PARIP 2003

NATIONAL CONFERENCE: 11-14 September

CONTRIBUTORS

CLARKE: PAUL
dartington college of arts
an experiential approach to theory from within practice

© Paul Clarke, 2004, Theatre, Dartington College of Arts, paul@hail.demon.co.uk

Rather than present a case study I will speak around this quotation from Susan Melrose (1995:1), in order to discuss the possibility of practice as research in performance and the ambivalent position of the practitioner-theorist. This paper draws on my Ph.d. research ‘Collaborative Performance Systems’. This project employed three modes of research synchronously: "new performance"-appropriate theoretical writing and analyses; detailed notation of the work of two contemporary live art companies, desperate optimists and Forced Entertainment; and performance practice as a mode of applied research – this was conducted collaboratively with Uninvited Guests, the company I direct. The thesis proposes the opening of theoretical discourses to the aesthetic and the possibility of undertaking the practice of performance theory in other modes than discourse; that, as Susan Melrose (1995) has said, live performance might theorise itself. At the same time, my performance practice with Uninvited Guests is speculated upon extensively and theorised within my writerly discourse, in order to contextualise the work within the academy.  

Firstly. If I choose to name myself as a practitioner, I feel compelled to ask ‘what am I doing here?’ As a practitioner, do I have a proper place from which to speak? I find myself in two places at once. My stance is precarious, like that of the tourist, out of place, looking down on a foreign city, observing from its highest tower. There is a politics to my performance as theorist, concerning the economics of knowledge within the academy; the symbolic capital of practices. 

1. Introduction

Susan Melrose (1995) suggests that the practitioner may have 'an experiential approach to theory from within practice, rather than a discursive approach outside of practice' (1). Performance making is here recognised as discursive, theory in practice - rather than “assimilating” (cf. Ulmer 1994) and “serving as a carrier to theories” (cf. Melrose 1995). Which is a concern for those proposing practice as research projects – that the practice and its chosen form of documentation will simply function to illustrate the theoretical position hypothesised.

Melrose (1994b) has suggested that Live Art, in particular, amounts to a ‘critical metapraxis’, an ‘intervention through practice into practices’ (77). She suggests that just as the ‘logics’ of Live Arts practice ‘play’ within the conventional order of theatre, so these practices may intervene tactically within the discursive and ‘may not be of the order of discourse’ (73).

My Ph.d project approached performance from both the position of the theorist and that of the practitioner, positions that de Certeau (1984) - in The Practice of Everyday Life - suggests have their homologue in the relationship of the ‘city planner or cartographer’ (93) to the pedestrian. In the allegory that opens ‘Walking in the City’, de Certeau imagines the theorist ‘looking down on’ the urban practitioners from a tower, a skyscraper the height of which affords a ‘totalizing’ perspective and the scopic ‘pleasure of “seeing the whole”’ (92). The pedestrians walk ‘below the thresholds at which visibility begins’ (93) and their practices are ‘characterised by their blindness’. The practitioner’s writings refer to ‘”another spatiality”’, a ‘poetic experience of space’ that, written from a position of blind, bodily knowledge, escapes ‘imaginary totalisations’.

In my research project, that included practice as research and critical reflection, I moved between an experiential approach that ‘admits first-hand experience’ and ‘the writerly-discursive’, which – in Melrose’ terms - ‘may prefer distance from concrete experience’ (Melrose 1995:1). In addition, mutual feedback and communicative exchange occurred between these positions; my performance practices were ‘informed by theory’ (ibid.) and intervened within the discursive. In the process of research, the distinction between the “theory of performance” and the “performance of theory” (cf. Melrose) became increasingly blurred for me.

As Melrose (1995) figures, ‘making "performance theory" is a creative practice, not unlike one or another "fine art"’ (3, citing Pavis 1991). Writing is one of the actions that cumulatively made up my performance research; statements made in the event of writing have been generative of new directional moves in my performance practice.

