Output details

Non

Non is a creative research project (2008-10) that was developed within the framework of Say the Word, my AHRC-funded 5 year Creative Fellowship at Roehampton University. The objective of the larger project has been to develop models for collaboration of direct value to those involved in the creation and reception of contemporary performance. The work on Non was concerned in particular with forms of collaboration that arise from – and in spite of – the ‘resistances’ of everyday conversation.

The project was an exercise in group authorship built around an invitation to the artist Sophie Calle to produce a single word starting point. Calle offered the word ‘no’. The performance, which was made with Drs Steve Nicholson, Frances Babbage and Bill McDonell from the School of English at University of Sheffield, reflected Calle’s own practice of soliciting texts from friends or professional contacts to nuance a single idea through a plurality of voices. Through a structured, reflexive performance of ordinary speech the project addresses an idea of the ‘self’ as a strategic and playful construct constituted through ‘the group’, while attending to problems of ownership, gender and recognition that occur in the creative process of making performance.

I invited my collaborators to collect narratives focusing on negation as a determinant of collaboration. On the basis of these I structured a series of performer-based improvisations exploring the boundaries of the individual performer’s role in collaborative practice, with particular reference to questions of authenticity, techniques of realisation and creative tactics. I directed the resulting performance, which was shown at Sheffield and Roehampton universities and at Festival des Urbaines, Lausanne. Research findings were disseminated as a performance script, published in Parallax 16.3, 2010.

The portfolio includes the published script, alongside research and development documentation, and an unpublished lecture that contextualises the creative research process.