Journal ISSUE #3
Issue #3 — 'Unspoken Rules' Editorial
We are delighted to present the third issue of CePRA Journal. Unlike the previous two issues that preceded without a theme, Issue #3 led with a quotation taken from writer and director Tim Etchells:
There are rules for the critical writing here (unspoken rules, only discovered afterwards): that it should open doors and not close them; that it should it some way mirror the form of its object; that it should work with the reader as a performance might (playing games about position, status and kinds of discourse). That it should be, in short, a part of the work, not an undertaker to it.
(Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, p. 23)
As a journal of practice research, it seems important that the various connections operating between the world and the signs and symbols used to describe it remain intact. Etchells' words were chosen for the way that they antagonise that relationship. Critical distance, so often the benchmark for establishing the value, authenticity, and originality of the rational mind, and writing, so often the representational art deemed most capable of enabling that hubris is, in the hands of Etchells, riddled with ghosts. Etchells asks for nothing more than for writers to take seriously the sway of the world that inspires and sustains its translation, and to recognise that in writing we are to some extent reperforming (playing games with) relations that were already written in the moment of their perception.
The three submissions in Issue #3 approach Etchells’ Unspoken Rules in three distinct ways. Clare Carter Osborne’s Monsterland explores motherhood as a force operating beneath the threshold of representation in and on what we call the Anthropocene. Using an autoethnographic approach, Carter aims to expose these hidden forces through an engagement with landscape, ecofeminism, and videography. In CHORAL: Collaboration as Approaching Bob Cobbing’s ‘Chamber Music’, Jon Gilbert, Blaise Sales, and Ed Cooper employ the figure of the score to complicate the relationship between intention and outcome, between what is written, played, and heard. Enticingly, they do so by foregrounding the intricacies of collaboration itself as a critical act, treating the various stages of the working process as an opportunity to engage, adapt, and redefine the work’s parameters by passing it on to someone new. Finally, Peter Petkovsek’s Promise seeks to draw attention to the non-human forces that sustain us all by engaging the environment as life-giving kin. Employing a methodology co-authored with an Indigenous leader, they seek an embodied language through which planet and human might begin to communicate on more equal terms.
A huge amount of thanks to all three contributors for responding to the call and sharing their timely and important research.
As editors, it brings us much delight to be able to build on the collection of excellent work found in issues #1&2. Thanks again to Ewan Stefani, Scott McLaughlin, and Fiona Bannon, the directors of CePRA, for supporting this project.
With warmest wishes,
Benjamin Jenner
The CePRA Journal Editorial Board: Benjamin Jenner, Georgia Hook, Oliver Rudland, David Randall-Goddard, Reem Alshammari, and Boyang Liang
Autumn 2024