Performance Research: 'A Lexicon'

Williams, David (2006) Performance Research: 'A Lexicon'. [Journal]

Abstract / Summary

Co-editorship of issue; editorial pp.iii-v; entry on ‘Weather’ pp.142-4.

This outcome emerges from a 12-year relationship as Contributing Editor with, and contributor to, Performance Research since its inception in the mid-1990s. In this context, an editor’s role is instrumental in discourse formation and dissemination, in terms of contemporary interdisciplinary practices in an expanded field of performance and their articulation on the page and digitally. Alongside an ongoing involvement in the editorial board and the planning/development of this international peer-reviewed journal, Williams has co-edited 5 issues of the journal in total, 3 within this RAE period: 6:3, ‘Navigations’, 2001; 8:4, ‘Moving Bodies’, 2003; 12:3, ‘A Lexicon’, 2006. A range of his research writing has been published in PR –articles, artist’s pages, interviews, reviews, editorials, translations – as well as material he commissioned and curated. Recently, this work led to an invitation to contribute to CPR’s 'A Performance Cosmology' (2007); and he edited/contributed an introduction to a section on ‘other theatres’ for 'Critical Decade: The Performance Research Reader' (2007).

‘A Lexicon’ reflects Performance Research’s long-term editorial interest in surveying the ways in which vocabularies and discourses of performance are contested or in flux. International contributors, both scholars and practitioners, were invited to write on one or more key terms/concepts of particular interest to them, or that they deemed to be making an impact on performance in its broadest sense. With reference to other recent lexicons, this lexicon concerns itself with the play of concepts: aesthetic, performative, political, analytical, propositional, relational etc. It also participates in a wider set of contemporary art/performance networks, in particular through its commissioned inclusion in the publications initiative of Documenta 12 (Kassel, 2007).

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