After Performance

Abstract

After Performance is a research group that has come together with a felt urgency to respond to particular geopolitical disquietudes. As our first voicing, this thought piece articulates and practices a mode of ‘transauthorship,’ invoking ensemble theatre-making as a means of supporting one another’s critical inquiry. Though not always together in time or space, we have attended to the experience of being with—or adjacent to—one another, in our affinities, frictions and divergences. As group members working in different parts of the world and time zones, we have used various platforms to enable and sustain our work. Transauthorship articulates authors resonating with each other and a commitment to be published as a collective. We use the prefix ‘trans-’ not to attempt a transcendence of the figure of the author or of authorship. Rather, it attests to an experience of transmutating beyond the boundaried authorial self. We work towards moments of transparency, transmission, and the transit—or more definitively the circulatory movements—of ideas.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We thank members of the After Performance workshop held at King’s College London in April 2016: Sruti Bala, Maaike Bleeker, Kélina Gotman, Carl Lavery, Jazmin Llana, Paul Rae, Alan Read and attendants of the corresponding ‘long table’ event. We show gratitude to those at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London who helped fund and facilitate these activities. The ‘long table’ is a discursive format developed by the performance artist Lois Weaver.

Notes

1 In italicising non-Anglophone words, we are alert to the processes of conforming and visual shaping enacted upon them in the context of international scholarship. We emphasise our hesitation on the matter in transauthorial writing. We also acknowledge the productive ambivalence in the face of linguistic and cultural appropriations carried out in the academic history of performance studies.