Potentials of Performance

In the third year of the project (2011/2012) the Performance Matters team worked in collaboration with associate researchers from Goldsmiths, University of London and University of Roehampton to investigate the as yet undocumented, unspoken and unrealized potentials of performance.

The year's theme looked towards possible futures as it addressed questions of promise and transformation. What does performance hold in store in its present-day testing of the limits of the social, the cultural, the vital and the critical? What are its potentials to transform civic social bodies and the production of subjectivities more broadly? And how might the failed promise of democracy in contemporary Europe and beyond necessitate a rethinking of the very promise of performance? In short: what can performance do?