Ends Lab develops the notion that we work together among the ends with a changing, perhaps evolving, methodology. Gatherings of Ends Lab incubate and generate new collaborative work across groups of researchers and artists. The work is sometimes intentional, but sometimes it is only recognized retrospectively through its emergent production of art, scholarship, or methods. Ends shares genealogies with other co-authoring procedures and groups that write and think together across shared online documents and video conferencing software, including the After Performance Research Ensemble and the Performance Studies international Future Advisory Board. Ends emerges conceptually from work across performance studies and diverse and overlapping collectives, organizations, and individuals. Ends Lab is thus not proprietary or a finalized system. Many have developed sometimes complementary, sometimes intersecting ways of working that bring together disparate individuals in the broad field of performance studies to work and think and, importantly, to write and research together. Ends Lab is an approach and always another beginning; additional projects and calls often emerge from the closing or publication of another project.

Ends Lab will occasionally announce here formal invitations for participation related to or independent of other organizations, conferences, and international gatherings of performance studies researchers and artists.

Generative Ends / Collaborative Beginnings

American Society for Theatre Research Conference—November 2024 (Program)

APPLY HERE

Amidst waves of catastrophes and misfortunes, this collaborative working group explores supportive and sustainable modes of research and writing that challenge individual investments in performance and theatre studies. Indeed, if the impending ends constantly distract, or more still, sometimes feel to be upon us, at least we can think and work through them together. Participants in the working group will generate shared research with a group of theatre and performance scholars willing to co-think and co-write with others. The working group approaches collaborative research by asking why we so often study theatre and performance alone when the artistic forms are almost always created collaboratively. In the same line of thought, by challenging individualist academic modalities, we engage with generative research methodologies that stem from shared experiences, processes, and writings. In this working group, participants will develop together new collaborative work stemming from the conference’s theme of generative acts. We agree with the conference call that “it is imperative that scholars and makers rethink how we generate academic research” and we believe that it is impossible to do so in the arts if we adhere strictly to the systems that privilege single authorship and solitary scholarship. At a time when generative AI seems to degenerate or dissipate academic writing and creative output, we need to urgently respond by developing a renewed operational system that counters generic thought, artificial reasoning, and the flattening of identity. By appreciating rather than erasing conundrums, clashes, contradictions, and inconsistencies in shared research and in our field, we will practice generative academic writing that complicates and intensifies study and critique. And, importantly, we intend to do so together, with others.

FORMAT
Working together in a shared online document, participants will contribute research and expand on the work of others. This writing will be developed through a series of generative workshops and iterative contributions in the months leading up to the conference. Thus, participants should be available to write on Google Documents and also to join scheduled Zoom meetings in advance of the in-person meeting in Denver. The focus of this work will be on shared and collaborative research methodologies that emerge from participants’ artistic and scholarly interests as they intersect with the conference theme. The meeting at the conference will be open to attendees and there will be an opportunity for participants to discuss the process and the content of the work thus far. At the conference, we will develop subgroups and identify projects that participants are interested in working on following the conference (e.g., articles, edited volumes, creative work, etc.). When applying, we encourage potential participants to note their previous experience with collaborative work and a range of topics, ideas, and theories related to the conference theme that they want to discuss and research with others. That is, applicants should not propose a “conference paper” or a singular case study, but a cluster of ideas they wish to share and work with among peers.

Facilitated by: Felipe Cervera, Luca Dominico Artuso, Renata Gaspar, Sozita Goudouna, Kyoko Iwaki, Eero Laine, Juliana Moraes, Rumen Rachev, Jonas Schnor, and Theresa Spielman.

A necessarily incomplete but regularly revised bibliographic genealogy of the methodologies used in Ends Lab:

Maria Shantelle Alexies Ambayec, Peter Burke, Renata Gaspar, Sozita Goudouna, Nilufer Gros, Adham Hafez, Jan-Tage Kuehling, Eero Laine, Sarah Lucie, Evan Moritz, Juliana Martins Rodrigues de Moraes, Malin Palani, Rumen Rachev, Aneta Stojnić, Kristof van Baarle. Mourning the Ends: Collaborative Writing and Performance. Advanced Methods: New Research Ontologies Series. Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Press, 2025. DOI: 10.53288/0506.1.00.

Eric Villanueva Dela Cruz, Gillian Dyson, Renata Gaspar, Sozita Goudouna, Tasha Haines, Eero Laine, Birgit Larson, Vahri McKenzie, Jimena Ortúzar, Sandamini Ranwalage, Anna Tzakou, and Evelyn Wan. “And So … .” Performance Research 28, no. 4 (2023): 139. DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2023.2311598.

Natalia Esling, Anna Jayne Kimmel, Azadeh Sharifi, and Asher Warren. “Diffracted Readings of the Future.” Performance Research 25, no. 5 (2020): 10–16, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2020.1868832.

Felipe Cervera and Eero Laine. “The Planet, Everyday: Towards Collaborative Performance Studies.” Text and Performance Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2020): 90–107. DOI: 10.1080/10462937.2019.1620960

Felipe Cervera, Shawn Chua, Panayiotoa Demetriou, Areum Jeong Eero Laine, Azadeh Sharifi, Evelyn Wan, and Asher Warren. “Orientations: Where is the Future Now?” GPS: Global Performance Studies 2, no. 2 (2019). DOI: 10.33303/gpsv2n2a1.

After Performance Working Group. "Vulnerability and the Lonely Scholar." Contemporary Theatre Review Interventions 27, no. 2 (2017). https://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/2017/vulnerability-and-the-lonely-scholar/. 

Felipe Cervera, Shawn Chua, João Florêncio, Eero Laine, and Evelyn Wan. “Thicker States.” GPS: Global Performance Studies 1, no. 1 (2017). DOI: 10.33303/gpsv1n1a8.

Felipe Cervera. “Planetary Performance Studies.” Global Performance Studies 1, no. 1 (2017). DOI: 10.33303/gpsv1n1a3.

After Performance Working Group. ”On Trans Authorship.” Performance Research 21, no. 5 (2016): 35-36. DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2016.1223445.

Eero Laine. “Collaborative Digital Research.” Contemporary Theatre Review Interventions 25, no. 1 (February 2015). https://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/2015/forum-on-academic-publishing/#collaborative-digital-research.

Henry Bial. “Performance Studies 3.0.” Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Ati Citron, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, and David Zerbib, 30–41. London: Methuen, 2014. DOI: 10.5040/9781408184707.ch-002.

Janelle Reinelt. “Is Performance Studies Imperialist? Part 2.”  TDR: The Drama Review 51, no. 3 (2007) 7–16. DOI: 10.1162/dram.2007.51.3.7.