Decolonisation and performance studies: Questions from the border

Extending efforts to articulate the decolonial project in theatre and performance studies, by revisiting the terminologies and thinking around “border epistemology,” this article establishes the intellectual and political agenda of GPS' Special Double Issue "Decolonisation and Performance Studies" by inviting its authors and readers to consider a future for performance studies that is more challenging to hegemonic configurations of power and epistemic privilege that place particular narratives, methodologies, and epistemologies at the “centre.” It is an invitation to unsettle notions of “centre” and “periphery,” critique, and explore understandings, methodologies, and epistemes towards decolonisation. Given the flaws in institutional understanding and practices around decolonisation, the authors featured in the issue, myself included, ask if it is possible to imagine a “decolonised” performance studies, or a performance studies (and scholars) that hold the capacity to decolonise the field and its institutional practices. In a field of pedagogy and scholarship whose hybrid formation and transnational situatedness potentially make it a fertile ground for activism, politicised practices, and solidarity movements, how can performance studies actively and meaningfully offer critical methodologies and frameworks as part of a broader process that can enable the making of just futures? How can the field contribute to undoing the implications of colonial violence, and dismantling systems of domination still prevalent today? Is there a “border” performance studies

Gestures of resistance between the street and the theatre: documentary theatre in Egypt and Laila Soliman’s No Time For Art

In this article, I explore a direction in contemporary theatre in Egypt that emerged since the 25 January revolution in 2011 and that employed the immediacy of documentary form as a response to political change, unrest and repression, seeing in documentary theatre a mode of resistance that intervenes in hegemonic discourse. Through extending Peter Weiss’s ideas on documentary theatre and its relationship to political protest, I show how the work explored attempts to extend the struggle on the street, occupying a liminal position between the performance space and the public space, instituting a dialogic relationship between performance and audience as active co-participants in a community ‘in the making.’ As such, documentary form models a constantly shifting and open-ended revolutionary process. In light of Weiss’s theatrical model, I focus on Egyptian director and playwright Laila Soliman’s performance series No Time for Art, especially its last performance to date, which demonstrates a particular inflection of the documentary mode contemporaneous to the 2011 Egyptian uprising. The series is shaped by a performance form that seeks a place directly connected to and implicated in the broader events taking place, while disrupting conventional modes of representation and rupturing the tendency to fix and reify events from the revolution. The open and direct mimetic mode shown in this series includes the audience in collective and intimate acts of bearing witness, in ways that extend Weiss’s proposed ideal of ‘theatre of actuality’ and puts forward the practice of theatre itself as a ‘gesture’ of political resistance

How large is the spreading width of a superdeformed band?

Recent models of the decay out of superdeformed bands can broadly be divided into two categories. One approach is based on the similarity between the tunneling process involved in the decay and that involved in the fusion of heavy ions, and builds on the formalism of nuclear reaction theory. The other arises from an analogy between the superdeformed decay and transport between coupled quantum dots. These models suggest conflicting values for the spreading width of the decaying superdeformed states. In this paper, the decay of superdeformed bands in the five even-even nuclei in which the SD excitation energies have been determined experimentally is considered in the framework of both approaches, and the significance of the difference in the resulting spreading widths is considered. The results of the two models are also compared to tunneling widths estimated from previous barrier height predictions and a parabolic approximation to the barrier shape