Documenting Performance 2018
Full Name: Johanna Linsley
Annual Conference Theme (if applicable): Classes of Categories
What were the main points that emerged from your WG this year?
The call for papers this year emerged directly from conversations during the previous two conferences in which the troubled status of the ‘category’ as both limiting and enabling became a recurring point of discussion. The responses to the call offered a diverse range of examples, from early experiments in psychotherapy in prisons in the United States to the politics of drag in contemporary Israel to the implications of audience feedback forms for UK cultural policy, to name just a few. From these examples and the resulting conversations, several key themes developed. These included questions around the aesthetics of the category; the situated practice of documentation; the notion of the ‘inchoate’ or the not yet specific; liberalism and inclusion; ‘sweeping terms’; abstraction as the premise of classification; the list and the miscellany, particularly in relation to the universal; the unromantic labour of care; the impostor and the inauthentic; contingency and self-determination; the politics of recognition; ‘the general public’; and the category of ‘experience’ as an object for study and a potential return to J.L. Austin to complicate ideas of the ‘limits of language’ in attesting to experience. One of the strongest questions to emerge from this rich set of offerings circulates around the problem of ‘description’. How do we describe performance? This question particularly chimes with the wider concern of the Working Group over the past three years to investigate how we do the work of writing and thinking about theatre and performance. We are currently considering a proposal for an interim event taking this question further, in relation to practices of art-writing and performance-writing as well as broader contexts.
What was discussed at your business meeting?
This year marks the culmination of Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley’s convenorship of the Documenting Performance Working Group. Diana Damian Martin (RCSSD), Eleanor Roberts (Roehampton), and Harriet Curtis (King’s College London) will take over as co-convenors from 2019. In order to facilitate a staggered transition over the coming academic session, it was agreed that the outgoing convenors will be responsible for an interim event engaging with ideas around art writing and description, emerging from the conversations in Aberyswyth discussed above. The incoming convenors with lead from the CFP for the 2019 conference.
Types of contributions:
Contributions largely took the form of papers, with several presentations taking on the convener’s invitation to consider the form and aesthetic of the category of the ‘conference presentation’. Several papers experimented with an essayistic structure and tone, and one presentation involved reading the first chapter of a novel-in-progress, a final chapter of which will be presented at a following gathering of the group.
Number of formal contributors (those listed in book of abstracts) 16
Approx. overall number of delegates who attended your WG Sessions Approx. 20 per WG session and 36 delegates for the Open Panel
Composition of WG (PG, ECR, etc.)
The Working Group is proud to maintain a productive representation of academic and creative experience across all levels, including two professors (Joe Kelleher and Stephen Scott-Bottoms) and three PhD students (Hannah Greenstreet, Vipavinee Artpradid, and Raz Weiner). It is important to note, too, the continuing participation of a predominant cohort of emerging female ECR academics (Giulia Palladini, Ella Finer, Emma Bennett, Eleanor Roberts, Diana Damian Martin, Harriet Curtis, Acatia Finbow, Kirsty Sedgman, Joanna Bucknall, and the Working Group Convenors Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley), who contributed significantly to the dynamism of this year’s intellectual content. This cohort also includes scholars newly appointed to the UK. In addition, longstanding Working Group member Acatia Finbow was a recipient this year of the newly inaugurated TaPRA ECR Bursary. The Working Group makes a point of bringing together contributors of differing career stages within panel sessions and this was particularly successful on this year’s Open Panel, as well as in terms of the generosity of response offered by more senior colleagues.
Did you have any non-UK participants? No
If your WG hosted an Open Panel, do you have any feedback?
The Open Panel this year was received with notable attention and care. The panel travelled the Working Group’s theme of classification into the terrain of criticism and included three different approaches to writing critically about art events. Questions about contingency, usefulness and value threaded in various ways through the papers. The Working Group chose to bring together presenters from different career levels (professor, ECR and PhD student) and this range helped create an atmosphere of open exchange and support that the Working Group is keen to foreground.
Any additional points or feedback not covered above?
The current Working Group conveners have been in this role for the past three years, and would like to thank the incredible scholars and artists who have taken part in the conversation over this time. Over three conferences and an interim event at Tate Exchange at Tate Modern, the conversations have been generative and rich. The conveners would also like to thank the Executive Committee for the support and brilliant organisation. We are delighted to be handing over convenorship of the group to three excellent Early Career researchers: Harriet Curtis (King’s College London), Eleanor Roberts (University of Roehampton), and Diana Damian Martin (RCSSD).
