The ideas examined and expressed in this book recognise the rich possibilities inherent in the ways that we actively engage with one another. This is a situation that Joyce aptly captures as a universe of âintermisunderstanding mindsâ. What is addressed across these pages are ways that we might recognise and affirm values and behaviours that could usefully be adopted in the process of creating and engaging with performance. The increasing identification withâand popular notions ofâthe processes involved in devising performance are at times differently framed as collaborative, collective, or co-creative practice. This range of terms is in need of our attention. These features of social behaviour are increasingly identified and adopted by a variety of artists, practitioners, and performance groups. They are familiar modes of teaching in the academy in the realms of studio practice and seminar deliberations. They are leitmotifs often quizzed, yet seldom answered in post-show interviews with practitioners and company directors and have increasing currency in conversations that promote interdisciplinarity as a feature of research. What has been sought here is evidence of practice in which groups of performance makers seek to mobilise ethical and aesthetic sensitivities through their investigations of the ever-evolving use and abuse of modes of joint authorship.
What has taken time, in terms of forming and preparing this book, has been the search for traces of practice that capture the shared journeys of people working together, where their preparedness and enthusiasm for being and creating with others is part of the impetus of the practice. At times they resonate with my own inclinations towards making performance whilst in other instances they provide a window onto alternative perspectives. In asking questions of these manners of attention and of our engagement with others, the aim has been to seek ways through which we might recognise the entangled parts of our experience that in turn contribute to informing an ethos of practice. When the processes and/or systems under consideration do not necessarily rely upon the use of spoken or written language , other challenges arise. The quest in seeking access to these modes of communication shared has become one of pursuing attitudes towards the practice of ideas. Together, it is relations found between our ethics and our aesthetics that inform our interactions and that, arguably, bring forth the serendipity of what becomes possible in the process.
With these thoughts in mind, the task became one of casting broad nets, in a search for ways to describe the foundations of relationships that can be recognised as shaping a performance. The aim throughout has been to understand how we can learn to create performance together and to recognise the impact that such encounters can have in terms of enhancing our lived experience. From an educational perspective, learning through processes, which at their core exhibit a character of âjointednessâ, provides access to personal and social insights that articulate ways of learning to be withâand in turn, learning fromâdifference. These are ideas that, of themselves, might shape imagination and inform a more inclusive world view.
As such, the discussions explore and contribute to a number of overlapping debates. Each of these considers how we might be said to live well, and to flourish, with respect to our experiences of our daily potential. With this somewhat open approach begins a quest to recognise behaviours that have integrity and could be considered to be fair, informing, and equitable, seen from a position of our engagement withâand our creation ofâcommunication in and through art. What the process involves is a view of ethics that moves away from insistence on any moral imperative as exhibited through the practice of agreed, or even enforced principles.
Instead, what is explored broadens the scope to include an intermingling of our ethical, aesthetic, and relational lives. Together, these arguments form an adaptive framework of ethics, as a practice that emerges through those elements gained from our responsible, responsive, and affective engagement with others. In this sense, the discussion revolves around our capacity to engage with variation, in terms of the circumstances in which we each find ways to facilitate positivity, satisfaction, and fulfilment.
Such experiences may evolve as counter proposition s to vulnerability, dispossession, doubt, or questions of worth that foster judgmental, rule-driven ideals and the diminishing of selves. Exploring ethics in this way moves us to consider interrelational practices of sensitivity that can be seen through the ties that we share with those with whom we are close, whether in terms of our work, our community, our neighbourhood, our familial associations, or other personal relations. In seeking to look at the in-between spaces of creative practice, what has been sought are ways to reveal relations forged in the shaping of our dynamic responses to our life experiences.
In the transmission of ideas that are often shared in a gesture or a silence, the exploration has presented challenges in terms of finding ways to capture complex nuances in words. Experience in the studio demonstrates the extent of the difficulties we face when we seek to address the growing expectation of revealing practice through trails of documentation. This, in turn, is met by a tradition that is reluctant to attempt to capture the multifaceted dimensions that contribute to the forming of a work at the point of its completion. Though this is often thought to accommodate the framing of ideas, and thereby disseminate the ideas that were honed in the process with greater ease, it presents challenges. These challenges are often characterised in terms of considering how to represent the intra-active manner of forming a work and to articulate the difficulties inherent in attempts to understand the inside of processes from an outside perspective. So, the quest in the early chapters has been one of asking questions about what should not be taken for granted and what should be recognised as being significantly integral to the process of co-working before we presume to embark upon any such journey.
Given that an important ambition is to speak to the lived experience of generating and forming ideas in the process of creating a performance, it is worth noting the impact that chance has played in the process. It was in such moments of opportunity, whilst attempting to thread parts and wholes together through a broad disciplinary discussion that I came to recognise significant directions for travel. The challenge has been to stay close to the intentions and choices made by the artists who, by a dint of their work, often come to share each otherâs thoughts and methods than would have otherwise been the case. In these ways, we might have the opportunity to appreciate the whole process as being greater than the sum of its parts.
