To Step, Leap, Fly

The stage is the open sensual throat of poetry and … it is your legs that can strikingly manifest quite definite states of the soul.

Robert Walser (1907)

On Poetics and Performance concerns itself with ‘poiesis’, or acts of making and giving form to the interplay of material and immaterial content intrinsic to any act of communication. As the diversity of words and images, arguments and ideas, practices and people in this volume attest, there is a poetics of dance and choreography, theatre and performance, art, architecture, criticism, politics, knowledge and everyday life. In bringing all of this together, it has been our aim to position poetics in relation to the contexts and discourses of contemporary culture, open concepts of performance and performance-making and an expanded view of what ‘poetics’ may mean now as a generative, productive – or possibly even redundant – term. There is a poetics of editing.

Perhaps not surprisingly, perhaps even crucially, we begin the issue with poetry. More specifically, we begin with ‘Some Notes on Poetics and Choreography’ where Ric Allsopp derives an understanding of poetics from the work of key mid-twentieth century poets and contemporary ones. Moving deftly through the writing and thinking of his chosen practitioners, Allsopp ultimately aligns a poetics of writing with a poetics of dance. Suggesting that both poetry and dance operate in excess of the functions of language, Allsopp foregrounds the importance of embodiment in the meaning-making procedures of both writing and choreography. So we begin as we mean to continue, stressing the importance of practice – and, related to this, emphasizing the role of embodiment and performance – in an approach to poetics.

Fittingly, the next piece in the issue is a creative piece from the poet and critic Peter Jaeger. In Martyrologies Jaeger employs strategies and tactics of found poetry and conceptual writing to borrow and recontextualize sentences from Christian accounts of martyrdom, thereby instigating the interplay between the material and the immaterial that we see as intrinsic to poetics. Here we encounter this interplay on the page; however, Jaeger's text was originally installed as a sound piece in Eliot College Chapel, University of Kent (2014), where it would have instigated such play otherwise: between the material fabric of the building and the immaterial layers of its liturgical history.

The interplay between material and immaterial content continues in ‘The New Arachne: Towards a poetics of dynamic forms’ where Boyan Manchev investigates the dynamism inherent in the poetic figure, noting its catalytic potential for a mode of immanent philosophical critique. Manchev sets about realizing this potential through his act of reading – and writing – the figure of Arachne. And through a richly imagined tapestry of figurative metamorphosis, he practices the poetics inherent in our materialization of thought.

From this rigorous elaboration on and of the process of meaning-making, we begin, again. We start with a frog, singing, at the opening of Jungmin Song's ‘Poetics of Spotting Rainbows: Towards a theory of Iritics’. Guided by Song's delicate prose, we move from the frog to her practice, through a window, cross the city, into history, toward philosophy, looking for image. We move like weather. We search amidst reverie for the image as fleet phenomenon. It's already there; it's almost gone. A metonymic operation offers a shift in scale and we find ourselves in the museum. More precisely, we find ourselves in the space of a label in the space of a fabulous museum. We look around. Is this fact? Are we fiction? In ‘Fictive Museums and the Poetics of Mislabelling’, Peter Le Couteur explores the stylistic and performative conventions of museum display, and gets us to ask questions.

The next two pieces ask questions of theatre, reconceptualizing its foundational poetics to open up critical and theoretical potential. Can theatrical performance embody traumatic memory? In ‘Towards an Embodied Poetics of Failure: Some sideway glances on violence and trauma in Needcompany's Marketplace 76’, Christel Stalpaert takes issue with the representational logic and preconceived cathartic effect of Aristotle's Poetics and, instead, looks to inaugurate an embodied poetics of failure for the purposes of staging traumatic narrative. Taking Needcompany's Marketplace 76 as a case study, Stalpaert champions a kind of theatre that does not seek to recuperate traumatic histories into a unilateral master-narrative and, instead, offers a kaleidoscope of ‘sideways glances’ on violence and trauma as a means of narrating how a community deals with violence, catastrophe, loss, sadness and traumatic experience. Can theatrical space contain cloud? In and Performing Skies: Towards an alternative Aristotelian poetics’, Penny Newell takes as her starting point the metaphorical relationship between Ancient Greek theatre and meteorology and, extracting from this structural analogy a metaphysical relationship between theatre and the skies, builds a meteorological poetics as an alternative to the Aristotelian Poetics of performance.

