The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a consortium of institutions, artists, and scholars dedicated to exploring the relationship between expressive behavior (broadly construed as performance) and social and political life in the Americas.

    The program draws on the emerging discipline of Performance Studies to foster intellectual and artistic relationships across boundaries of geography, institutions, languages, and academic disciplines.

    The Hemispheric Institute is funded by grants from the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation and administered by the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in New York City.

    Why Performance Studies?
    Performance Studies combines anthropology, performing arts and cultural studies, using an interdisciplinary lens to examine a range of social acts: rituals, festivals, theatre, dance, sports, and other live events. Performance Studies offers a mode of critical inquiry that can illuminate cultural practices across cultures, from the aesthetics of everyday life to the complex social movements of our times.

    Performance and Politics
    Studying performance in its myriad manifestations (as act, as masquerade, as intervention), scholars and artists can analyze the ways in which performance is used to communicate social or religious values, to elicit identification, or to forge a sense of community. But politics itself also provides a rich arena for performance analysis: electoral politics, populism, protest movements, military parades, and mass rallies are just a few of the spectacles that can be best analyzed using a performative lens. The Institute thus explores the ways in which performance and politics are mutually formative: performance as a practice of politics, politics as a mode of performance.

    Hemispheric View
    The Hemispheric Institute aims to provide a model for academic study that is specially suited to the study of performance in the Americas. The interdisciplinary focus on performance avoids some of the ethnocentric limitations inherent in traditional theatre and dance studies, enabling students to focus on expressive forms that fall outside the bounds of European performance genres. The Institute hopes not only to look beyond these disciplinary limits which a long colonial history has imposed, but to illuminate the ways in which much theatre, dance, and music in the Americas has been tied from the outset to the history of colonialism itself. Studying cultural and political performances across the Americas offers scholars and artists a better understanding of the many shared histories and practices in the Americas that defy national borders.

    Research and Development

    The Hemispheric Institute is developing four primary areas of research into the field of performance and politics in the Americas: 1) Performance and Politics; 2) Conquest and Colonialism; 3) Memory, Atrocity, and Representation; and 4) Globalization, Migration, and the Public Sphere, as described in greater detail below.

    To develop each area of research we will organize (1) a web-based Hemispheric Course or (2) a summer Seminar in Latin America. Ideally, we will organize both a course and a seminar for each area. For the latter two areas, we will offer a course in the Fall, and a corresponding seminar the following summer.

    The web-based course will allow students at member institutions to study the subject in depth, and will enable us to make key texts in that area available as part of the Institute's web-based archive. At present, participating institutions in the web course are: the Department of Performance Studies at New York University; the School of Drama at the University of Rio de Janeiro, Brasil; and the Department of Communications at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima.

    The summer Seminars-two-week intensive programs held in different sites in Latin America-will allow for intensive focus on a more narrowly defined topic as suggested by the site and by the particular research interests of seminar participants. At present, we have scheduled seminars in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2000), Lima, Perú (2001), and hope to plan the 2002 seminar in Mexico City.

    Areas of Research

    1. PERFORMANCE AND POLITICS
      addresses the methodological and theoretical tools offered by the emerging interdisciplinary field of Performance Studies to address issues of political and social change in Latin America.
      Hemispheric Course: Spring 2000
      Annual Seminar: Brazil 2000

    2. CONQUEST AND COLONIALISM
      addresses the methodological and theoretical tools offered by the emerging interdisciplinary field of Performance Studies to address issues of political and social change in Latin America.
      Hemispheric Course: Fall 1999
      Annual Seminar: Brazil 2000

    3. MEMORY, ATROCITY AND REPRESENTATION
      focuses on performance modes as a means of transmitting cultural memory and as a strategy for political intervention.
      Hemispheric Course: Fall 2000
      Annual Seminar: Mexico 2001

    4. GLOBALIZATION, MIGRATION, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
      will examine performances of national identity, citizenship, language, and cultural heritage as they cross boundaries in the Americas through migration, exile, and other socially-motivated issues. How do dramas of nation-ness and identity tie into other p erformances-economic, global, and cultural-of which they are also a part? The NYU/Mexico course offering will focus specifically on the cultural formation of 'Mexican' and 'Mexican-American' and 'Chicana/o' through the examination of public space in both Mexico and the U.S. The courses offered in Brazil and Peru might explore similar issues of migration, displacement, and continuity in the context of Afro- or indigenous populations.
      Hemispheric Course: Fall 2001
      Annual Seminar: Peru 2002
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