On Hybridity

We write this editorial in summer 2020, at a time when most of us have had to adapt to a different way of seeing and doing things. By the time you read this issue of Performance Research on the theme of hybridity, the COVID-19 viral strain, which ‘jumped’ species, will have spread even further, merging and fusing tighter the boundaries of reality and its representation, in the process hybridizing the multiple facets that constitute it. Something similar can be said of the other major event in 2020 that had global repercussions: the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing worldwide protests of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which foreground histories of intermingling, oppression and privilege as much as the urgency of seeing and doing things differently. Although these events occurred after this issue’s Call for Proposals and the subsequent selection of contributions, the discourses of genus, mixture and transmission, as well as of diversity, equality and activism that come with the realities and imaginaries of COVID-19 and BLM resonate in more ways than one with the theme of this volume.

This issue of Performance Research considers hybridity in relation to performance, in particular the making, reception and study of performance as a set of practices that emerge from heterogeneous sources, as well as the performative operation of hybridity in historical, cultural and political contexts. To say that we live in a hybrid world would be at best a truism, at worst an erasure of a claim to difference. Equally to say that performance is hybrid would be no more than pointing towards the various expressive means that comprise it. For this reason, a key priority of this volume has been to advance an examination of hybridity that is mindful of a double process of the constant proliferation of hybrids, on the one hand, and their seamless absorption in the lifeworld, on the other. If hybridity is all around us, if many of the entities we take for granted are hybrids, then what should we examine and why? Are some entities more hybrid than others? Are there old hybrids and new hybrids? Do all hybrids operate in the same way?

In its most fundamental sense, hybridity refers to mixture and fusion, of species, races, plants or cultures. The contemporary application of the word can be traced across various disciplines, from biology and chemistry, to linguistics, politics, racial theory and popular culture (Pieterse 2009: 119). The term itself emerged from roots in agriculture and horticulture (for example, grafting) and is related to animal husbandry (cross-breeding) and to applications in metallurgy (alloys). It took on pseudo-scientific biological overtones when it overlapped with the history of imperialism and slavery, in the process generating a racialized discourse. In the context of inter-species (plants and animals) and inter-racial (human) breeding, biological hybridity is also associated with issues of purity, vigour and sterility/fertility.

In the second half of the twentieth century, in part due to the poststructuralist resistance to ‘notions of fixity and purity in origin’ (Papastergiadis 2015 [1997]: 257) but mainly due to evolving politics of liberation and emancipation in industrialized societies, hybridity became more broadly associated with questions of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity’, eventually leading to notions of cultural hybridity (Kraidy 2005). Homi Bhabha’s influential reading of the term in the context of colonialism (1994) marks the interstitial and the liminal, for example in processes like those of mimicry, which reproduce the dominant culture in an ‘alien’ indigenous/colonized setting. Such perspectives resonate with others that emerge when two (or more) cultural worlds collide, including creolization in language, as well as Mikhail Bhaktin’s heteroglossia (the ‘hybrid utterance’) and the carnivalesque (satire/critique through imitation) (1981). Hybridity, therefore, became closely associated with notions and practices of cultural as well as individual performance.

In the twenty-first century, hybridity has taken a more pronounced tinge in light of technology, mainly as it affects 1) globalization – with interactive digital and social media extending the ease of travel and other forms of communication to foster more intense intermingling of cultures and individuals; and 2) our daily life – where to be human entails an ever-increasing reliance on and entanglement with nonhuman materiality, making ours a progressively hybrid existence. This phenomenon has been theorized in terms of the cyborg (Haraway 1991; Zylinska 2002), the posthuman (Hayles 1999) as well as in relation to notions of ‘originary technicity’ (Bradley 2011) and ‘mediation’ (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2010), which draw attention to the hybridization of human embodiment that emerges from the incorporation of tools. In addition to discourses about postcolonialism, multiculturalism and identity, therefore, hybridity is now invoked in the contexts of globalization, technologization and the Anthropocene. Accordingly, in discussions on contemporary performance, hybridity is often used loosely to capture the synthesis and co-mingling of different sources, practices and methodologies that arguably underpin it (Lavender 2016). More specifically, the term has been employed in discussions of cultural and racial performance (Joseph and Fink 1999), as well as in relation to the emergence of new theatrical practices in colonial contexts (Liu 2013).

