The PSi Lexicon is a living project that reflects on the changing discourses, grammars, embodied practices, epistemologies and creative traces of performance studies. The Lexicon moves along with ideas and concepts as they travel between or emerge in places, times, languages, people and communities. It is a live place for the convergence of the multiple roots and routes of performance studies.
The Lexicon is home to a number of multilingual entries.
The Lexicon is open for new entries and collaborations and is facilitated by the Performance Studies International Lexicon Officer.
Lexicon Guidelines
Submissions to the PSi Lexicon are open to all PSi members and guests. All entries and proposals are considered by the Lexicon Officer.
- New entries: new concepts, or entries responding to or expanding existing ones in the Lexicon
- Activations: pedagogical, critical or other encounters with Lexicon materials, which might result in new entries
- Takeovers: collaborative or collective engagements towards the development of new entries
We ask that all entries be accompanied by two-three proposed readers who can engage with the proposed languages or forms of the entry.
The Lexicon Officer will support the development of your entry or project, and will make the final decision about publication or assess the need for further development in line with the Lexicon’s remit. We are particularly interested in expanding what the Lexicon can do and hold, working towards under-represented concepts, epistemologies, practices, forms or ideas.
Copyright
The Lexicon is Open Access by default. Authors and contributors remain the copyright holders of their works. We ask you to agree your material for publication with the Lexicon under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Lexicon History
The Lexicon was created in response to the diversity of Performance Studies international and the disciplines and practices it engages and dialogues with. Being international is not a given but a challenge, one that manifests in the languages we use, and how they influence the concepts through which we engage with artistic and scholarly inquiry. As Performance Studies unlearns itself and engages in processes of decentering and decolonisation, the ongoing question of language and other epistemologies remains central. The Lexicon reflects how our work can be strengthened by the overlap and tensions between our local and regional perspectives and understandings, whilst invested in the challenges and power dynamics of ‘international’ as it sits with the intersecting crises, violences and agencies of our current times.
The Lexicon sprang from the PSi Regional Research Cluster ‘Encounters in Synchronous Time’ (Athens, November 2011), where 8 Greek artists and theorists presented a lexicon for performance studies in Greek, offering 24 entries, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet. Then past PSi President, and speaker in the event, Maaike Bleeker invited the curatorial team of the Cluster in Athens to work on an expanded multi-lingual lexicon for PSi’s website, which was available online from 2012-2019. In 2021, a new website was created, re-envisioning the Lexicon as a living and continuously expanding project and a reflective space on epistemologies and performance studies.
The Lexicon tracks some of the concepts we use, and the ways they change and question. It serves as a speculative, live and questioning archive of ever-shifting terms and the elasticity of their usage. It is edited and maintained by the current Lexicon Officer, Diana Damian Martin.
Former Lexicon Officers:
Jane Frances Dunlop (2019-2022)
Antje Hildebrandt and Katerina Paramana (2016 – 2019)
Efrosini Protopapa (2013-2016)
Former Lexicon Editorial Board:
Gigi Argyropolou, Konstantina Georgelou, Antje Hildebrandt, Katerina Paramana, Efrosini Protopapa, Steriani Tsintziloni, Danae Theodoridou