Performance Writing

Experimental and interactive account of Lads of Aran, a work that touches on performances of masculinity, performance writing, and the democratisation of forms and sources of knowledge. Focusing on the methodologies of bricolage and parataxis I further question the academy's ability to receive performance writing.

Note: In preparing this report, I thought about the etymology of the word mobility and its usage in the late 17th and early 18th centuries to describe the emergence of a new social class, 'the great mobility' or 'mob', which emerged as a consequence of urbanization. I wanted to return to this use of term as a collective noun to describe a community that is defined by being in movement and by its habitation of public spaces that make possible its emergence. Its original usage carries pejorative connotations of 'fickle', 'common', and 'excitable', which we might revisit in valuing a concept of community that is provisional, transient, and without fixed form. In the context of our gathering on this continent, I would also acknowledge the meaning that the word 'mob' carries within the dialectical English spoken by members of Aboriginal communities to refer to an extended family or language group. I wish to honour and respect the deep kinship structures and connections to place that are conveyed by that usage.

In ‘Writing Coastlines: Either and both’ J. R. Carpenter articulates the double meaning implied by the term 'writing coastlines'. The act of writing translates aural, physical, mental and digital processes into marks, actions, utterances and speech-acts. The intelligibility of that that is written is intertwined with both the context of its production and its consumption. Coastlines are shifting terrains where land and water meet, always neither land nor water and always both. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges and legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces, both points of departure and sites of exchange. One coastline implies another, implores a far shore. The coastlines of the United Kingdom and Atlantic Canada are separated by 3,400 km of ocean. For centuries, fishers, sailors, explorers, migrants, emigrants, merchants, messengers, messages, packets, ships, submarine cables, aeroplanes, satellite signals and wireless radio waves have attempted to bridge this distance. Generations of transatlantic migrations have engendered networks of communications. As narratives of place and displacement travel across, beyond and through these networks, they become informed by the networks' structures and inflected with the syntax and grammar of the networks' code languages. This paper takes an overtly interdisciplinary approach to interrogating this in-between space with a series of questions: When does leaving end and arriving begin? When does the emigrant become the immigrant? What happens between call and response? What narratives resonate in the spaces between places separated by time, distance and ocean yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration? How may writing coastlines serve as contexts for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, land and sea, home and away?

Performance Writing

The poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy discharge. –Charles Olson

When you place a brick against a brick you are not rubbing hard matter up against hard matter…you are placing effect against effect. –Brian Massumi

Performance involves 'the moment of action, its continuity, inherent temporality and relationship to the present.' –Hans Diebner


Alongside establishing a field that includes a variety of practices, Performance Writing enables an open enquiry into poetic practices within an institutional setting. However, due to the embodied contemporaneity of PW, it can be difficult to situate the instance of the practice(s) without reducing the field. Thus it is helpful to consider the enquiry and practice of PW as a continuum alongside writing-textualities. I have coined the term ‘language-art’ to discuss poetics within an approach of PW on such a continuum. In my paper I discuss various sites of PW and use ‘language-art’ to illustrate the approach of PW in my own creative work; ‘analogue-writing’ and what appears fixed in contrast to the fluidity of digital writing, and why these notions of flux matter in the approach of PW.

This paper explores the ways in which These Lungs (2015), a performance writing work, privileges self-constituted libidinal surfaces and points of contact over existing biologically determined ones in order to create new (and specifically queered) representations of sexual experience. This piece contrasts These Lungs (2015) against tendencies towards repeating oppositional representations of difference in contemporary performance work. Additionally, the article utilises multiple slippages between formal, informal, narrative and critical writing to further this inquiry.

Utilising multiple narratives to move in and out of a critical reading of Among the Salt Flats, a performance score written by the author in 2014, this article explores the different modes by which a performance writing practice generates multiplicities of place. The disruptive characteristics of performance jar the perceived fixed temporalities and locations of writing. These disruptions in the time and place of writing invite new proximities to the page which in turn recuperate the distance of re-presentation. This article rewrites the disrupted linguistic geographies of Among the Salt Flats, focussing on the destabilising force of this form on linearity and re-presents it through a text that moves between critical writing, image and first person narrative.

The overlap between the visual and textual in practice research provides an opportunity to explore ways of presenting knowledge through performance writing. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a performance writing practice can be incorporated into and shape research writing. This text uses descriptions of Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographic documentation, medical–historical documents and the deconstruction thereof to create a piece that demonstrates performance writing as a means to bridging practice research and research writing.

This paper examines the work of plurilingual poet and performer, Caroline Bergvall. By looking at the way Bergvall manipulates language and meaning in her performance piece, Cropper (2006, 2008, and 2011) through both written and performed speech, my paper explores the various techniques of poetic practice that enable her to work both between and in-between media, and encourage an interdisciplinary engagement with a variety of mediums.
To investigate the concept ‘in-between,’ I read Bergvall through Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the ‘rhizome,’ focusing on what Brian Massumi calls the ‘middling.’ By locating Cropper as a piece of performance writing, I seek to place Bergvall in the larger context of this ambivalent and complex term, one that I align with ‘middling’. I employ some of Bergvall’s own ideas about what performance writing is, and consider her current work within the historical context of other avant-garde and experimental writers. I ask how writing can be performative, both on the page and in spoken word, and how structures and constraints of power and identity can be both disseminated and reworked through the act of such experimental language projects.
Furthermore, this paper also locates performance writing—a relatively new term that encompasses a largely interdisciplinary practice—within the wider framework of performance and performance theories. By examining Cropper as a work of embodied presentation, this paper also looks as iterative poetics, interrogating the relationship between the written and spoken word, thus exploring its capacities for indeterminacy and proliferation.

