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Performing Stillness: Community in Waiting.

‘Performing Stillness: Communities In Waiting’ is a book chapter in Stillness In A Mobile World, an interdisciplinary academic collection edited by two Australia-based academics. It represents Performing Communities, a sub-section of my broader enquiry, Not Yet There (http://www.not-yet-there.blogspot.com/), which investigates the capacity of participatory performance to intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated by producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for rehearsing alternative – ethical, political, critical – forms of sociability and collectivity.

Central is my practice-based involvement (as an art-writer) in the art-project Open City, whose performance-based practice is interrogated through the prism of Deleuzian-Spinozist philosophy. Key research was undertaken in Japan (dislocate festival, Yokohama) supported by an Arts Council Grant, Exploring New Strategies of Participation within Site Specific Performance, 2009. The contribution to knowledge is in exploring the affective potential of performed stillness, conceiving ‘being still’ as a constitutive space of active, embodied citizenship.

The chapter develops an earlier article ‘From Passivity to Potentiality: The Communitas of Stillness’, published in the peer-reviewed journal M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1, Still, 2009. Its ideas have been tested at various international conferences (including PSi #16 Performing Publics, Toronto, 2010 and Writing, Site+Performance, ANTI festival, Kuopio, Finland, 2011). Related investigations exploring the use of invitations for producing collectivity have resulted in journal articles ‘RSVP – Choreography Collectivity through invitation and response’, published in the peer-reviewed online journal Rhizomes (‘Hives, Tribes, Assemblages: New Collectivities’, 2011); ‘Pay Attention to the Footnotes’, in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2010; ‘Social Assemblage’, in FrenchMottershead - SHOPS, People and Processes (Site Gallery, 2010), and ‘Permission Granted’ - essay in the online journal, Drain, 2011. The Spinozist notion of affect was further elaborated as part of an invited essay in Reading/Feeling: The Affect Reader, (If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2013).