In this text Mårten Spångberg elaborate on some of the more corrupt terms used within the
contemporary field of theatre and dance related performance. The last decade has seen the growth
of a number of terms and definitions that today are used with little or no specification.

Over the last ten or so years new sets of terminology has flourished within the circles of performing
arts. Some of them picked up from visual art, others from various horizons between entertainment and
scientific discourses. Revisiting the period of time, during which I myself has been active in the field it
seems that the terminology machine used tend to updated more in respect of market strategies,
including applications, public talks, reviews, presentation text etc. than through an explicit need to
formulate different or alternative modes of production and representation. I should not try to escape the
attraction of such strategies as I myself has been sitting on various seats in respect of our landscape and
have been quick in adopting terms that I hardly knew, or know, what they actually implied. But I must
confess that I have developed a certain desire to clean up in the use, not so much in respect of
definitions and epistemology, however I have been a spokesperson for such, but in respect of a users
positions. What I mean here, is that I believe that the terms used and in use as often, as not, tries to
implement different and alternative strategies in ways that are oblique to the major strategies applied by
the field and its markets. And if we in the field are not cautious with its use they might be recuperated
if not obliterated by market forces. A significant example is research that was (as far as I can remember
the term showed up in this shape around 1997) issued by makers mostly with good intentions. After
just short to ten years of use the term seem to have lost its capacity as an alternative grounds for
production, as well as its etymology from scientific use, namely to research, as a matter of coming in
terms with one or other site of difficulties, and with it is particular capacity of knowledge production.
Several of the terms addressed by this glossary are weak in respect of capitalist notions of production
as well as due representational strategies, which makes it even more important that makers and curators
use them in ways that are proper in order not to be inscribed in such modes of production and
representation. It is also important that makers are conscious to what strategies lie behind the use of
certain terminolgies due curators and funding systems. For example the term research was first issued
by makers but was quickly picked up by curators and presenters. Why? I can see two main reasons, 1.
when the markets economy and audience were failing in the mid 90s it was important to issue new
arguments to gain public support. One of them was to address the importance of research in order not
to have to have a large-scale audience, or said in a less direct way, it was a means of deviating away
from a spectacularisation of the fields representations proper. 2. Continuing on the notion of
spectularisation, it could also be seen as a way for market forces to localize and fasten productions that
were, either dangerous due its critical potentiality, or in order to maintain a certain kind of productions
within a particular size of economies of circulation, distribution and language, in respect of support,
infrastructure, logistics, visibility and mediation. In short, by issuing a research framework in e.g. a
festival it implied to announce certain productions as something that a regular public should not see,
but that they were for a "special" kind of audience made up by connoisseurs. Hence to issue a research
program as part of e.g. a festival was a means to maintain for the large scale audience an entertainment
based program and at the same time satisfying the critical implementations of the makers and doers in
the field.
On the other side what kind of ambitions was it that the fields makers and doers needed to satisfy when
baptizing their proposals research. Most of them were probably relevant but several were indeed
addressed as research not only due the fashion but also through an ignorant use, due that one were
incapable of creating works that were so to say finished, or in other cases, due that makers and doers
where incapable of producing a coherent method of work. However, at the end of the day, are we
actually capable of addressing an artistic work without some sort of research procedure? Isn't it a
contradiction in terms to think that one is not researching, or in some or other way experimenting when
going to work, in the studio, in the study or other places.
It is my belief that research economies normally are weaker than economies of production and it is
therefore important to be cautious with how the small economies for research are being used. It would
be a shame if they at some point would be consider as similar to economies of production due a misuse
of them, in respect of e.g. a use which is understood as simple preparation for a conventional
production. I will not here address the dangerous fields of what the terminologies in this glossary
implies in respect of representation. Isn't it so that e.g. research lately also has developed into more or
less a style, with proposals for light, style of performance, set and/or kind of dramaturgy (normally flat
and fragmented)? If so this can only be of negative values for the field in its entirety.

