In Performing Process. Sharing Dance and Choreographic Practice, Hetty Blades and Emma Meehan present a peer-reviewed collection, which examines both the implications of sharing processes of making dances, and the possibilities of methods, formats, and voices that might be activated through this sharing. The editors begin by pointing out how the book “cannot provide any easy answers” (9) to the questions at hand: those relating to distinctions between process and performance, the implications of sharing practice, or the repercussions this sharing might have for different audiences. They also explain how its discussion is “situated within multiple fields of influence” (9) and highlight that its essays are written mostly by practitioner-researchers (11). The arguments in the book then emerge from, or are exemplified through, practices of choreography, which, combined with its variety of theoretical frameworks, make the collection relevant and timely. Although not equally achieved in all the chapters, this carefully edited compilation of essays comes close to offering a balanced discussion emergent from and illustrated by examples. The book reveals insightful reflections on unpretentious practices, with generative and powerful ideas deduced from analysis of complex processes.

The book is divided into four sections of differing lengths, containing a total of thirteen chapters together with an introduction. The first part, titled “Philosophy of Process,” consists of two chapters—one by Stephanie Jordan and Anna Pakes, and one by Blades herself— which discuss the value of sharing choreographic practice and its potential impact on choreographers, scholars, and audiences. This part also explores definitions and appreciation of dance, and different ways of understanding choreographic knowledge. Part 2, “Methods and Formats,” moves between case studies and proposals, studying possibilities of sharing formats and methods, moving from multimodal, multilevel artistic work seen in Sarah Whatley's chapter, to ways in which Annette Arlander's actions and performances create both matter and meaning. This second part continues through cohabitation of scholar and choreographers explored by Erin Brannigan, Matthew Day, and Lizzie Thomson; while Meehan investigates co-creation between performer, site, and audience in her chapter. Part 3, “Documentation, Dissemination and Scores,” explores diverse modes of documenting practices and how the documentation can shape the forms of sharing and, in turn, the practices themselves. “Politics and Labour,” the fourth and final part, refers to ways in which dance and choreographic processes have to be understood as forming part of a political context, through resistance or compliance, as well as either political actions themselves or potential illustrations of social dynamics. Although the book is meaningfully divided into these four parts, the themes that cut across the four sections are of more significance when treated separately from their disciplinary frameworks.

The first theme is the idea of performance as unfixed, not as product but as always in the process of becoming. Although encountered in the philosophical discussions of Part 1, the idea is more explicitly articulated in Arlander's chapter, “Process as Performance or Variations of Swinging,” in which the definition of process is questioned. Arlander proposes that a performance can share process by choosing a process as its topic, by showing its own making practice in the work, or through participation of the audience, during which viewers replicate the activity itself (101). In “Crystallisations, Constellations and Sharings: Exploring Somatic Process with Sandra Reeve,” Meehan investigates whose process is being shared, and whether there is a sense of co-creation in performances, which are sharings of somatic practices. Performance is hence elaborated as always becoming, “an inquiry constantly unfolding in relation to scores and audience” (121). In this sense the “product” of performance is in itself a process. Delving deeper into this topic, the boundaries between process and product are already blurred in “Atomos EChOs and the Process-ing of Dances” with Jordan and Pakes questioning the ontological impact of process in the product itself (40). Blades further discusses how annotation has the potential to add artistic properties to the existing aesthetic properties of a performance, layering the actual product with information about process (“Choreographic Knowledge and Aesthetic Empiricism,” 56).

The second theme is best exemplified by Sara Jansen's chapter on “Animating the Archive: Voguing, Sampling and Queering Tatsumi Hijikata.” The archive is often understood as a dynamic object, almost self-sufficient, full of potentiality, which implies that the archive is more alive than the performance if it is understood as product. The more traditional view of archives as static, incomplete, partial visualizations is also present. Significantly, the archive is reflected upon as potentially misrepresenting the work of the artist, as Jansen explores. Cassiers's chapter examines Jan Fabre and how artists can edit their public figure by adjusting the documentation after the performance event, in “Dancing on the Page/Writing on the Stage: Sharing Dance (and) Theatre Process Documents – The Drawings of Jan Fabre.”

