FUSE#5

Choreography Theory—Seven Fragments
‘collaborator’ in political discourse can also mean an individual that
is colluding with the enemy—“he is a collaborator, a traitor”. I found
this duplicity very fascinating.
Successful collaboration involves negotiation, conflict, and also
a letting go of the ego, or the idea of the artist as the “solo genius”.
Collaboration requires those that are involved to contribute their interests
and skills to the artwork that they are creating (hopefully with the
goal of creating something beyond what each of your individual efforts
could have achieved).
Collaboration should not be about finding the “lowest common
denominator”. However, collaboration is very much dependent on the
level of trust, relationship, belief, and ability of the artists to meet
differences of opinion with an open mind.
Collaboration is not always equal collaboration— people can
collaborate within specific roles or frameworks in the service of an
artwork, or it can be more of a 50/50 split, where there is much more
openness about who has the agency in creative decisions.
Fragment 3: On Participatory Performance, Online Events
and Post-Covid Art 1
What then, when the majority of work is now online, and the distance
grows even greater? What does participation look like now? Shannon
Jackson points to some of these ideas in her keynote Essential Service
and the Proximity of Labour (2020). In one way, the reliance on the
network plays into the hands of both neoliberal technocrats (we participate
endlessly in a series of digital pastiches, and exploit both our
own efforts and those of the artists who are usually doing this for
free) and relational aesthetics, where we are in a state of re-producing
sociality and re-negotiating the relationship of the elements through
Zoom-performances where everyone is “present” and “participating”
(because they are visible—a backdrop to the performance). And yet,
we are sitting behind a literal 4th wall of the computer screen. We are
lacking the desire to question, experiment, and engage as a means of
experiencing performance (Ranciere, 2008) because we are experiencing
Jackson’s spatial emptiness. In this instance, the distance between
the spectator and the artwork almost feels too great. We both lack
boundaries as an audience and have the most “hard-to-breach”
boundary of all. In an “experience economy” (Kunst, 2015) how do
we make this digital “experience” count for anything more meaningful
than scrolling through Instagram. How can we harness what Jackson
calls the “energetic power” of distance to bring the audience back
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