Resisting a drive towards ârationalizingâ thought has been important and in tune with the project itself. Learning to wait, to allow time for recognition of ideas and to seek debates embracing approaches to practice that are confused, complex, chaotic, and disorderly resulted in the recognition of themes that in turn reveal, individual and common human relatedness. Here, I take my lead from Deleuze in terms of performance and writing when he says, â⊠writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experienceâ (Deleuze et al. 1998b: 1).
Engaging in this project has brought to light a concern to find ways to observe, to consider, and to shape the generation of ideas as they tumble into existence. These are often driven, and at the same time, hampered by the constraints of the structures of language . As one writes, decisions are made and other potential connections can be lost. It becomes difficult to hold onto the rich complexity of the threads involved, and yet, it is these very threads that contribute to and are part of the entanglement of our relations. In the creation of performance works realised through forms of collective action , it is the inherent attention to praxis of complex relationality , through affirmative ethical interaction that underpins the exploration here. Writing, and at the same time retaining a sense of other possibilities with respect to the sharing of ideas or shaping of different thoughts remains a difficult challenge. It is made more difficult when exploring modes of transfer from ideas found or made beyond words. The movement of these ideas are in moments of dynamic, spatial, human, contextual phrasing. They are the essence of the work, yet often remain unspoken and not repeated.
However, given the complexity of the times in which we live, there is value in exploring the increasing attention given to what are differently described as collaborative, co-creative, or participatory-led ventures with respect to the making and the dissemination of performance. The purpose is to examine aspects of adopted approaches to creating performance in terms of the ethical, the aesthetic, and the lived experience of things that matter. The focus falls on the ways that we work, play, learn, and interact with one another, and through which, shape artistic responses to our experience of the world. In the process we chance to grasp new opportunities in ways we might benefit from developing our abilities to â⊠transform chaotic variability into chaoid varietyâ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 204).
It is in recognising the potentiality of what I see as affirmative ethics that the discussion leads to a place wherein âWorld-makingâ is a way of learning to be, self-in-relation. Such an ethical approach concerns the manner of engagement, the manner of individual and group behaviours and the chosen values that are put into active use in the complex process of creating shared responses through performance. For all that we are, we are identifiable as, ââŠcontinually more or less intermisunderstanding mindsâ to echo the observation of Joyce in Finnegans Wake (Joyce, 1939). So, the decision is to look within the complexity of the environment of collaborative practices, to where there are opportunities to unravel thoughts and make new understandings available.
A key argument here is that in the qualities of the lives that we live, we can come to realise ways through which we may positively benefit from our interdependence . In making art, the same complexities are evident; it is a situation to be explored and recognised for the struggles through which we learn. Striving for and through independence is a trait fostered in many of us from an early age, though arguably, part of this includes the honing of our ability to benefit from our interrelatedness , as beings-in-common . For it is the manner in which we learn and think with imagination and in which we give our attention that shapes the ways in which we might continue to prosper together. These common experiences of the world make it evident that the only way to seek to explore the realities that challenge us is by addressing questions of our ethical relations. We, in turn, learn to prosper in the process of coming to recognise and to realise ourselves through the knowledge that we gain with, and of, others. As bell hooks (2015) suggests, we can rewrite ourselves in the process of coming to understand more of âanotherâ with whom we engage through our working relations.
Therefore, these debates concern the complex associations between people who are engaged in generating ideas, through the giving of their attention to the manner of their exploration, and ultimately, to the articulation of the accumulated ideas as performance. It becomes a question that concerns dialogic practice. Where we ask about the benefits in learning through attending to our human entanglements. What is important here is investigation of these possible futures in terms of ways of working and of appreciating the contributions made when we learn through being with our complex selves, and embracing the possibilities of changing our futures.
The jounrey has meant revisiting modes of improvisation and performance making that call for a certain intellectual agility on the part of the players involved as well as a willingness to engage with each other and with the unforeseen and unforeseeable emergent ideas. Whilst this may seem familiar in terms of what could be expected of an improvisational environment, it is something that is not always evident or overtly addressed in collaborative work.
Looking Towards Practice
Collaboration , is of course, claimed to exist in many guises, and not always aligned with an aim to empower all those involved. It takes time to recognise traces of process that address or even discuss the potential of empowering our âsituatedness â.
In writing the book, I have found benefit and support in the work of Bronwyn Davies (2011), who speaks of our ability to come to know through the writing process itself. The task of learning ways to shape the book became a process through which to keep my own knowing of the context open and available to change. Davies encourages an experimental and experiential approach to writing, â⊠in which the world is not reduced to what [is already known]â (Davies 2011: 198). As a consequence, I have noticed that the process of writing has itself enabled me to move between ways of knowing. I have learned to embrace a broadening range of intersecting possibilities, ideas, and motivations. Some of these emerge as new lines of thought whilst others resonat with my lived experiences.
What remains important throughout the discussion is a developing association with ethics as a rational and social process. In this way, the journey is, in effect, an explor...