“a body of work that both stuns and nourishes” – Rosalie Doubal, Senior Curator at Tate Modern

“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.”

It can be pre-ordered or ordered here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/autobiography-of-a-performance/bhanu-kapil/blue-pieta/9781068751592

The soft book launch will take place on Friday, the 24th of October, at Café OTO at 7 pm. Bhanu Kapil and Blue Pieta will stage a short performance, a scene from a larger work, alongside book launches and readings from other authors. The performance comes before the break.  Link to further information about the launch: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/the87press-present-mushaira-october-25/