Hope as affect: Engaging with crisis and collapse through collaborative performance making

The project is interested in how hope can operate as an affective, embodied force within collaborative performance-making processes. In this specific context it was to see how, where and why the concept of hope was possible in the collaborative making of a new and original full length theatre work that was addressing themes of crisis and collapse. Invoking key theorists – Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (2022), Donna Haraway (2016), Kathleen Stewart (2007), Jonathan Lear (2006), and Rebecca Solnit (2016) – the research investigated how hope can be consistently enacted. Centred on investigating hope as affect experienced in the present here and now, as opposed to a future-orientated or Utopian function of hope, this practice-as-research project utilised reflective practice to develop a queer, feminist performance practice, and a working transferrable framework for devising practices situated within an ethical, radical and restorative version of hope.