‘Open Dialogues is a UK based collaboration, founded in 2008 by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces critical writing on and as performance. We define critical writing as an intellectual encounter between writing and art. The way we do things is deeply indebted to performance – to collaboration, documentation and the politics and processes of making and showing live work. Our model is resistant to resolution; it is a living contract with our performance collaborators and an ongoing work in and of itself.’
Rachel Lois Clapham
From 2008 to 2015, Open Dialogues pioneered the model of embedded criticism in performance art festivals, refusing to participate in the fiction that criticism is ever objective. Instead, Open Dialogues approached their work as a process of criticality, in which experiments in writerly form, authorship, collaboration and means of publication were a key part of the intellectual engagement with their subjects. Technically on hiatus as both writers have young families, Open Dialogues is in the midst of a decade long publication project, NOTA: a paradoxical book of unpublishable notes, published, in ten chapters.
http://open-dialogues.blogspot.co.uk/
Open Dialogues website
https://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/2015/nota/
Open Dialogues: NOTA on Creative Theatre Review
words by Mary Paterson
Something Other 