Feeling a bit stuck with the writing bit of the PhD. So in an effort to get unstuck, I have been reading about critical creative-artistic-performative writing. Reading this now it feels like this action is an act of procrastination. Perhaps it is! Rather than getting on with the writing I will read about writing. It sounds ridiculous. But I am sticking to my guns and claiming it is helpful.
Reading is from two sources:
The Creative Critic: writing as/about Practice (2018), edited by Katya Hilevaara and Emily Orley1, and article How We Talk About The Work Is The Work in Performance Research by Theron Schmidt (2018)2.
Here is what what I have learned:
Borrowing Peggy Phelan’s famous phrase, Theron Schmidt concludes his article:
“Critical writing can become ‘something other’, a practice in its own right, in both senses of ‘practice’: it is something to be practiced, to be cultivated – something we can get better at, making discoveries through working more closely and deeply with the task. As writers we can learn from other writers. And also: it is a practice among other creative practices. We can learn from other non-writing. We can find ways of using the rhythms and scores of architecture, dance, daily life. From other fields we can borrow terminology and jargon, methodological approaches and forms of composition.” (2018)
This feels pretty spot on and sums up some of the reasons I am feeling stuck and overwhelmed. I am ‘borrowing’ from fields beyond the safety of my main practice, community dance, to make better sense of it. In a somewhat panicky email to my supervisors Efrosini Protopapa and Sara Houston at Roehampton University last Monday, I said:
“There seems to be so much to read and write about…
Walking/flanerie/Psychogeography
Site dance/choreography
Community dance/participatory arts/socially engaged arts
The everyday
Care/care ethics/ethics
Place/Urban planning/placemaking/regeneration/gentrification
Woolwich
Civic role (of arts)
Outsiderness/tourism/hospitality
Local/localness
Chairs
Attention/distraction (affect theory?)
Writing about practice methodology/methods
The curatorial (not been on radar much recently)”
and “Wider contextual issues seem relevant to write about too, for example: Impact of covid, social justice movements, climate emergency, Sarah Everard case walking safety. Perhaps these form chapters of their own, or one chapter that covers how all these things have impacted the project.”
I think I am overwhelmed by feeling that to write as and about the practice is to write in the context of all these things. I need to identify: what is central and what is a distraction; what will be part of the contextual, background literature review; what is integral to the multi modal methodology that borrows from different fields; what is the critical writing about the practice; and finally what is the public sharing of that practice and subsequent writing about that ‘event’ that might continue the “resonances and reverberations” (Schmidt) of the practice?
Hilevaara and Orley’s introduction to their book talks about the different ways of referring to writing as/about practice: Robin Nelson’s complimentary writing; Henk Borgdorff’s writing alongside practice; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing beside practice; Irit Rogoff’s writing with practice. There are calls to not be shackled by categorisations of writing that include performative writing, art writing, auto-ethnography and others. I do like their inclusion of “Writing-beside involves, first and foremost, an attending to, a listening, a level of care. A methodology that P.A. Skantze (drawing on the work of Sebald) calls a narrative of care” since care is a central concept of my research. Perhaps it is writing about a practice of care through a narrative of care.
To close, for now, the practice of this PhD can be described as a walking, dancing and choreographic practice that is being researched through the lens of care, is situated in the public realm and is responding to issues in the public realm, like regeneration, gentrification, access and littering. I think next time I might need to interrogate the concept of public further, so will end on this note from Schmidt who refers to Suzanne Lacy’s writing:
Schmidt says “The idea that ‘public’ is a thing that is manufactured, that is tested and contested, became the focus of what Suzanne Lacy would describe as ‘new genre public art’. A shift out of designated spaces for art and into city landscapes, domestic dwellings and specific communities, meant that ‘public’ was no longer a term that could be taken for granted, but must be considered one of the things that the artist is actively making:
‘Is ‘public’ a qualifying description of place, ownership, or access? Is it a subject, or a characteristic of the particular audience? Does it explain the intentions of the artist or the interests of the audience? The inclusion of the public connects theories of art to the broader population: what exists in the space between the words public and art is an unknown relationship between artist and audience, a relationship that may itself become the artwork.’ (Lacy 1995: 20)”
More on that and the publicness of writing another time. When I have finished procrastinating on this.
References
- Hilevaara, Katya and Emily Orley. Eds (2018) The Creative Critic: writing as/about Practice. Routledge: Oxon
- Schmidt, Theron (2018) How We Talk About The Work Is The Work, Performance Research, Vol .23 (2). pp 37-43.
woolwich wandering 