Ping-Pong Criticism was conceived as part of the Live Art Writers Network programme performingborders curated as part of Linha de Fuga Festival 2025. To access all commissions in this programme, click HERE.

This is a how-to Guide on how to create collective and multidisciplinary critical responses to performance, ping-pong style! Feel free to use this methodology in your own practices and/or laboratory, or workshops. If you do please credit us and let us know how it went.

1. Framing / Context

We begin with a conviction: conventional art criticism is a form of violence and an exercise of power to legitimise artists within a market-driven, capitalist, hierarchical logic, tendentially exercised by cis white Western men, and which also serves to assert their authority and superiority in a system of values that they themselves have created, thus ensuring the foundation that gives them legitimacy.

Hence, the Crítica Pingue-Pongue, or Ping-Pong Criticism

2. Ping-Pong Criticism as a Practice

Preference is given (but it is not absolutely essential) to the use of sports equipment (e.g. caps, yellow ball, and you may even like to wear short shorts!…). The fundamental thing is in the intention: that this is an exercise in sharing, exchanging ideas, knowledge or questions, in which one person writes (in an expanded notion of ‘writing’ and ‘text’) and then passes it on to another person, and everyone participates in a sequence that is a mixture of randomness and the decision to take their turn. It does not matter if it is the most erudite, eloquent reflection, nor does it matter if it is free of errors or grammatical mistakes. What is intended here is to be truly present in relation to one another, to be present and to express something linked to a place of personal enunciation about or prompted by the work of art under analysis. 

This was the Ping-Pong Criticism game we played in Coimbra, as part of the Linha de Fuga 2025 Festival. In the rush for everyone to have time to write something of their own, in their own language, from their own perspective, we multiplied the number of computers available, which led to simultaneous writing – including sharing a song, filming a performative gesture… In this whirlwind, a choir singing in turns gained voice and image – in which all expressions come together in the same place, but each with its own tone, rhythmic and energetic expression, its own media, and its own conviction. 

There was no designated leader, nor a voice to guide the direction of the reflections. The proposal was simple and, at the same time, challenging: to construct a collective text from diverse perspectives, without hierarchies, allowing each person to influence the path of the narrative with equal weight. 

Just as we do not have to agree with everything each person has said, written or done, we also accept mistakes in writing, words tinged with inaccuracies or adventurous spelling, we accept typos, or even mistakes, contradicting any idea of binary thinking between right and wrong or AI-generated perfection, because Ping Pong Criticism is a breathing exercise that reminds us that We Are Humans Who Are Still Human. And if there had been more time, there would have been room to throw the ball back to each other and continue the conversation…

Horizontality did not erase differences — on the contrary, it gave them a legitimate place in the text. The end result was less a finished text and more a record of a process: multiple, plural, marked by voices that intertwined without overlapping. This was an exercise in coexistence, where each participant emerges as a co-author of a truly horizontal experience. 

3. Ping-Pong Criticism – Step by Step Guide
   

1. Set up the room as you prefer (i.e. a long table with everyone around, or circle of chairs, or sit in puffs scattered around).
   
2. Collectively settle on a particular art-work that everyone has either seen or agrees to reflect on
   
3. Collectively nominate the person who will start.
   
4. Everyone introduces themselves, at either own time, with their own intentions. The first person, after their introduction, passes the ball to the next person, at their choice. You may use this time to also give some preliminary thoughts on the art work. This section may take as long as it needs. 
   
5. Once everyone is introduced, set up collective writing/reflecting spaces (ie. a Word Page set up on a shared Google Drive, various laptops with the Google Drive Word Page open, a long sheet of paper on a wall for everyone to use, random pieces of tissue across the table, whatever your preferred set up is) and give everyone 10mins to prepare their criticism/reflection. This can be in writing, singing, audio-recording, video-recording, drawing, poem, etc. 
   
6. Once the time is up, everyone is prompted to write. Gather around the writing spaces, and start to write. Take your turn. Find your moment and space to write. Feel free to disrupt the flow of the writing. If there is a song, stop and hear it, record it and add to the final document. If there are tissues or wall paper written on, for example, add them to the final document as well. 
   
7. The Ping-Pong Critical Text is concluded once everyone has contributed. 

To read the collective, multilingual and multidisciplinary Ping Pong Critical Text PERCURSO DRAMATÚRGICO PARA UMA POSSÍVEL LEITURA created during the Building Critical Responses: a Collaborative Session for Writers and Artists session at Linha de Fuga 2025, click here (LINK).

Credits:

Ping Pong Criticism is conceived and written by Cláudia Galhós, Pedro Vilela e Xavier de Sousa. Commissioned by performingborders for Live Art Writers Network x Linha de Fuga 2025.
Curated by Xavier de Sousa and Anahí Saraiva Herrera.

