore Management University from 15th-18th June 2004. It was the first PSi conference to take place in the Asian region, and aimed to bring together a diverse range of theorists, scholars, artists and activists to debate the wide range of themes, practices, and academic disciplines that constitute the emerging field of Performance Studies in the region and beyond. A pre-conference was held in Penang, Malaysia in June 2003, where about thirty regional scholars sought gain a sense of the cultural and critical practices that might conceivably fall within the purview of a field of enquiry called "Performance Studies". The 2004 event addressed intersections between tradition, translation, globalisation, and performance practices in theatre, ritual, spectacle, commerce and propaganda. In addition to featuring some of the most significant regional and international voices in the field, participants came from China, Taiwan, Japan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, as well as Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Adrian Heathfield was elected as the new President of PSi.

Themes of the conference.

The title Perform: State: Interrogate: comprises three verbs with multiple resonances. Interrogate implies the questioning of power, as in the power of theory, practitioners, the "people" or the state. The state figures centrally in much performance in Asia, bringing to bear issues of patronage, engagement, resistance, and complicity. Arguably the central "performance" that takes place in a nation like Singapore is that of stating the concerns of the state.

While perform connotes the more conventional understandings of the term (theatrical performance, etc.), there is also the question of how theory itself performs, that is how it can be "stated" and '"nterrogated". What are the ways it can be tested and evaluated? What are its effects? How does it contain, domesticate, obfuscate, and appropriate, or liberate, enable, enlighten? These areas of concern among others constituted the conference.

PSi#10 was divided into four main types of activities: dialogical Main Sessions that focused on what the organizers considered to be the primary themes of the conference; Parallel Panels for the presentation of papers on a wider assortment of themes from various global perspectives; continuous Interest Groups that met repeatedly over the course of the conference for the deeper investigation of various issues; Special Events, including a selection of performances and screenings.

Most performance theorists are aware of the proclivities of Performance Studies to "map" cultures through the production of research, and of how problematic this mapping is in post-colonial Asia. Many are also aware that colonial anthropology smudged into colonial tourism for the intelligentsia in places such as Bali in the early twentieth century. Yet, these issues continued to play out with force in the conference sessions. Some of the most productive tensions in the conference arose over the themes of recent global trauma and war, and the interlinking of interpretive perspectives and geographical locations that informs responses to such events. Once again performance theory was seen to be contextual and contingent, and the lessons of cultural and post-colonial studies were found to be central to the field of Performance Studies. Many of the major themes of this conference - translation, global vs local tensions, the invention and survival of traditions, the omni-presence of global trauma and violence, and the problematics of Performance Studies as a field - were to be found not only within the conference walls, but outside in the streets, in the pages of the press, on the screens in the MRT trains and buses, in advertisements, in the daily rituals of the kopi tiam (coffee shop), in the life of the HDB (state housing) estates, in the small parcels of undeveloped land inhabited by Singapore's rapidly vanishing bio-diversity, and in all the complex interactions of the participants.

GEOGRAPHIC BREAKDOWN OF PARTICIPANTS