Pinchbeck, M., 2016.

No rehearsal is necessary: the politics of the guest performer in The man who flew into space from his apartment

I will explore the politics and the ethics of the guest performer in The man who flew into space from his apartment (2015) and other work that uses a guest performer e.g. Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree (2005), Nassim Soleimanpour?s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. I propose that this enacts a dramaturgy of not knowing, a curating of the unknown. For this article, I explore the politics of the guest performer and how they become an inside eye or internal dramaturg in the process of making a performance. In doing so, I propose a new dramaturgical paradigm for the guest performer involved and reflect on the way practice as research is an inherently dramaturgical and curatorial process. The performance takes place in liminal space between composition and dissemination and sees dramaturgy as process and product. The text is the seed but it grows in different ways depending on how it is interpreted by the performer. It is germinated in performance in front of an audience not the usual incubation in the rehearsal room. The piece explores the process of raveling the work from its own devising, of making something wide open and making something narrow, of opening and closing a weave. I relate the role of dramaturg to that of curator and argue that it is a catalysing role that enables intersubjective relation with a number of texts authorised by an audience.