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Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts

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To Step, Leap, Fly

Ric Allsopp & Kristen Kreider
Published online: 16 Feb 2015.

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To cite this article: Ric Allsopp & Kristen Kreider (2015) To Step, Leap, Fly, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing
Arts, 20:1, 1-3, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2015.1009235

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 To Step, Leap, Fly
On poetics and performance
RIC ALLSOPP & KRISTEN KREIDER
The stage is the open sensual throat of poetry and
it is your legs that can strikingly manifest quite
definite states of the soul.
Robert Walser (1907)
On Poetics and Performance concerns itself with
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poiesis, or acts of making and giving form
to the interplay of material and immaterial
content intrinsic to any act of communication.
As the diversity of words and images, arguments
and ideas, practices and people in this
volume attest, there is a poetics of dance and
choreography, theatre and performance, art,
architecture, criticism, politics, knowledge and
everyday life. In bringing all of this together, it
has been our aim to position poetics in relation
to the contexts and discourses of contemporary
culture, open concepts of performance and
performance-making and an expanded view of
what poetics may mean now as a generative,
productive or possibly even redundant term.
There is a poetics of editing.
Perhaps not surprisingly, perhaps even
crucially, we begin the issue with poetry. More
specifically, we begin with Some Notes on
Poetics and Choreography where Ric Allsopp
derives an understanding of poetics from the
work of key mid-twentieth century poets and
contemporary ones. Moving deftly through the
writing and thinking of his chosen practitioners,
Allsopp ultimately aligns a poetics of writing
with a poetics of dance. Suggesting that both
poetry and dance operate in excess of the
functions of language, Allsopp foregrounds
the importance of embodiment in the
meaning-making procedures of both writing
and choreography. So we begin as we mean to
continue, stressing the importance of practice
and, related to this, emphasizing the role of
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 201 : pp.1-3
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PR 20.1 On Poetics and Performance.indd 1
embodiment and performance in an approach
to poetics.
Fittingly, the next piece in the issue is
a creative piece from the poet and critic
Peter Jaeger. In Martyrologies Jaeger employs
strategies and tactics of found poetry
and conceptual writing to borrow and
recontextualize sentences from Christian
accounts of martyrdom, thereby instigating
the interplay between the material and the
immaterial that we see as intrinsic to poetics.
Here we encounter this interplay on the page;
however, Jaegers text was originally installed as
a sound piece in Eliot College Chapel, University
of Kent (2014), where it would have instigated
such play otherwise: between the material
fabric of the building and the immaterial layers
of its liturgical history.
The interplay between material and
immaterial content continues in The New
Arachne: Towards a poetics of dynamic
forms where Boyan Manchev investigates the
dynamism inherent in the poetic figure, noting
its catalytic potential for a mode of immanent
philosophical critique. Manchev sets about
realizing this potential through his act of
reading and writing the figure of Arachne.
And through a richly imagined tapestry
of figurative metamorphosis, he practices
the poetics inherent in our materialization
of thought.
From this rigorous elaboration on and of the
process of meaning-making, we begin, again.
We start with a frog, singing, at the opening of
Jungmin Songs Poetics of Spotting Rainbows:
Towards a theory of Iritics. Guided by Songs
delicate prose, we move from the frog to her
practice, through a window, cross the city, into
ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online 1
2015 TAYLOR & FRANCIS
01/02/2015 11:10
 history, toward philosophy, looking for image.
We move like weather. We search amidst reverie
for the image as fleet phenomenon. Its already
there; its almost gone. A metonymic operation
offers a shift in scale and we find ourselves in
the museum. More precisely, we find ourselves
in the space of a label in the space of a fabulous
museum. We look around. Is this fact? Are we
fiction? In Fictive Museums and the Poetics
of Mislabelling, Peter Le Couteur explores
the stylistic and performative conventions of
museum display, and gets us to ask questions.
The next two pieces ask questions of theatre,
reconceptualizing its foundational poetics
to open up critical and theoretical potential.
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Can theatrical performance embody traumatic
memory? In Towards an Embodied Poetics
of Failure: Some sideway glances on violence
and trauma in Needcompanys Marketplace
76, Christel Stalpaert takes issue with the
representational logic and preconceived
cathartic effect of Aristotles Poetics and,
instead, looks to inaugurate an embodied
poetics of failure for the purposes of staging
traumatic narrative. Taking Needcompanys
Marketplace 76 as a case study, Stalpaert
champions a kind of theatre that does not
seek to recuperate traumatic histories into
a unilateral master-narrative and, instead, offers
a kaleidoscope of sideways glances on violence
and trauma as a means of narrating how
a community deals with violence, catastrophe,
loss, sadness and traumatic experience. Can
theatrical space contain cloud? In SunVistasqai
and Performing Skies: Towards an alternative
Aristotelian poetics, Penny Newell takes
as her starting point the metaphorical
relationship between Ancient Greek theatre and
meteorology and, extracting from this structural
analogy a metaphysical relationship between
theatre and the skies, builds a meteorological
poetics as an alternative to the Aristotelian
Poetics of performance.
Given our emphasis on practice in this
approach to poetics, coupled with the fact that
this discussion takes place in an academic
journal, it is not surprising to find a number of
articles addressing the poetics of knowledge
2 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 201 : ON POETICS AND PERFORMANCE
PR 20.1 On Poetics and Performance.indd 2
production as well as the critical act. Writing
in The Poetics of Performance Knowledge,
Fred McVittie begins with the observation
that ways of writing, and ways of thinking, are
associated with sensory modalities, drawing
attention to the priority of vision in manners
of conceptualization and expression. McVittie
counters this with a consideration of the haptic
as a distinct sensory realm, one with its own
poetic epistemology. Exploring the strengths
and weaknesses of both optic and haptic ways
of knowing, McVittie ultimately addresses
what kinds of sensory knowing best engage
with performance. In Material Poetics and the
Communication Event: A theory and critical
framework for artworks at a crossover between
poetry and text-based art, Kristen Kreider
develops a theory of material poetics and offers
a discursive, embodied and politically situated
framework for critical encounter. Predicated on
the act of speaking and listening, the theory and
the critical framework that Kreider develops are
extended to account for the meaning-making
potential inherent in any act of communication,
for example, speaking and listening, writing
and reading, gesturing and viewing. In Towards
a Poiesis of Critical Practice: 1000th LIVE and
the politics of appearance, Diana Damian
Martin begins with a proposition: criticism is
a matter of politics and aesthetics, configured
within the realm of the sensible. She proceeds
to present a conceptualization of criticism
as a political event, drawing on the work of
Jacques Rancire and referencing specifically
her own critical engagement with Forced
Entertainments And on the Thousandth Night,
as part of Culturegest Festival. She suggests
the potential for the critical act to instigate
dissensus, resulting in a redistribution of the
sensible as the political.
(These three articles are interwoven with
two sets of artists pages. The first set: a shock
of orange! As NaoKo TakaHashi presents The
Body Pulled (2014). The second set of artists
pages: a loose taxonomy: a configuration of
words and lines: a cifra to mark the beginning
of what will be a story as the collaborative pair,
Kreider + OLeary, reflect on their site visit to
01/02/2015 11:10
 the Open City. Situated in the sand dunes just
off the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Valparaiso,
Chile, the Open City is a school, an urban
laboratory and the embodiment of a utopian
ideal: a radical pedagogical experiment founded
in 1971 by the Argentinean poet Godofredo
Iommi and the Chilean architect Alberto Cruz.
In the Open City, architecture is constructed
on a foundation of poetry and shifting sand.
In these pages, Kreider + OLeary, a poet and
architect, are its students.)
The relationship between politics and
performance is addressed in the next two
articles of the issue. Writing in Dog Sniff Dog:
Materialist poetics and the politics of The
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two interviews from a series conducted by
Marino and Cuellar: the first, with Diana
Taylor, discusses how her work has been
informed by thinking about fiestas in relation
to cultural memory, history and performance;
the second is with the poet Leda Martins,
discussing performance, spiral time and dance,
and considering what performance can offer
histories and discourses that text leaves behind.
What remains then at the end of the issue is an
echo, a suggestive resonance of the first article.
So prose has taken us from A to B, but poetry is
the dance.
*

