Towards a Collaborative Ergonomics

From Strangers to Symbiotic Community through Boundary Traversal in Performance

How do we collaborate effectively with 'strangers' in projects that seek to cross boundaries and borders? Reflecting on my collaborative practice throughout the PaR Applied Theatre project series ‘A Home on the Island,’ I foreground the necessity of a collaborative ergonomics.

Collaborative ergonomics is concerned with the efficacy and efficiency of collaboration between individuals of divergent sociocultural, geohistorical, and disciplinary backgrounds. I argue that linguistic translation, lexical translation, and the transference and co-production of embodied knowledge are the critical steps towards such ergonomics.