Call for Proposals
PSi #30 Conference: XXX Cruzo, Cruising, Crossroads
Fortaleza, Brazil
11-15 December 2025
Performance Studies international (PSi), in collaboration with the Graduate Arts Program at Universidade Federal do Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil, invites responses to the call for proposals for the PSi #30 Conference in 2025.
Conference theme: XXX — CRUZO, CRUISING, CROSSROADS
Different senses of crossing animate PSi#30. First as a written mark, the three Xs of the Roman numeral that represent “30” here cast the reading into a polysemic realm of competing/collaborating linguistic and cultural forces: secrecy, mystery, incognito, redaction, overwriting, an algebraic variable, an unknown value, non-binary gender, refusal, aphasia, disorder, error, intersectional pathways, intersecting diagonals, proliferating angles, multiplication, lack, blocked, out, hardcore sex, danger, a sacral point, a “something”, a “thing”, the unspecified, a target, a treasure, the vote, the kiss.
The undecidability of the x-thing is held onto here as a sign of complexity, not imprecision. It imparts a critical quality of inconclusiveness that bespeaks the diversified and often conflicting modes of reception and mobilization of Performance Studies in Latin America. For some, another colonizing trend from the academic elite; for others a fresh, rebellious framework enabling the torsion of academic coloniality. From the standpoint of the crossroad, which this conference intends to embrace, the vibrating energy produced by the paradox is way more fertile than the attempt to settle for a conclusion.
CRUZO
In the intercrossing of African diasporic and indigenous cosmopolitical perspectives that structure the religious-philosophical system of Umbanda in Brazil, CRUZO emerges as tactical action of both reading and making worlds. Literally referring to the point in which two pathways cross, the noun CRUZO is nevertheless used and understood as a verb: to make CRUZO is to infuse magical and political potentiality into a text, a sign, an image, a body. Oppositional to any sense of dualism, the operation of CRUZO transforms the thing by imbuing it with dynamism, unpredictability, and potentiality. For this reason, it is a principle associated with Exu/Èṣù and Pombagira, the male and female guardians of the path connecting humans and divinities, and ultimately the deities responsible for opening and closing all pathways and possibilities for communication and creation.
While there are numerous qualities and incarnations of Exu in different spiritual traditions, one of them perfectly illustrates the theoretical-methodological principle of CRUZO in its defiance of hegemonic truth regimes. As historian Luiz Antonio Simas and pedagogue Luiz Rufino tell us, Exu was challenged to choose one between two gourds, which he would bring to the Ifé market: “one contained good, the other contained evil. One was medicine, the other was poison. One was body, the other was spirit. One was the visible, the other the invisible. One was speech, the other what will never be said. Exu immediately asked for a third gourd: he opened the three and mixed the powder from the first two into the third. He shook it real good. Since then, medicine can be poison and poison can cure, good can be evil, the soul can be the body, the visible can be the invisible and the not-seen can be presence, speech can say nothing, and the unspoken can be eloquent.” He then became Igbá Ketá (Lord of the Third Gourd), which he carried on his journey to the Ifé market, while dancing along the way.
CRUZO provides us then with a first principle of non-binarism, inversion, impurity, critical uncertainty. Also of transgression, accumulation and convergence, territory of Exu, with which we expect the field of Performance Studies will inspire itself in its journey through Latin America. In the aftermath of colonialism, which for many of us is but its long duration, CRUZO produces a reenchantment effect, “encantamento”, because it widens the present in order to include paradoxical temporalities and the coexistence of multiple cosmovisions. CRUZO turns knowledge into a dance that tricks universal reason, a dance that fills the wound left by colonial violence with embodied potential, proliferating pathways and possibilities.
CRUISING
Crossing geopolitical boundaries and knowledge formations in the strategic mode of CRUZO is hardly immune to the economy of desire and desiring. In a nod to the late José Muñoz, the epistemic force of CRUISING is invited here as a critically queer stance that embraces the libidinal contours of knowledge and politics. Much like in Muñoz’s project, CRUISING is not only, or even primarily, a reference to gay male sexual practices, although these do create exciting space for transgression. CRUISING here is rather a more inclusive mode of relation that queerness affords in its inevitable linkage between desire and politics. It gives access to that intercrossing between what Muñoz called the desire for politics alongside the politics of desire.
In that sense, CRUISING is also a form of CRUZO: for a Latin American artist and scholar, approaching the metropolitan legacies, theorists, and institutions of Performance Studies by way of flirting and seduction is a tactical disarming of power relations already in place before any encounter. By way of CRUSING, performance shifts from an “object of study” to an “object of desire,” with all the promise and anticipation the latter transports. By the same token, Performance Studies turns from a transdisciplinary field of studies to a mode of desiring, rubbing ideas and concepts together, and crisscrossing relations. It also brings to the fore the magnificent theorizing of pleasure that has taken place in the history of black and indigenous performance in Brazil, and elsewhere, including carnaval, samba, capoeira, jongo, brega funk, forró, “malandragem” (roguery), and “vadiagem” (loitering), all of which articulate local performative refusals of racist and cis-hetero-patriarchal coloniality.