One might question the possibility of theoretical distance from practices within my critical reflection, and equally the possibility of a bodily immersion in practice that excludes the speculative. As a theorist in practice, one carries an internalised Panopticon (Foucault 1977:200), as both object of information and subject in communication. As a practitioner in the work, reflecting theoretically upon my own practice, I moved between subject and object positions. Subjecting my own practices to what Foucault calls 'a field of visibility' (Foucault 1977:202), I became the principle of my 'own subjection' (202). In writing theoretically, as a practitioner, I took up a speculative view-point that had the potential to overpower my own practices. This alienated position 'consists in being a foreigner at home' (de Certeau 13) and equates to the relation of the flâneur to the city, or civitas, the ‘community of citizens, the body politic’ (Osborne 1993:331). This might lead to the transformation of practitioners and processes into objects, such that they can be included within the ‘scope of vision’ (36) and discursive text, and to the projection of 'illusory interpretations (13) onto the work.

My ambivalent position, that both attempted the ‘panoptic practices’ (36) of the theorist and the common-sense tactics of the agent in practice, is comparable to that of the ‘citizen-tourists’, described by Meaghan Morris (1993). In ‘Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower’, Morris suggests that Sydney residents become ‘one with “foreign” tourists’ as they gaze from the tower at their own city and its processes, of which they are a part. At the same time, they become ‘the potential living objects of that self-same tourist gaze’ (385). Like the tourist, whose video misreads a city, the practitioners "misread" their own practices and the patternings of others within the civitas, At the same time, this 'de-centred' (ibid.), eccentric reading, might be productive.

The problematic facing the performance-theorist, described by Alan Read (1993) in relation to the analysis of everyday life, is that a certain ‘removal’ (106) is necessary ‘to see’. The practices of everyday life, are ‘difficult to discern’ from within the collective body, like those of tactical agents in performance: at the same time, ‘if our looking’ for these tactics ‘removes’ and separates us then it ‘jeopardise[s] the somatic research project’.

As social scientist, Pierre Bourdieu suggests in Outline of a Theory of Practice, the practitioner "does more than s/he knows" (cf. Bourdieu 1977). "Knowing" here is a synoptic apprehension, above the level of consciousness, which is entwined with seeing - as opposed to a somatic knowledge drawn from the body as memory (cf. Bourdieu 1977, Melrose 1995). To reflect critically, as practitioner-theorist, I attempted to review my own practices from the place of the other, to analyse and conceptualise them as other than my own. This leads me to Lacan's (1970) observation that, 'I am unable to see myself from the place where the Other is looking at me' (120).

Perhaps in this light, like the inhabitants of crowded cities, it is impossible for me to establish a relation of distance and my “perceptual apparatus” (cf. Freud 1920) fails as ‘an instrument of […] control’ (Mazzoleni 1993:297). I remind the reader here of the relationship between knowledge and what de Certeau calls ‘”all-seeing power”’ (de Certeau 92). Perhaps I have no “proper”, place from which to theorise or speculate upon my own practices with Uninvited Guests. In what Peggy Phelan (1993) describes as 'the failure of self seeing' (15), how can I believe in the reality of the coincidental acts that "go to make up" the work? As a subject lacking any distance from the representations perceived, how can they gain a status as objects of discourse? These memories of on-going formations require a witnessing "eye" - but what of the evidence of other senses, of sensuality? As Gregory Ulmer has recommended, we turn here to a multi-vocal and speculative discourse that admits the instabilities of its material. We turn also to the speculative potential of ‘visual and figurative’ performances themselves, that according to Melrose ‘precede the discursive’ (Melrose 1995:4) interventions of the performance theorist. Analytical speculations are grounded on visual and somatic practices; as Melrose suggests, they conventionally take as their responsibility the observation and ‘discursive “ordering”’ of these practices.

In turning from practice to discursive writing (whilst questioning the ontological distinctness of its discursivity), the other practices that are its “objects” are inevitably transformed. This remembering and interpretation changes the state of performance practices, puts them in another place. On the page, both performances and the mobile memories of those processes are reproduced in the fixed space of writing - no longer "live", but mediated and “artificially remembered”, in Platonic terms. In this transposition, performance and devising processes are selected from, condensed and distorted. The primary sources are compressed and abstracted, such that the signs they bore are scrambled; new units are fabricated from notation and memories of practices that were not “structured like language” (cf. Lyotard 1989:24, Lacan, in Wilden, 1968).

De Certeau suggests that the ‘voyeur-god created by’ the ‘fiction’ of “theoretical” distance knows only ‘cadavers’ (93). Similarly, for Freud (1900), the work of disguising/distorting practice into text resembles a murder (SE 4-5:43). Ulmer (1989) notes that, transposed into text, live performance is laid out on a page (like the erotic-morbid object), preserved to be looked at, again and again.