Due to its diverse and flexible applicability, hybridity is often invoked as an explanatory framework. Yet, attention needs to be paid to the semantic polyvalence of the word, which may diminish its analytical potential, or worse, may neutralize conflict under the disguise of positive and unavoidable (ex)change. Consequently, the priority of this special issue has been to ground hybridity in specificity and consider its processes in relation to contexts of incubation and emergence. At the same time, it is also acknowledged that it is precisely this fluid, and often destabilizing factor, that marks hybridity’s strength in resisting fixity and absolute categorization. In bringing forth the unknown and dilution, the potentially chaotic and downright subversive, the appeal of hybridity comes with risks that demand consideration.

In this regard, the limits of hybridity (that is, what can be intermingled, how and when) can also mark a possible – if fluid – ethics. In some cases, uncontrolled hybridity (as in genetic experimentation or cultural appropriation) can have adverse and harmful consequences, hence the requirement for some coordinates or guidelines, however minimal and indicative, not so much to determine the result as to provide parameters of operation. In other cases, the outcome of fusion and mixture – including in culture and art – can lead to defamiliarizing perspectives and discoveries that would otherwise not have been possible. As process and output, then, hybridity favours the complex and the nuanced, the multi-directional and the multi-dimensional, in the coming and clashing together of beings and things, human and nonhuman.

Against such a background, this edition of Performance Research has two interrelated aims. It endeavours to foreground hybridity in the wider field of performance, that is, to explain how it operates in specific instances and what are the ethical, aesthetic and political implications of this operation. To this end, the special issue aspires to advance a timely reconsideration of the concept that parallels related formulations such as intertextuality, interweaving (Fischer-Lichte et al. 2014) and intra-activity (Barad 2007). This volume is also premised on the assumption that performance, in reflecting and influencing human activity and life, is strategically placed to conduct a reappraisal of hybridity specifically via its practices of preparation and presentation. Not only is performance hybrid, but hybridity often has a strong performative dimension; hybrids are often engineered with the explicit purpose of enhancing performance; and hybridity, even when it is not the result of intentional mixing, is an inherently performative expression. Accordingly, this issue investigates the intersections between hybridity and performance as the coming together of performer and environment, materials and practitioners, performance and reception, event and analysis. Thus understood, hybridity is at once a formative, trans-formative and performative encounter that shapes performance and culture on many levels: as pedagogical process, as compositional and production strategy, as ensemble and assembly (human and nonhuman), as inter- and intradisciplinary endeavour, as a policy and as inter- and intracultural phenomenon.

Considering the many intersections between hybridity and performance, the articles of this special issue are organized according to four main strands. The first cluster deals with considerations and operations of hybridity at a meta-level, that is, as a process that underpins performance and unfolds according to specific rules and interactions. In ‘Towards an Ethics of Hybrid Agency in Performance’, Duncan Jamieson discusses the way assemblages of human and nonhuman actors raise questions about the ontology of human subjects and their agency, especially with reference to twenty-first-century artificial intelligence (AI) developments in ‘algorithmic processes’ and ‘affect-aware systems’ that monitor and control social interaction. Jamieson argues that performance is a site that can allow us to play with different intelligences, flows and intensities and thus gain an understanding of a series of phenomena that often transcend the human sensorium and/or existing political and legal frames.

Complementing Jamieson’s macro-analysis, Frank Camilleri proposes an analytical framework in the form of a continuum to examine instances of hybridity in terms of mechanisms, qualities and outcomes. Camilleri deploys the continuum to illustrate hybridity on an embodied micro level, which he denotes by the term ‘bodyworld’, to mark human–nonhuman relationalities, specifically with reference to athletes who operate gym machines and the psychophysical work of performers. For Camilleri, the focus of the continuum on material processes sheds light on a phenomenon’s aspects that are often marginalized but that serve to counter – through concrete practices – the ubiquitous quality often associated with hybridity.

