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Towards a Collaborative Ergonomics: From Strangers to Symbiotic Community through Boundary Traversal in Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2020

PEILIN LIANG
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Abstract

In the globalized twenty-first century, the relevance of intercultural performance is to forge supporting infrastructures between collaborators of divergent sociocultural backgrounds and disciplinary training. Fostering such infrastructures is vital for reconfiguring existing social relations and redistributing resources in the face of increasing sociocultural asymmetry. However, I argue that transforming collaborating ‘strangers’ into interdependent components of a sustainable symbiotic community necessitates the implementation of a collaborative ergonomics. It is an ergonomics concerned with the efficiency and efficacy of collaboration that actively seeks to traverse boundaries and borders. Linguistic translation, lexical translation and the transference and co-production of embodied knowledge are the crucial steps for effecting a collaborative ergonomics. Signs of an emerging symbiosis include the increasingly collaborative relationships between the collaborators and the transformation of embodied practices into highly reflexive and rigorous praxis.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , October 2020 , pp. 245 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2020

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References

NOTES

1 Thompson, James, ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Care’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 20, 4 (2015), pp. 430–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7 Instead of using the term ‘South East Asia’ I have chosen the term ‘ASEAN’ to highlight that it is a region of various sovereign states. The members of the ASEAN include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

8 The workshop was inspired by Cecily O'Neill's process drama workshop. O'Neill, Cecily, Drama Worlds: A Framework for Process Drama (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), pp. 86–9Google Scholar.

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13 Ibid., p. 21, emphasis in original.

14 International Ergonomics Association (IEA), www.iea.cc/whats/index.html, accessed 3 September 2019.

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17 Ibid.

18 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 26.

19 Liang, Peilin, ‘Localising People's Theatre in East Asia: Performing Hakka Women and Pear-Growers on Taiwan's Fault Line’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 17, 3 (2012), pp. 377–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 A Singaporean expression meaning ‘similar’.

21 Chia, post-workshop reflection writing, 3 July 2015.

22 Peilin Liang, workshop notes, 20 February 2019.

23 Sim, post-workshop reflection writing, 10 July 2015.

24 ‘Peranakan’ is a term commonly used in Singapore to refer to descendants of settlers from the southern provinces of China and the local population of the Malay archipelago.

25 Chia, post-workshop reflection writing, 3 July 2015.

26 Ibid.

27 Sim, post-workshop reflection writing, 23 March 2015.

28 Lim, post-workshop reflection writing, 3 July 2015, 18 March 2016; Pan, post-workshop reflection writing, 3 July 2015, 8 March 2016; Tan, post-workshop reflection writing, 18 March 2016.

29 Lim, post-workshop reflection writing, 18 March 2016.

30 Yeh, post-workshop reflection writing, 12 March 2016.

31 Ibid.

32 Peilin Liang, workshop notes, 23 February 2019.

33 Lee, post-workshop reflection writing, March 2019; Tan, post-workshop reflection writing, 10 March 2019; Tay, post-workshop reflection writing, 5 March 2019; Tay, WhatsApp discussion, 20 May 2019.

34 Lee, post-workshop reflection writing, 6 March 2019.

35 Tay, WhatsApp discussion, 20 May 2019.

36 Ibid.

37 Tay, post-workshop reflection writing, 5 March 2019; Tay, WhatsApp discussion, 20 May 2019.

38 Tay, post-workshop reflection writing, 5 March 2019.

39 Chang, post-workshop reflection writing, 8 March 2019; Kuo, post-workshop reflection writing, 26 March 2019; Huang, post-workshop reflection writing, 6 March 2019.

40 Thompson, ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Care’, p. 437.

41 Tay, post-workshop reflection writing, 5 March 2019; Ow, post-workshop reflection writing, 10 March 2019.

42 Toepell, Andrea, ‘Cooperative versus Collaborative Research: Assessing the Difference’, in Richards, Merle, Elliott, Anne, Woloshyn, Vera and Mitchell, Coral, eds., Collaboration Uncovered: The Forgotten, the Assumed, and the Unexamined in Collaborative Education (Westport, CT and London: Bergin and Garvey, 2001), pp. 61–82Google Scholar, here p. 63.