PSi Lexicon
About
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 questions 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 by Jane Frances Dunlop, re-envisioning the Lexicon as a living and continuously expanding project. In 2023, a new Officer, was appointed, continuing the work of the Lexicon as a reflective space for epistemologies and performance studies
The Lexicon tracks some of the concepts we use, and the ways they change and question. It serves as a speculative, live and questioning archive of ever-shifting terms and the elasticity of their usage. It is edited and maintained by the current Lexicon Officer, Diana Damian Martin.
Call for New Entries
The Lexicon is open for new entries from PSi members, which must define a concept or epistemology in at least two languages. The Lexicon is looking for entries that are interested in working against definition and with other epistemologies, be they embodied, aural, visual, and we welcome entries in multiple formats.
New entries to be added to existing ones are welcome: we know that our concepts travel through time as well as between languages and places.
The concepts can be defined in any two languages and we welcome creative formats; however, we request that the submissions be accompanied with contacts for two potential reviewers in each language/mode of entry. Reviewers will be credited in the entries.
Edited by current Lexicon Officer
Diana Damian Martin
Former Lexicon Officers
Jane Francis Dunlop (2019-2022)
Antje Hildebrandt and Katerina Paramana (2016 – 2019)
Efrosini Protopapa (2013-2016)
Former Lexicon Editorial Board
Gigi Argyropolou, Konstantina Georgelou, Antje Hildebrandt, Katerina Paramana, Efrosini Protopapa, Steriani Tsintziloni, Danae Theodoridou