Following Jamieson’s view of performance as a place for exercising responses to the ethical problems hybrid entities throw at us today, and Camilleri’s evocation of human–nonhuman relationalities, the following section includes a set of articles that look at specific examples of practice. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck offers a detailed consideration of Becoming Leeches: Episode1 – Having dinner, an installation by Doo-Sung Yoo that involved human and animal participants interacting in a real as well as a virtual setting. Hybridity is here examined in terms of interspecies mingling and as an interdisciplinary aesthetic medium, both of which raise questions of care and participation. As Parker-Starbuck argues, the series of interactions that were made possible in Becoming Leeches offer a powerful reminder of the interdependence of species and raise questions about the position of humans in a more than human world.

Marco Donnarumma examines the relationship between the performer’s lived body and a series of materials in his own work with Margherita Pevere as well as the theatrical living sculptures of Olivier de Sagazan and the dance-less bodyscapes of Maria Donata D’Urso. Donnarumma charts the various ways in which the performer’s body intersects and interacts with different materialities in compositions that allow, constrict and regulate the expression of human and nonhuman behaviours. According to Donnarumma, the sophisticated encounters and hybrid states of embodiment that unfold in these performances demonstrate that the privilege with which white male subjectivity has been so far endowed is only provisional. The normative function of the white male subject can be replaced by other identities that make space for the abject, the incomplete and the irrational.

Maria Kapsali explores the way hybridity complicates the aesthetic experience of visitors in museums and galleries. She examines the use of sonification and movement sonification systems as tools for aesthetic engagement. Drawing on Bruno Latour, she argues that sonification can provide not only an alternative modality for engaging with artwork but also raises questions about pre-existing boundaries drawn around subjects and objects, artworks and visitors. Echoing the arguments that Parker-Starbuck and Donnarumma raise with reference to the performances they examine, Kapsali contends that hybridity renders present the spaces that exist between previously demarcated categories and that, through performative encounters, it can allow us to play in those spaces and rehearse alternative positions for both subject and objects, human and nonhuman.

The section concludes with a visual essay by Alda Terraciano that traces spaces in-between, specifically the cultural and geographical journeys of migration across urban metropoles, via ‘the hybridization of physical and digital spaces through multisensory interaction’. In Terraciano’s composition of maps, routes and fragments of experience, hybridity is captured in the communities, aromas and utterances that move between places and cultures.

The focus of the third strand is on the different ways in which particular manifestations of hybridity in performance affect the experience of audiences. The section opens with an essay by Marzenna Wiśniewska that maps the relationships between puppets and performance in three different categories: the bio-object, whereby performer and object create a new construction, which operates with a distinct kinetic and dramaturgical signature; a hybrid structure consisting of two parts, one human and the other puppet, both of which remain visible to the audience and are endowed with agency; and finally a technological hybrid that mixes the performer’s body with mediated representations thereof. As Wiśniewska explains, these relationships mark not only a range of dramaturgical possibilities and aesthetic choices; they also stage different possibilities for co-existence between things and humans and, as such, offer different strategies for meaning making.

The two essays that follow are specifically concerned with the way dramaturgical and scenographic composition between performers and objects have a direct effect on the experience of audiences. Continuing with the theme of puppetry, Morgan Batch explores the use of objects in performances that deal with dementia. Looking at work from companies based in the UK, Australia and the US, Batch argues that the use of objects can stage nuanced representations of the condition, especially in devised dramaturgies that do not privilege the spoken word. In certain cases, such enactments of dementia not only enable the audience to diagnose the way loss of memory complicates daily tasks but also open up new realms of experience. Hybridity in these works, as Batch attests, operates both on material and conceptual levels, as ‘dramaturgical authority’ is now ‘redistributed’ from spoken word to objects.

