Performance, Research as

Increasing numbers of cultural, queer, feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial geographers are engaging in performance as research. Three key areas of performance shape this line of inquiry: performance and identity, the embodied or experiential quality of performances, and the connections between performance and the everyday. Geographers engaging in performance investigate the ways in which space is produced and enacted. Performance methodologies and theoretical approaches also provide tools to uncover the power relations through which landscape and subjectivities are continually embodied and contested. Dance interventions and creative walking tours, for example, offer innovative and relational strategies for investigating the layered politics of place and space. Such methods open up opportunities for critical and reflexive attention to the presence or absence of certain voices in the production of spaces and subjectivities. Performance research raises questions regarding the race, gender, class, and colonial dimensions of engaging in such methodologies and conceptual approaches.