Text and Performance Quarterly

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A “Performative-I” Copresence: Embodying the

Ethnographic Turn in Performance and the
Performative Turn in Ethnography

Tami Spry

To cite this article: Tami Spry (2006) A “Performative-I” Copresence: Embodying the Ethnographic
Turn in Performance and the Performative Turn in Ethnography, Text and Performance Quarterly,
26:4, 339-346, DOI: 10.1080/10462930600828790

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Published online: 18 Feb 2007.

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Text and Performance Quarterly
Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2006, pp. 339
346

A ‘‘Performative-I’’ Copresence:
Embodying the Ethnographic Turn in
Performance and the Performative
Turn in Ethnography
Tami Spry

The ‘‘crisis of representation’’ in the social sciences and humanities was not so much a
crisis for performance studies artist/scholars as it was a recognition of a familiar. Our
disciplinary roots are grounded in interpretation, a process wrought with the crisis
and complexity of representation. The ‘‘performative turn’’ in ethnography (Turner)
has served to expand the scope and recognition of the cultural/political implications
of performance studies. Similarly, performance studies theories of embodiment
and textual interpretation inform ethnographic methods of ethics, researcher
positionality, cultural performances, and fieldwork (Conquergood ‘‘Performing,’’
‘‘Rethinking’’; Schechner). In 1998, Mary Susan Strine mapped the ‘‘cultural turn’’ in
performance studies, asserting that the ‘‘culture-performance matrix’’ resituated
literature as ‘‘an always politically inflected form’’; refocused perspectives on how
performative forms and practices have served to ‘‘produce, sustain, and transform’’
systems of power and dominance; and directed us toward less traditional texts
(personal narratives, oral histories, performance art) (6
7). Strine, with Conquer-
good, argued that this culture-performance matrix signaled a paradigmatic shift
‘‘from performance as a distinctive act of culture to performance as an integrated
agency of culture’’ (7).
The dialogic engagement between ethnographic studies of performance and
performance studies of ethnography continues to expand our knowledges of self/
other/context by continually (re)activating our methods of representation. These
methods assist in approaching such crises as political fissures in the status quo, as
fractures interrupting hegemonic practices, and as ruptures in imperialistic research
routines. Performance and ethnography continually turn back upon themselves

Tami Spry is Professor of Performance Studies at St. Cloud State University. Correspondence to: Tami Spry,
Dept. of Communication Studies, MS 170, St. Cloud State University, 720 Fourth Ave. South, St. Cloud, MN
56301-4498, USA. Email to: tlspry@stcloudstate.edu.

ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) # 2006 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/10462930600828790
340 T. Spry

emerging as praxes of participatory civic social action (Conquergood ‘‘Performance

Studies;’’ Denzin; Madison Critical; Schechner).
One methodological (re)location resulting from the culture-performance matrix or
a performative ethnographic praxis is a repositioning of the researcher, whether s/he
is researching a text for performance, engaging field work, or composing a text for
print and/or performance. I offer the phrase performative-I as a researcher
positionality that seeks to embody the copresence of performance and ethnography
as these practices have informed, reformed, and coperformed one another in the
historicity of their disciplinary dialogue.
I come to this performative-I positionality from a space of frustration, and then
later, of stifling grief. My continued work in Chile with the traditional Mapuche
rituals of healing had taken, as ethnographic work can, some serious interpersonal
twists and turns between the two Mapuche healers (one indigenous Mapuche, the
other Chilean) with whom I apprenticed. The class, culture, race, and gender issues
involved in our interactions began to foreground my positionality as researcher,
apprentice, and friend turning coproduced research plans and methods on end
(which can, sometimes, be a good idea, but not this time). The complexity of the
situation was exacerbated when I became pregnant during the research. Then we lost
our son in childbirth. Things fell apart. The shadowlands of grief became my
unwanted field of study.
Since I could not seem to escape from or live within my own body as researcher,
woman, mother, I began furiously to write from that terrible liminal space. And
although I view the research artist as a nexus upon which spin the processes of critical
participatory representation (Spry ‘‘Performing’’), this subject(ive) position was
different. I could hear Craig Gingrich-Philbrook:
Some people talk about the body, about what the body knows, about what the body
tells them. They have separate bodies, I suppose, the way some people have separate
homes, summer homes. I live body-language-body-language. My body makes
language. It makes language like hair. (3)
Writing was the only ritual I could enact, words the only thing my body could feel.
Having broken into little pieces, my subject position went from a destabilized ‘‘me’’ to
a chaotic but oddly comforting ‘‘we.’’ Pieces of selves became others manifesting
language and constructing a plural and kinesis sense of self that seemed to navigate
the interrelations between self/other/bodies/language.

