Bodies in Motion: Working through Plurality

The collaborative article addresses questions regarding the notion of plurality as experienced in the performer-body. Through practice and writing we attempt to account for such a body and address wider questions regarding the body and identity in performance.As professional performance-makers working independently through practice-as-research (in a doctoral context at Middlesex University), we have undertaken an on-going collaboration based on our mutual concern for the process of embodying our research. The purpose of the article is to frame certain tendencies which occur when two or more people are working together in the studio. The set of conditions for this on-going project has provided a good terrain in which to break down some of the mechanisms of performance making and has therefore allowed us to illuminate some aspects of contemporary performance making.Drawing on philosophical approaches to performance making including William James’s Radical Empiricism, we discuss in detail our shared practice and attempt to find strategies that will allow us to examine the shifting tension between our sense of the monadic ‘I’ and the idea of the distributed self that Brian Rotman describes in Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (2008).