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.

Writing with Thirty Hands: A Workshop On Collaborative Writing in Large Groups

Performance Studies international Conference—June 2024 (Program)

“Writing with Thirty Hands” invites performance scholars and practitioners to participate in a collaborative writing workshop. This workshop follows from the processes that were developed among fifteen co-authors across almost as many international time zones. Our writing collective was established following the canceled PSi conference in 2020, and it grew to develop multiple articles, conference presentations, and an edited special journal issue, as well as a collaboratively authored book published by Punctum Books.

The workshop is developed as an encounter with other artist-scholars as an opportunity to collaborate across distance and through difference. With the conference theme of assembly as our starting point, we ask that participants bring ideas or a constellation of topics that they are enthusiastic about and would like to work on with other performance practitioners and scholars. Through this workshop, we are also interested in further developing and expanding methodologies for shared and collaborative writing and creation in and through performance studies. The workshop is open to all who are similarly inclined and we welcome the opportunity to think, write, and create work together.

The hybrid/remote workshop will begin with various practices of writing and editing together in a shared online document. We will then turn toward more specific topics and potential projects that our group finds compelling to work on. By the end of the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to end their participation or to continue their collaboration at yet to be arranged meetings with the remaining group or with smaller clusters.

Facilitated by: Renata Gaspar, Sozita Goudouna, Eero Laine, Sarah Lucie, Juliana Moraes, and Aneta Stojnić

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

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.