ABSTRACT
Is there a melancholy of illness? People say that the severe illness of a loved one puts one’s life and one’s work in perspective. But in attempting to cope with, make sense of and endure this circumstance within my own life, I seemed to lose all sense of perspective. It was as if the proximity of loss rendered all too visible the fragility and irreplaceability of relationships so easily taken for granted. How can one maintain the suspension of disbelief necessary to withhold despair, to believe that what one can do or say matters, against the knowledge that it may not make a difference? Perhaps these are thoughts that should be preserved for a private register, one that is more profound, and ought not to figure in a formal essay. Yet it is precisely these circumstances that have forced me to rethink the relationship between mourning and grief as well as what is at stake in working on the subjects of illness, race and the politics of collaborative performance. While collaboration often implies a unique form of working together, a melding of minds with seamless intentions, those of us who work collaboratively also know that it can be one of the most frustrating, ambivalent, overinvested, underappreciated, unbalanced, unequal, conflicted, co-dependent and downright debilitating ways to make art. In writing about collaboration, then, it is also toward those things that get left out, that go unsaid or unexpressed – toward what Toni Morrison (1989) has called those ‘unspeakable things unspoken’ – that I would like to direct this chapter.