De Certeau suggests, in discourse there is ‘no way out’ (13) of language, which is limited as a representational strategy being of a different order and structural logic to bodily practices (cf. 13-14). A written thesis does not itself qualify as a way out, but performance events themselves - and perhaps audio-visual documentation - constitute 'other place[s] from which to interpret' (de Certeau 1984:13) practice; from within, or beside performance.

At the same time, in theorising about/speculating upon performance, 'one does not "leave"' (ibid.) the space of practices, it is impossible to ‘disentangle’ oneself from these ‘intertwining […] behaviours’.

2. The theoretical tower

The etymological root of theory, in Greek, is in spectacle and speculation; to be a spectator, to view. Its root also connects with theos, meaning ‘a god’.  De Certeau points to the theorist's desire 'to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god’ imposing an order by divine command, ‘to be a viewpoint and nothing more' (92). Theatre shares the same etymological root as theory: theatron meaning "the place where things are seen" (cf. Durand 1993). Theoria and speculari are linked to sight; which necessitates a distance from that which is “given to sight”.

In de Certeau’s ‘Walking in the city’ the cartographer – and by implication, the theorist, is represented as ‘looking down on’ practitioners from on high. This distance affords a strategic perspective. Strategic rationalisations are decided from what de Certeau calls, a delimited place, a ‘base from which relations’ can be established with the performance work as an ‘exteriority’ (de Certeau 1984:36). The strategist takes a proper place that can be named as his/her own. This relatively isolated position enables ‘a mastery’ of the work ‘through sight’, a sense of control over practices included within their vision, and hence within the scope of their proper knowledge. 

De Certeau goes on to state that ‘The "proper" is a triumph of place over time’. A strategic position ‘allows one [...] to give oneself a certain independence with respect to the variability of circumstances [...]. The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice. The eye transforms foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus controlled. The ability to see (far into the distance) is also to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading a space and mapping patterns of practices (cf. de Certeau, 36).

This panoptic knowledge, to which the performer/devisors, like de Certeau’s (1984) pedestrian are blind, might be critiqued as nothing more than a projection of the 'aloof, [...] space planner' (de Certeau 1984:93). Hence the performance theorist might see an abstract, "theoretical" performance-process that is a 'misunderstanding of practices' (ibid.) and their internal, embodied logics.

Bourdieu (1977) states that social agents

practise as irreversible a sequence of actions that the observer constitutes as reversible. The observer's totalizing apprehension substitutes an objective structure fundamentally defined by reversibility for an equally irreversible sequence of actions (6).

The observer's relation of physical separation - and temporal distance, as s/he makes analyses after the event - encourages the theoretical distortion which substitutes a timeless model for schemes that work themselves out only through time. Within linguistics, M.A.K. Halliday points out that a 'theory of praxis' is a theory 'of practices which operate irreversibly, ordered in time' (in Durant and Fabb, eds. 1987:151).

The notion of the irreversibility of social processes relates closely to Peggy Phelan’s (1993) familiar discourse on the impossibility of recording, or repeating live performance, as it was. Defined as unrepresentable, a performance cannot be returned or turned back, as its state will not be the same again: writing/documenting performance inevitably transforms its object.

Bourdieu (1984) describes notation of practices and social interactions as 'like a photograph of a game of marbles or poker which freezes [play ...] at a given stage, [...] a moment in a struggle [between ...] agents'' (245). Similarly, notation of devising processes tends to cut into, or interrupt practices, taking a series of synchronic cross sections of states of "play". As is evidenced by my experience of surprise on returning to Forced Entertainment’s and desperate optimists’ rehearsal processes after a break/interval, synchronic analysis does not necessarily reveal the possibilities for the diachronic unfolding of performance processes.

The performance theorist also practices selection and exclusion, which constitute what Pierre Bourdieu calls acts of “violence” (cf. Bourdieu 1984). They frame some elements as within the contemporary discursive milieu whilst turning others over to the past. The theorist’s practices resemble those of the cartographer who collects together various components ‘to form a tableau’ that marks the current "state" of geographical knowledge’ (de Certeau, 121).

