Diana and Jesusa in Cuicuilco, an archaeological site in the Americas (Mexico City, 2024).
The Department of Performance Studies is happy to announce that University Professor Diana Taylor has been awarded a year long Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities to finish her digital book, Shape Shifting Performance. Here’s a description of the project. Alongside the digital book, print versions will be published by Duke University Press in English and 17, Editorial in Spanish.
"Shape Shifting Performance (SSP) will be an interactive and multilingual digital publication that explores transformational performance practices based on Indigenous theories of incessant change. The platform adds decisive non-Western analyses to theories of transformation. In Mesoamerican metaphysics, everything is alive and interconnected. The cosmos consists of energies linking and transforming all that exists. Thus Mesoamerican epistemology powerfully expands beyond Western theories of drama. SSP focuses on the prolific performance work of Jesusa Rodríguez (b. Mexico, 1955). From her 1999 essay 'Nahualismo: An Aztec Acting Method,' Jesusa examines, adapts, and applies performance practices from pre-contact Mesoamerican philosophy. Her work demonstrates that shape shifting is more than an artistic practice. It is a way of being, knowing, surviving, and acting in the world.
What does a 'nahualist' resistant performance practice look like? How has performance enabled communities to survive over five hundred years of colonialism?"