Michael Richardson draws on his own work to discuss a rehearsal and performance-making process that involved deaf and hearing actors and accordingly addressed deaf and hearing audiences. Charting a hegemony of audism within theatre praxis, Richardson argues that hybridity can foreground the sensory needs and preferences of both actors and audiences. Drawing on a Freirean methodology, he contends that performances that make use of a range of languages, including sign language, offer insights into the way that sensory modalities affect the preferences and meaning-making processes of audiences. These performances also highlight expectations about access and reveal the extent to which spectators are prepared to deal with unfamiliar dramaturgical structures. Hybridity, Richardson concludes, can thus alert us to the hegemonic structures that determine theatre production to expose the marginalization and experience of minority groups.

In ‘Learning from Experience: Disciplinary hybridity between group psychoanalysis and performance’, Olive Mckeon considers the intersections between group relational conferences and performance-making processes with special reference to a work by visual artist Leigh Ledare. The Task constituted a recording of a Group Relational Conference presented as a form of performance. Mckeon discusses the problems that emerged from Ledare’s work and argues that interdisciplinarity, as a form of boundary-crossing, is no longer a satisfactory analytical tool. She proposes, rather, that the kind of intermingling that happens between the two fields requires that artists and practitioners are ‘accountable to two fields at once’. Similar to Richardson’s account, Mckeon foregrounds the ethics of hybrid assemblages and the responsibilities that artists have towards their audiences and participants.

This section is concluded by a visual essay from an interdisciplinary team of researchers. In ‘Experiencing Choreographed 4D Visuals in a VR Dance Installation’ Stephan Jürgens, Carla Fernandes and Rafael Kuffner discuss the way the choreographic process of Sylvia Rijmer was captured and represented in a virtual reality (VR) setting that enabled participants to gain an embodied experience of key choreographic tools. In this example, hybridity is a catalyst in the team’s effort to put forward a mode of embodied and proprioceptive knowing in a medium that can render it present to an external observer. This project, as the team found out, made possible the combination of different ‘epistemological perspectives’ and enabled the VR user to develop an embodied understanding of the artist’s ‘choreographic thinking’.

The fourth section of this special issue includes essays that deal with expressions of hybridity in cultural performance, which mingle different registers, upset existing hierarchies and enable the establishment of new identities. In ‘Queer Fiesta: Hybridity, drag and performance in Bolivian folklore’, Enzo E. Vasquez Toral examines a Bolivian carnival procession that originates from Catholic devotional practices and initially had a strong nationalist and heteronormative character. Vasquez Toral discusses the way the fiesta has been appropriated by a community of transgender activists and artists and, in the process, became a fecund place for expressing complex gendered and ethnic identities. The argument is developed in terms of a ‘queer hybridity’ in the already-syncretic contexts of Bolivian folklore (which combine Andean/ Indigenous and Spanish/Catholic legacies) that has now been extended to Gay Pride Parades.

In line with Vasquez Toral’s interest in the way hybrid performances make possible the negotiation of cultural identity, Avanthi Meduri explores the establishment of British South Asian Dance in the UK from the 1970s to the present. By considering the agendas of funding bodies, the imperatives of cultural organizations as well as the artists’ aesthetic and professional choices, Meduri demonstrates the complex set of interactions that underpinned the development of the field. She argues that hybridity often served as an integrationist tool that aimed to elide a range of languages, artistic forms and experiences within the apparently innocuous melting pot of ‘multicultural Britain’. Aiming to redress the balance, the picture painted by Meduri is a lot more volatile, revealing the frustrations and struggles that are often hidden beneath the veneer of integration and also pointing to the considerable efforts that are still needed in order to ensure the future flourishing of the field.

