2005 PSi11 "Becoming Uncomfortable"

Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

In our call for participation, we invited scholars and artists involved with performance to historicize, contemporize, embody, celebrate, or challenge our title. Our call was answered in the spirit it was offered.

We received several hundred proposals for performances, installations, papers, panels, and provocations and were privileged to have the opportunity of fashioning a conference from these rich offerings.

We wanted a festival as well as a conference, a mela as well as a lila, a conference that would challenge the confines of the academy during the day and that would spill out into a city called Providence at night. And we wanted to make this affordable.

At PSi#11 we hosted a conference where scholars who identified with the discourses of visual arts, media and cultural studies, theatre, dance, public rhetoric, ethnography, musicology, and philosophy could find common ground, however rocky and uneven.

This conference not only engaged with and advanced the discourses that surround performance, but featured installations, theatrical and dance performances that challenged the borders of those genres, and scholarship.

The conference was attended by over 400 registered members of PSi who were joined by a considerable number of others at live events. A more detailed write-up of the conference and a geographic breakdown of attendees will be posted here shortly.