Three Acts of Care in Performance and Beyond: A non-linear testimony

Abstract

We began collaborating in 2019, as co-curators of the ‘Materiality and Corporeality’ stream in Performance Studies international’s (PSi’s) conference ‘Crises of Care: Act respond engage’. The conference did not take place, but with the COVID 19 pandemic, its theme became more urgently lived, and we kept coming back to one another to reflect on what care meant for vulnerable bodies in crisis and their broader material circumstances and relations. Our contribution represents an effort, through the material practice of writing, to engage our wonder, as framed by Catherine Malabou, and to link it – theoretically and practically – to care and performance. Our writing is underlain by the proposition that both scholarship and dramaturgy are practices fundamentally grounded in wonder. Here we tease out how this grounding in wonder is a care-full praxis, which we trace through theatre-making and enact in writing. The main body of this article situates our collective and singular thinking around the theme of care, while the texts on the margins are material testaments of our non-linear procedures of writing, questioning, affirming and exchanging with one another. Drawing from a broad range of performances and experiences – including LASTESIS’ protest performance in Chile, Jija Sohn’s performative practice in Central Europe, and the rehearsal process of As Much in Istanbul – our consideration of care works to enjoin these examples of practice, while exploring the heterogenous manifestations care takes. By teasing out the affinities between care and performance as affective, material, social and intersubjective practices we point towards the rhizomatic possibilities performance offers to care –and the way such practices resist the carelessness of late capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy. We contend that the pressing question now is perhaps not so much ‘What is care?’ but rather what is needed for care to manifest and what procedures support its manifestations.