Abstracts for PPP2022 conference, 18 June 2022
Abstracts for the fourth and last day of the Performance Philosophy Conference 2022.
Key Group 6: Nik Wakefield, Daniela Perazzo and Diana Damian
Unnamed Autofictions: Dissonant Co-labouring
Collaborators of the Working Group in Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy of the Theatre and Performance Research Association proposes to engage with collaboration itself as a problem.
While collaboration has become ubiquitous in today’s cultural economy, its ‘social halo’ often prevents us from considering co-labouring, or the actuality of the everyday compromise with structures and scales beyond the control of the individual. Collaboration has come to stand for generous, consensual, humane working practices of genuine experimentation, sharing and discovery; yet, its critical potential as a modality that decentres the idea of authorship and dissolves the boundaries between artistic disciplines and professional roles is diluted by its comforting allure. In dialogue with Bojana Kunst’s critique of collaboration as a guarantee of visibility and ‘one of the most fetishized fields of the present day’ (Kunst 2015: 78), with Claire Bishop’s exposure of collaboration’s implicit association with ‘dematerialised, antimarket, politically engaged projects’ (Bishop 2006: 178), with Julietta Singh’s (2018) critical and decolonial undoing of the notion of mastery and with Roberto Esposito’s (2010) understanding of community as a duty towards the other that strips each member of their individuality, our group will testify to and confess of the crimes of collaboration. Can collaboration ever fully account for plural and heterogeneous positions, overcoming the partiality that the idea of working with those who already have something in common necessarily implies? In drawing attention to the implicated stickiness of inevitable consequences, known and unknown, that occur in collaboration, and attend to the politics of co-labouring, we propose to engage with different adjacencies and with the potential of dissonance (Moten and Harney 2013) within collaboration.
As co-conveners and collaborators of a working group, our work mostly consists of arranging moments for other speakers to share research. Collaborators of the working group will contribute partly fictionalised problems of collaboration. The presentation will theorise alongside these autofictions. We will use a method of collaborative presentation that disrupts the regime of authorial visibility. Our approach will avoid the imperative for possessive authorship by anonymising and fictionalising particular examples of working together. Stripping labour of its named owners/authors de-instrumentalises collaboration by altering the terms of visibility. This is an attempt at destabilising what is possible in performance philosophy scholarship by encouraging both disavowal and creativity as critical possibilities.
Biographies: Dr Nik Wakefield is Senior Lecturer in the School of Art, Design and Performance at University of Portsmouth. He is a researcher, artist and writer working mostly in performance but also across dance, theatre and visual art. His research is concerned with theoretical issues of time and ecology in contemporary performance and art practices. Wakefield’s solo and collaborative performances have been shown in UK, USA and Europe. His writing has been published in journals such as Performance Research, Maska, Choreographic Practices, Contemporary Theatre Review, and TDR. Nik Wakefield is co-convener of the working group in Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy in the Theatre and Performance Research Association.
Daniela Perazzo is senior lecturer in dance at Kingston University London. Her research interrogates the intersections of the aesthetic and the political in contemporary choreography, focusing on the ethical, po(i)etic and critical potentialities of experimental and collaborative practices. She has published in Performance Philosophy, Performance Research, Dance Research Journal, Choreographic Practices and Contemporary Theatre Review. Her monograph Jonathan Burrows: Towards a Minor Dance was published by Palgrave in 2019. She is co-convenor of the Theatre, Performance and Philosophy Working Group of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA).
Diana Damian Martin is an artist and researcher. Her work concerns alternative critical epistemologies, interventionist and political performance and the politics of migration, with a focus on ‘Eastern’ Europe. She co-runs the Serbo-Romanian critical cooperative Critical Interruptions, Generative Constraints and Migrants in Culture. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Performance Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where she leads the BA Hons Experimental Arts and Performance course. Diana is editor for Performance Philosophy Journal and Critical Stages Journal, and convenes the Documenting Performance working group of Theatre and Performance Research Association and sits on the Future Advisory Board of Performance Studies International.