CROSSROADS
Encruzilhada, in Portuguese, the CROSSROAD is the home of Exu and Pombagira, a liturgical place to dispatch the heavy load of colonial disenchantment. It is also a poetic, philosophical, and political figure of dialogue, of entanglement, and coexistence. But the CROSSROAD also retains a sense of threat and danger. It displaces the conciliatory overtones once associated with “syncretism” and “amalgamation” in order to more fully embrace the tensions and conflicts of intersecting trails, histories, and perspectives.
In the words of the African Brazilian transgender artist Ventura Profana: “we turn the cross into a crossroad”. Leda Maria Martins, prominent scholar of black performance in Brazil, argues that by virtue of having their immediate material connection with home severed by chattel slavery, African Brazilians have re-inscribed memory in cross formulations of knowledge, which are also crossings of temporalities and spatial formations – past and present, Africa and Brazil, are often entangled constructs in performance culture here. This is why the CROSSROAD is so significant in African Brazilian religious systems, such as Umbanda and Candomblé: in diaspora, ancient knowledge is always crossing with newly acquired ones, old and new languages, old and new beliefs, old and new forms of combat. Moreover, as the aforementioned territory of Exu and Pombagira, spirits of mediation, communication, and transport, the CROSSROAD is that which forces the cutting across of directions, of Africa and the Americas, the spiraling of past, present, and future. This figure of radical translation and dialogue between time and space, between north and south, traditions, languages, and hemispheres, should be the central, encoding, and proliferating figure of PSi #30.
Hosting Performance Studies International in Latin America for the first time, especially in the peripheral city of Fortaleza, is the casting of triple X, a triple magic spell: simultaneously a CRUZO, a CRUISING, and a CROSSROAD.
PRESENTATION FORMATS:
The conference invites proposals in English, Portuguese, or Spanish, for online, in-person, or blended participation in various formats that include:
- Curated panel presentations and roundtables (of 90 minutes maximum)
- Individual papers: in-person (20 minutes); online (12 – 15 minutes)
- Performances and/or installations (03 – 30 minutes with minimal technical support)
- Laboratory/workshop sessions (90 minutes)
Submit your proposal for a paper (max. 250 words), a curated panel (max. 600 words), performance or workshop (max. 500 words) in word or pdf-format by 19 January 2025 at https://forms.gle/DESadCo3gGcVobVW8.
Please be aware that all applicants are expected to provide proof of PSi membership while submitting a proposal. If you aren’t currently a member of PSi, you can sign up here: https://www.psi-web.org/membership/
The annual membership fee is $25 or $50.
Conference Subthemes
Conference presentations will be organized according to the following subthemes:
- Philosophies, aesthetics, politics, and pedagogies of the crossroad
- Senses of crossing in performance theory and practice
- Anti-dualisms
- Counter-colonial strategies in art, life, and theory
- Practice research as a crossroad
- Latin America as a crossroad
- Politics and aesthetics of enchantment/encantamento
- Politics and aesthetics of pleasure
- Senses of cruising in theory and performance
- Desire for politics and politics of desire
- Theoretical and artistic figures of entanglement
- Non-normative spiritualities
- Performances of vitality, revitalization, vitalism
- Crossroads of queerness
- Politics and poetics of delinquency
- African diasporic and indigenous cosmopolitical perspectives in performance
- Hemispheric perspectives in performance studies
- Crossing boundaries in performance art
- Contradiction, paradox, and inconclusiveness in performance
If you have any questions, or require additional information, please contact organizers directly at psi30.crossroads@gmail.com
Organizing team
Conference chair: Pablo Assumpção Barros Costa, Universidade Federal do Ceará
Steering committee:
Eleonora Fabião, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Denise Ferreira da Silva, New York University
Christine Greiner, PUC-São Paulo
Sérgio Andrade, University of Amsterdam
Marcos Davi Silva Steuernagel, The New School
Felipe Ribeiro, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
André Lepecki, New York University
Clarissa Diniz, independent curator
Yuri Firmeza, performance artist and scholar, Universidade Federal do Ceará
Francis Wilker, FUNARTE
If you wish to inquire about future partnerships or conferences with PSi get in touch with Serap Erincin at VicePresident@psi-web.org.
References:
Martins, Leda Maria. Performances do tempo espiralar: poéticas do corpo-tela. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2021.
Ventura Profana, “Eu não vou morrer” (song lyrics). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWZPd5EcJO8
Simas, Luiz Antonio & Luiz Rufino. Fogo no mato: a ciência encantada das macumbas. Rio de Janeiro: Mórula, 2018.