The inter-Asia Performance Studies Working Group was officially launched in the Performance Studies international (PSi) and the Critical Island Studies Consortium (CIS) 2026 Joint Annual Conference: Archipelagic Flows in Universitas Kristen Indonesia, Jakarta.
The inter-Asia Performance Studies working group unites scholars, practitioners, and artists to explore how Performance Studies intersects with an inter-Asia framework. The working group aims to decenter Western knowledge production in research, artistic practice, and pedagogy while critically intervening in the Cold War framework of “Asian performance.” While inter-Asia cultural discourse has grown over two decades, the specific contributions of theatre and performance to this field remain underexplored, prompting questions about how “inter-Asia Performance Studies” might emerge as its own theoretical intervention. The group seeks to foster epistemological kinship and solidarity by engaging performance as both a method of social inquiry and an ethic-making practice — one that confronts legacies and ongoing impacts of colonisation, authoritarianism, militarisation, marginalisation of indigenous communities, and other ongoing crises across Asia and its diasporas. We are officially launching the WG in Jakarta, and invite participants with a research interest and/or practice in the many Asias and their diasporas to join. We are particularly intrigued by the potentiality of the ‘inter’, and the key issues and questions that emerge in our very encounter, as PS scholars, practitioners, and artists with a shared interest in Asias from our different cultural histories, identities, and curiosities.
In the PSi#31 conference, using the method of speculative fabulation, we hosted 2 workshop sessions with WG participants to co-imagine iAPS as a mature field in the future, and from that speculative perspective, play with the creation of speculative course manuals in which the field is taught. Speculative fabulation (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016) is a method that knots together seemingly disparate concepts to challenge established conventions, which opens a shared space for us to co-imagine the future of this field. In this process, we wish to co-create inter-Asia PS syllabi/ archives/ pedagogies/ methods, discover challenges, intersections, solidarities and frictions, and co-define what inter-Asia PS means to our WG.
>> My Afterthoughts:
I always appreciate how PSi brings together open-minded and curious people. Across two iAPSWG sessions, participants generously contributed keywords to imagine a proposed inter-Asia performance studies curriculum for academic institutions. If “inter-” inherently demands that we repeatedly discover, comprehend, hesitate, think, imagine, and adapt amidst shifting differences, how do we make sense of the processes that shape and interpret these in-betweenness? I am eager to explore further how performance studies can respond to and thrive within such a state. [read more…]
The PSi#31 and CIS#6 2026 Joint Annual Conference: Archipelagic Flows was hosted by Universitas Kristen Indonesia (Christian University of Indonesia), Jakarta, Indonesia, 15-18 July 2026.