‘Performing, Writing’

Abstract

This paper is a reduced and edited version of a keynote address given at the Performing, Writing Symposium, held in and around Wellington, New Zealand, in March 2017. The author, who played a leading role in conceiving and developing Performance Writing as a field of study, practice and research at Dartington College of Arts in Devon (England), uses the opportunity to compare the Wellington and Dartington projects and in doing so to assess the continuing salience of the conjoining of the two terms, 'perform' and 'write'. He considers the formulation of their respective titles, including the suggestive differences between the '-ing' and '-ance' suffixes, word order and the use or absence of a comma between the key terms. He also considers the terminology used to indicate different options within the implied fields. In both cases writing and performing are seen as having potential for complementary relationships of 'differences that augment each other'. The Dartington context for the conception of performance writing is sketched, emphasising the significance of writing forms that emerge out of performance practices rather than exclusively from literature. The final part of the paper offers a list of nine open thoughts on the continuing multiple dynamic relations of 'perform' and 'write', with implications for different modalities of practice. The list includes a return to the valuable extension of the term 'perform' to encompass J.L. Austin's concept of 'performativity' and tentatively suggests, with thanks to M.A.K. Halliday's concept of 'grammatical metaphor', the notion of 'domainal metaphor' as a term for the transference of qualities and modes of discourse between domains of cultural practice, largely through collaboration across fields or mixed modal work.