Ten Years of Performance WritingThe Newsletter of the Dartington College of Arts Association Issue 24: Summer/Autumn 04

On Thursday 29 April 2004, the Galleries at Exeter Phoenix became the venue for the exhibition - in association with tEXt 2004 - which marked the tenth anniversary of the Performance Writing course at Dartington, a cross-section of text-based work, which reflected some of the diversity of writings associated with the Performance Writing course at Dartington College of Arts over the last decade. 
The exhibition offered examples of writing operating within, pushing up against, and exceeding the boundaries of different media: sound-works, video-works, screen works, page and book-works, installation-works and of writing for differing contexts and cultural settings, and included works from present students, graduates and staff and associates of the course, including:
ric allsopp, peter atha, thejauntycontinuum, john cayley, things not worth keeping, heiko fischer, allen fisher, jerome fletcher, gilbertandgrape, john hall, robert hampson, jason hirons, shelley hodgson, mark hunter, peter jaeger, conan Lawrence, mark leahy, anya lewin, claire macdonald, samantha martin, brigid mcleer, redell olsen, edith pasquier, deborah price, a smith, alaric sumner, claudia wegener, greg Whelan, philomena wynne. John Hall, as previous Director of Performance Writing, was invited to address the audience on this special occasion. 

" We wanted in the broadest sense to address the writing that might be about to come and neither of the two words in our title – performance or writing – were terms we wanted anyone to take for granted. Our approach was predicated on the assumption that writing has a history. It changes. And this history is as much to do with what writing performs within a society as with what forms it takes. For example, walking around Exeter today I was reminded, as though a reminder were needed, of how ancient sacred and bureaucratic inscription has been appropriated and transformed for the purposes of capitalism. The city is a place of words of desire (as is the ‘country’ though these words are largely invisible – internally audible perhaps) and every home and place of work is filled with text, sounded and / or seen.
Already in the early 90s it was becoming clear that paper, ink and pen – for some time the conventional tools of a writer’s trade – would not in any simple way be superseded but would themselves be changed through the emergence of new environments and technologies of writing. Printers still use ink but a computer screen or projector doesn’t. There is now a writing in light and a writing whose substance is digital and therefore transformable into different media.
So we were recognising two related questions: that the material practices of writing and the environments in which writing occurs were changing and that behind this was a whole set of questions about changing uses of textuality in social life – you could say, how texts are lived or even how texts live us. I use the word ‘question’ because we wanted from the start a practical approach to writing that was driven by questions and not by taught solutions. Every act of writing is a partial reply.
We caught something – a moment in the changing history of writing – with this approach, that has attracted international attention.
The first undergraduates were recruited in 1994 and graduated in 1997. Some of their work is here in the exhibition. In 1999 we added an MA award. At last count we had twelve research students working in – or in relation to – the field. Some of their work can be seen here in this exhibition.
Thank you."john hall 30th April 2004