Given our emphasis on practice in this approach to poetics, coupled with the fact that this discussion takes place in an academic journal, it is not surprising to find a number of articles addressing the poetics of knowledge production as well as the critical act. Writing in ‘The Poetics of Performance Knowledge’, Fred McVittie begins with the observation that ways of writing, and ways of thinking, are associated with sensory modalities, drawing attention to the priority of vision in manners of conceptualization and expression. McVittie counters this with a consideration of the haptic as a distinct sensory realm, one with its own poetic epistemology. Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of both optic and haptic ways of knowing, McVittie ultimately addresses what kinds of sensory knowing best engage with performance. In ‘Material Poetics and the Communication Event: A theory and critical framework for artworks at a crossover between poetry and text-based art’, Kristen Kreider develops a theory of material poetics and offers a discursive, embodied and politically situated framework for critical encounter. Predicated on the act of speaking and listening, the theory and the critical framework that Kreider develops are extended to account for the meaning-making potential inherent in any act of communication, for example, speaking and listening, writing and reading, gesturing and viewing. In ‘Towards a Poiesis of Critical Practice: 1000th LIVE and the politics of appearance’, Diana Damian Martin begins with a proposition: criticism is a matter of politics and aesthetics, configured within the realm of the sensible. She proceeds to present a conceptualization of criticism as a political event, drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and referencing specifically her own critical engagement with Forced Entertainment's And on the Thousandth Night, as part of Culturegest Festival. She suggests the potential for the critical act to instigate dissensus, resulting in a redistribution of the sensible as the political.

(These three articles are interwoven with two sets of artist's pages. The first set: a shock of orange! As NaoKo TakaHashi presents ‘The Body Pulled’ (2014). The second set of artists' pages: a loose taxonomy: a configuration of words and lines: a ‘cifra’ to mark the beginning of what will be a story as the collaborative pair, Kreider + O'Leary, reflect on their site visit to the Open City. Situated in the sand dunes just off the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Valparaiso, Chile, the Open City is a school, an urban laboratory and the embodiment of a utopian ideal: a radical pedagogical experiment founded in 1971 by the Argentinean poet Godofredo Iommi and the Chilean architect Alberto Cruz. In the Open City, architecture is constructed on a foundation of poetry and shifting sand. In these pages, Kreider + O'Leary, a poet and architect, are its students.)

The relationship between politics and performance is addressed in the next two articles of the issue. Writing in ‘Dog Sniff Dog: Materialist poetics and the politics of “The Viewpoints”’, Tony Perucci looks specifically at the Occupy movement in the United States and the coextensive rise of interest in The Viewpoints: an actor training programme that grew out of the New York City downtown dance scene of the late 1960s. Drawing comparisons between them, Perucci recontextualizes The Viewpoints in relation to current forms of political activism, using the poetics of this performance practice as a springboard to address wider issues around work, global capital and the potential for solidarity and resistance. Following this, Nandita Dinesh writing in ‘Poetics and (Mis)representation: Creating theatre with/for/about ex-militants in Kashmir’ discusses her documentary theatre piece Meri Kahani Meri Zabani (My Story My Words), which sought to perform the narratives of ex-militants in Kashmir. Dinesh's piece works in part as documentation of the piece ‘Voices’, incorporating multiple voices and viewpoints, and in part as a critical reflection on the project, outlining the ethical imperative behind working with a poetics of (mis)representation for the purposes of staging of political conflict. The effect can be read as a page-based enactment of the plurality and mobility inherent in the political; the partiality inherent in historical narrative; and the mis-communication inherent in any discursive exchange.

The issue concludes with Angela Marino and Manuel Cuellar's exploration of ‘Fiesta: Performance as Epistemology’ including two interviews from a series conducted by Marino and Cuellar: the first, with Diana Taylor, discusses how her work has been informed by thinking about fiestas in relation to cultural memory, history and performance; the second is with the poet Leda Martins, discussing performance, spiral time and dance, and considering what performance can offer histories and discourses that text leaves behind. What remains then at the end of the issue is an echo, a suggestive resonance of the first article. So prose has taken us from A to B, but poetry is the dance.

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As we noted at the beginning, there is a poetics of editing. For this issue, we have brought together materials, ordered them in sequence and made connections across and between them. Here, in the preface, we have taken you through this, step by step. Now we invite you into this space of poetics and performance – (your entry, another beginning) – to follow the double-helix interweaving the conventional and radical, methodological and experimental, critical and creative. And as you move through – (step, leap, fly) – we solicit you to find your own connections and make your own meaning. There is a poetics of reading.