Missing Names

Abstract

This contribution starts from observing a remarkable absence of continuity in scholarly debates and discourses, in the field of theater and performance studies. Instead, our ‘debate’ seems to be hidden in a process of ongoing proliferation, moving in any kind of direction without any sense of orientation, which makes it very hard to identify a specific theatre and performance studies perspective or to identify approaches and methodologies specific to the field - something that is actually quite relevant when interdisciplinary exchange is to be a mutual affair. The problem of this wide variety of approaches is that it renders theatre and performance studies invisible as a specific practice with particular approaches. How are we to be recognized in an interdisciplinary field? By inquiring in the practice and politics of ‘naming’, and the absence of that, this contribution addresses the current state of affairs in the theatre and performance studies field, followed by the suggestion that we should perhaps give names to our tools and concepts and methodologies, to establish debates in which we enter into discussion and actually respond to each other. This contribution deliberately seeks to move through uneasy terms like ‘tradition’ or ‘branding’, to advocate a practice of naming. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s analysis of naming practices and activities (rather than classes or categories) and Rosi Braidotti’s citationality, this invitation is not a call for ‘closing the ranks’, instead it is a plea for articulating particularity; an invitation to develop a joint, accumulative practice, in which we continue acting fugitively, but with a plan.