ABSTRACT
The continuation of performance studies as a field of study depends upon a strong commitment to the doing of aesthetic presentations. Without such commitment, it is a bankrupt discipline. Performance studies finds its heart in embodiment, in enactment. Only through staged performance, whether behind the proscenium arch or on the streets, does performance studies hold claim to a defining method, a method that understands performance to be a way of knowing. To use performance as a method, as is true for all methods, demands training. It requires practitioners to be fluent artists who know their way around the stage, who know what it means to call upon theatrical techniques as strategies of inquiry. This method of speaking from the body, like other forms of arts-based inquiry, brings forward understandings that are not found with objective, distanced methodological stances. Instead, the method of performance studies is an act of immersion, of becoming and being, of reflection and reflexivity. It tells what the body comes to learn.