Pieces
I sit left of center stage in a straight-backed wooden chair with no arms. Pieces of paper
lie scattered about me, some whole, some torn. From where I sit, I can read some of the
pieces. There are words or bits of words, forming a grammar of fear and confusion.
Agitated, I rise from the chair. My arms break off my shoulders and bounce stiff and
clumsy about my ankles on the stage. I stumble trying to assemble the shards of this
language, fractured fairy tales from the wreckage of a birth and death. I lurch within
 A ‘‘Performative-I’’ Copresence 341

the boundaries of the stage trying to read the pieces, trying to remember sentence
structure, trying to piece together an alphabet. 1
After losing our son in childbirth, writing felt like the identification of body parts, as
if each described piece of the experience were a cumbersome limb that I could snap
off my body and lay upon the ground. There was a bizarre and profound comfort in
admitting to and describing this feeling of dismemberment and fragmentation. I had
subsumed, however, dominant cultural narratives about grief, narratives asserting
that patience over time (six months according to the doctor at our HMO), would
bring closure. I am thankful for the disciplinary wisdom to view lived experience
through theories of embodiment, because it was only in trusting the embodied
knowledge that ‘‘I am an un/learning body in the process of feeling’’ that I began to
heal (Madison ‘‘Performing’’ 109). I felt a deep somatic connection to that fractured
self and space, like I was moving back into my body. Reinhabiting the only space I
ever lived with my son motivated a deeply embodied theorizing about the narrative
disposition of this grief. With this fracturing, my body seemed to wield a motile sense
of self (production). In embracing this sense of wreckage, I began to see rupture and
fragmentation as a form and function of performative ethnographic representation.
It is, as Dwight Conquergood says, a ‘‘performance-sensitive way of knowing,’’ that
walked me through the shadowlands and light spaces of grief (‘‘Beyond’’ 26). In
conjunction with this empathetic epistemology, performativity, ‘‘the everyday practice
of doing what’s done’’ (Pollock 43), allowed me the ‘‘doing’’ of meaning about that
liminal, manifold, and incoherent space. Embodying this performative turn upon
grief activated an intervention upon dominant cultural performances of grief. I could
feel a methodological shift in my positionality within this and other fields of study
from participant-observer actor to a ‘‘performative-I’’ subject(ive) researcher
positionality involving (1) textual forms as effects of the fragments and wreckage
of experience, (2) an empathetic epistemology of critical and copresent reflection
with others in transforming systems of dominance, and (3) a performative writing
that constructs self as a motile conflation of social/linguistic effects creating a
performative participatory engagement with others.

Fragments
The researcher positionality of a performative-I approaches the auto/ethnographic
process/text as wreckage or rupture of linear concepts of meaning-making allowing
fragments of experiences to be articulated and arranged in a collage or bricolage
form. Certainly, a bricolaged or compiled script is a familiar textual form to
performance studies practitioners; employing this form from the performative-I
narrative location can directly intervene upon cultural practices that resist linear
concepts of time, space, and closure. A textual representation of work with the
Mapuche (used with proper permission) constructed through a performative-I
positioning might include fragments of oral narrative from healers, songs and chants,
and autoethnographic accounts from others and myself, more clearly reflecting a
Mapuche perspective on the circularity and simultaneity of time and history. A
342 T. Spry

fragmentation of form can allow diverse methods of representing varied cultural

representations of being engendering diverse textual forms to emerge in the felt-
sensing ‘‘un-learning body’’ (Madison ‘‘Performing’’ 109) embracing ‘‘performance as
an integrated agency of culture’’ rather than ‘‘a distinctive act of culture’’ (Strine 7).
Such a form implicates the movement of meaning in relation to the diversity of
selves and others in myriad sociopolitical contexts allowing a method of textual
cultural kinesis turning language and bodies in upon themselves reflecting
and redirecting subaltern knowledges. The text becomes a diaspora of dialogic
engagement between disparate moments and movements of meaning. Unhinged
from a linear narrative deployment, fragments of lived experience collide and realign
with one another, breaking and remaking histories. In ‘‘Paper and Skins: Bodies of
Loss and Life,’’ autoethnographic texts are broken apart and put back together
differently in each performance calling into question strict linear sedimented
narratives of grief. Pieces of life and limb are added, pulled apart, taken away,
organized by the wreckage of grief and healing. My mother’s garden speaks with her
grandson’s ashes, conversing with their dying husband/grandfather, consoling the
body’s birth of her lost child. In the spirit of dialogic engagement, the text resists
‘‘closure’’ and offers comfort in the inconsistency and partiality of knowing.

