As I write this introduction to the first issue of TPQ under my editorship, the National Communication Association (NCA) turns 96 years old. Performance studies has been part of NCA since its inception, originally under the moniker “oral interpretation,” then “interpretation,” and since 1990, “performance studies.” This Journal was inaugurated in 1980 by the Interpretation Division of (then) SCA under the name, Literature in Performance, and was later adopted by NCA and changed to Text and Performance Quarterly in 1989 to reflect the expanded vision of performance and texts that was fueling our field. As this disciplinary maturation was occurring, I was beginning my doctoral work in performance studies. This positioning afforded me the benefit of simultaneously learning the roots and history of the field and making a professional entrance at a time of unparalleled exploration and discovery. I felt fortunate to begin my professional life at this critical moment.
In the last 20 years, since the Journal and disciplinary name changes, performance studies has shifted from the margins to become more of a nexus for communication and related disciplines. Scholar-artists in performance studies have seen their work increasingly inform, as well as be informed by, the work of those in numerous areas of critical-cultural studies within communication and other areas of study in the humanities and social sciences.
The performance studies scholarship published in TPQ persists in its objective to examine how performance as a subject, method, and product of inquiry helps us to make sense of our lives. While the essays in this issue reflect some of the multidisciplinary evolution, all the essays place at their core some aspect of the relationship between performer/performance and audience. All consider in some way the liminal space of performance-centered border crossings—borders between fictive and other realities, between the living and the dead, between bodies that are always in some way raced and sexed, between the past and the present, between cultures—and all examine performance as creating transcendence through time, space and the body. How do the performers and audience each contribute to, and facilitate, these border crossings? What obstacles challenge or impede them? What is to be gained from accessing this liminal space of the border that exists in and through performance?
Each of the five articles explores these questions distinctly yet may be grouped in a number of ways. Two of the essays extend performance studies work on memory and memorializing. Two others explore the competing and complementary needs of performers and audiences and how these needs are played out, at times playfully and at times quite tenuously, in the moment of performance. Three articles further the discourse on performance as a site of cultural exchange. Another three contribute new insights to the field's interest in autobiographical texts and performance. All but one article utilize various components of ethnography, demonstrating the enduring role this methodology plays in performance studies research.
As TPQ enters its third decade, the Journal continues to explore the myriad texts and contexts of performance from the discrete as well as blurred perspectives of aesthetics, poetics, and praxis. The interdisciplinary dialogue cultivated by the previous editors of TPQ—and encouraged by the proliferation of qualitative approaches to scholarship—has fostered relationships with multidisciplinary and international readers and authors. I look forward to continuing the dialogue with this issue and those to come.