This seminar examines performance as a multilayered concept that is continually reshaped through travel and other mobilities. Performance, in this context, can be understood in its broadest sense as a dynamic practice through which identities, relationships, meanings, and experiences are negotiated and transformed. By bringing performance and mobilities into conversation as mutually illuminating frameworks, the seminar seeks to explore how their intersection creates new critical possibilities. 

Thinking about performance vis-à-vis mobilities draws attention to the varied forms through which these practices take shape and acquire meaning. For instance, Tim Edensor applies the “metaphor of performance” to tourism, examining how tourist practices may be “regulated, directed and choreographed” while also allowing for “improvisation and contestation” (59). The connection between performance and mobilities also foregrounds how performed identities mediate access to movement across different spaces. Jeanne Baret’s participation in Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s expedition in the eighteenth century while disguised as “Jean,” for example, demonstrates how gender performance became a condition of mobility, as women “donned masculine garb when they wished to enter where women otherwise dared not tread” (Schiebinger 24). Travelling performances further demonstrate how mobility is not merely a context for these practices but can become part of the performative process itself. Little Amal, a giant puppet representing a young Syrian refugee girl and part of the art project The Walk, exemplifies this relationship by transforming her journey across cities and borders into an embodied encounter with displacement. 

This seminar invites further inquiry into the expansive relationship between performance and mobilities, exploring the many ways their intersection can be approached and rethought across historical periods, cultural contexts, literary genres, and modes of expression. 

Possible topics include (but are not limited to): 

• Performances of identity (gender, race, nationality, class, caste, etc.).
• Tourism and the performance of authenticity.
• Migration, displacement, and belonging.
• Travelling theatre and other itinerant performances.
• Travel, empire, and performances of knowledge and authority.
• Religious performances, rituals, and sacred journeys.
• Social media and curated performances of travel.
• Writing, documenting, and archiving travel as performance.
• Travelling figures and cultural encounters.
• The travelling gaze: voyeurism, surveillance, and spectatorship.
• Museums, exhibitions, and the mobility of objects. 

If you have any questions about this seminar, please feel free to contact us: [email protected] & [email protected]