Reorienting Performance is an artist-led exploration of how diasporic artistic practice can function simultaneously as aesthetic expression, historical intervention, and critical knowledge production.

Moving between performance documentation, archival reflection, scholarly inquiry, and visual experimentation, this book challenges how South Asian dance and performance have historically been framed within Western cultural discourse. Written from the perspective of a second-generation, mixed-heritage artist of South Asian and Jewish background, the book interrogates the Orientalist assumptions, authenticity narratives, and neoclassical expectations that have long shaped the presentation and interpretation of South Asian performance. Rather than reproducing inherited binaries between “classical” and “contemporary,” scholarly and artistic, or archival and embodied forms of knowledge, Reorienting Performance explores how diasporic artists negotiate identity, racialization, memory, belonging, and creative agency through interdisciplinary performance practice.

Structured through chapters and interludes that move between theory, choreography, installation, autoethnography, and visual documentation, the book traces the development of a body of work first presented through a major exhibition and performance project at REDCAT in Los Angeles. Across discussions of site-specific installation, kinetic scores, movement research, self-documentation, and diasporic embodiment, the study demonstrates how performance can become a mode of inquiry capable of generating new forms of artistic, historical, and theoretical understanding.

At the same time, Lionel Popkin offers a broader critique of the cultural and institutional frameworks through which South Asian diasporic art is often consumed, categorized, and legitimized. By foregrounding the lived complexities of mixed heritage, diaspora, and artistic process, Reorienting Performance challenges simplified narratives of homeland nostalgia, cultural authenticity, and representational visibility, proposing instead a more unstable, experimental, and critically self-reflexive understanding of diasporic performance.

Combining rigorous scholarship with artistic experimentation and an accessible, deeply personal voice, Reorienting Performance makes a major contribution to performance studies, dance studies, diaspora studies, artistic research, and contemporary South Asian cultural studies. The book will be essential reading for scholars, artists, curators, students, and readers interested in embodied practice, interdisciplinary art-making, and the relationship between performance, identity, and critical theory.