Disarmed
It is the incoherency of it all. Bombs have gone off, and rather than running around
trying to put bodies of words back together, I find that I can only watch and witness as
the dismemberings bleed a syntax of fractioned sentence structures.
The words are unmeshed in the blood and bones of the mother and child. Arms
ache and disarm themselves with the visceral absence of the other. Writing doesn’t help
me put my arms back on, but it does help me to remember that I had arms, and then,
to show me that the arms are still usable in a way I can’t yet understand.

Empathetic Epistemology
Conquergood’s performance-sensitive way of knowing is an empathetic epistemology
merging participant-observer positioning with the vulnerability of the felt-sensing
‘‘un-learning’’ body. ‘‘Empathetic scholarship,’’ writes Ronald J. Pelias, ‘‘connects
person to person in the belief in a shared and complex world’’ (12). Ethnographer
Ruth Behar writes evocatively of the necessity of ‘‘anthropology that breaks your
heart’’ (161). Striving for empathetic knowledge construction requires an openness to
the connection, and also to the pain and confusion inherent in empathetic interaction
with others in the field of study. A performative-I positionality requires that the
researcher remain present within the complexities intrinsic in cultural and political
issues of power and control which demand astute critical self-reflection. In
‘‘Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,’’ Conquergood describes
‘‘an ethnography of the ears and heart that reimagines participant observation as
coperformative witnessing’’ (315, emphasis mine). In conjunction with the texts of
 A ‘‘Performative-I’’ Copresence 343

Fredrick Douglass, Conquergood describes a ‘‘hermeneutics of experience, relocation,

copresence, humility, and vulnerability’’ where knowledge is located, engaged, and
‘‘forged from solidarity with, not separation from, the people.’’ Within this relocation
of understanding, the observer of the participant-observer is subsumed and
transformed by the complexity of civic interests and the local effort of ‘‘coperforma-
tive witnessing.’’ In concert with Douglass, Conquergood articulates a kind of
subversive listening to the ‘‘soundscapes of power within which the ruling classes
typically are listened to while the subordinate classes listen in silence’’ (315). A
performative-I positions the researcher to listen to the responses toward hegemony by
marginalized others, seeking a Burkean consubstantiality where differences are
experienced as a continual motivation for connection, accord, and social redress.
This methodological solidarity with the other in ethnographic work has emerged as
a reaction to centuries of others violated by those with the power to research, write,
and name history (see, e.g., Fabian; Said; L. Smith). Such is a colonizing research
system whose practitioners believe they should or even could ‘‘give voice to’’ The
Other. A later popularized position touted that the researcher should, instead, seek to
have voice with The Other, assuming simply wanting to would make it so. ‘‘Research,’’
writes Linda Tuhiwai Smith in Decolonizing Methodologies , ‘‘is one of the ways in
which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and
controlled’’ (7). Our disciplinary work within the culture-performance matrix, as
evidenced by the work of Strine, Conquergood, Jones, Madison, and others, has
provided the theory and practice within which the notion of the performative-I can
intervene in the subtle and overt hegemonic colonizing practices of cultural
representation, listening for both the silences and the songs of subjugation. An
empathetic epistemology of a performative-I is an intentional and ‘‘performance-
sensitive’’ method of listening critically with ears and heart to engage local and
relocated knowledges forged in the copresence of the other. A researcher embodying
the performative-I positionality is a coperformative participant felt-sensing a
hermeneutics of humility for listening to and assisting in the subversion of
‘‘soundscapes of power.’’

Writing Copresence
Living betwixt and between for me does not mean living on the hyphens. Those lines
are too straight; when I step on to them they break leaving me hanging from one word
or another. Maybe if I were to let go . . . but I can’t let go of words. My body keeps
making them. My body ‘‘makes language like hair,’’ as Craig Gingrich-Philbrook says
(3). My hair dreads itself into knots of meaning that are (k)not-me, and not-(k)not-
me. The dreads become the ropes that I hang onto when the hyphens between the words
break from the weight of my body. The dreads tether me to words, their chaos of form
offering me assurance that my scattered pieces of stories will somehow be told, no
matter how chaotically string theory-ish they may be.
I have written before that ‘‘Performative writing composes the body into being. Such
a praxis requires that I believe in language’s representational abilities, thus putting my
body at (the) stake . . .’’ (Spry, ‘‘Preface’’ viii). I have come to believe that whether or
344 T. Spry

