Performance Criticism in Southeast Asia: Conversations, Communities, Collaborations

Practices of performance criticism in Southeast Asia both appropriate and diverge from lineages of Eurocentric arts criticism; these may style the critic as a “parasite” siphoning off the creative energy of a work, or as symbolic of accrued cultural capital endowed with the expertise to decode an artwork.  Drawing from Julietta Singh and Irfan Ahmad’s troubling of colonial masteries and resistances to western lineages of critique, I wonder: how might the critic unravel the tangle of parasitical masteries that separate her from the performance she goes to see – and move alongside a work, skin to skin? My repositioning of the critic’s navigational journey is informed by archipelagic performance theory (Paul Rae 2019), and this paper in particular draws from a nascent Practice-as-Research (PaR) project that involves a loose working group of critics and practitioners from across archipelagic Southeast Asia who are interested in mapping ecologies and vocabularies of critique in the region and collaboratively theorizing lineages of critique from where we are located. While in its early stages, this PaR project will involve a series of meetings, focus groups and workshops across a six-month period, with an emphasis on care studies, relationality and embeddedness in a regional context, and translocal exchanges.

Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)
Panel 2: Organized Culture

11:30am-1pm HK/SG / 4:30-6:30am BST / 5:30-7:30am CEST / 11:30pm-1am EDT / 8:30pm-10:30pm PDT