Lingering in action: contemporary performance and scenes of stasis

Acts of lingering are framed by the conditions that govern the spaces in which they occur, including those where they are expected, welcomed, tolerated, and discouraged. In temporal terms, lingering suggests staying beyond a fixed period of time or refers to contexts in which there is a loosely understood time frame after which lingering might cease. In this paper, I think through lingering as a critical and creative practice. This is one of the beginnings of a research project that explores the spaces, temporalities, and politics of lingering in relation to: archives and residual materials; activism, protest, and occupation as acts of lingering (of lingering as action); lingering in the gallery, the alley, the doorway (of thresholds and of holds/holdings of items, subjects, and in-betweenness); lingering legacies, including of shame, guilt, and desire; and affective states of lingering, persistence, refusal, and letting go. Ultimately, I want to ask: how are subjects constructed, shaped, and policed by practices of lingering? How might performance connect and complicate lingering as scenes of action and/or of stasis? Drawing on an understanding of the spectator-scholar as invested in and meditating on forms and practices of performance that requires thinking deeply and challenging the terms on which we encounter art, I am interested in lingering as a commitment to staying with complexity, uncertainty, and discomfort, of holding fast, not moving off, on, and not letting go for longer than may be useful, comfortable, or, indeed, productive. In the context of this Working Group, I want to explore the possibilities of the ordinariness of lingering in performance and everyday life, particularly in the sense of the delaying of beginnings and endings, conversational exchanges that linger on knotty subjects and work through uncertainty, and scenes of stasis that might facilitate a practice of lingering in/as action.