Full updated call as .pdf here.
Performing, Writing: A symposium in four turns imagines how a text can be conceptualised, written, presented and figured with equal or more contingency and responsiveness to temporal and corporeal happenings, and vice versa. What creative, dialogic, autobiographical or alternative writing approaches might elicit a text that engages with the plurality of affects of an artwork? How might a creative work be informed, inspired, directed, scripted or critiqued with the same respect for live-ness that unfolds spatially as it does textually? How might these parallel practices inhabit space symbiotically? How might a new culture of criticality develop in between acts of “performing through”?
The symposium is structured as four turns playing out across several days of experiences, textures, flavours and modalities linking acts of performing with acts of writing.
Turn One: ON Live occurs as part of Performance Arcade, a public programme running 9-12 and 16-19 March 2017 on the Wellington waterfront and beyond. This turn includes a collection of curated new performance works, the symposium opening event and a series of seminars. The performance works are intended to highlight the primacy of practice and serve as hosts for on-going discussion around the translation or transference between performance works and textual works.
Performing, Writing will formally begin on 12 March 2017 with an evening keynote. All participants are encouraged to arrive in Wellington no later than 10 March in order to witness the Arcade works at least once and engage in ‘floor talks’ and masterclasses. Those artists involved in Performance Arcade will be given the option to perform 9-12 March, 16-19 March or both periods leaving the artists the ability to attend the symposium.
Turns Two, Three and Four are foregrounded by three provocations: ON Site, ON Score and ON Voice. Participants will encounter a series of situated ‘turns’ around the city, exploring different sites and environments, and thereby allowing us to ‘turn our thoughts’ in the direction of some of the various spaces in which performance and performance writing ‘turns up’. The precise order and format of these situations, and the particular ways in which they host the 'turns', are to be developed in parallel with the curation of the proposals. Thus, they form part of a performative framework from which the form(at) of the symposium will emerge.
The provocations for Turn Two, Three and Four are:
ON Site questions the nature of the relationship between performance writing and place, traversing territories that may include site-specific works, works about place, or narratives around journeys between places. This day of the symposium is an excursion to Matiu Island (also known as Somes Island), an island in the middle of the Wellington Harbour rich in New Zealand cultural, geographical and geological history. Matiu island raises notions of islandness and pries open concern for ownership and stewardship, migrancy and transience, internment, bio-security and environmental heritage, belonging and outcast. It offers a space for us to distinguish what site-specific, site-situated and site-responsive are in practices of performance and writing.
ON Score asks us to consider a shifting spectrum between the singularity of the script and the plurality of the score, challenging the relationship between the written, inscribed, or etched, and the performed, live, or imagined. The situation of a black box theatre at Bats Theatre offers an intimate acoustic range and potential friction to the differentiation between live art and theatre. It is an opportunity to test the limits of the theatre space's interior contours, audience-performer relationships, and the affective qualities of darkness.
ON Voice prompts an exploration of aurality and oral traditions including those emerging from indigenous peoples and those associated with storytelling, singing and public speaking. It is here that we welcome proposals sensitive to the voice and pitch of the writer, the reader, the speaker and the space(s) in which such elocution occurs including the immediate room, the atmosphere and/or the political, geographical or cultural climate.