There is a perversity to mapping, and likewise to performance documentation, we desire what Pascal Bonitzer calls the “obscene touch of the real”. Yet our desire to fix the impossible, pushes the moment ‘away into […] prehistory […] as if into the wings’ (de Certeau 1984:121).

In transcribing what can be perceived/recorded by the documenter of performance practice, it is only possible to approach the work and decision-making processes. The reality of performance is always in excess of the representative models and perspectives, overflows the logical structures available to practitioners and theoretical observers. Descriptive methodologies may operate in complementarity but completeness continues to escape them, always – according to Melrose - ‘just out of reach […] while the life of the performance goes on" (Melrose 1994a:4).

Transformed "out of existence" within a static visual recording, or the "Symbolic order" (cf. Lacan1977) of text, documentation "stands in" for what is missing from its place. This substitution entails the absence of its object or referent: the material real performance event that has always gone before its representation. Like the detective at the scene of a crime, the performance-theorist arrives too late, after the critical event has happened.

As Regis Durand suggests, in relation to the photograph, the representation tends to veil as much as it reveals. This leads us to the possibility of the performance event representing itself as a legitimate mode of knowledge.

3. The Ground

Like the pedestrians’ by the city - in de Certeau’s reading – the practitioners’ bodies are ‘clasped’ by the performance space and entangled in its intertwined behaviours (92-93). Conventionally, having no ‘proper place’ within the academy, performance practitioners operate within the space of the tactic, ‘below the thresholds at which visibility begins’ (93). De Certeau defines tactics as ‘calculated action[s]’ made from a ‘rough’ and unstable position. ‘The space of the tactic is the space of the other’. Here the practitioner is unable to determine an exteriority, does not have the means to keep to him/herself, at a distance and hence cannot view behaviours as a whole. De Certeau’s analysis suggests that the tactic ‘must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organised by the law of’ (37) the strategist: in performance, critics, theorists and funding bodies.

Due to their proximity in the performance space, practitioners are not able to see their own actions in relation to others’ synchronous activities. Hence they cannot contrive visual connections, or disjunctions. The observer - if presupposing that knowledge is visual, speculative and always at a distance from its object - may wonder how the performers know/apprehend "what works". How does a performer select a particular element to “play out” in adjacency with another performer's action in an improvisatory collage? Is this choice arbitrary, caused simply by a desire ‘to see what will happen'  - as Cathy Naden (Small Adventures 1998) of Forced Entertainment has stated - or is this a denial of decision-making processes that do not rely on visual knowledge?

Performers ‘make use of spaces that cannot be seen’ (de Certeau 93) by an “outside eye”. They have an intimate bodily knowledge of these unforeseeable spaces, that ‘is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms’.

Melrose proposes that 'principles [are] embodied' (Bourdieu 1977:94) through practice and may constitute complex 'body-knowledges' (Melrose 1994:83) other than the visual, which enable 'somatic work', a structuring generated by 'felt' responses (ibid. 82) or that is 'body-reasoned'.

Melrose (1994) states that, '[e]very action taken in the theatre is a decision made' and ‘these decision-making processes and the knowledges they entail appear to be activated at lightening speed and almost invisibly by theatre professionals. (4). In de Certeau’s analysis, '"tactical" practitioners respond to situations as they are affected' (Ahearne 1995:164); touched by them in a bodily sense.

The bodily and tactile knowledges that enable such immediate practical decisions reside beneath the threshold of consciousness/perception and as such are unpresentable. They are placed beyond the limits of the practitioners’ own discursive knowledges such that they are difficult to speak of/reflect upon.

My research project proposes that thinking-subjects know in a bodily sense and that conclusions reached through practical and somatic research itself are legitimate forms of knowledge, knowledges that circulate through practice and in practice; are not communicated between practitioners through spoken or written discourse.

As Melrose has illustrated, the performer’s practice in devising resembles the "somatic intelligence" (c.f. 1994a:81) applied to the city by de Certeau’s "pedestrian", whose movements redefine the spaces in which s/he moves, without pre-planning. The pedestrian employs, what de Certeau calls, the 'improvisation of walking [in order to] privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements' (de Certeau). In relation to conventional praxes, s/he both increases the number of possibilities 'by creating shortcuts and detours' (ibid.) and selects possibilities to rule out; she forbids him/herself from taking ‘paths generally considered accessible or even obligatory' (ibid.).

