Each year, Springback Academy graduates have the opportunity to attend a live meeting at a dance festival. This year it was the first weekend of the CODA Oslo International Dance Festival, where we also participated in a workshop on collective writing by the Norwegian Performing Criticism Globally project.

It turns out that collective writing is… pretty complicated! Joint agreement on final words is slow, difficult, and often impractical. On the other hand, we found we could easily expand the idea of collective writing to include texts which have an editor as well as an author; have more than one author; are collections of writing rather than collectively written; or which cite, or even are influenced by, other people’s words. (The bottom line: language itself is collective, not authored.)

Never mind how it’s written, though, it’s also important to ask: how is it read? After all, the unity of a text lies not in its origin – the writer – but in its destination. That is: in you, the reader. 

With that in mind, you can find here a collection of four texts on four CODA performances, written separately by four authors. Together they form a necessarily partial view of the range of performances on offer, from a range of viewpoints. Such is dance writing; read them as you will.