Laboratory

Even more peculiar is how performing arts have used the term, or label laboratory. It occurs that the
field has mixed the term up, considering it something more than a site, or confinement, where certain
systematic, or not, activities can be executed. It seems that performing arts regard laboratory, or in the
worst of cases "lab", as being a per definition creative environment in which inventions take place. I
don't want to be general about what laboratory can impose, but it is factual that its very condition is to
be a neutral site that does not intervene in, or preferably alters specific and sensitive experimentations
to a minimum extent. It is only in our fantasy that innovators spend day and night in the laboratory, and
it is indeed naïve to assume a laboratory, in any discipline and any part of the world, to be hold any
innocence.
In fact I believe that the notion of laboratory in performing arts most of all is influenced by popular
culture. A research and laboratory concept derived from Jules Verne coupled with Merry Shelley,
mixed with black and white movies where the genius change the world, or engage in alchemic or life
giving success stories that of course end up in hell.
This is of certainly an as good as any other image and construction of a laboratory, but what our field
should keep in mind is what laboratory propose or do in respect of the field. What is the lack that needs
to be fulfilled by laboratory, and what is this lack nourished by? Is it possibly so that such romantic
notions of laboratory in fact obtain the opposite of its intention, which, I assume, to be a
deterritorialisation of the field in order for a more progressive future? I believe that laboratory, as used
in performing arts, to a large extent is a means of recreating an artist genius, but formulated external to
artistic production which long ago shook the sticky clown “The Genius” of its back through
modernism, as well as giving priority to intuitive processes in which the methodology favored is one
which end up with the researchers hair standing straight up, being completely black in the face, with a
disorientated smile of methodological ignorance shining form within the soot.
The critical voices of certain groups within the performing arts environment that laboratory and
research emphasize is in other words, correct if the concept of research and laboratory used would
coincide with proper definitions due an academic or scientific agenda, but as this is not the situation the
same terminology is in fact promoting intuitive processes which methodologies often is mediated as
obscure or even as something which would lose its magic if articulated, when in fact any standard
definition would emphasize that it is not a site with a priority for research and experimentation, but that
the aim is to provide fast and reliable results.
Recapitulating the exhibition "Laboratorium" curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara
Vanderlinden, it is imperative to note that it was not an attempt to forefront research and
experimentation, however neither to provide fast reliable and fast result, but to provide a specific
framework within the field of visual art that negotiated the work of art as process, as knowledge
production, conversation or dialogue. The exhibition was not a site for experimentation; it was a site of
presentations of processes that rigorously applied laboratorial strategies.
It is indeed remarkable how performing arts over ten last years has nourished research and laboratory,
close to, unconditionally, when in other art-forms similar attempt has had no, or little, significance.
Whether this is an ignorance in respect of modes or production from other art-forms, or an evidence for
how performing arts again has been trapped by capitalist strategies, as a vain attempt to reinvent the
body as a site of experimentation or even worse provocation, is not to be unfolded here, but it is evident
that performance through the ontological discussions issued in the early 90s due gender, ethnicity,
sexuality etc. has been kept as a mascot of some pretty conventional narratives.

Collaboration/Collectivity

In respect of this it is also important to properly negotiate for example the differentiation between more
or less conventional management models and terms such as collaboration and/or collective/collectivity.
It is seems to me to be a bad omen when simple teamwork and collaboration is intermixed and
confused. It is my belief that collaboration and collective/collectivity needs to be the topography of a
work or works to qualify as relevant, in front of groups and constellations that announce their method
as collaborative. As far as I know even the most demonic director or choreographer is in some or other
way collaborating. A conductor in front of a symphonic orchestra is still inscribed in a collaboration,
moreover one with very specific features.
If a group or constellation wish to address collaboration as an important feature of its work or its being
some kind of community, it is at least in its place to know and to be able to articulate what specific
features a collaboration or collective want to emphasize. If what one want is to push is the importance
to work together, that the result can become different or that it deviates models of authorship, it is my
belief that one should stop talking immediately as I hardly can imagine any work situation that is not
constructed due these or similar issues, understood as positive or negative. There seems to be a political
paradox inscribed in any collaboration or collective that does not pose its very existence as the work,
and its socio-political nexus. Isn't politics motored by these very operations between equality and
liberty, and thus become the only realm necessarily to invest in respect of intra- and extra-structural
notions of domination? It is further interesting to note that within the field of performing arts the
production of collaborations and collectives is generated in respect of processes and appearance
through strong spatio-temporal coordinations, i.e. collaboration and collectivity is hardly ever
addressed under any other circumstances than superficial deviations of authorship, through which the
instigator, the delegating unit, receive an even stronger position, not far from the co-ownership raised
by e.g consultant companies in the 90s, which without further difficulties could be reduced to a
redistribution of loyalty from the community of workers to the community of owners.

