With/nessing Cultural Exchange via 'Verbatim Theatre'

How do communities of writers in the Asia-Pacific, in Alvin Pang’s words, find ‘our own sustainable ways of speaking among ourselves’ (2016: 257)? Or, in Melissa Lucashenko’s terms, ‘really dig down with writers from other nearby cultures (what we in Aboriginal English call “Proper Neighbour Country”)’ (2016: 258)? The idea of ‘speaking among’ collectively or communitastically as method (Rendle-Short 2023) is central to the Australia Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project ‘Connecting Asia Pacific Literary Cultures: Grounds for Encounter and Exchange’. This paper builds on a performance drawn from the ARC interview data delivered at the 28th Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) conference for the theme ‘We Need to Talk’. It reports on enacting a ritual of exchange and conversation by bringing together voices from the Asia- Pacific in a version of ‘verbatim theatre’. The aim of the verbatim theatre script was to capture the experience, knowledge and insights gained by a group of writers during a collaborative residency program held at the Singapore Writers Festival in 2022. The ‘verbatim script’ was fashioned out of interview data collected post-residency. It offers views and testimony of writers interviewed for the field research activity from across the region (Australia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, The Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam). This kind of documentary or witness theatre or verbatim theatre-as-cultural exchange performs ‘what is known’ as a kind of ‘ethical eavesdropping’ (Webb 2009; Schechner 1997; Valentine 2009; Peters 2017; Nocera 2022; Peters & Burton 2023). This paper considers the delivery of the verbatim script and creative critical responses in relation to thinking with others, the risks of ‘giving voice’, and granting audience (Wake 2013).<p></p>