I sometimes get confused by that and find myself having to go back to J. Like you say Fred, the word is often used to describe an empty gesture, an insincere going-through-the-motions. I agree that it often doesn’t sound right. Hypatia Vourloumis : It seems to me that in different art, educational, or activist contexts, the word “performative” gets thrown around a lot. In the process of deforming all these forms and genres and disciplines, the formless helps you understand how performativity actually labors. Sandra Ruiz : Well, the “formless formation” of our book is performative and a little dirty it is meant to enact what we learned as Performance Studies students, and it’s also meant to show how you do study as opposed to how you think study. But your book is guiding me through this.
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It just means “you just playin’, you just talkin’ shit, you just merely making these empty rhetorical gestures rather than actually doing something.” Having been raised up in “Performance Studies,” it doesn’t quite go in my ear right when they use the term, even if I feel they’re right in the way they use it. For many of them, the term “performative” is like a dirty word. And having recently returned to the department, while never having left the field, I keep coming back to the words “performance,” “performative,” “performativity,” especially because of the way students formed and deformed and enformed and informed themselves last summer with the protests, in the midst of the pandemic, really becoming aware of themselves as activists.
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We were hanging out in the halls we were students together. And Stefano, who was teaching in New York at that time, was always there. I was teaching there when you were there as students, but I was a student, too, an initiate in the field, learning with and from José Muñoz, Barbara Browning, May Joseph, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Allen Weiss.
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1 In a way, we all got started, and also restarted, in and around the Department of Performance Studies at NYU around twenty years ago. Yiannis Hadjiaslanis, Formless Formation, 2020, digital photograph.įred Moten : Hypatia and Sandra, the occasion of your book Formless Formation coming out is also the renewal of our ongoing family reunion.