Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2009

Drawing on my experience of working in collaboration with the project Open City, in this article I reflect on how this close encounter with a performance practice has enabled a critical shift within my own approach, from a mode of writing about to one of writing in dialogue with or alongside performance. Open City is an investigation-led artistic project that explores how public space is conceptualized and organized by interrogating the ways in which our daily actions and behaviours are conditioned and controlled. Their research activity involves inviting, instructing or working with members of the public to create discrete interventions and performances, which put into question or destabilize habitual patterns or conventions of public behaviour. In 2007, I was invited by Open City to produce a piece of writing in response to their work for a series of publicly distributed postcards, and have since worked more collaboratively with the project on a phase of research investigating how the different temporalities within the public realm might be harnessed or activated creatively; how movement and mobility affect the way in which place and locality are encountered or understood. In this article, I reflect on how different forms of writing specifically the postcard texts have performed in response to the work of Open City, focusing in particular on the use of footnotes and the different concepts conjured up by the word. Footnotes are one of the ways in which the different temporal possibilities of writing have been explored and exploited within the project, where they have been used as a creative and critical device for producing points of slowness and blockage within the act of reading, or as a form of performative invitation that encourages both textual and physical wandering.

This article takes the issue of epistemology in writing for (performance) art to ask: What is the value of using fictional as in novelistic writing in reflective discourse on creative practice generally?

Using Susan Sontag's seminal essay Against Interpretation as a starting point, the article argues that much writing on art assumes art's will-to-signify its value as a form of meaning and consequently explanation as the purpose of art writing. The problems with this reflex are discussed, including its suppression of alternative responses, which may include acknowledging that art is an affective entity: it has a function (if, in Kant's phrase, it is without purpose) and it has an ontology that may be more than its identity as signification.

Extending, or restoring, the scope of art's reflective discourse in this way, the paper also notes, via reference to George Steiner, that a reciprocal extension for the media of this discourse is also possible, and it seeks to map the two extensions as the axes of a grid that offers varied combinations of the content-form dimensions of art writing. One of these conjunctions produces fictional writing as a possible response to art. Seeming to dispel the problem of reductionism in explanatory discourse, the article then goes on to argue that the use of fiction in the spaces of art writing Situational Fiction may be valuable in other ways as well.

Hence, this is an argument for knowledge of creative practice in creative form. But Situational Fiction may pursue this ethos of creative knowledge in another way as well: as its reflexive dimension implicates the reader in deciding whether any aspect of this academic paper designates this work as fictional, as the paper understands this.

This paper describes a cross-disciplinary method of encountering place and place-specific art work. This involves two stages: a close sensory observation of the place's details followed by a remembering of this engagement through writing. I suggest that, as a method, it offers a way of negotiating the distinct roles of critic and practitioner by juxtaposing creative modes of writing alongside more traditional academic forms. By drawing on the work of five writers in particular, I will demonstrate how they influenced and inspired me to develop my own writing practice. They are anthropologist Clifford Geertz, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, novelist and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, cultural critic and art writer Mieke Bal, and architectural designer, historian and theorist Jane Rendell. I will also provide a sample of my practice in the form of a written tour of the Princelet Street House Museum in London.

Reflecting on the contemporary phenomenon of blogging, and performed in the specific modality of the blog, this article presents a snapshot of a world wide web of writing (and the performance of writing) measured in centuries, rather than decades. As the reader works their way back through the timeline of the article, questions arise as to the status and stability of the texts, scriptors and their layered performance. Enacting a living methodology associated with Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, the article makes live the performer's dilemma to borrow, reference, steal or recycle the writing of others. Overall, the article cannot be summarized or translated beyond the event of its very performance (and the performances it archives).

Within a practical environment that reeks of the possibility of failure (Zarrilli 2002a: 163), psychophysical performer trainers, like Phillip Zarrilli and Sandra Reeve, discursively construct alternative rules and understandings of mistakes and failure. Participants' sustained assimilation of these alternative rules lead to the necessary reconsideration and removal of conditioned responses to mistakes and failure. Through a selection of examples, and from the position of participant-observation, this article highlights how these alternative rules of mistakes and failure can be usefully examined within, and applied to, the reflective documentation of such psychophysical practices. The examination and application of these alternative rules can help to create a more embodied, performative form of articulation that engages with the experiences of the live, fallible, processual body. Such articulation works to tackle, upon the page and then through to the practice space, participants' disembodied conditioned responses to mistakes and failure, and supports development of a fuller psychophysical engagement.

This article explores the means of, and results from, creating this embodied articulation in pertinent and reflexive dialogue with Luce Irigaray and, particularly, Hlne Cixous's theoretical writings. These writings explore and play with notions of bodies, embodiment and embodied writing. Moreover, direct and stimulating connections can be drawn between the practical alternative understandings of mistakes and Cixous's and Irigaray's emphasis upon the importance of frailty, error and kindness within the processes of writing.

Therefore, through the focus of mistakes and failure, this article proposes a new interpretation of the role of written articulations of pre-performative practice that can be used by, and taught to and by, training participants and practitioners. It demonstrates processes of written reflection that offer access to, feed, and critically analyse the embodied, creative and intuitive experiences of the psychophysical training space.

This article examines the different writing processes within a New Zealand intra-cultural community theatre project. Drawing on a practitioner perspective I explore how marginalized minority community groups were able to write their own stories and discover a collective identity. In analysing this process I develop the metaphor of the midwife to conceptualize and theorize the role of the dramaturge. I use this case study to interrogate Barthes's notion (1977) of the death of the author and Bhabha's argument (1994) about how some forms of multiculturalism can lead to political empowerment. In conclusion, I suggest that this multi-authored community project exemplifies the kind of empowerment that Bhabha describes.

This article describes the first Writing Space project, held in the Department of Performing Arts, University of Winchester. The purpose of this project was to test a structure that would engage diverse writers in an inclusive, non-hierarchical conceptual dialogue, leading to the production of a series of short, experimental texts. The article considers the relationships produced between participating writers/artists and performers, as well as the dialogues that took place within and between the performed texts themselves. The article is presented as a series of linked speculations about the range of relationships taking place between texts, writers and performances. Commenting on some of the more conventional thinking within the UK theatre, I argue that greater awareness or interest in the collaborative and dialogic element within theatre and performance writing practices could lead to a transformation of dramaturgical strategies among and between writers and other artists.

This article discusses the process of writing through devising in performance. It takes as a case study Apart of and A Part From in which muscle and sense memory touch, smell, taste, sound and sight were the points of departure for a contemporary performance piece on migration and identity. This was a practice-as-research project aimed to better understand the artist's body (myself) in improvisation with memory fragments. Working from a non-verbal frame the writing experience began as actions in space, then new memories in my body, to maps on paper, to key word and some staging patterns, to systematic capturing of the textual, rhythmic and spatial structures in the emerging 30-minute performance. Various objects were incorporated to give aesthetic coherence of the piece. The article reports on the processes of writing in action, the writing and performing as lived experience and how the writing emerged from the spaces in between self and other, self and object, self and space, present self and past self.

York/NEW YORK A performance installation featured at the Writing Encounters symposium at York St John University, September 2008

Inspiring Writing in Art and Design: Taking a Line for a Write, Pat Francis (2009) Bristol: Intellect, 256 pp., ISBN-10 1841502561, ISBN-13 9781841502564 (pbk), 20.50