Collaboration within the Field

Abstract

Impudence threatens to become the lingua franca of performance studies today. Or, at least, that is how it seems in the aftermath of the First Annual Performance Studies Conference amidst many of the groundless complaints and inaccurate claims lodged against its "stars." Having stated this, I realize that it may be viewed as incredibly impudent for me as a PhD candidate to offer personal views about the conference in particular and performance studies in general, but I am willing to take the risk. On the one hand, I can only hope that the voices of graduate students will not be dismissed too readily since so many of us did take part in the organization and in the actual running of the conference. On the other hand, after hearing and reading some of the remarks made by other graduate students about the conference, I can now better understand why our comments and input have hitherto been taken with so many grains of salt. First of all, who were these so-called "stars" of the conference? Given the subsequent comments and gossip about the conference posted between 2-6 April 1995 on WTP-L, an electronic conference for the study of women in theatre and performance, and perform-1, the electronic newsgroup devoted to performance studies, star quality within the performance studies community has less to do with either star appeal or performance than it does with perceptions of who wields power and control. As a result, the post facto designated stars were not so much the cabaret performers-most of them local performance artists with the notable exception of Guillermo G6mez-Pefia-as much as those presumed to have a lock on both "authority" and "power."' Granted, the accusations against certain individuals were to some degree expected if not unavoidable given their positions vis-a-vis the conference and/ or performance studies as a whole. Others were not. Orlan, a French professor of art and a multimedia performance artist, better known in Europe than in the United States, became the focus of much scrutiny and controversy. A bit of this spilled over, bizarrely enough, to her two unknown and therefore nameless graduate-student "translators"-no doubt due to their proximity to her "presence" and "aura." As one of these two obscure translators, and also as the organizer of the panel on which Orlan spoke, I wish to give my take not only on Orlan's presence at the conference but also on the subsequent heated E-mail discussions in which I became a reluctant-and, as one commentator on the WTP-L list put it, "hostile"-interlocutor. It is from these positions that I present my views