Making sense of the “Inter-”chaos and confusion…
This year’s PSi (Performance Studies international) conference was held together with the Critical Island Studies Consortium at Universitas Kristen Indonesia (UKI) in Jakarta, Indonesia. Although the theme Archipelagic Flows did not really align with my primary research focus, I decided early on to attend, so as to officially launch the inter-Asia Performance Studies Working Group (iAPSWG) — an initiative I co-founded with a few Asian scholars within the PSi framework — following a year of preparation.
Perhaps due to the location and theme, the faces I met this year were vastly different from those at PSi two years ago in London. My experience at this edition of PSi constantly oscillated between chaos, misunderstandings, wonder, discovery, inspiration, disappointment, trance, and joy. Asia consists of countless island nations — Indonesia alone consists of over 17,000 islands. Using performance studies to explore the diverse culture of archipelagoes and reflect on power differentials and dynamics is a complex task with no definitive answers.
This was my third trip to Indonesia (over a decade ago, I spent three weeks across three major cities for a research project, and later returned for a performance art festival). Yet, I still found myself disoriented by banknotes with values in the hundreds of thousands or millions, or navigating damaged roads alongside confusing public transit and map app directions. Indonesia operates within its own cultural systems, values, and ways of doing things. Whenever my inquiries yielded no clear answers, or when I received souvenir bags packed with batik fabrics, handmade notebooks, instant noodles, and instant coffee, I kept wondering: how do I interpret these seemingly unsophisticated gestures of goodwill?
At the same time, there were administrative procedures that felt almost like surveillance — student helpers frequently entering rooms to take photos for documentation during presentations, obsessive group photos at the end of every session, uniformed security guards aiming cameras at attendees, constant requests before the conference for advance submissions of abstracts and slides, and sticking “FULL” signs on doors mid-session to block latecomers… These practices left me deeply disturbed. The local host may be uncertain about the PSi’s culture and how to support it. Meanwhile, as cultural tourists descending upon Indonesia, how do we truly understand the conditions they face?
As I came specifically for iAPSWG, I was especially invested in making sense of these encounters born out of uncertainty and unease. Throughout the conference, I kept returning to a line from Paul Rae’s keynote: “All performance cultures have their secrets, scandals and shibboleths.” While we might assume that archipelagos are interconnected neighbours, each island has its own hidden and unspoken dynamics.
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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.
PSi never fails to surprise. At the closing ceremony, the organising committee and student helpers took to the stage to dance and sing, eventually joined by other scholars and artists on the floor. Such scenes are rare at ordinary academic conferences, but in an interdisciplinary field as open as performance studies, it felt just so natural — performance studies is about embodied and embodying knowledge in praxis. As the conference took place in Indonesia, some topics remained untouched (this edition presented noticeably few papers with explicit social/political orientations). Yet, the genuine, lively spirit of the host created a very different kind of encounter — one that exposes the friction between local practices and dominant knowledge frameworks…
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