On writing & performance: Editorial

This issue of Performance Research dwells on contemporary writing and its performance, on performance and its writings, and on the various environments and contexts in which such work takes place. It seeks to extend current and historical dialogues on the shifting relationship between textual and performance practices and considers its theme from the perspectives of a diverse sweep of live, sited, scored and voice work, and critical texts in the fields of performance and writing. ‘On Writing & Performance’ imagines how a text can be conceptualized, written, presented and figured with equal or more contingency and responsiveness to temporal and corporeal happenings, and vice versa.

This journal issue is not the first place nor time that this enquiry has been launched. In April 1996 a five-day interdisciplinary symposium called Performance Writing was held at Dartington College of Arts, UK, with intensive workshops led by artists of international repute working with writing in various media and opening into a weekend conference. The Performance Writing symposium was arguably the first of its kind to take place in the UK. It brought together professional artists and students from theatre and fine art performance, poetry and experimental writing working in the emergent field of performance writing and provided a unique opportunity for artists and theorists to meet in an interdisciplinary forum to explore the various contemporary discourses and practices that at that time defined writing and its performance.

The conference focused on contemporary debates surrounding the use of text as object, the developments of text in relation to new technologies and the synthesis of performance and text. It aimed to extend the understanding of textuality both in relation to ‘literary and performic’ approaches to writing through short polemics, in-depth papers, chaired panels and small-group discussions with contributions from Caroline Bergvall, John Cayley, Tim Etchells, Heiner Goebbels, Matthew Goulish, John Hall, Claire MacDonald and Alaric Sumner among others. Performances, installations, open readings and curated exhibitions (in association with Book Works, the London-based artists’ books publisher) were an integral part of the conference. Book Works commissioned new work by twelve artists for ‘Itinerant Texts’, which explored the physical and conceptual siting of text, text/image and writing, and took the form of a series of projected texts commenting on travel, transience and the nature of site specificity as a touring exhibition launched at Dartington.¹

The flyer for the symposium, reflecting the materiality and physicality of the act of reading/ writing, consisted of an A4 card folded and glued to form a three-sided object with horizontal, vertical and inverted texts enclosing a photograph of Brian Catling's performance of ‘Scroll’ (1994) and an epigraph from Maurice Blanchot, which read:

… without language nothing can be shown. And to be silent is still to speak. Silence is impossible. That is why we desire it. Writing (or Telling, as distinct from anything written or told) precedes every phenomenon, every manifestation on show: all appearing. (Blanchot 1986 [1957]: 10-11)

Flyer for Performance Writing: an interdisciplinary symposium, 1996.

Photo courtesy of WRA 2018

The five workshops² explored vocalized writing, installed writing, sited writing, graphic writing and improvisational writing, and provided a convergence of issues and debates in contemporary performance writing that fed into the conference, and a number of subsequent publications that began to define and map the field (see, for example, Allsopp, 1999, Allsopp & Mount, 2004; Bergvall, 1996, 2001; Etchells 1999, Goulish, 1996, 2000; Hall, 2007, 2013).

In the very same month, the first issue of Performance Research, ‘The Temper of the Times’ (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1996), was published. The Editorial³ noted that ‘one of the difficulties of the temper of these times is that performance is no longer separated from its social and political context – if it ever was – by placement within “the theatre” or “the gallery”, but invades or even colonises the everyday’ (1996: vi). The Editorial also noted:

the performance cultures of the late twentieth century no longer ‘make sense’ within accepted classical or modernist notions of aesthetics, of temperament. The voices that speak through the first issue of Performance Research seem to bear this out. They are not only ‘out-of-tune’ and ‘distempered’ but have already shifted into building from other starting points, other ideologies, other identities which begin to make their own instruments with which to encounter, celebrate and confront the temper of these times. Performance now seems more a means of ‘tampering with the times’, trying to shift the fixities of identity, culture, ideology, formal concerns’. (1996: vii)

