Description
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
