Fanformance Art: The Practice of Making Fanfiction Real

This chapter explores fanfiction’s transformative potentials by rewriting Henry Jenkins’s utopian description of a media fandom working together, as narrated in the opening of “Scribbling in the Margins,” a chapter from his influential book Textual Poachers (1992). Similarly, I suggest that live art can be examined as an active community of consumers and producers who together instrumentalize Francesca Coppa’s description of fanfiction as a “living theatre in the mind” to transform an existing source into something else. The purpose of this chapter is to expose the methods of rewriting/reenactment that live art and fanfiction already share while also foregrounding the kind of active community and impassioned atmosphere so indispensable to live art practice. I build my argument around three examples of my practice-based research: the Fans of Live Art—DIY Workshop (2015), commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency, which included fourteen live art fan participants from across the United Kingdom, and the subsequent fan club (2015) public program and Live!Art fanzine publication (2015) that followed. With reference to these examples, I propose a shift from fan practice as performative and imitative (via Coppa) to fan practice as an embodied “becoming-fan” (via Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), and as an affective and emergent community.