Force with Force Chorus: A practice-as-research method translating Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence through collective narration

Force with Force Chorus is a collaborative workshop format and hybrid performance methodology that translates critical theory into embodied, autoethnographic performance-making. Collaborators collectively resignify key concepts from Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind through writing, voice, and dialogic reflection. Participants read their own texts and the texts of others aloud, composing a shared, leaderless “chorus” that treats nonviolence as a technique of relation: sensing how singular experience becomes communicable across multiple subjective positions without requiring identity-based categorization.

In its virtual iteration, the performance is delivered as an audio-only collective narration: cameras off, anonymized names, and abstract profile images, producing a listening-based social space shaped by porosity, consent, and attunement. The collective narration is documented as sound art and can be exhibited through listening contexts that include a shortened practice-as-research sequence, participant reflection writing, and facilitated dialogue on nonviolence and social equality. An in-person iteration focuses on displacement as a form of violence, using performative writing and choral voicing as a mourning ritual that supports memory-work, intergenerational connection, and refuge-making through language-sharing.