(Work in progress text)
The groundwork for a new academic discipline comes together over a period of years as researchers and teachers express their dissatisfaction with aspects of the status quo, make contact with others of like mind, experiment with alternatives, launch raids on neighbouring disciplines to borrow their methodologies and theoretical concepts, and gradually realise that something new has emerged that has its own intellectual integrity. As might be expected, most of this work is communicated in papers given at conferences, reports on work in progress to research seminars, and articles in ephemeral publications produced in-house when mainstream journals and publishers are slow to acknowledge the new approaches.
In bringing together these texts, some of which go back more than 40 years, I have been struck by the precarious nature of their existence in the public domain, scattered in published proceedings of long-forgotten conferences, in journals that have since ceased publication and may or may not have been digitised or taken up by one of the aggregators, journals that are in any case available in very few libraries after the decades of budget cuts that have decimated journal collections in university libraries.
Making these texts available all together on this website is my attempt to counter the precariousness, and to preserve a record of my part in the intellectual adventure involved in developing performance studies as an academic discipline. Scholarly writing is a genre that requires a certain register and imposes constraints that tend to remove the emotional turmoil inherent in a term such as ‘adventure’. But re-reading these articles, most of which I have not looked at for years, has reminded me of the heady excitement of those days, the joys of collaboration with theatre practitioners, the commitment of our first students, the generosity of colleagues within the Faculty of Arts, our exhilaration at certain discoveries, and even the energy with which we argued our case with parsimonious administrators and sceptical academics.
Some of the articles that [will] follow exist only as manuscript notes for oral presentation, some were published. Where the latter are available online as the journal in question has been digitised (and aggregated), I provide the URL. The articles [will be] grouped here in a number of thematic clusters rather than as a simple chronological list as this makes it easier to perceive the logic connecting the various fields – production, performance, reception –that needed to be explored and for which analytical methods had to be devised. Within each cluster, however, the articles are listed chronologically so as to indicate the development of my thinking and the increasing sophistication of the technology on which I was able to draw. It is salutory to remember that in the 1970s, when our experiments began, academic departments were only just acquiring photocopiers, video recording was in its infancy, and personal computers had not been invented. Theory and practice were inextricably entwined in the development of this discipline, but both were enormously influenced by the technological revolution that was occurring at the same time.
There [will be] six thematic groups, with slightly porous borders as befits a body of work that evolved over four decades in response to a variety of academic constraints, technical challenges, and the need to tailor research to teaching…