Diana Taylor

You Are Here: The DNA of Performance

Among the mothers and the children of the disappeared in Argentina, performance of various kinds is a way of marking, accusing, and remembering. How can performance transmit traumatic memory? How do those of us who have not suffered the violence come to understand it? And how do we participate, in our own ways, in further transmitting it?

Scenes of Cognition: Performance and Conquest

Scenes of Cognition: Performance and Conquest explores how Mesoamerican pre-Conquest practices trouble some basic givens about the terms theatre and performance and ask us, not necessarily to replace them, but to rethink them again. This essay is as much about examining our own epistemic grids as about pre-Conquest theatre and performance.

Double‐Blind: The Torture Case

710 Thanks to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Marianne Hirsch, and Lauren Berlant for their suggestions and close readings, as well as to students from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University for their feedback. 1. Charles Krauthammer, “The Truth about Torture,”TheWeekly Standard, 5 Dec. 2005, pp. 21– 25; hereafter abbreviated “T.” 2. Quoted in Anthony Lewis, “The TortureAdministration,”TheNation, 26Dec. 2005, pp. 13–15. 3. Jean Amery,At theMind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington, Ind., 1980), p. 33; hereafter abbreviatedA. Double-Blind: The Torture Case

Dancing with Diana: A Study in Hauntology

Whats Diana to me, that I should weep for her? How and why does Princess Dis ghost haunt our memories as well as the latest political crisis?

Denise Stoklos: The Politics of Decipherability

One of Brazils few solo performance artists, Stoklos combines political clowning/commentary, mime, androgyny, magic, and Brechtian gestus as she explores the ways in which gender, sexuality, power, and familial bonds pull and push in a womans flesh.

Performance and politics

The introduction to the issue ‘Performance Politics: spectacular productions of culture in contemporary Latin America’ looks at how performance practices shape contemporary debates and determine political outcomes in Latin America in the post-dictatorial present.

MEMORY, TRAUMA, PERFORMANCE

Abstract: Trauma is a way of transmitting the past in the now, which gets re-activated full force. This paper discusses the durational nature of trauma, of history as lived, and as embodied practice. Keywords: performance; trauma; memory. Resumo: O trauma e um modo de se transmitir o passado no agora, reativando - o. Este texto discute o trauma como uma experiencia de natureza duradoura, como historia vivenciada e como pratica incorporada. Palavras-chave: performance; trauma; memoria.

The Many Lives of Performance: The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

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.

12. TRAUMA AS DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE

Pedro Matta, a tall, strong man walked up to us when we arrived at the unassuming side entrance to Villa Grimaldi, a former torture and extermination camp on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. He is a survivor who twice a month or so gives a guided visit to people who want to know about the site. He says hello to Soledad Fallabella and Alejandro Gruman, colleagues of mine in Chile who thought, given my work with human rights groups in Argentina, that I would be interested in meeting Matta.2 He greets me and hands me the English version of a book he has written: A Walk Through a 20th Century Torture Center: Villa Grimaldi, A Visitor’s Guide. I tell him that I am from Mexico and speak Spanish. “Ah,” he says focusing on me, “Taylor, I just assumed…” The four of us walk into the compound. I hold the booklet and my camera – Alejandro holds my digital tape recorder. I’ve come prepared for my “visit.”

Raging On: The Politics of Violence in the Work of Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe

Diana Taylor considers the influential work of Jesusa Rodriguez and Liliana Felipe who, when they fell in love in Mexico City in 1979, brought together two distinct but related histories of violence in the Americas. While Felipe speaks of the Argentine dictadura (dictatorship) and Rodriguez refers to Mexico’s dictablanda (‘soft power’), Taylor shows that behind the very obvious difference in style, each of these forms of governance has served to usher in and bolster neoliberal economic policy. Since shutting down their cabaret space, El Habito (The Habit), in 2005, Rodriguez and Felipe have entered a different, some would say darker, period of their collaborative performance work. This chapter explores the impact of the shift to savage neoliberalism on their career-long performance activism.