The next article, by Sinibaldo De Rosa, takes us to Turkey in an account that weaves together the cultural practice of a dance performance (“biz” by choreographer Bedirhan Dehmen), its adaptation of ethno-religious Alevi rituals, as well as a specific geo-political social context and the mourning that ensues in the violent aftermath of the 2013–14 Gezi Park protests. For De Rosa, who focuses on the movement dramaturgy of “biz”, generalized notions of hybridity are not enough to examine the nuances of such phenomena. Accordingly, he complements his analytical framework of hybridity with concepts like individualization, resonance and multivalence to foreground the composite quality of the piece. For him, the ‘composite’ marks the coming-together of various elements without necessarily enabling a cohesive appreciation of a specific cultural practice or of the social reality from which it emerges.

In their own different ways, both Meduri and De Rosa show how hybridity might be inadequate to capture the range of exchanges that take place within and betwixt artistic and cultural contexts. They alert us to the possibility of hybridity becoming co-opted by a rhetoric that aims at integration within a dominant narrative. In relation to the case studies that each author considers, hybridity, while still operative at various levels of interaction, requires careful consideration and adjustment to reflect rather than deflect the socio-material circumstances of those encounters.

Rosemary Cisneros, Marie-Louise Crawley and Sarah Whatley chart a different set of interactions, this time between heritage sites, artists and visitors. With reference to cultural tourism, the authors discuss Culturemoves, an EU-funded project that aimed to create a set of digital tools towards ‘enabling new forms of touristic engagement and dance educational resources’. In the project, heritage sites become remediated through dance and digital interfaces. Hybridity in this project operates both through the research and collaboration process and is also evident in the final product. Yet, in their analysis of a multimedia dance piece created in response to a touristic site, Cisneros et al. argue that hybridity is often compromised by the appeal of an imaginary authentic (site, dance form or experience), which prevents the development of a meaningful dialogue between disparate elements. Their account foregrounds then the way hybridity requires an abandonment of the imperative for authenticity, which often defines the language and experience of cultural tourism.

The interactions between culture, site and audience discussed in this strand are playfully juxtaposed in Nick Hunt’s visual essay ‘Photoscenography: Cuddington’. In a collage that combines different registers of writing with photographs of a park in South London, Hunt (re)creates on page the hybrid palimpsest the park became through the years: from reclaimed farmland, to metropolitan suburb, to recreational space, Cuddington exemplifies the way hybridity has both a spatial and temporal component and marks experiences of place and time.

This volume concludes with a consideration of hybridity in relation to the very elements that comprise it. Jasper Delbecke offers a historical overview of the essay as a hybrid form of writing and knowledge production and argues that its power lies precisely in its ability to mix registers and forms. Delbecke contemplates more recent manifestations of the form and considers the development and function of ‘essayistic performances’. By looking at the work of Ho Rui An, an installation of Mobile Akademie Berlin and the performance lectures of Bruno Latour, Delbecke argues that the attribute these works have in common is the creators’ desire to grapple with the material they explore and with the questions and doubts that arise from such encounters. Essayistic performances, therefore, do not aim to disseminate stable nuggets of knowledge but stage the very process through which knowing takes place.

In a certain sense, the collection of articles in this special issue confirmed our initial assumption that hybridity is a generative process that ‘makes’ culture and as such underpins a range of diverse practices. What this volume also demonstrates is the different ways this process manifests and the power games that underpin it. Even if hybridity is considered to be the very means through which different cultures and materialities meet and combine, as the authors in this edition of Performance Research show, these meetings are often guided by heteronomous agendas and/or are already determined by existing interests. It is crucial then that this volume also confirmed our second initial assumption: that hybridity engenders the unexpected. Collisions and merging between previously separate entities can sometimes result in surprising novelty – and they also enable the slow erosion of stable and fixed positions. The transgender activists dancing in the Bolivian fiesta; the metropolitan audiences flying as a simulation of leeches; the states of embodiment expressed through infinite combinations of inorganic and organic matter; the merging of bodies and machines; the cross-pollination between therapeutic and artistic frameworks; the range of aesthetic experiences that become possible through the destabilization of established sensory hierarchies; the mixing of language, registers and protocols show that hybridity can be counted on to take us to new territories.