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FRONT COVER_Autobiography of a Performance_R1 (1).jpg

Autobiography of a Performance: Scores, Essays and Reflections

£11.99 £15.99

by Blue Pieta & Bhanu Kapil

This co-authored work focuses on five performances developed by Blue Pieta, a multidisciplinary artist, director, dramaturg and performer and Bhanu Kapil, a poet, between 2022 and 2025. A public notebook of working scores and performance writing, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PERFORMANCE contains analytic depictions of shared time experienced during performance, notes on dramaturgy and applause, and thinking towards performance as a mode of inter-generational healing (borderwork). This hybrid collection studies performance as a place both unknown and emergent, the rough sketch that's always incomplete, carried over to the next performance, and always in the company of radical others of many kinds. Both writers also change roles during the course of a performance, a mode of autobiography that most closely resembles mutation. A dramaturg is also an artist, a dancer, the poet of the work. A poet stands up from the table where they are seated to enter the domain of gesture and movement. Pieta and Kapil decompress an interoceptive approach to poetry, memory and ritual awareness: scenes that can't be written, but only staged.

by Blue Pieta & Bhanu Kapil

This co-authored work focuses on five performances developed by Blue Pieta, a multidisciplinary artist, director, dramaturg and performer and Bhanu Kapil, a poet, between 2022 and 2025. A public notebook of working scores and performance writing, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PERFORMANCE contains analytic depictions of shared time experienced during performance, notes on dramaturgy and applause, and thinking towards performance as a mode of inter-generational healing (borderwork). This hybrid collection studies performance as a place both unknown and emergent, the rough sketch that's always incomplete, carried over to the next performance, and always in the company of radical others of many kinds. Both writers also change roles during the course of a performance, a mode of autobiography that most closely resembles mutation. A dramaturg is also an artist, a dancer, the poet of the work. A poet stands up from the table where they are seated to enter the domain of gesture and movement. Pieta and Kapil decompress an interoceptive approach to poetry, memory and ritual awareness: scenes that can't be written, but only staged.

ISBN: 9781068751592
134 pages
Date published: 23/10/2025
Paperback

For fans of: Kate Zambreno, Marina Abramovic, and José Esteban Muñoz.

PRAISE:

"The words of Bhanu and Blue coalesce in power in this precious sharing of their unique collaboration. Particularities amass to a broader take on the artistic possibilities afforded by performance itself, one that is based in flesh and kinship. With gratitude, I commend their unveiling of vulnerabilities, for they’ve forged a body of work that both stuns and nourishes.” —Rosalie Doubal, Senior Curator, International Art (Performance & Participation), Tate Modern

“Autobiography of a Performance is a thrilling, perilous experiment in diasporic intimacy as collaborative writing. Kapil and Pieta share the body of a text, passing its raw heart between them. The production of interdependency is both brutal and tender, but the healing of ‘borderwork’ migrates across such absolute distinctions. As discrete forms of writing are destabilised, so too are national borders and familial boundaries, troubling histories of partition, population exchange, loss and shame.” —Katrina Palmer, Artist and Professor of Fine Art

“Autobiography of a Performance is an osmotic gift. Receive it with trembling hands, as its icy heart bleeds through paper, fabric, and skin. Pieta and Kapil’s choreography is borderwork in reverse, unpicking partitions, undoing bloody paradigms. Read this book or let it unspool you. Trace the lines of your body back through diasporic time; run into the parallax of love killed, love sought. ‘How will you live now?’ Pieta and Kapil ask, proffering the answers that we so desperately need in the torrential beauty of their encounters.” —Nisha Ramayya, author of States of the Body Produced by Love

“The stage is set - characters, props, costume - an exploration of performance that refuses stillness. Kapil and Pieta craft a visceral choreography, shifting between tender sublimity and unyielding violence. Through gestures, chants, prayers, and rituals, the reader is compelled to question home, displacement, love, and loss. A triumph of vision, this work charts personal, social, and political histories rooted in diaspora, yet extending every limb beyond.” —Karenjit Sandhu, author of young girls! and gestalt

“In this brilliant work that connects flesh and text, organs are arranged on the dinner table as gestures. Tender questions test our emotional and ethical reach. I learn that writing can be made out of scars, debris, feral dances, and that dark mirrors can be made out of writing, mirrors on which you smudge your oily lips. Luminescing, like fascia. This is collaboration as sacrificial wound, as touch, as witness—that greets me on the sidewalk where their and our performance continues, doggedly, and I hum, in awe and synchronicity.” —Sophie Seita, author of Lessons of Decal

Blue Pieta is a multidisciplinary artist, dramaturg, director and performer. They were dramaturg for Akram Khan Company’s production Thikra: Night of Remembering (2025) and musical operetta Nine Songs directed by Farooq Chaudhry OBE with musical direction by Jocelyn Pook. Their art has been featured in exhibition programming by Serpentine Galleries, Courtauld Gallery, Britten Pears Arts, and staged at The Place, Battersea Arts Centre and Royal Court Theatre.
https://www.bluepieta.org/

Bhanu Kapil is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. A former Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow of the University of Cambridge, she is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has been awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University and a Cholomondeley Award from the Society of Authors, both for poetry. Her most recent book of poetry, How To Wash A Heart (Pavillion Poetry) won the TS Eliot Prize.
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Features a fresh new softcover design with french flaps.

THE BUTCHER SHOP

Café OTO performance at the launch for Autobiography of a Performance.

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