Johanna Linsley

One premise of pedagogy is that the successful outcome of learning is knowledge. At the same time, and especially in performance teaching and training, there is a notion that the risk of failure offers a crucial freedom to the student. Without a safe space to fail, experimentation and innovation cannot occur.  But if failure is success, what happens to critique and accountability? Must experimentation dissolve into toothless consensus? If there is value for performance pedagogy in the freedom to fail, there must be clarity about what failure is and does, and what it produces. We must think through the myriad non-knowledges that might be revealed through pedagogy and consider how these non-knowledges are performed.

Many artists in recent years have staged pedagogical encounters in order to think through precisely these problems. The format of the performance lecture in particular has become nearly ubiquitous in festivals and symposia, but little has been written to account for the popularity of the form, much less the critical, philosophical and political problems these performers are working through. In this paper, I argue that an important impulse for many performance pedagogues is to critically examine and strategically produce non-knowledge. Further, I argue that non-knowledge must be thought in multiple categories, with various affective forces. I focus on the categories of stupidity, paranoia and wonder in order to demonstrate how non-knowledge operates not in direct opposition to knowledge, nor as an easily recuperable failsafe, but as independently articulable experience packed with its own problems and potentialities.

The performance examples I consider (lectures, or ‘lectures’, by William PopeL., The Atlas Group and Aaron Williamson) contribute to a framework for thinking through failure and pedagogy without relying on an immediate recuperation of failure into some vague notion of ‘process’. Rather, this framework develops specific processes and concrete categories to account for the rich and shifting terrain of knowledge and non-knowledge as they operate in pedagogy. Finally, this paper figures performance as a guide to what is stupid, paranoid and wonderful about the pedagogical encounter.

‘How to Write Protest’ considers the practice of writing and the materiality of the written word in relation to protest.  It asks, simply: how is protest written?  Keenly aware that the question exceeds the scope of this context, the article approaches a partial answer through analysis of two recent cultural projects: a performance titled In the near future by artist Sharon Hayes, and a film titled The Case of the Grinning Cat by Chris Marker.  Both works treat the subject of political and social protest in part as a problem for writing, while demanding an expanded definition of writing with a performative valence. Using my analysis of these works, I argue that while protest favours immediacy and visceral reality, nevertheless it cannot be thought separately from history.  Writing – particularly considered in an expanded definition describing various inscriptions of language – is a crucial partner with direct action, as present struggle finds an ally with specific events of the past.

This paper looks at the performance work of UK artist Martin O'Brien, considering the interplay between queerness, endurance and illness O'Brien explores, drawing on his own experiences with Cystic Fibrosis, and a queer generational connection he has created with Sheree Rose and her partner, the late Bob Flanagan (who died of Cystic Fibrosis in 1996). On the one hand, O’Brien’s practice is highly determined. It is conditioned by his illness, it draws on the concrete materials of his own body, and it reproduces the highly regulated space of the medical institution. However, one of the remarkable things about this intensely physical practice is how the various codes and signals of identity embedded in representations of medical treatment, images of masculinity, and ideas about homosexuality, are scrambled, queered, so that a radical contingency fuelled by a sense of potentiality emerges. What does it mean to find potentiality in a practice so connected to the extreme certainties of illness and mortality? In this paper, I trace a few examples of O’Brien’s practice to locate where and how contingency and indeterminacy are found, and what kind of politics might ripple out from them. These examples come from my own witnessing of his work, his published writing, and both casual and more formal conversations I have had with him. My theorizing comes from engagement with a range of critical and philosophical sources dealing with potentiality, indeterminacy and contingency.

From the battle to displace the phenomenological/ontological primacy of the visual (e.g. Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘anti-ocular turn’) to attempts in psychoanlysis to redirect Lacan’s gaze (e.g. Bracha Ettinger or Mladen Dolar), the voice is a fresh field for re-thinking both being and experience, and developing new political
responses. Key to much of this philosophical work on the voice are questions of authenticity and singularity – for instance, Adriana Cavarero’s uniqueness of vocal expression which is also necessarily a complex being-in-communion with others. This paper suggests that the voice as a tool for thinking about
authenticity and singularity might be useful for work in performance studies around documentation and the traces of performance. Works like Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains show how performance is neither a stable, enduring object nor a neatly vanishing event, but rather remains in complex
and ever-shifting modes. Performance documentation is thus a volatile and significant place for questioning authoritative histories and destabilizing fixed identities and hierarchies of knowledge. In this paper, I argue that the remains of the voice are particularly tricky and valuable materials for this work.

This paper focuses specifically on the video and performance work of ASM Kobayashi, a young New York-based artist. Her work uses found documents to restage both intimate and banal encounters between ‘real’ people. Drawing particularly on her extensive collection of audio tapes found in secondhand answering machines, Kobayashi’s work pairs the seemingly ‘authentic’ voices
of strangers with elaborately acted-out visual re-enactments. In so doing, Kobayashi reveals both the fluidity of singular identity, and the labour that goes into the reverberation of authenticity

This paper considers Dan Carter, a video piece by Canadian artist ASM Kobayashi.  I use the framework of ‘eavesdropping’ to approach this work, suggesting as well that a broader methodology for listening to/as performance might be extrapolated.

