Paraha, Tru, Jo Pollitt, Amaara Raheem, and Theron Schmidt. “Ensemblography: Making Collaboration through Performing Writing.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2021. https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv4n2a2
The proposition is this: four ‘performance writers’, each with their distinctive practice, use the digital and material page as a space for collaborative performance-making and cooperative thinking.
We enter the page as studio. Page as interval. Page as middle and entrance and ending and overlap.
We approach writing as dancing (Pollitt). As continuation, as doing, as inside renderings of emergent score, tone, and timing.
We approach writing as wearing masks, specifically, the masks of Dionysus as were once hung up as lucky charms in Mediterranean vineyards and would swing around in the breeze.
We approach writing guided by ‘flowers and songs’ as encountered in the essay by Indigenous scholar and storyteller C. F. Black, ‘The Land is the Source of the Law’.
We approach writing as the balance between the planned and the contingently arising that renders structures, bodies, and materials as infinitely unpredictable: ‘an extreme form of speculation, one that grasps the work from the perspective of its contingent materials’ (Negarestani 15).
We approach writing by staging the event of writing, foregrounding ‘the transformative play of text as performance’ (Allsopp 79) and the conflicts and tensions that writing may manifest at the level of form, not just content (Bergvall).
We propose to follow the shape of a typical collaboration, with the use of instructional tasks or scores for other performers/writers as its core method:
In this way, rather than writing about another process of performance-making, the writing itself becomes a process of collaborative making, at the same time as it reflects on making collaboration.
As remote practitioners attending through the digitas, we encompass the griefs, gifts, and challenges encountered during a time of global pandemic. We oscillate through alternate time zones to form and reassemble, perform our ensemble, with new currencies of exchange.
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