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Review Essay: Performance Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke UP, 2003. 326 pp. ISBN 0-8223-3123-3
Tedlock, Dennis. Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice. Oxford UP, 2003. 361 pp. ISBN 0-19-513974-7
The multidisciplinary nature of performance studies invites analytical perspectives from psychology to religion, anthropology to theatre, literature to music. To wed the nebulous confines of performance studies to the historical syncretism of the Americas is a formidable task, and Taylor, who heads NYU's Hemispheric Institute on Performance and Politics, successfully negotiates the subtleties of register and identity inherent to this multifaceted undertaking. While in one chapter of The Archive and the Repertoire she engages definitions of camp, kitsch, rascuache and relajo to characterize the all-encompassing appeal of Univision astrologer Walter Mercado, in other chapters she focuses on the performance of grieving and trauma related to the death of Princess Diana (especially by New York City Latinos and as compared to Evita and Selena) and to her own witnessing of the September llth terrorist attacks. She likewise brings personal experience to her exploration of contrasting ideas about performance as witnessed when police officers unjustly disrupted an Afro-Caribbean musical event in Central Park in 1998.
The Archive and the Repertoire contains ten chapter-length essays, more than a hundred illustrations, an introduction, notes, bibliography and index. Taylor's central thesis develops the concept of a repertoire as a corporeal, multi-generational heritage of actions that exists independently of the archive, which contains exclusively recorded material. In her opening chapters Taylor foregrounds the repertoire's great significance vis-à-vis the indigenous and African populations of the Americas and their strategic performative reactions to European colonization. After a viewpoint analysis of colonial performative...