Form process to ownership

As much as collaboration doesn't start in the studio and ends in the dressing room. Nor does process
have any particular relation to site or duration. Three decades later performing arts has returned to
process; quoting, doubling, honoring and deviating through a complete mismatching heroes of the neo
avant-garde, recycling aesthetics to make collaboration etc. recognizable, resurrecting ideology in an
easy way in order to disguise the fact that we have nothing to voice, but it seems less in a manner of
emphasizing heterogeneity as clumsy means of escaping malign capitalism á la late 90s. Isn't it just
magic that collaboration and process goes rocket to the sky in the moment performing arts buys itself a
mobile phone, or as soon as soon as performance constellations got themselves an e-mail addresses
starting info@?

What artistic work is not issued through one or other process? Hardcore conceptual work, yes. But that
is something that we haven't seen in performing arts since the late 60s, considering that a conceptual
work, at least as inscribed in art history, is protocol based and can therefore, on a display level, not
involve any process, or collection of experience due the works representation. Hence, it is not enough
to speak about process but it necessarily has to be conceptualized, or preferably speak its
conceptualization in its representation. Never mind any interdisciplinary attempts which often sound
great on the level of application but seldom offer any further production of ideology or knowledge in
its presentation. With both process and interdisciplinarity its awkward to realize that its manifestation, as
with collaboration, seems to have been formalized to include only a process just prior to a finished
product, but is rarely considered to include any other frame of time or space.
What process-orientated work in performing arts needs to look further into are matters of ownership.
To what extent, and in respect of what mechanisms are, or are not, also processes owned by somebody,
or some entity? An activity, whatever process is involved, necessarily will be represented by or through
somebody, or some entity, and it is therefore important to address, not what process is implied, but
what differentiation of ownership a given process provokes, due what market or environment. It has
become common that e.g. performers are inscribed in credit lists as co-creators but it is rarely common
to consider what it would imply to issues matters of co-ownership. Even though I risk becoming
tedious I still want to raise these questions on responsibility that necessarily occur in respect of process
and production. It is not evident that co-authorship implies a wider range of transparency, nor into
legacy of a work, not in respect of laterality of procedure. On the contrary it seems that co-authorship
decreases opportunities of resistance, doubt or failure due that each individual, or institution, involved
run the risk of losing its face, a feature that democracy necessarily carries with it. Its regime of
cowardice is exponential to any legitimized consensus.
In fact, the process-orientated work that has flourished in performing arts over the last ten years has
been an important factor relating to the currently conservative climate. Is it perhaps so that an
autonomous author instead could venture into a greater degree of radicality due that a collaborator is
familiar with exactly what responsibility is issued? Something that must, at least for the capacity for
critique be true. The entire range of collaboration, process, co-production, co-authorship etc. is
performing arts own opportunistic response to a society of control.
What is then the solution? I believe, to use an extensive amount of terminology and to change its
meaning continuously, as a means of deterritorialisation and in order to create further recognition to
any user that an assembly of terminology not only establishes markets, but also is an important
instigator of history and historicity. A discourse indeed has, or issues, the terminology it deserves, and
as seen in Gille Deleuze two books on cinema, any assembly of terminology is also what produces
paradigm and territory. But this is not enough. It is important to observe and inquire what terminology
can be of use, which etymology can not be derived from academic or scientific backgrounds. Can
performing arts instead conceptualize terminology from pop culture, everyday language, sports,
cooking or management in order to produce autonomy, something which certainly has produced
resistance because an appropriated use naturally is a means of establishing e.g. dance as an art-form
proper. This is the trap in which Doris Humphrey had to step into with her “The Art Of Making