O Diário "A Adormecida que Mordeu A Maçã Verde e Não Colocou o Dedo na Roca", foi gerado a partir de uma performance ocorrida no 16º Festival Videobrasil, em parceria à exposição "Tulse Luper Suitcases", do cineasta britânico Peter Greenaway em outubro de 2007. O Projeto se compôs com um solo e um livro performance.

…and by islands I mean paragraphs is a web-based work which is both composed and displayed in a modular format: http://luckysoap.com/andbyislands A sea of white space extends far beyond the horizon of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating (with mouse, track pad, or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands… and by islands I mean computer-generated paragraphs. These fluid JavaScript compositions draw upon variable strings containing fragments of text harvested from a vast literary corpus ­ Deluze’s Desert Islands, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Bishop’s Crusoe in England, Coetzee’s Foe, Ballard’s Concrete Island, Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries, and many other lesser-known sources including an out-of-date guidebook to the Scottish Isles and an amalgam of accounts of the classical and possibly fictional island of Thule. Individually, each of these textual islands represents a topic ­ from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing on the topic of islands. In this constantly shifting sea of variable texts one will never find the same island twice… and by islands, I really do mean paragraphs.

In this talk I propose to present this modular work in a modular format loosely informed by Anne Carson’s Short Talks and Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will. I will offer a brief introduction, and then navigate the work. As I come across textual islands I will offer short ‘talks’ on them. Each of these ‘talks’ will be composed of a selection of the fragments contained in that particular island’s variable strings.

The Broadside of a Yarn: A Situationist Strategy for Spinning Sea Stories Ashore, by J. R. Carpenter, reflects upon The Broadside of a Yarn, a multi-modal performative pervasive networked narrative attempt to chart fictional fragments of new and long-ago stories of near and far-away seas with nought but a QR code reader and a hand-made print map of dubious accuracy. The Broadside of a Yarn was commissioned by ELMCIP for Remediating the Social, an exhibition which took place at Inspace, Edinburgh, 1-17 November 2012. The Broadside of a Yarn remediates the broadside, a form of networked narrative popular from 16th century onward. Like the broadside ballads of old, the public posting of The Broadside of a Yarn signified that it was intended to be performed. Embedded within the cartographic space of this printed map are QR codes which link to web pages containing computer-generated narrative dialogues, performance scripts replete with stage instructions suggesting how and where these texts are intended to be read aloud. As such, these points on the physical map point to potential events, to utterances, to speech acts. The stated intention in creating this work was to use the oral story-telling tradition of the sailor’s yarn, the printed broadside and map, the digital network, and the walk-able city in concert to construct a temporary digital community connected through a performative pervasive networked narrative. Through the process of composition the focus shifted away from the temptation to lure people on walks through a city tagged with links to stories of the sea, toward a desire to compel people to collectively speak shifting sea stories ashore. This paper reflects critically upon this shift, toward an articulation of The Broadside of a Yarn as an collective assemblage of enunciation.

This paper locates narrative resonance in transatlantic communications networks through a discussion of one web-based work, TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE], a computer-generated narrative dialogue which propagates across, beyond, and through transatlantic communications networks. These networks engendered by generations of past usage come to serve as narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away.

Since the advent of the internet, advocates and critics alike have heralded the end of the book. George P. Landow observed that hypertextuality and poststructuralism emerged at the same moment, both due to dissatisfaction with the printed book and hierarchal thought. Derrida argued the question of writing could only be opened if the book was closed. Consider, then, the paradoxical position of Vienna-based publishers TRAUMAWIEN. Recognizing that although the vast majority of the text produced by computer systems – protocols, listings, error logs, binary codes – is never seen or read by those who consume it, this text is internal to our daily thoughts and actions and is thus literary. TRAUMAWIEN conceives of the print books it publishes as snapshots of computer generated literary processes which would otherwise be disappearing as soon as they are written. This paper will discuss the iterative processes by which I generated one such book published by TRAUMAWIEN in 2010. GENERATION[S] expands upon a series of short fictions generated by Python scripts adapted (with permission) from two 1k story generators written by Nick Montfort, and incorporates GORGE, a never-ending tract spewing poetic paroxysms on food, consumption, decadence and desire, a hack of Montfort’s elegant poetry generator Taroko Gorge. There was only one rule in creating GENERATION[S]: No new texts. All the texts in this book were previously published in some way. The texts the generators produce are intertwined with the generators’ source code, and these two types of texts are in turn interrupted by excerpts from the meta narrative that went into their creation. Most of the sentences in the fiction generators started off as Tweets, which were then pulled into Facebook. Some generated comments which led to responses which led to new texts. All these stages of intermediation are represented in the print book iteration of GENERATION[S].