If/when performance studies came to Singapore: PSi #10 and its ramifications

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2004, Performance Studies came to Singapore for a brief visit, and, by some accounts, it was a fraught encounter. That year, a Performance Studies international (PSi) conference, PSi #10, was hosted in Singapore, the first time this association gathered in ‘Asia’. In this essay, I use this conference as a starting point to tease out the intersections between my discipline and my home country, and the anxieties and potentialities that arise from bringing the two in the same space with someone like me as an interlocutor. In doing so, I critically raise the question: what does it mean to ‘perform’ Performance Studies in a place such as Singapore, a (post-)colonial, soft- authoritarian state?