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I was nineteen years old, fresh out ofjunior college and on a production internship at my favourite Singaporean theatre company (The Necessary Stage), when I decided that my next academic move should be studying at the University of Sydney with performance studies as my major. I wrote an email to my father, who lives in Shanghai, and stated the reasons for my choice-as opposed to taking business, economics, or law (I am a child of a Singaporean-Chinese family after all). The University of Sydney ranked high in the academic world, especially in the arts and humanities, and I would be following my passion (and also my father's unfulfilled love) for theatre and the performing arts. I would not, however, be limited by this passion, as I wrote in the email.
I want to study performance studies instead of just theatre studies because performance studies includes some very interesting research on daily performance like praying, getting married, etcetera. It's a lot like human studies [anthropology] with an emphasis on performing.1
The truth is I can't say I actually knew much about anthropology, but the online description I found on the University of Sydney's Department of Performance Studies Student Guide had sold me on its importance. I found the idea of performance studies somehow freeing, exciting, and a little edgy. Instead of just studying theatre, I could gratify my interests in history, philosophy, cultural studies, and analyse "real things" in the social world. I didn't even have to make a choice between disciplines. My father indulged me. He wrote back on the same day (in English, a rare thing for him to do): "If it is as good as your wish, you can try. Regards, Ray." Three months later, in July 2010, I enrolled.
"The sting of memory," Norman Denzin writes in "The Call to Performance," "locates the moment, the beginning" (2016, 142). Denzin refers to painful moments in the writer-as-ethnographer-as-performer's life which connect personal crises, troubles, or turning points with larger social issues. What makes the above memory "sting" for me, however, is precisely the absence of a crisis, struggle, or turning point as I answered the "call" to performance (studies). It is a memory of a privileged, youngest daughter...