Parliament of practices : no-topian tactics for praxical dialogue

Many practitioner-researchers have built up a constellation of experience, practice, techniques and knowledge regarding the art of the performer and its relation to society at large. However, many contemporary performers, theatermakers and researchers have an isolated, fragmented, production-oriented practice and experience little context around their work. The idea of continuous personal artistic research, horizontal exchange and nourishment between peers is difficult to organise and manage. To address this Cross Pollination - an international platform of performers, theatre makers and researchers - was set up in 2017 at Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium / Odin Teatret in Denmark. We explore an expanded laboratory for the dialogue in-between practices, both academic and artistic, as an integral part of a politics of embodied research in theatre and performance. In this dialogue we engage in the transformation and generation of knowledge by reterritorializing specialized techniques and considering their impact and broader ramifications. This opens up topics like bodies and knowledge in transit, building conversation in diversity, compositionist alignments and practices of companionship (Haraway, 2016), new assemblages and modes of thinking performance. How can we respond to the genealogies of personal practices we carry whilst engaging with broader social concerns, such as diversity, intersectionality and democratic participation? Can new epistemologies, practices or even an ethos emerge from a dialogue between different practitioner-researchers grounded in diverse traditions of techné? Can a practice in-between practices question and transform existing paradigms, both inside and outside the realm of theatre practice and research? In this co-authored article, four members of the Cross Pollination platform reflect on the concept of ‘utopia’ in terms of the etymological root of the word, which translates as ‘no-place’. As a collective we have experienced the amorphous spaces in-between our practices as a no-place, in which emergent potentialities lie hidden. We have found that these potentialities can be activated by a dialogue in-between personal practices, which are located in the bodies of the artist-researchers engaged in the laboratory. In this article we base our reflections on the strategies we have been developing as a collective over the past three years. We will respond to the question how our praxis can be translated into conceptual images that feed us and can help other groups to orientate their practices. We will open up a discussion regarding the potential of examining what lies in-between performance techniques, contributing to a broader, contemporary understanding of the laboratory tradition in performance. We finish by proposing our emerging model of The Parliament of Practices as a broader and more open platform for practitioners, artists and scholars to engage in such a dialogue and build an ecology of practice and research