Artists and writers concerned with performance were invited to respond to two questions: ‘What are the current concerns in your work?’ and ‘How do they, or might they, relate to the context of the times in which we live?’ Alongside the voices of other contributors, Caroline Bergvall's response as a ‘writer coming to performance’ and as an artist whose work has helped to shape the field, asked how one may envisage

a writing which defines its textual approach in terms of actual performability, rather than in terms of a projected performance? How would one write a performance text which does not only indicate, does not simply point to, but actually contains, manifests textually, structurally, that performance? A text which very materially provides and actualises the notion of its own performance. (Bergvall 1996: 95)

These questions continue to be reflected in this current issue in cultural conditions that have changed radically since the 1990s, but still remain at the heart of continuing artistic experiment and investigation.

There was a close relationship between approaches to arts practice and thinking that were prevalent in Dartington in the 1990s, including the establishment of the Performance Writing course in 1994,⁴ and the founding of Performance Research as a vehicle and platform for the publication and dissemination of writings, texts and artists’ pages that set out to reflect and energise cross-disciplinary conversations and constellations of artists and theorists concerned with an expanded and expanding field of performance. This meant that many of the artists and thinkers who contributed to the 1996 Symposium were also contributing their voices, images and thinking to the journal and have subsequently continued to give voice to the shifting and developing relations between writing and performance that have shaped contemporary practice over the last twenty or so years. The approach to the cross-disciplinary turn of performance from the 1990s onwards, which underpinned both the contents of the first issue of Performance Research and the Performance Writing symposium, and the effect that this had (and continues to have) on the status and cultural positioning and understandings of writing, performance and other forms of artwork, has provided a directionality and focus for both practice and research over the intervening years.

The life line of these two significant events was extended by Performing, Writing: A symposium in four turns, a 2017 event held in Wellington, New Zealand, hosted by Massey University in association with The Playground, a New Zealand performing arts company, and its annual waterfront series, Performance Arcade. Julieanna Preston conceptualized the symposium as a research initiative and led it along with several other artists, designers and writers from the College of Creative Arts. The symposium was structured in four parts – ‘ON Live’, ‘ON Site’, ‘ON Score’ and ‘ON Voice’. Each ‘turn’ took place in a different part of the city, a tactic that held the sometimes-tiresome pace of conferences at bay, and, more importantly, enabled a greater diversity of contributions afforded by venues of different size, character and cultural significance, such as Matiu Island, Bats Theatre, the historic Infirmary (now SPCA building), City Gallery and the Performance Arcade container site. Performing, Writing enquired as to what creative, dialogic, autobiographical or alternative writing approaches may elicit a text that engages with the plurality of effects of an artwork. How may a creative work be informed, inspired, directed, scripted or critiqued with the same respect for live-ness that unfolds spatially as it does textually? How may these parallel practices inhabit space symbiotically? How may a new culture of criticality develop in between acts of ‘performing through’? (Preston 2016)

While Performing, Writing paid respect to and drew inspiration from Performance Writing and its various articulations in Performance Research and elsewhere, it also sought to (re)frame writing and performance in relation to current directions and practice. How would the insistence to keep performance and writing hinged to each other and live be inflected by contemporary technologies, world events, new notions of identity, subjectivity and objecthood and the specificities of the Pacific Rim and a bi-cultural nation? How may practices of live art and writing oscillate among each other as a hybrid temporal and materializing, even politicizing, event?

John Hall, poet, writer and contributor of more than several articles on writing and its various relations to performance, has written extensively on performance writing and poetics (see Hall 2013) and in particular on what writing does, and how it performs itself within the structuring and generative rules of grammar (see Hall 1996). Noting a significant point of difference to the original Dartington symposium's name, John Hall's keynote at Performing, Writing asked provocatively: ‘What's that comma up to?’ He elaborated:

When the two terms – Performance and Writing – come together in any kind of coupling, their combination no longer marks a single, clearly designated practice or space of operation or display. When a comma comes between them everything really does start wobbling in the enactment of an unfinished thought. A relationship is signalled: could it be the beginning of a longer list, for example? How does the performance of a comma differ from that of an unpunctuated gap or of an ‘and’ or of any of a range of prepositions such as ‘for’? (Hall 2018 [2017])

