Becoming plural: The distribution of the self in collaborative performance research

This article seeks to explore the shifting sense of identity experienced in collaborative choreographic practices. In this critical discussion I develop a concept of collaboration based upon my collaborative work in two specific practical enquiries. I reflect on how each practice accounts for a collaborative site of multiple selves; or better perhaps, I want to suggest that collaboration in dance research can on the one hand reveal the tension between self and other; and on the other hand it belongs to a process that tends towards the experience of a plurality of selves. The critique of the self as an individual entity is nothing new. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic view of subjectivity, for example, has permeated the discourse on collaboration in performance studies since the 1990s. However, the entanglement of digital and computational technologies with our human experience has further deepened the gap between the subject as a singular, unified individual and the sense of multiplicity expressed through computational-associated terms such as the networked or distributed self. If contemporary subjectivity is foremost relational, what might collaborative dance research illuminate in relation to distributed subjectivities? The essay considers the relationship between the plurality of self that I have experienced as a performer/choreographer engaged in (collaborative) practice as research and the specificity of process and product which has emerged out of these collaborations.