Perform. State. Interrogate.

Welcome to the "User's Guide" to PSi #10. The purpose of this publication is to provide you with the necessary information to negotiate the conference, and to access the various means it provides for interaction and participation. However, as elsewhere, we have felt the need to first provide you with a "map" to the conference and then to crumple that map, so that the single plane becomes a three-dimensional relief...

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... Most performance theorists are aware of the proclivities of Performance Studies to "map" cultures through the production of research, and of how problematic this mapping is in post-colonial Asia. Many are also aware of the way that colonial anthropology smudged into colonial tourism for the intelligentsia in places such as Bali early in the 20th century. The economics of tourism demand that the objects of the touristic gaze find it in their interest to display themselves as expected by global travelers. Delivering on expectations in this way allows for the consummation of the touristic exchange. Today's guide books - including the backpackers' guides - are read by the traveler, tourism marketing companies, and government agencies alike. The experience sought is seamlessly constructed and delivered. Many of the major themes of this conference - translation, global vs local tensions, the invention and survival of traditions, the omni-presence of global trauma and violence, and the problematics of Performance Studies as a field - are to be found not only within the conference walls but outside in the streets, in the pages of the press, on the screens in the MRT trains and buses, in advertisements, in the daily rituals of the kopitiam (coffee shop), in the life of the HDB estates, in the small parcels of undeveloped land inhabited by Singapore's rapidly vanishing bio-diversity, and in all of your complex interpersonal interactions.

(Source: Perform. State. Interrogate user guide)