by Diana Taylor
As a child, growing up in a small mining town in northern Mexico, I learned that the Americas were one, that we shared a hemisphere. Many years later, when I arrived in the U.S. to do my doctorate, I heard that "America" meant the U.S. There were two hemispheres, north and south, and while Mexico technically belonged to the former, it was usually relegated to the latter - part of "Latin America." These two conceptual maps lead to very different world views, to different ways of thinking about the history of our continent(s), about migrations, traditions, cultural exchanges, and possible collaborations and cross-cultural understandings. What we see depends on how we look at it.
The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, started at NYU in 1998 with major funding from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, sees the Americas as a deeply entangled and contested space. The 'First' world is in the 'Third' world just as the 'Third' world lives in the 'First.' The apparent discreteness of nation-states, national languages, and official religions barely hide the deep interconnectedness of peoples, languages, and cultural practices. Histories and trajectories become visible through performance, the many practices and events - dance, theatre, ritual and religious practice, political rallies, funerals - that involve theatrical, rehearsed, or conventional, event-appropriate behavior. How do these 'embodied' practices or performances intervene in the social arena? How do they transmit a sense of collective memory and identity - from local to 'hemispheric'? How do embodied practices produce, store, and transfer knowledge within and across generations, within and across national and linguistic borders?
The Hemispheric Institute, a consortium of universities and cultural institutions throughout the Americas, brings artists, scholars, students, and activists together in three, inter-dependent projects. First, our annual 'encuentros' (or gatherings) bring between three and four hundred people together for ten days to share our artistic and scholarly work. This past event, Spectacles of Religiosities, was hosted by NYU at the new Kimmel Center. Previous encuentros have been held in Brazil, Mexico, and Peru. Secondly, graduate students from member universities share an annual course to expand the scholarship about the role of performance in the Americas. How would our disciplines and methodologies change if we took seriously the idea that bodies (and not only books and documents) "produce, store, and transfer knowledge"? (i.e., 'Conquest' 1999, 'Colonialism' 2000, 'Staging the Nation' 2001, 'Globalization, Migration, and the Public Sphere' 2002). These courses examine how cultural embodied practices simultaneously transform in keeping with socio-political shifts and yet continue to transmit social memory and identity. The third major component of the Hemispheric Institute's project, developed in conjunction with NYU Libraries, is the creation of a digital library on performance in the Americas. This groundbreaking effort will result in the first major digital archive of videos, photographs, texts, scholarly essays, bibliographies, syllabi, and other materials of interest to those scholars, artists, and students working in the Americas.
Is this reconfiguration of the Americas important - urgent even - in this era of 'free' trade and closed borders? It depends how you look at it.
Diana Taylor is Professor, Performance Studies and Spanish Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.