In 2005, Kobayashi found a second-hand answering machine in a charity shop in Toronto, with the tapes still inside. She used these found voices to create intimate and sometimes unsettling portraits of the lives of strangers. I argue that in this work and in her broader practice, Kobayashi deploys ‘listening-in’ as a complex strategy for thinking about language and identity, and, further, that this mode of ‘listening-in’ might have broader use in how we think about listening in (and to) performance.

This chapter is contextualized within research into documentation and performance. In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in how performance remains, with books, conferences, exhibition and research projects all focusing on performance and its documents. However, documentation of the voice remains under-theorised, even as one of the most important questions to ask of any archive is ‘whose voice is heard’? I propose that ‘listening-in’ might be a way to think about how we listen to the voices of others (and ourselves), and the narratives – historical and personal – that we create in response. I argue that Kobayashi’s mode of overhearing – excessive and unstable – helps highlight the labour that goes into the construction of identity, whether those constructions concern a stranger on the street, a legitimated voice in the archive, or the sound of our own voice.

As part of the Performing Documents project at the University of Bristol, four artists' projects were commissioned with the remit to use the University of Bristol's Live Art Archives or Arnolfini's archive at the Bristol Records Office in order to create a new piece of work. The four companies chose very different strategies to fulfill this remit. Every House Has a Door re-created nine 'beginnings' of historical performances, and in the process created a philosophical reflection on the structure and act of beginning as such (and perhaps also of 'ending'.) The Performance Re-enactment Society made Group Show in which the three members of the company created their own immaterial responses to the highly material documentation of Arnolfini's fifty-year exhibition history. Blast Theory returned to their own obsessively produced video archive, chopped it to pieces and offered it up to audience interaction – interactivity is perhaps an even more important legacy of their twenty years of work than the physical documents they have collected. Finally, Bodies in Flight returned to a collaboratively produced show from 1996 called Do the Wild Thing!  In their 'redux' version, the company members disassembled the component parts of the original collaboration (text, video, photography and choreography) and created new, singly authored pieces. In this paper, I will reflect briefly on these different approaches, suggesting how each company’s attitude toward a return to the archive also constitutes part of a wider performance ethos. I will also consider more broadly how a return to the archive framed explicitly as a generative act might offer scope for thinking of documentation outside of the instrumentalised ‘branding’ and ‘publicity’ function that it often serves, and into an idea of documentation as part of a conversation across temporal and geographical spheres. This conversation necessarily involves failures of communication and slips of meaning, but it can also connect the historical with the creative, and the material with the immaterial.

In this paper, I look at performance artist Kira O'Reilly's recent work in biology laboratories. I show how O’Reilly understands her work in the lab as ‘play’. This denotes both an attitude oriented towards indeterminacy and improvisation, as well as a (not always 'fun') play of desire and intimacy. Considering O’Reilly playing in the lab in these ways allows for investigations of cultural difference between arts and science, and the negotiations of interdisciplinariy. It also opens up questions about the status of ‘work’ within both disciplinary areas. Finally, it suggests broader philosophical questions about indeterminacy and the possibility of change.

While not all of the work I look at in this article is explicitly situated as theatre or performance, this investigation of play is particularly useful for performance studies. I pay attention to O’Reilly’s descriptions of interactions in the labs where she worked, which themselves have a complex status as performance; they are time-based and process-led, though they may lack formal documentation or representation. Yet it is within these informal and sometimes unspoken exchanges of knowledge, alongside the more constructed artistic outputs, that O’Reilly’s tactics of playfulness are developed. This is of broader importance for the study of performance, and for the use of performance practice within other disciplines. The informal, unspoken and blurrily defined edges of disciplinarity should sometimes be played with so that different forms of knowledge can emerge. Performance is a particularly compelling place for this type of play.

In his well-known essay ‘The Storyteller,’ Walter Benjamin draws a line, separating story from information.  Storytelling, for Benjamin, provides the ‘communicability of experience,’ while information is a self-contained unit that passes, unchanged, throughout the modern infrastructure.  Information is necessarily ‘understandable in itself’ and it ‘lays claim to prompt verification’ – which also, of course, relegates the unverified into the category of the false, the mistake. For Benjamin, the transmission of information supplants the sharing of experience, and communication – as a product in modernity – is put to the service of capital. 

Over half a century after Benjamin’s formulations, what is the state of storytelling in the ‘age of information’ – the commonplace phrasing for the technological context in which information is, if not actually ubiquitous, at least mobile in a way it has never been before?  Are there strategies available for creating a new version of ‘the communicability of experience’? And are there political implications for these strategies?

Berlin-based dramaturge and producer Hannah Hurtzig has devised a series of projects that address these challenges.  Her Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Nonknowledge, eleven versions of which have been staged in various cities since 2005, organises 100 ‘experts’ from different fields into one large, theatrical space, and invites audience members to purchase a half-hour lecture with one of them.  Along the way, however, Hurtzig disrupts the very notion of expert, as the ‘lectures’ are revealed to be narratives in disguise – storytelling smuggled in under the cover of a sanctioned space for the transmission of information.  This ‘report’ will explore Hurtzig’s employment of the unverifiable, questioning whether and how the duality of ‘mis–‘ might be productively dissolved or refigured.