What is Performance Studies?

Performance studies is an interdisciplinary field that lies at the intersection of several disciplines, including anthropology, dance and theater studies, sociolinguistics, and gender studies. Performance studies foregrounds embodied knowledge and approaches what constitutes performance in broad terms. Diana Taylor regards performance as acts of transmission that transfer memory, knowledge, and identity through citational behavior, or what Richard Schechner calls twice-behaved behavior. From everday acts to artistic productions to collective expressions, performance encompasses a wide range of embodied, citational behaviors. Performance studies also provides a methodological framework that allows us to interrogate events as performances within contextualized space, place, history, and systems of power.

Relevant to the present project's discussion on performing solidarity in the Crucian and Viequense context, I approach protests and resistance to the U.S. Navy, carnival and calypso, and USVI-PR Friendship day as performances. These acts range from collective expression to artistic creation to national government-sponsored celebrations. Through these acts, people embody solidarity, consciously or not, by articulating a trans-Caribbean union in peripheral U.S. territories. Whether it be through protest, music, or USVI-PR Friendship Day, each performance (to use Diana Taylor's framing) transmits memory, knowledge, and identity. Through this project, I draw from archival sources, scholarly articles, and multimedia to analyze events as performance and decipher repertoires of embodied solidarity in and between Vieques and St. Croix.

The video below, featuring Richard Schechner, further elucidates how performance functions as theory, methodology, and practice, specifically focusing on the role of archives and repertoires.