Likewise the performer makes "somatic realisations" and invents novel possibilities, employing what can be defined as tactical and "spatial reasoning" (c.f. Melrose 1994:81). Within the context of performance research, original contributions to practical knowledge emerge through processes in the space and are embodied.  A practitioner cannot be analysed as/broken down into a communicable code. It is difficult to ascribe him/her a value that can be exchanged in the economics of knowledge, but s/he acquires and carries “cultural” and “symbolic capital” (cf. Bourdieu 1984) through embodied practical sense.

Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus provides a model for the way in which performance practitioners internalise and store sets of appropriate practical knowledges. For Bourdieu (1984), habitus is the ‘result of a long process of inculcation’ (22) and forms 'the strategy generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations' (Bourdieu 1977:72), to form 'spontaneous theories' (20) in/through practice. Definitions of habitus vary throughout Bourdieu’s writings, these include; modus operandi, “a feel for the game”, “practical sense”, “common sense”, and “second nature”. As ‘principles em-bodied’, habitus also relates closely to Bourdieu’s rethinking of ‘the body as a memory’ (1984:94). As a complex “mnemic system” (Freud 1920), the body is entrusted the ‘abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic’ capital of culture, the ‘fundamental principles’ of appropriate practice.

Bourdieu (1977) suggests that certain principles are implicit in practice. They ‘exists in a practical state in the agents' practice and not in [...] their discourse (27). Unwritten, immanent schemes are held, transferred and communicated in and through practice, out of reach of both the observer’s and the practitioner’s discourse, impossible to finally decipher, decode or name.

4.  ‘Critical Metapraxis’ (Melrose 1994b:77)

Again drawing on de Certeau’s analogy, Susan Melrose suggests that Live Art practitioners self-consciously ‘walk[] about (and within) the institutions of performance’ (Melrose 1994b:76). She states that Live Art is ‘about ([…] as in “around and about”) performance’. Practitioners ‘walk about’, following critical “desire paths” within and between conventional performance structures. As Nick Kaye (1994) suggests that Live Art tends to critically address performance history, to call into question this ‘ground on which’ (2) it stands. In addition, Kaye writes Live Art, ‘considers its own “constructing, ordering and selecting processes”’ (Kaye, 10) and practices ‘self-reflexive narratives’ that ‘address their own […] participation in the processes they critique’ (10).

Like de Certeau’s pedestrians, in the space of Live Art, practitioners play on and with the terrain, organised and authorised by laws of theatrical/theoretical convention. The given structures the practitioners occupy, and inscribed audience expectations, are resisted and contested tactically.

Their practices, are both ‘about’ (Melrose 1994b:76) performance, in terms of what Melrose calls ‘critical metapraxis’ (77), and tactically insinuate themselves into the gaps in the conventional order, moving ‘around’ within the canonical structures of performance and moving those structures around. Practical arguments are enunciated, through thinking on their feet, and circulate in and through practice.

5. The scriptural economy

Conserved and recorded in Ph.D. theses and academic publications, practices accumulate “symbolic capital”; prestige and recognition. Performance works are strategically appropriated/incorporated into academic knowledge as the objects of critical discourse (cf. Johnson, 1993). The exchange of capital is mutual: the theorist/critic’s text accumulates symbolic capital by referring to innovative, or recognised performance work, and a practitioner’s work receives recognition in a field of knowledge that has tended to privilege writing.  As Bourdieu (1984) states,

The production of discourse […] about the work of art is one of the conditions of production of the work.

The practitioner-theorist shifts between roles, subjecting their own tactical practices to strategic speculation, recognising and authorising their own somatic work through discursive writing. Yet the writerly/documentary practices - that legitimate performance practices within the Academy - operate as, what de Certeau calls ‘procedures for forgetting’ (97), placing the reality of the performance events themselves under erasure.

Within the Academy and Arts Council, the value of discourse and of art-work often relates to the writer’s recognition of innovative practice and a work’s recognition as innovative. ‘Organised’ and analysed ‘by the “speculative” and classificatory operations’ of the performance-theorist (de Certeau 1984:94), practices may become fixed and stabilised. 

