Overview

This co-authored work focuses on five performances developed by Blue Pieta, a multidisciplinary artist, director, dramaturg and performer and Bhanu Kapil, a poet, between 2022 and 2025. A public notebook of working scores and performance writing, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PERFORMANCE contains analytic depictions of shared time experienced during performance, notes on dramaturgy and applause, and thinking towards performance as a mode of inter-generational healing (borderwork). This hybrid collection studies performance as a place both unknown and emergent, the rough sketch that's always incomplete, carried over to the next performance, and always in the company of radical others of many kinds. Both writers also change roles during the course of a performance, a mode of autobiography that most closely resembles mutation. A dramaturg is also an artist, a dancer, the poet of the work. A poet stands up from the table where they are seated to enter the domain of gesture and movement. Pieta and Kapil decompress an interoceptive approach to poetry, memory and ritual awareness: scenes that can't be written, but only staged.

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9781068751592

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Blue Pieta is a director, performer and dramaturg based in the UK. They were dramaturg for Thikra: Night of Remembering (2025) directed by Akram Khan. Bhanu Kapil is the author of six books and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first UK collection, How To Wash A Heart, won the TS Eliot Prize. Since 2022, Pieta and Kapil have performed in a succession of collective performances derived from Kapil’s poems and choreographed by Pieta. These performances have been featured in exhibition programming by Serpentine Galleries, Horse Hospital, Burley Fisher Literary Festival, The Place and the University of Cambridge.

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