not I believe in language, language will represent me, others, culture, based on its
collective will, a will composed by those in various kinds of power at the moment of
utterance. Sometimes I am one of those in power. Sometimes I am not. Language and
body activate one another, not necessarily in ways agreeable to the body’s person. I
am with Craig Gingrich-Philbrook in saying: ‘‘That the body ‘knows’ something
doesn’t preclude the need for the linguistic situation, articulation, and critical/ethical
evaluation of that knowledge’’ (4). The writing process of a performative-I
positionality emerges as a conflation of effects concerning how the body is read in
various cultural settings, and the representational power of language to constitute the
body. ‘‘The body is like a cultural billboard for people to read and interpret in the
context of their own experience’’ (Spry, ‘‘Performing’’ 719), but, assuming some
measure of performative agency, I can also use my body as a critical tool of linguistic
representation. A performative-I positionality emphasizes this critical potential of
interrupting dominant cultural narratives deployed upon bodies by retelling those
narratives from the body itself subjected/assigned to those narratives.
In not trusting my own grief process, I was not trusting what I knew as a
performance practitioner, to view performance as transgression, as ‘‘a force which
crashes and breaks through sedimented meanings and normative traditions and
plunges us back in the vortices of political struggle’’ (Conquergood, ‘‘Performance
Studies’’ 32). A performative-I positionality employs performativity and poesis
deploying heretic agency within hegemonic acts thereby ‘‘doing’’ critical reflection
upon one’s sociopolitical location and interaction with others. My own discomfort
about my grief writing came from notions of mimesis, a mimicry of dominant grief
narratives rather than remembering the movement and disruption of poesis, and the
relation of word and body of kinesis. Here, embracing performance from cultural
invention to intervention, the performative-I recognizes diverse representations of
grief, releasing the floodgates for many forms of processing and healing.
But the ‘‘writing self ’’ of the performative-I positioning is herself subject to
fragmentation and linguistic dismemberment. It is the concept of fragmentation and
the conflictual effects of representing sociocultural interaction that is at the heart of
the ‘‘writing self ’’ of the performative-I positionality. Sidonie Smith agues that the
notion of a coherent unified ‘‘self ’’ in autobiographical writing produces necessary
failure; she conceptualizes the autobiographical subject as ‘‘incoherent, heteroge-
neous, interactive’’ (108). Pollock describes a performative self that ‘‘is not merely
multiple,’’ it moves itself ‘‘forward . . . and between selves/structures’’ (87). A
performative-I positionality is concerned less about identity construction and more
about constructing a representation of the ‘‘incoherent,’’ fragmented, conflictual
effects of the coperformance, of the copresence between selves and others in contexts.
Truly there was no ‘‘coherent’’ self for me to identify or construct in the shadows of
grief; there were pieces, fragments. Realizing that I am a conflation of autobio-
graphical effects, performatively doing grief gave me agency to keep breathing, like
Emily Dickinson, ‘‘Because I could not stop for Death*/He kindly stopped for
me*/the Carriage held but just Ourselves*/And Immortality’’ (712). And then the
carriage keeps going. Performatively, Dickinson knew that Death is an everyday
 A ‘‘Performative-I’’ Copresence 345

practice of breaking and remaking meaning, of colliding and realigning with history.
In Dickenson’s carriage the performative-I negotiates the manifold fragments of
identity and grief.

Rubble
This anguish is a carnivale of lost and found, of presence and absence, an embodied
theorizing of the postmodern identity continuously dismembering only to reassemble
differently each time I fall apart. Through writing, I grope to pick up the pieces
scattered among the towers of 9/11 rubble, paper blowing down the streets and
corridors; business cards, birth certificates, memos, post-its, obits, old agendas.
An arm, a leg, a dear ankle.
We all lay about in ruin, amongst the rubble, knowing that meanings are in people,
not in words.
Using the body as a critical tool of performative intervention upon dominant
narratives, and reconstituting the self as a conflation of social/linguistic effects that
de/re/constructs a relation of cultural representation may offer a researcher
positionality with the ears to listen within the silences of hegemony and the heart
to engage a critical empathetic epistemology. A performative-I positionality embodies
the disciplinary copresence of performative ethnographic praxes navigating the inter-
relations of self/other/bodies/language. Sometimes, it is in the knowledge that we live
experience directly, but study it performatively that we find ways to live in the
fragments of language and bodies that lie about the stages of interactions with others
in contexts.

Note
[1] Italicized segments are from my ‘‘Paper and Skin: Bodies of Loss and Life.’’

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