As Kaye suggests, the recognition of dynamic/emergent practices, potentially has the effect of “pinning them down” (Kaye 1994). A “proper” place is defined for them in the cultural scene and innovative practices are recouped, or acquired as part of legitimate knowledge. Innovation inevitably becomes historicised and canonised, once captured and codified in the academy’s “scriptural economy” (cf. de Certeau 1984).

6. General writing

As Melrose writes, citing de Certeau, ‘“walking [in the city”], [and] listening to the jabber of social life’ can itself be perceived as a discursive practice, that rewrites the cartographer’s city. The practitioners’ bodies write ‘an urban “text”’ (de Certeau, 93) that whilst walking they cannot read. Their bodies, as elements of the city/civitas are signed by many other bodies (cf. de Certeau). From above/at a distance, the collaborative ‘networks […] of intersecting writings’, composed by the paths their bodies sign, can be mapped-out and their ‘manifold stories’, or ‘poems’ (93) become readable.

Yet, within Derrida’s (1978) conception of ‘general writing’, practitioners produce ‘writing of the body itself […] within the movements of the theatre’ (191). As J-D Dewsbury says of Uninvited Guests’ Guest House (1999), devising is ‘a writing of space’. Devised traces are inscribed by and on the body, simultaneously disappearing from perception and being placed in the mnemonic reserve of the body as memory.

7.Interpraxiological dialogue

A paradigm shift can be perceived to have occurred in the relationship of the performance theorist to practices. A movement has occurred away from what Meaghan Morris calls, the distanced and ‘statis-imposing power knowledge’ (Morris 1993:394) of Structuralist analysis towards the subjective and ‘experiential approach’ that Melrose proposes, ‘from within’ (Melrose 1995) the frame of practice. This constitutes a strategic move, down from the theoretical tower into the tactical space of practices.

Practical research projects are placed at the limits of discourse; as Bourdieu states, they have the potential to destabilise ‘the ordinary division between practical, partial, tacit know-how and theoretical, systematic, explicit knowledge' (Bourdieu 1984:387).

Bourdieu (1984) states that only a method which retains a notion of intertextuality, an observational system ‘of differential stances’, that – in  his terms

reintroduces a notion of agent (i.e. producer), acting (consciously or unconsciously) within a specific set of […] relations, can transcend the seemingly irreconcilable differences between internal and external readings of artistic works (14).

My research project attempts to reconcile the typological differences between writerly praxis and performance practices through, what Melrose terms an “interpraxiological” (cf. Melrose 1994b) dialogue, written from the position of an agent who produces both practice and theory and moves between an internal and external “reading” of devising processes.

The practitioner-theorist’s role oscillates regularly between an internal, somatic experience and an external perspective, between the ground and a place at the top of the theoretical tower. At the same time, the practitioner-theorist remembers the appropriate practical knowledges, embodied in the time and space of performance. They are unable to disentangle themselves from the practitioners’ intertwining behaviours in order to place themselves at a distance from which to speculate.

8. Video

The projected video backdrop was shot from the balcony of the National Theatre during a performance of David Mamet’s Edmund, as the light faded. It was intended to provide a visual analogy, demonstrating figuratively the shift from looking down on practitioners (in this case predominantly tourists), to ground level. Your attention shifts from looking at patterns and predicting where paths will cross, foreseeing potential meetings, to looking at singular people and details of bodies.

Credits

National Theatre 14/7/03 (DVCam, 40 mins) was shot with Anna Lucas and edited with Jonnie Williams.

References

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de Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. S. Rendall. London: University of California Press, 1984.

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Foucault, M., Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of The Prison. 1977. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991.

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Halliday, M.A.K. 'Language and the Order of Nature'. The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature. Ed. N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant, C. MacCabe. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1987. 135-54.

Johnson, R., ed. The Field of Cultural Production. London: Polity Press, 1993.

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Melrose, S. A Semiotics of The Dramatic Text. London: The Macmillan Press, 1994a.

---. 'Please Please me: 'Empathy' and 'Sympathy' in Critical Metapraxis'. Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 2, 2, 1994b, 73-83.

---. MA Course Description. 1995.

Morris, Meaghan. ‘Metamorphoses at Sydney Tower’ in Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location. Ed. Erica Carter, James Donald and Judith Squires. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993. 

Phelan, P. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.

Lyotard, Jean – François. The Lyotard Reader. Ed. A. Benjamin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Read, A. Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.

Ulmer, G. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. London: John Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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