Dances”, an in its form almost classical treatise, and is it not precisely here that Yvonne Rainer's No manifesto is most valuable, and provocative, namely as a matter of defining dance, choreography, or
performing arts, as radically different to any conventional aggregate of commodification? This is
certainly not a matter of diminishing or questioning the role or capacity of though, theory, academic
procedures or any abstract models available, through e.g. esoteric parallax, commercial value,
availability or didactic purposes, neither to favor properties of any foreign assemblages, but simply a
matter of destabilizing circulations of language within the field of performing arts in order to not
exclude any utterance or production. The intensity with which academic practices has been invaded by
performativity over the last ten years has brought with it an increase of theoretical-academic surplus
also into the practical and productive field. The increase of terminology with an etymology in these
mentioned discourses is evident, and however positive their influence have been, they are productive
precisely because they are specific and territorial. With the recent depression of performativity and its
thinkers, it is clear that academic discourses will leave the field, and especially its practical
applications, as soon as it possibly can. Following canonical theories of research the likely hood that
performance studies will sustain its position in the academic marketplace. At that moment it will be
important for the field to not end up in the cold due assemblages of terminology that are not compatible
with other productive fields. I is therefore my conviction that the production and establishment of
terminology have to evacuate the fatherly control of certain academic, and especially systems
promoting master/disciple relations.
Instead each participant and constellation in the field need, 1. To identify the limits; what is the realm
that an assemblage of terminology can, should or need to configure, change or otherwise shift? 2. What
possible external demands can be identified; in respect of what interests are the understood limits
viable. With these two conditions in to mind create a third; to establish a dynamique d'enfer, a dynamic
from hell… so complex that all interconnections, mutual dependencies, the proliferation of interfaces,
the superimposition of users and providers all together form a group of capacities, shacked together by
mutual obligations, exacerbated by the very complexity offered by the concept unwittingly.
It is today instead imperative to divert terminology and find ways around institutional frames and
capitalist economies, and perhaps even to use terminology with such abundance that not only active
creators and doers in the field has to invest and announce positions and opinions, but also other
participants in order to create a shared criticality through which can be produced not multiplicity, but a
multitude. Performing arts today need to create terminology, which differentiates its participants
instead of, brings them together all in order to necessitate a livelier discussion on all levels. It is first
through a shared interest in accuracy of use of terminology that the field for instance can initiate
discussion on curatorial practices and economical circumstances.
Flexibility and mobility must be conceptualized, precisely as a means to not be positioned due a given.
The Performing arts have to understand what a critical position is, and has to announce itself as mobile,
but not in respect of the market but in respect of other and different coherences. As long as performing
arts associate with, and refer to, existing assemblages of terminology, however general, performing arts
will never be given a voice, i.e., will not be accounted for. To produce a voice it is, of course, not
enough to appropriate another voice, but it is first when an autonomous site can be established that a
voice can be established, when something that does not exist can be given a name. Only something
with a name can have a voice, and it is in this act of naming that speech can pass from one period, or
age, to another, and this is not a matter of a uprising that can be put down; it is a question of some kind
of progressive revelation that can be recognized by its own signs and against which there is no point in
fighting1.
Yet within this work, we participants of the field, are subject to a responsibility which is extremely
complex to handle in its multiplicit directionality, which operability is to expand the conclusive
concept of performing arts in order to give a multitude of processes, productions and products,
discourses and intuitions, amateurs and professionals, collaboration and collectives the opportunity to
create performing arts so far unthinkable.

Mårten Spångberg

1 See Jacques Ranciére: Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy, (Minneapolis, 1999), p. 24-27.