CFP Global Performance Studies Special Issue 2.2 “Future Now” TITLE The Future is Naked AUTHOR Rumen Rachev AFFILIATION PhD candidate, Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Auckland, New Zealand TEXT Perform or else. This is the mantra by which I was initiated (as a form of pre-liminal ritual) into performance studies, by the all too familiar name McKenzie. Perform or else. I hold the mantra and the mantra holds onto me, through the past and present years; through different performance turmoil and performance journeys. What is the future of performance? To this question, in McKenzie’s framework, it would be restated as: which future and which performance? It seems that McKenzie’s mantra rejects as well a clear divided linear progression of past-present future, stating that temporalities are switching back and forth between different emerging states, which are all marching under the tune of ‘perform or else’. Is it still valid, and to whom, to ask over and over again ‘perform or else’? What differences do the mantra, the book, the performative thinking, that McKenzie started, make in relation to the current modalities of governing life? Who is the one asking ‘which future’ is actually now? Does the future possess a future or it is traded much further in the past, to speak ever for a future yet to come? If all in all is perform or else, what else can there be, but a future? The future will not come to human’s salvation; rather, it will bite and assimilate all there is, into a future not ever to come. Not a ‘post’ or ‘pre’ future, just A future. One possibility amongst many. That possibility, one amongst many, speaks to the future-yet-to-come, the future-yet-to-be, the performance of engaging with temporalities that refuses to perform for the past, present, and future; the performance that enables and disconnects from/by/to the present futures, again in McKenzie’s non-linear and polyrhythmic manner. As a professional performance research scholar, I have to ask/offer questions, since answers are expected to be produced for