ABSTRACT
Offering an insight into the emergence of performance philosophy as an interdisciplinary field, and summarizing, as well as problematizing, some of the movement’s most salient interests and concerns, this chapter introduces and sets the stage for the book as a whole.
What is a Companion? Although now obsolete, the English language used to include the verb: to companion, meaning ‘to make equal’. The very idea of equality as a verb rather than a noun – of an equalizing act – speaks to performance philosophy, as we understand it. Less an authoritative guide, then – or a comprehensive overview produced from a totalizing ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986) – the chapter frames the book as practising a kind of equalizing or companioning both in terms of the relationships between performance and philosophy that it stages in the different registers and voices, hesitations and interruptions it displays, as well as with you, its readers. What might it mean to equalize the relationship between performance and philosophy? To see philosophy as a kind of performance, to see performance as a kind of philosophy? A reminder here that the word ‘kind’, meaning “class, sort, variety”, comes from the Old English cynn, meaning “family”, and is related to the Proto-Indo-European root gene meaning “to give birth, beget”. So, thinking performance as a kind of philosophy and philosophy as a kind of performance means thinking how one gives birth to the other, how the two are related through familial ties and how they might play together – child-like, as it were (Kind = child in German). Speaking in more than one voice, the chapter also considers the extent to which performance philosophy might also be invested in being kind, as in, considerate and hospitable, as part of its ethico-affective practice.
