Echolocation and Reverberation: Praxical Dispositifs in Laboratory Theatre

This multi-authored text aims to both extend and reflect upon the polyphonic praxis of Cross Pollination (CP), a nomadic laboratory promoting dialogues in-between different arts practices. [1] CP was established in 2017 by Marije Nie and Adriana La Selva, performers and scholars with a longstanding connection to Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium (Denmark). Over the past three years, Nie and La Selva have gathered a transnational group of core artist-researchers, including Maciel and Campbell, to develop research, knowledge exchange and performance together. CP is an interdisciplinary platform incorporating fields such as theatre, dance, music, visual arts, circus and somatic practices; the work of CP consists of dialogues in-between these disciplines as well as an expanded understanding of creative work that also incorporates and acknowledges the practices of daily life. Thus, the work of the platform seeks to eschew binary divisions and facile categorisations, and approaches the performative from a broad socio-aesthetic-political perspective that resonates with epistemic fields such as Theatre Anthropology (Barba and Savarese, 1991, 2018; Barba 1995), Performance Studies (Schechner, 1998; Taylor, Fischer-Lichte, 2009; Schneider, 2011), Practice as Research (Allegue, Jones and Kershaw, 2009; Nelson, 2013; Barrett and Bolt, 2019) and Embodied Research (Gil, 1997; Greiner, 2005; and Spatz, 2015). We do not slavishly follow academic trends, however, and our concerns resonate much more with the praxes developed by contemporary theatre/performance laboratories and practitioners such as Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, La Pocha Nostra and William Kentridge, amongst other adepts of creative witchcraft. Furthermore, in our studio work, our biggest conceptual playground lies in the epistemic terrains of new materialism, deep ecology, indigenous philosophical ecology and the philosophy of science (Bohm, 1990; Rolnik and Guattari, 1999; Stengers, 2005, Tsing, 2015; Haraway, 2016; Krenak, 2019)