Current issue: Volume 28 Issue 4

This issue of Performance Research examines the mundane as both an analytic of day-to-day performance and as an inspiration and foil for art and performances that have sought to disrupt, disturb and even destroy the mundane and the attendant monotony and conventions of daily life. The fact that, even among the extraordinary events of the past few years, we continue to embrace and even rely on the mundane as an often-invisible structure to our lives and performative practices is striking. This issue aims to take seriously the potential expansiveness of performance to examine that which is so commonplace as to be often overlooked. In this context the editors developed collaborative workshops to consider daily performances across the planet. These theorizations together map an array of performing mundanity. How does, say, crossing the street in Mumbai speak to the same mundane performance in Cairo, Ramallah, São Paulo, Vancouver? What mundane acts are performed each day by a billion people? How might we collectively theorize the shared performances of our often-mundane daily lives? The issue invites performance studies to push the logics of performance through the lens of mundanity.

 

READ THE EDITORIAL AND ABSTRACTS ONLINE

 

1 Editorial: On mundane performance

SOZITA GOUDOUNA, ELENI KOLLIOPOULOU, EERO

LAINE AND RUMEN RACHEV

 

5 Everywhere, All the Time, 3:42: Collaborative encounters

with the mundane

ORIENTATION 5

ENTERING 25, 32, 41, 44

MAINTENANCE AND CARE 49,52, 56, 60, 65, 66, 69

PRESENCE 72, 75, 76, 79, 87, 88, 90,

91, 92, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101,

RITUALIZED 102, 104, 106, 109, 110,

113, 114, 117, 118, 121

WAITING 123, 126, 131, 134

AND SO... 139

ERIC VILLANUEVA DELA CRUZ, GILLIAN DYSON, RENATA

GASPAR, SOZITA GOUDOUNA, TASHA HAINES, EERO

LAINE, BIRGIT LARSON, VAHRI MCKENZIE, JIMENA

ORTÚZAR, SANDAMINI RANWALAGE, ANNA TZAKOU and

EVELYN WAN

 

7 Reading Rest as Resistance: Artistic responses to cultures of

productivity

RANJANA DAVE

 

14 Performing Heroic Laziness: Historical consciousness and

everyday life in the Thalua Club of Banaras

BHARGAV RANI

 

26 Curating Unmarked Banality: A Chinese migrant worker's

lifestyle vlogging

BINDI KANG

 

34 Walking Out of the Mundane: Body, space and practice in

contemporary Chinese behaviour art

ZHEN ZHANG

 

42 Twelve (Queer) Labours: The mundane as catalyst for the

archiving of queer transgressive joy

ALAN PARKER

 

51 Witnessing the Mundane: Spectatorship and the domestic

onstage

JESSICA NAKAMURA

 

61 Zen Tea Practice as Mundane Performance

JANELLE REINELT

 

70 T.MUDD: A hyper-caffeinated performance-meditation on

messianic themes

BRANDON WOOLF

 

86 Modern Dating and Performance: Creative blendings

between the mundane and the exceptional

ELLEN REDLING

 

100 Beyond Spectacle: Inadvertent and intentional use of the

mundane in immersive theatres

TERI HOWSON-GRIFFITHS

 

111 Clods, Compost and the Buoyancy of Clowns: Alex

Tatarsky's mundane methods

TIM REID

 

122 Beyond Mundane: Zim Nqawana's environmental

improvisation

JOANNA RUTH EVANS

 

130 On Listening in to the Scientific Mundane: Parameters for

understanding uncertainty and political indeterminacy

REBECCA COLLINS

 

140 Frequencies

RENATA GASPAR AND ALIA ZAPPAROVA

................................................................................................

REVIEWS

142 Composing Atmospheres, Engineering Liveness

MARK SUSSMAN

 

143 Assemblies under Pressure from Catastrophe

MAURYA WICKSTROM

 

145 Challenging Normo-divergency

JAMES LAYTON

 

146 Dramaturgy of Mundanity, Dramaturgy of Utopia

STEVE LUBER

................................................................................................

 

148 Notes on Contributors