With the dominant focus on gathering artists, scholars, and researchers from different disciplines, it is no surprise that the book deals with collaborative formats that are unconventional in dance practice. Co-imagining and cohabiting are presented as a collaborative “thinking together” that eliminates, or at least blurs, disciplinary differences, offering transferable methodologies (in Brannigan, Day, and Thomson, “Research as Co-Habitation: Experimental Composition across Theory and Practice”). Similarly, Arlander proposes Karen Barad's “intra-action” as a model for her experimental demonstrations, actions which allow entangled agencies to emerge, such as her swinging processes, which create both meaning and matter in the act of demonstrating the research process (106). Perhaps more unprecedented, as a testament to the years these established scholars have been at the forefront of research into process, is the proposal of “co-design” as an iterative cyclical process in the chapter by Scott deLahunta, Jordan Beth Vincent, Elizabeth Old, Garry Stewart, James Leach, and Catherine J. Stevens (“Exploring Creative Thought in Choreography Together: Process Documentation with the Australian Dance Theatre”). The proposal of co-design is problematized, countered, and supplemented by the use of Leach's quote explaining how no common product exists in cross-disciplinary collaborations. Each research element has to be allowed to develop process and product within their discipline. Through co-design and by joining transdisciplinary forces, the creative process moves forward toward the performance “product.” This development occurs while allowing multiple potentialities and areas of research to emerge, continuing exploration through each of the individuals, and indeed returning to, and perhaps exploring further, Brannigan et al.'s idea of cohabiting. By confronting these two notions, deLahunta et al. argue in favor of and demonstrate the potential of choreographic processes to be used to understand or discuss more general topics, in this case the complexity of cognitive processes.

Although perhaps less innovative as a topic within dance studies, the issue of language, words, and the difficulty of articulating certain processes emerges clearly as a theme. The common positions of language as the “enemy” or opposite of dance sit between the lines in some of the chapters, but, thankfully, the book overall refrains from a simplistic approach to this topic. Conventional forms of thinking and knowledge are problematized. Brannigan et al. recognize the “colonizing potential of language” (86) as the sense of loss, which seems to be embedded in forms of notation. At the same time, the importance of documenting a sharing process, and attending to choreographic writing, is clearly established, for example, in Ariadne Mikou's chapter, “Architectural and Choreographic Diagrams as Processual Modes of Sharing Creative Practices.”

Philosophical questions regarding what shared information might do, or to whom it might be useful, emerge throughout the book, but especially in the two chapters of Part 1. Is the choreographer's intention important to appreciate the work of art? Is the context of the work necessary to perceive it? As it promises, the book gives no easy answers to these questions, but Blades, and Jordan and Pakes acknowledge the impact and potentials of sharing practices, while questioning how and why this sharing might be done. Understanding facilitates appreciation, they argue, guiding the audience's perception or informing them to enhance their experience of the work. In “Enhancing Choreographic Objects: Traces, Texts and Tales of a Journey through Dance,” Whatley describes how sharing Wayne McGregor's choreographic practice uncovered information that has potential to illuminate his own understanding of his practice. Benefits for audience and choreographer are illustrated in these initial chapters, and the usefulness of this information for the scholar is perhaps less contentious. However, it is precisely the position of the scholar that is most intriguingly discussed in the book and constitutes my next theme.

While Meehan's chapter on the work of Sandra Reeve is a brilliant piece of analysis and argumentation, the point that resonated most clearly was her definition of her scholarly position as “panorama” (124). Her knowledge as a theoretician is kept in her immediate awareness, while writing from her trained performer body. While she “hone[s] in on detail of [her] own experiences, at the same time [she is] concentrating on moving between [her] position and wider fields of practice and theory” (124). This definition makes a single perceptive contribution to the position of the scholar-practitioner, while the quasi-choreographic movement in her writing allows for a vital perspective in the understanding of dance, defining a new generation of hybrid practitioner-researchers.

It is not possible, nor should it be, to write at this point in our lives without acknowledging the global situation we are in. And somehow, like truly groundbreaking works, aspects of this book clearly resonate with very current problems of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Meehan's proposal to engage with newer biovirtual modes of being “in order to provide strategies for dealing with this burgeoning part of the ‘ecology’ of everyday life” (134) seems now urgent. And although nobody wanted to join her garden gnome club, Claudia Kappenberg's performative opposition to the extreme valuing of usefulness might have a lot to teach us about our own quest for productivity under lockdown.

As a form of conclusion, rather like the medical student who thinks they have all the illnesses they study, all the ideas of this book seemed relevant to my own choreographic thinking. Some concepts offered innovative ways of engaging with areas of embodied knowledge that arise out of creative practice but are seldom articulated verbally. In focusing on relationships between process and product, this book offers insights for choreographers, dance students, and those interested in knowledge-generative features of creative processes. It choreographs a reading journey by highlighting diverse ways and implications of sharing processes of dance, without letting readers accommodate their thinking at any point. The increased growth in practice-as-research within the academy, as well as the benefits for practitioners and audiences demonstrated throughout its chapters, reinforce why this book is vital for both the artistic and scholarly future of our discipline.