This is not a dictionary. The materials collected in this workbook have been initiated, produced or found by dance scholar Constanze Schellow during the work on her project "ma(r)king difference" at a.pt (advanced performance training). Dealing with the terminology of absence and negativity in recent texts about contemporary dance, this PhD-research is situated in-between dance studies and philosophy. To explore the concepts behind the vocabulary and to challenge the (im)possibilities of academic analysis on art, she invited choreographers, performers and visual artists to respond to a list of 56 "negativities", creating works or comments through their respective practices.

"56 ways (not) to" generates by means of composition, repetition, combination, succession, interruption, omission, link and reference a possible text from the diversity of voices that has accumulated through reading and making in the past 12 months. Those voices come from the fields of art, philosophy, physics, poetry, linguistics, dance and performance studies, recent politics, computer programming, architecture or medicine. They include song lyrics, movies or historical texts on military technology. A discourse is mapped out as a territory for individual trajectories. Each of them will amplify certain utterances as relevant statements while reducing others to an indifferent mumbling or whisper.