Biographies:

Cláudia Galhós: Jornalista, especialista em artes performativas e escritora. Escreve sobre artes performativas em geral e dança em particular para jornais desde 1994, em publicações como BLITZ, O Independente, Público, Jornal de Letras, NetParque (portal de cultura do Parque das Nações), Diário Económico, Dance Europe, Mouvement, “Festival Bytes” (foi colunista do blogue da European Festivals Assocition, EFA, 2012/2013), Visão, entre outros. Escreve sobre artes performativas para o semanário Expresso desde 2005. Fez documentação de seminários, festivais e programas de experimentação e residência artística, como o Colina – Colaboration In Arts, de Rui Horta (que aconteceu no Convento da Saudação, O Espaço do Tempo, em 2003 e 2004), TryAngle – Performing Arts Research Laboratories (2012, projeto europeu liderado por O Espaço do Tempo, de Rui Horta), MOV-S (espaço de intercâmbio internacional de dança e das artes do movimento espanhol, com caráter itinerante, em Barcelona, 2007, Galiza, 2009, e Madrid, 2011), Festival Citemor – Festival Internacional de Teatro de Montemor-o-Velho, BoCA – Bienal of Contemporary Arts, a título de exemplo… Foi, entre 2005 e 2006, observadora/consultora da rede Íris (rede de programadores de Itália, França, Espanha e Portugal). Na área da cultura em geral e dança em particular, publicou o livro «Corpo de Cordas – 10 anos de Companhia Paulo Ribeiro» (Assírio & Alvim, 2006); o ensaio biográfico «Pina Bausch – Sentir Mais» (Don Quixote, 2010), “There is nothing that is beyond our imagination” (2015, no âmbito da rede europeia “Imagine 2020 – Art and Climate Change”, que reúne 10 teatros europeus, liderada pelo Kaaitheater, em Bruxelas), “15 anos do Espaço do Tempo” (2016, Centro Coreográfico de Montemor-o-Novo, de Rui Horta); “TryAngle – Performing Arts Research Laboratories” (2013); “Colher para Semear – 25 anos de GDA e 10 anos de Fundação GDA (edição Fundação GDA, 2021).

Pedro Vilela: artista-curador-investigador. Doutorando em Educação Artística pela Faculdade de Belas Artes do Porto, desenvolve a TREMA!, associação que conecta artisticamente Brasil e Portugal e colabora com diferentes estruturas da cidade do Porto. Tem interesse central na cena afro-latino-americana, refletindo temas como decolonialidade e dispositivos de racialidade. É ainda o primeiro latino-americano a ganhar a Bolsa Magaly Muguercia, promovida pelo Programa Iberescena.

Xavier de Sousa: performance maker, editor e curador da plataforma de investigação de performance digital, performingborders. A sua prática é na sua essência multidisciplinar, explorando relações entre a identidade pessoal e a comunitária, o espaço digital como ponto de conexão entre indivíduos, arte e sistemas sócio-políticos. 

Recentemente tem-se dedicado ao desenvolvimento do projecto Live Art Writers Network, que visa desenvolver novas linguagens e métodos de criação de escrita crítica e reflexiva multidimensional, entrelaçando práticas de performance, edição e publicação híbrida. O projeto, na sua essência colectivo e de acompanhamento de artes performativas, cria laços de relação e proximidade entre participantes, coprodução e publicação de comissões de escrita experimental, crítica e reflexiva em diálogo com a performance e live art.

Performances incluem Encruzilhada (Cultura em Expansão, 2024), What Becomes… (METAL, 2024), Slow Cooking (Theatre in the Mill, 2024), Pós- (Teatro do Bairro Alto, 2021), REGNANT (HOME, 2021) POST (Battersea Arts Centre, 2017-2021 tour internacional) e Almost Xav (Southbank Centre, 2015). Formou-se no mestrado de Theatre & Performance, Queen Mary University e colaborou com Dori Nigro, Aura, Tino Sehgal, Rosana Cade, Tim Etchells, Fado Bicha e Puta da Silva, apresentando espetáculos com Teatro do Bairro Alto, Festival Citemor, National Theatre London, Barbican (RU), Onassis Culture Centre (Greece),  ITT Gandinagar (India), entre outros.  Website: www.xavierdesousa.co.uk  |  Instagram: @xavinisms

Anahí Saravia Herrera: (she/her) works at the intersection of community organizing, DIY publishing, and cultural work. She is thinking about how creative spaces can hold political questions and how we can build political alliances through cultural work. She is the current Civic Fellow at Cubitt Gallery, cares for performingborders and is incubating a community-led feminist press: Slow + Dirty, based at House of Annetta. Anahi is physically based in London, and thinks/ feels from the diaspora, she was born in La Paz, Bolivia.