International Conference
Dynamics of Interweaving Performance Cultures
21-24 June 2018

The conference sets out to investigate a key topic in research on interweaving performance cultures—this is the notion of knowledge. In four panels and two workshops, scholars from around the globe explore the dynamic relation between past and present processes of interweaving between performance cultures and practices of knowledge production. 

While the panel Generating Knowledge focusses on how interweaving processes are related to knowledge shifts within performance cultures, the panel Epistemologies of Performance Cultures examines how researchers can acknowledge and even methodologically interweave culturally divergent knowledge systems and theories of knowledge (epistemologies). The panel Forgotten Futures investigates the politics of remembering, probing why specific histories of interweaving are sometimes marginalized or even completely neglected and ‘forgotten.’ The panel Fear of Interweaving asks: Who is afraid of interweaving and why? In today’s world, these questions seem to be of utmost importance as they address the fear of cultural exploitation, of devaluation, of exoticization, and, not least, of the unknown. 

The workshop Frames of Interweaving reviews cultural institutions that facilitate and organize interweaving processes, examining the politics and ethics of their policies by asking what types and practices of knowledge are involved in their policy-making. The workshop ‘Probing’ Interweaving looks at how new models of interweaving are emerging in practices of co-creating performance work, what knowledge about interweaving is generated in such creative practices and how it can be investigated, collected, and maybe even shared.

With Dynamics of Interweaving Performance Cultures, the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste Berlin seeks to consider globally shifting conditions of performance making, to identify overarching themes and topics, and to create a new dynamic in international scholarship on performance—especially by proposing ‘epistemological interweaving’ as a new methodology.