PSi 19 Day 3

Performance is hard work, especially in the heat currently enveloping the Bay Area. Nevertheless, we soldier on. Highlights from Day 3 at PSi 19:

1. A great panel on performance and food featuring former student Ted Whittall, who has a fantastic career ahead of him.

2. Lunch with former Vancouver colleague Jisha Menon, now at Stanford, and just returned from a sabbatical in Bangalore to jump back into the fray of helping to manage a conference of this scale.

3. A plenary panel between Thomas Richards, of the Growtowski Workcenter, and Daphne Brooks, from Princeton, on race, the body, and the dynamic range between sonic resonance and sonic dissidence. Though both had amazingly insightful things to say (particularly Brooks on Sarah Vaughn's interpretation of Summertime), this second "plenary dialogue" proved that the format is so far not working. Here's hoping tomorrow's conversation between Peggy Phelan and Una Chaudhuri is just that--a conversation.

4. Hearing Shannon Jackson put performance/art's post-medium condition(s) in disciplinary perspective.

5. Witnessing Guillermo Gomez-Pena play with, occupy, and generally reimagine multiple borders at the Pigott Theatre, including the one that perhaps remains the most pernicious for performance: that of the proscenium (are you listening Ron Athey?).

6. Catching the beginnings of a durational piece--Wreckage Upon Wreckage--conceived and executed by a group of talented artists from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, including project lead Nancy Tam, Daniel O'Shea, Sean Marshall Jr., and Finley Hyde.

SFU MFA candidate Didier Morelli (and my TA from this past spring semester) was also participating in a performance praxis session this evening, but I was too bagged to make it (sorry Didier!).

Oh, and I also contributed an account of 10 minutes of my time spent at PSi to Spatula and Barcode's collective and cumulative Record of the Time we've all spent here--though in hindsight I think I may have got my designated entry time wrong!

P.