performing utopia

Cruising Utopia - performed by Ministry of Untold Stories Pic by Fenia Kotsopoulou

Performance

Allows thinking through and with the body

Brings feeling into the archive

Makes as/if

Move from potential to represented

Indexes here and there, now and then

For Diana Taylor, performance is defined as ‘simultaneously connoting a process, a praxis, an episteme, a mode of transmission, an accomplishment, and a means of intervening in the

world’ (1997: 15).

Jill Dolan’s discussion of utopia in performance:

‘The politics lie in the desire to feel the potential of elsewhere. The politics lie in our willingness to attend or to create performance at all, to come together in real places – whether theaters or dance clubs – to explore in imaginary spaces the potential of the “not

yet” and the “not here”’ (Dolan, 2005: 20).

Dolan, Jill. (2005), Utopia in performance: Finding hope at the theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Taylor, D. (1997), The Archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.