As we noted at the beginning, there is a poetics

Viewpoints, Tony Perucci looks specifically
of editing. For this issue, we have brought
at the Occupy movement in the United States
together materials, ordered them in sequence
and the coextensive rise of interest in The
and made connections across and between
Viewpoints: an actor training programme that
them. Here, in the preface, we have taken you
grew out of the New York City downtown dance
through this, step by step. Now we invite you
scene of the late 1960s. Drawing comparisons
into this space of poetics and performance
between them, Perucci recontextualizes The
(your entry, another beginning) to follow the
Viewpoints in relation to current forms of
double-helix interweaving the conventional
political activism, using the poetics of this
and radical, methodological and experimental,
performance practice as a springboard to
critical and creative. And as you move through
address wider issues around work, global
(step, leap, fly) we solicit you to find your own
capital and the potential for solidarity and
connections and make your own meaning. There
resistance. Following this, Nandita Dinesh
is a poetics of reading.
writing in Poetics and (Mis)representation:
Creating theatre with/for/about ex-militants
REFERENCES
in Kashmir discusses her documentary theatre
Walser, Robert (2002 [1907] from Response to a Request
piece Meri Kahani Meri Zabani (My Story My in Selected Stories of Robert Walser with preface by Susan
Words), which sought to perform the narratives Sontag, New York: New York Review of Books.
of ex-militants in Kashmir. Dineshs piece works
in part as documentation of the piece Voices,
incorporating multiple voices and viewpoints,
and in part as a critical reflection on the project,
outlining the ethical imperative behind working
with a poetics of (mis)representation for the
purposes of staging of political conflict. The
effect can be read as a page-based enactment
of the plurality and mobility inherent in the
political; the partiality inherent in historical
narrative; and the mis-communication inherent
in any discursive exchange.
The issue concludes with Angela Marino
and Manuel Cuellars exploration of Fiesta:
Performance as Epistemology including

A L L S O P P & K R E I D E R : T O S T E P, L E A P, F LY 3

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