PSi Working Group: inter-Asia Performance Studies

Call 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. What we wish to do in the WG - Address research, pedagogy, creative and socially-engaged practices in the to-be-defined field of inter-Asia Performance Studies; - Collate relevant projects and case studies as part of this speculative field (existing and continuing research, historical case examples, contemporary artistic practice, publications etc.); - Share pedagogical materials to support each other’s teaching practices; - Build discourse through co-writing and publishing; - Support the creation of networks, consortia, and/or transdisciplinary engagements amongst ourselves as a meeting point within PSi. The story so far // The co-convenors have been meeting online periodically since PSi#29 Assemble in London, as a reading group. The group has read excerpts from Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau’s Siting Postcoloniality (2022), Joan Kee’s The Geometries of Afro-Asia (2023), Vincente Rafael’s Motherless Tongues (2016), Tina Chen and Charlotte Eubanks’ Global Asias (2025), and Hong Kong playwright Yan Pat To’s play A Concise History of Future (2016). We used these texts to orient ourselves, find common ground and gain inspiration.