In fact, when John Hall posed that question months before the keynote in a call that crossed datelines, equator and times zones, Julieanna posited the comma as a deviation of the full stop, an acknowledgement of the (not) empty space between performance and writing. She spoke of the comma as an agent for keeping things mobile and told the story of learning to paddle a canoe: the j-stroke is a large-scale gesture of writing a comma, carving space in water, propelling the canoe forward and, when done well, keeping the canoe from tipping. The active nature of the comma/stroke then turned this more recent symposium towards two verbs, two fluid terms and practices of doing. Hall concluded the keynote ‘with a list of open thoughts on the continuing multiple relationships of perform and write’ and noted that ‘both performing and writing are always terms within relational sets, by no means always with the same signification, and often changing, often tentative’ (ibid.).

Writing – writing in general – is unavoidably a material, technological, social practice that ‘does things’ between people. That is not an accident: it is supposed to. J. L. Austin most influentially talked of the ‘performativity’ of speech acts (Austin 1976). If we treat ‘speech’ as including writing, we can take it that acts of writing do not have to await an event called a performance in order to perform, even though some forms of writing are intended for just that purpose. Performance Writing confronts all writing with its modes of performance, actual and potential, and in doing so keeps in play two notions of performance, that weave in and out of each other: one is formal and assumes an alignment with (other) performance practices; let's call the other anthropological, being this idea of performativity as a culturally variable systemic component of all symbolic behaviour. (Hall 2018 [2017])

It was only fitting that this lineage of performance and writing, and writing and performance, would then find its way back to Performance Research. Like the Performing, Writing symposium, ‘On Writing & Performance’ both recalls and acknowledges its provenance in the 1996 Performance Writing symposium. Julieanna likes to think of the ‘&’ as a loose woven knot, binding and unravelling the two material and performative modalities. This issue registers current radical shifts and challenges specific to the ‘fixities of identity, culture, ideology, formal concerns’ mentioned in the 1996 Editorial, and brought about precisely because writing, as John Hall points out, is ‘a material, technological, social practice that “does things” between people’ – a ‘doing of things’ that is clearly demonstrated in the articles, artists’ pages and contributions that follow here.

We hope that the issue reflects the extent of a current field of writing and performance that embraces topics as diverse as activism, feminist poetics, participation, nomadism, song, autobiography, archaeology, spatial design, archival practice and documentation, and, of course, artists’ pages. Drawing on writings from varied and contrasting demographics – from the Pacific Rim to Kazakhstan, from North America to Turkey – the work presented here underpins the highly cross-disciplinary forms of writing and performance that exemplify twenty-first-century arts practice. While the contributors to the 1996 Performance Writing symposium may have self-identified within a limited range of disciplines – fine art, experimental writing and poetics, theatre and performance – the contributors to this issue position themselves within a diverse field of architecture, feminist theory, popular performance, speculative choreography, puppetry, art and technology, poetics and archaeology, performance studies and theory, music and sound works, ecology and philosophy. We hope that this gives a sense of the current transforming and transformative practices that constitute writing and performance.

Notes

1 Itinerant Texts (1996) – projected texts/slide installations from Judith Barry, Robert Barry, Angela Bulloch, Tacita Dean, Jimmie Durham, Tracey Emin, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Susan Hiller, Joseph Kosuth, Tracy Mackenna and Simon Patterson. See Itinerant Texts – www.bookworks.org.uk/node/1624

2 Symposium workshops were led by Jean Binta Breeze, Mary Lemley, Mike Pearson, Fiona Templeton, and Aaron Williamson with Tertia Longmire.

3 Editorial by Claire MacDonald and Ric Allsopp.

4 The Performance Writing course at Dartington College of Arts (1994– 2010) was initiated by John Hall with Caroline Bergvall, Brigid McLeer, Ric Allsopp, Alaric Sumner, cris cheek and others.