Collaborative effervescence through communitas

Background Edith Turner (2012) describes communitas (a loanword from Anthropology and Ritual Studies) as ‘togetherness itself’. As a collaborative endeavour, the proposition that the essay addresses is one of imminent possibility, enacting means and methods for generating collective joy (Ehrenreich 2006) in the liminal spaces of communitas. The essay explores its theme through the creative unfolding of three projects: The Symphony of Awkward (producing work on diaries since 2017), Writing Walking (crossover writers-in-performance), and an interactive experience with graduate students from Columbia College Chicago. Situated within creative writing research, the essay asks: how might the many, the lateral, and the collective show up in the sphere of arts and writing? Contribution ‘Collaborative effervescence through communitas’ draws on three related sites of durational, hybrid, creative collaborations. The essay uses dialogic, collaborative, and queered co-writing processes (Campbell et al 2023, Eades 2023, Ellis et al 2020, Gayle and Wyatt 2017, Murray and Rendle-Short 2021) and crossover writing (Carlin 2018). The liminal spaces of communitas are explored within interleaving reflections on digital voice, live chorus, satellite offerings, testimony, wit(h)nessing, oversharing, listening, and secular ritual. The choral text reflects on how to embody communitas, on and off the page, by displaying the joyous embodied knowledge of the communitastic. Significance The work was commissioned by Sydney Review of Books (an initiative of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University) for a series of essays taking an experimental approach to questions of the collective in the sphere of arts and literature. The essay builds upon work presented during a panel presentation at the 2021 nonfictioNOW conference, the peak event for writers and scholars of nonfiction internationally, and for whom participation at the conference is by highly competitive selection. In the first essay a posse of graduate students, a gamut of walking writers, and an ensemble of diarologists, explore the idea of the communitastic, ‘togetherness itself’ (Turner 2012), through a daisy chain of gifts: digital voice, live chorus, satellite offerings, testimony, wit(h)nessing, oversharing, listening, and secular ritual. Drawing on three related sites of durational, hybrid, creative collaborations (presented at nonfictioNOW 2021) this choral text will display the joyous embodied knowledge of the communitastic. In their essay-in-response (https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/musicking-communitas/), Jack Madin and Ed Service discuss communitas through ‘musicking’ (Small 2018). The duo’s manifesto, tested globally at clubs and festivals (in the wake of their song ‘Love Tonight’ becoming an international anthem) offers music as a vehicle for the celebration and development of collective relationships. Exploring a dialectic of the structure of everyday society and the anti-structure of communitas, SHOUSE proposes that communitas is generated by the rituals that are festivals, group singing and dancing; transgressing and dissolving the norms that govern our daily, structured, and institutionalised relationships.