duskin drum, Selections from Performance Artmaking

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the rhetorical term ‘medium’ and the figure of allegory, which always asks for audience engagement. Alongside work has no genres, so how does either the performer or the audience understand where moments of political agency might be opening up? How do audiences and artmakers collaborate in ways that keep the valuing going? The artmaking by duskin drum from the northwestern United States, currently working around the Pacific Rim, generates media that increasingly build performances that not only engage audiences in attending to the not-known of the materials in the performance ecology, but also embodying that not-known in performances that involve audience members from many quite distinct and disunified sociosituated locations. This is situated work in the social world of the alongside that embraces the possibility that emergent forms may move into the sociocultural—yet may not.