Actions of Transfer: Women’s Performance in the Americas :: November 20-23, 2008 :: University of California, Los Angeles.

This four-day event — co-sponsored by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and presented by The UCLA Center for Performance Studies — will include performances and invited speakers along with round table discussions and workshops. It brings together women performers/ activists from throughout the Americas and scholars who think about performance as a mode of embodied transmission and social intervention. The event will explore issues of indigeneity, gender and sexuality, transnational/global encounters, labor, domestic violence and access to material resources.

Featured participants and performers, among others, include: Jesusa Rodriguez and Liliana Felipe, performers from Mexico City; Luisa Calcumil a Mapuche, artist from Patagonia; Ana Correa, member of Peruvian theater group Yuyachkani; FOMMA , a Mayan Women’s Collective from Chiapas Los Angeles-based lesbian performance group, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (BdP); Tanya Lukin Linklater, First Nation Choreographer / Performer Choreographing Identities: Christine Suarez; Rebecca Pappas, Taisha Paggett; Hana van der Kolk,
Denise Uyehara.

Actions of Transfer is being held as a sister event with the inauguration of Centro Hemisférico/FOMMA, a joint research/cultural center and performance space in Chiapas, Mexico, which will take place in San Cristóbal de las Casas, August 28-29, 2009.

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a collaborative, multilingual, and interdisciplinary consortium of institutions, artists, scholars, and activists throughout the Americas. Working at the intersection of scholarship, artistic expression, and politics, the organization explores embodied practice — performance — as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory, and identity. Anchored in its geographical focus on the Americas (thus “hemispheric”) and in its three working languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese), the Institute seeks to create spaces and opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration and interdisciplinary innovation among researchers and practitioners interested in the relationship between performance, politics and social life in the hemisphere.

While its administration is housed at New York University, the Hemispheric Institute is comprised by over twenty-five member universities and cultural institutions throughout the Americas. Institute initiatives include courses, work groups, conference-festivals (Encuentros), a digital video library (HIDVL), archives, an online scholarly journal (e-misférica), a trilingual website, an Emerging Performers Program in New York City, and public online forums. In 2008, the Institute inaugurated the Centro Hemisférico, a collaborative research center and performance space in Chiapas, Mexico, in partnership with FOMMA (a Mayan women’s theatre collective) as well as its Hemispheric New York initiative, a program of public events that features artistic and scholarly work produced in New York City.

Why Performance Studies?

Performance Studies combines anthropology, performing arts and cultural studies, using an interdisciplinary lens to examine a range of social acts: rituals, festivals, theatre, dance, sports, and other live events. Performance Studies offers a mode of critical inquiry that can illuminate cultural practices across cultures, from the aesthetics of everyday life to the complex social movements of our times.

Performance and Politics

Studying performance in its myriad manifestations (as act, as masquerade, as intervention), scholars, activists and artists can analyze the ways in which performance is used to communicate social or religious values, to elicit identification, or to forge a sense of community. But politics itself also provides a rich arena for performance analysis: electoral politics, populism, protest movements, military parades, and mass rallies are just a few of the spectacles that can be best analyzed using a performative lens. The Institute thus explores the ways in which performance and politics are mutually formative: performance as a practice of politics, politics as a mode of performance.