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Moving beyond speculation on immediate and mediated interpretations of presence that saturate our field, we drift toward new orientations regarding presence that capture a metered togetherness: a disjuncted assembly emerging from both localized and networked logistics. Presence is not always signaled by the coterminous junction of shared time and space, but as the multiple trajectories that emerge in its wake.

This article considers the challenges of juggling the demands of motherhood in the experience of early career researchers operating in the British neoliberal academy, and discusses opportunities fo...

The Library of Unfinished Texts is a digital library that gathers writing on and about performance, in collaboration with Something Other, a space for writing from, around and about performance. These are: texts that have not yet found their ending, forgotten paragraphs that drifted off, drafts never sent, and notebook scribbles with no home. The Library of Unfinished Texts draws a link between criticism as a mode of thinking, and the library as a site of investigation.In Against Interpretation (1964), writer and critic Susan Sontag argues for a rethinking of the project of interpretation that allows the appearance, rather than usurping, of a work of art. Appearance, to Sontag, means 'experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself' (1964: 10). Elsewhere, in The Life of the Mind (1971), philosopher Hannah Arendt speaks of thinking as an essential activity of criticism. Sontag and Arendt both offer reflections on two fundamental processes of criticism: thought and interpretation. Where Sontag acknowle...

For political philosopher Hannah Arendt, action is also that which inserts us into the world, makes possible our public appearance and our political participation. In performance, action is that which invites us in, marks or blurs the boundaries between public and private, theatrical gesture and its spectating. In writing about performance, I am confronted with action two-fold. In the instance in which I encounter it in the live moment, raw and incomplete; and in the textual gesture I extend in return. This paper considers the relationship between critical writing about performance and training practice, through an exploration of action. It draws on Arendt’s philosophy to examine the ways in which action operates in pedagogical approaches to critical writing. It does so by considering the plural modes of action and representation as found in a Jackson Pollock painting inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this manner a gentle confrontation is staged between the process of critical writing, mar...

Diana Damian Martin proposes in this chapter that performance criticism operates as a kind of “phenomenological poesis”—an emergence that is itself a form of creative production. Damian Martin is navigating here the channels the interlink action, perception and thought, and she draws on Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the very nature of appearance to aid in that navigation. Here, as elsewhere, the argument concerns ways of knowing that are always emergent, particularly as Damian Martin’s chief focus is on “live writing”—criticism which responds to the performative event as it unfolds, and as such not only forms part of the performance it is “perceiving”, but, in Damian Martin’s words, “marks its own eventness”.

In the UK, words used to describe Eastern European countries continuously turn to movement, specifically to ‘flood’, ‘overflow’ and ‘flock’, as well as ‘tide’, and are often accompanied by meteorological language of prediction, including ‘migration flows’ and forecasting. These ecological descriptors evidence a speculative poetics of movement that pertains more widely to migration and its representation, conflating territorial boundaries, geopolitical jurisdictions and the nation-state in a neoliberal, and necessarily transnational circulation, against an unfolding ecological crisis causing irreparable damage across communities. This essay explores the relationship between the representational poetics of Eastern Europeans in the UK, that of movement in the work of two artists from the region, arguing for the emergence of subjectivities of the Anthropocene: plural, ecological and displaced. The project turns to two distinct, UK-based encounters with bodies that have arrived at movement, through movement, in and around the time of the Brexit referendum, and following on from the termination of transitional measures for A2 EU countries: Polish artist Justyna Scheuring’s Everyone, Merry Go Round (Canal Gallery, London, 2017) and Romanian artists Manuel Pelmus and Alexandra Pirici’s Public Collection (Tate Modern, London, 2016). The essay is presented as a four-part audio performance, that is in dialogue with a work of speculative fiction which draws together descriptions of choreographic incidents within these works. These are reset in a damaged future landscape as an exercise in representational poetics.

This collection brings together reflections on, and analysis and theorisations of, contemporary experimental Portuguese theatre. Placing equal emphasis on the aesthetics and the formal, material, a...