This book pays attention to nonconforming practices of criticism, that is, forms of thinking about performance that defy, challenge or resist the category of criticism. It explores the work of critical collectives, collaborative digital projects, live writing, artist-led critical projects, salons and publishing from cultural workers, writers and thinkers migrating across borders, ecologies of knowledge and disciplines of writing.
Unpacking the colonial logics that shape certain practices of criticism, and bringing in dialogue decolonial, feminist and queer theorisations of affect and relation, the book concentrates on what lies beyond forms of governance of cultural criticism in and beyond performance. It looks at nonconforming critique in contexts where forms of power enter in conflict, locating a disparate, hopeful and grassroots exploration of political modalities of critique and its relation to experimental performance in the contemporary moment in UK and beyond.
The book is structured into three parts, constituting a partial lexicon for performance criticism: Experiment, Event and Resistance. In doing so, the book moves through forms of thinking-in-public that reconfigure relations of meaning between criticism, performance and political life, and provide alternative modes of listening and reflecting.