ABSTRACT
How might performance, activism and writing cross-pollinate in forms of writing that invite ambiguity, fragmentation, rhythm, darkness, poetic experimentation and style as a kind of touch? Such writing makes space for resistance against academic convention, to enable a blaze of tender or creative violence to move through normative, enculturated habits of language, making space for yet-to-be-imagined modes of practice. The matches of affect, feeling, intensity and memory (in all its multiplicity) can burn into pages, incinerating passive and disembodied conventions to make space for new authorial freedoms and embodied knowledges. A multi-modal approach to activism and dance writing inform the ten parts of this chapter. The Chilean protests of 2019 form a recurring motif through sections that provide different perspectives on writing affect in relation to performance making and political activism. Kathleen Stewart’s evocative, fragmentary approach to non-fiction, Erin Manning’s event score, Lisa Robertson’s poetic evocations of texture and space and Claire MacDonald’s writing in the expanded field are discussed in relation to diverse artists. Expanded approaches to performance documentation enable writing, performance, choreography, artistic mapping and visual art to bleed into each other. enabling an unpredictable sprawl of ideas through page-based and digital media, into social life and education.
