Critical Analysis

My creative writing piece follows a collage/montage of three different moments that occurred around the same time, physically amalgamating the fragmented experiences that form my affective and embodied spectatorship of Travis Alabanza’s Sound of the Underground in February 2023. The piece involves a manifesto about disrupting workplaces, a love letter to the trans* community, and an embodied critical analysis on the emotional experience of watching Alabanza’s play. I also include three images that involve the subject matter of my creative piece, as visual reflections of the anger, love and community that circulate throughout each section.

The manifesto is a fictionalisation of my experience of quitting my job, after being implicated as a “disruption” for challenging homophobia and transphobia in the workplace. I chose to fictionalise this experience as I do not want to re-traumatise myself in discussing this exploitative personal experience. I focus on the idea of disruption via the image of rust in a machine, representing the outspoken queer “disruptions’’ as angry and powerful, in response to being disempowered within a white capitalistic, cis-heteronormative patriarchy that prioritises profit over social equity. The language of this section is inspired by Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, but I subvert her ironic writing on ‘women in the circuit’ by suggesting that queer people may instead disrupt the “machine” of a work environment. [1] My comparison of queer people to an inanimate thing - rust - is not to dehumanise queerness, but to highlight the ways in which queerness has been historically excluded from the label of “human”, following Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen’s post-humanist provocation, ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’. [2]

The second part is a letter in response to recent violence against transgender people and transphobic rhetoric in the UK, particularly after the murder of Brianna Ghey. [3] This section counters the forceful delivery of the first part, instead invoking a sense of power through love and community in times of grief. I triangulate love, grief and solidarity in this letter, heavily inspired by Black feminist writer, bell hooks, whose book All About Love was foundational. [4] I am also influenced by Alabanza’s debut play, Burgerz, in which they explore themes of active solidarity in the face of anti-trans hate crimes.

I write about anger, fear, grief and love in the first two sections, in order to highlight these affects as temporally and spatially present within my embodied spectatorship of Sound of the Underground. These two sections culminate in the final review where I consider the ways in which spectatorial subjectivity is constructed by personal experiences and political climate. This final section takes a more conventional academic style; however, the subject matter is based on interior emotions, as I present an affective encounter with this performance event.

The fragmented exploration of emotions relates to my creative form here as one of collage/montage, which I create via differing written and visual forms in seeming disorder. Responding to Gregory Ulmer’s writing on ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’, I engage his idea for post-critical writing that utilises avant-garde artistic methodologies of ‘collage’ as a ‘transfer of materials from one context to another’, and ‘montage’ as ‘the “dissemination” of these borrowings through the new setting’. [5] Ulmer suggests that collage and montage ‘lift a certain number of elements from works, objects, preexisting messages…to integrate them in a new creation in order to produce an original totality manifesting ruptures of diverse sorts’. [6] He indicates how weaving together different works produces new meanings that extend beyond the representational. This links to Martin, discussing how criticism emerges from ‘amongst the scraps of notes, the memories, the detailed descriptions we want to render present in our critical texts’. [7] The messy expression of emotions within my creative-critical writing mimics the ways in which thoughts rarely form in a linear pattern whilst writing performance criticism. Ulmer suggests that montage ‘mounts a process…in order to intervene in the world’, [8] thus I write a creative composition that indicates the process behind my critical response to Sound of the Underground.

Consequently, the form of my creative writing responds to a research question of what methodologies we use in performance criticism, and why expanding the boundaries of institutional academia is crucial to its development. T.W. Adorno considers the form of the essay, suggesting that the essay ‘thinks in fragments just as reality is fragmented and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over’. [9] Adorno writes against scientific methodologies of a ‘logical order’ in essay-writing, as something which presumes the existence of objective truth. [10] Ideas of order and objective truth within the essay form maintain disciplinary views of performance studies, which suits institutional attempts to restrict academic research to hegemonic white, patriarchal standards. This is core to my creative piece: I attempt to expand the boundaries of what is considered academic writing in order to resist the disciplining of performance studies.

In challenging ideas of objective truth within the academic essay, I attempt to decolonise performance research methodologies in order to disrupt hegemonic Euro-centric epistemology. Sruti Bala, in ‘Decolonising Theatre and Performance Studies’, argues for the use of the ‘anecdote’ in performance research, citing its popularisation within oral history and feminist ethnography. [11] She states:

To use the anecdotal story form in academic writing is thus not to claim a seamless, verifiable correspondence between experience and social reality, but rather, to make as visible as possible the grounds from which this perceived reality is discursively constructed. [12]

This is what inspires my creative writing. I do not talk about my subjectivity and consequent affective responses to Sound of the Underground to suggest that what I see is objectively true. Instead, I use a creative, embodied style of writing to argue for an understanding of how all spectatorship is constructed through one’s own subjectivity. The failings in my creative writing to consider how other audience members interpret the play is purposeful, highlighting how performance studies cannot be encompassed by ideas of hegemonic academic objectivity. By employing creative written forms to represent spectatorial subjectivity and affects, I follow Swati Arora’s proposal that performance studies ‘needs to interrogate what it deems “theory” and embrace a multiplicity of knowledge systems as vital to our pedagogy’. [13] Arora advocates for the decolonisation of performance studies, through its epistemological and material conditions. Thus by resisting Western academia’s tendency to demand objective truth, and instead turning towards embodied, affective and subjective writing, I present the ways in which performance studies can decolonise the production of knowledge. Arora highlights how the embodied nature of performance studies allows for this decolonisation of knowledge when we engage ‘with the affective legacies of Black and Global Majority scholars in our everyday life, pedagogy, and research instead of relegating them to footnotes and margins’. [14] As a queer person of the Global Majority, I reassert the importance of empirical epistemologies within my writing, in order to show how temporal and spatial histories constitute my critical spectatorship of Sound of the Underground. The collage/montage form follows the disorganised nature of the emotions that I discuss in the subject matter, in order to mimic the non-linear, embodied knowledges that are frequently erased from hegemonic academic writing.

This creative-critical piece was originally produced for the Theatre and Performance Research Methods module for my MA.

[1] Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 1991) 149-181, p.149.

[2] Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, GLQ, 21.2-3, (2015) 183-207, <doi:10.1215/10642684-2843215>.

[3] See Ben Hunte.

[4] See bell hooks.

[5] Gregory L. Ulmer, ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1983) 83-110, p.84.

[6] Ulmer, p.84.

[7] Martin, p.220.

[8] Ulmer, p.86.

[9] T.W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, New German Critique, 32 (Spring/Summer, 1984) 151-171, p.164, <https://doi.org/10.2307/488160>.

[10] Adorno, p.164.

[11] Sruti Bala, 'Decolonising Theatre and Performance Studies: Tales from the classroom,' Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 20.3 (2017): 333-345, p.335.

[12] Bala, p.336.

[13] Swati Arora, ‘A manifesto to decentre theatre and performance studies,’ Studies in Theatre and Performance, 41.1 (2021): 12-20, p.17, <doi:10.1080/14682761.2021.1881730>.

[14] Arora, p.17.