The PSi Lexicon is a living project that reflects on the changing discourses, grammars, embodied practices, epistemologies, and creative traces of performance studies.
Background
The Lexicon is a digital platform that holds ideas and concepts as they travel between, or emerge in places, times, languages, people and communities. It is a living project that acts as a convergence of the multiple roots and routes of performance and its study and practice.
The Lexicon reflects how our work can be strengthened by the overlap and tensions between our local and regional perspectives and understandings, whilst invested in the challenges and power dynamics of ‘international’ as it sits with the intersecting crises, violences and agencies of our current times, and ‘lexicon’ as it intersects with colonial logics of capture.
The Correspondents
We are looking for correspondents who will be taking part in this year’s PSi29 conference, and whose scholarly, artistic and/or critical creative work intersects with the Lexicon in multiple ways. We are looking for folks keen to engage, reflect, dialogue and collaborate with the assemblies and communities of the conference and the convergence of practices, epistemologies and ideas.
Entries might take the form of:
- A concept to be offered for the Lexicon that has emerged in conversation, listenings, exchanges
- Correspondence, dialogues or other materials emerging from the experience of the conference, or related activities that might form an entry for the Lexicon
- Entries that return or reflect on existing Lexicon material or revisit these in multiple ways
- Other proposals for activations, take-overs or collaborations that work with, from or on the Lexicon
We are also open to dialogues and correspondence engaging the conference for those who might be interested to share or interact with the Lexicon and conference theme from the perspective of their own practice and research.
A selection of these will be considered for the conference issue of Global Performance Studies.
Get in touch by 30th June if you are interested on lexicon@psi-web.org
We welcome approaches that seek to deborder, challenge, or decentre epistemologies of performance studies, including dialogue between languages and form.
Correspondents will be invited to offer one entry for the lexicon at any point during, and up to two months after the conference. These might be co or multi-authored; multi-lingual and multi-form, and emerge from multiplicity of methodologies of listening and attunement within and beyond the conference itself.
For more information contact PSi Lexicon officer Diana Damian Martin on lexicon@psi-web.org or diana.damian@cssd.ac.uk
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What is the PSi Lexicon?
The PSi Lexicon is a living project that reflects on the changing discourses, grammars, embodied practices, epistemologies and creative traces of performance studies. The Lexicon moves along with ideas and concepts as they travel between or emerge in places, times, languages, people and communities. It is a live place for the convergence of the multiple roots and routes of performance studies. The Lexicon is home to a number of multilingual entries. The Lexicon is open for new entries and collaborations and is facilitated by the Performance Studies International Lexicon Officer.
The Lexicon was created in response to the diversity of Performance Studies international and the disciplines and practices it engages and dialogues with. Being international is not a given but a challenge, one that manifests in the languages we use, and how they influence the concepts through which we engage with artistic and scholarly inquiry. As Performance Studies unlearns itself and engages in processes of decentering and decolonisation, the ongoing question of language and other epistemologies remains central.
The Lexicon reflects how our work can be strengthened by the overlap and tensions between our local and regional perspectives and understandings, whilst invested in the challenges and power dynamics of ‘international’ as it sits with the intersecting crises, violences and agencies of our current times.
The Lexicon sprang from the PSi Regional Research Cluster ‘Encounters in Synchronous Time’ (Athens, November 2011), where 8 Greek artists and theorists presented a lexicon for performance studies in Greek, offering 24 entries, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet. Then past PSi President, and speaker in the event, Maaike Bleeker invited the curatorial team of the Cluster in Athens to work on an expanded multi-lingual lexicon for PSi’s website, which was available online from 2012-2019.
In 2021, a new website was created, re-envisioning the Lexicon as a living and continuously expanding project and a reflective space on epistemologies and performance studies.
Access the lexicon here: https://lexicon.psi-web.org/about/