In Conversation: exchange and relation in live art and performance processes.

Theatrical collaboration is perhaps unique in its reliance on 'conversation', as a fundamental element in its processes. This research focuses on an issue at the heart of the making of much contemporary performance work: the language and politics of collaboration.

The practice of this research is organized around a collaborative game which I've called Say the Word. Fifteen invited artists and theorists are invited to send me a single word as a starting point for making a new piece of performance work. The resulting work will effectively become a part of an exchange or a conversation with the sender of the word and their own practice - a remote collaboration if you like. A secondary exploration of the language and dynamics of collaboration will take place in the rehearsal room, as each single word starting-point gets excavated/built upon as an invitation or instruction working through different collaborative contracts and with different artist-collaborators each time. These creative exchanges, (resulting in six new, distinct, and responsive pieces for performance over the five years) form the methodology, the content and the main output of this programme of practice.

The creative research project will question and document ideas around truth and strategy, authenticity and performance, play and realisation, through this ongoing programme of performance practice, a model that is reciprocal with my own experience of twenty-four years of successful contemporary collaboration with Forced Entertainment, one of the leading UK exponents of experimental theatre.

I have been part of this stable ensemble of theatre artists throughout my working life and have had the opportunity to identify, debate and reflect upon a number of emergent questions key to the collaborative making of devised theatre. Forced Entertainment has sustained a constant creative core of six people over this period, and has also initiated and developed collaborative relationships with a number of artists and theorists outside of the company, who have nonetheless become an essential part of the conversation of our work; Sophie Calle, Adrian Heathfield, Andrew Quick, Sara-Jane Bailes, Jerome Bel, Richard Maxwell, Wendy Houstoun, and Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson amongst others. The Research Fellowship would provide the space to extend, examine and document a critical/creative exchange that has increasingly become an integral part of my work. Alongside this work and over the same period, I have experienced intense short-term artistic collaborations with members of other leading European companies: TG Stan, Desperate Optimists, Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods and many solo artists outside of the FE ensemble. This has led to a growing interest in the possibilities of creative exchange with established artists across form, language and cultures. I now wish to direct this experience and interest into a specifically focused body of new work, led, framed and theorised by myself.

The part-time nature of the position will allow me to identify and pursue, as research questions, issues and strategies that run concurrently with my work within Forced Entertainment. I wish to interrogate these issues practically and theoretically outside of the commercial environment and to document and reflect on these processes, as a performer and maker, within an academic context, through performative papers and through the composition of an artist's handbook.