Participation, Research and Learning in the Performing Arts Symposium on the 6th May 2011, Centre for Creative Collaboration, London. Royal Holloway, University of London, and PALATINE Dance, Drama and Music., 2011
What constitutes participation based research in the performing arts, and why are we discussing i... more What constitutes participation based research in the performing arts, and why are we discussing it here today? In the most reductive of terms, participation based research is a mode of qualitative research, ethnographic in its origins and orientation and often concerned with research into community, carried out in many instances by researchers who are not normally members of that community. Its research focus is likely to be something like ‘understanding and facilitating distributed collaboration’ and within these sorts of parameters we are also likely to find ongoing criticalmethodological enquiry into the ethical implications of this sort of research focus and application. The terms ‘indigenous’ and ‘nonindigenous’, used in some accounts of ethnographic research, give some sense of some of the wider ethical implications :traditionally, the ethnographer is likely to be ‘nonindigenous’, while the focus of her or his enquiry is indigenous: the former’s research focus might be, in one example, ‘traditional instruments’ used in East Javanese marriage ceremonies, carried out by a European or American musicologist - who may but may well not be an expert musician. So far, it might seem that this kind of research has little to do even with qualitative research into the Performing Arts, although there have been exceptions: what used to be called ‘theatre anthropology’ took up precisely this sort of focus ; and over the past decade there have been a number of doctoral research undertakings in the Performing Arts that have taken certain aspects of the ‘autoethnographic’ tradition and terminology as their model .
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Papers by Susan Melrose
Susan Melrose with Stefanie Sachsenmaier
Susan Melrose with Stefanie Sachsenmaier
The presentation draws on the writing of Karin Knorr Cetina and Charles Spinosa, identified, in the context of what was called the "practice turn in contemporary theory" as "posthumanist", on the basis of the judgement that their approaches step outside of established social sciences’ ways of generalising practice.
Rosemary Butcher’s Secrets of the Open Sea is a new choreographic work merging archive material and current film with live movement. Inspired, she reports, by the perception of form in ruins, the focus of Butcher’s new work is the creation of new histories through her re-engagement with her own past work which is also – far from coincidentally – one history of contemporary dance. We report on Butcher’s creative process with dancer Lucy Suggate, which involves an active enquiry into what remains, a ‘looking at something that has its root elsewhere’, in a process of choreographic notation that shifts forward and backwards in time.
Working with the conception of ‘activities’, Butcher investigates the ‘doing of the movement’, aiming to show its construction, rather than ‘finished’ form. This ‘doing of movement’ involves the choreographer and dancer in a simultaneous working of layers of past and future choreographic ‘things’. The work – already in process – moves away from a central focus on the dancer’s body inhabiting its own space, to work as well with a sense of ‘imprinting’ the dancer’s bodywork onto the floor and into the air.
With these processes in mind, we explore Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the technical as one constitutive aspect of the art work (‘L’Obédience’, 1988), arguing that in Butcher’s process we can see her engagement with an abstract yet rational choreographic dispositif, allowing us to speak about an inventive ‘dance’ that explores developments in visual art but remains identifiable as such. We discuss how Butcher’s creative process employs a layering of temporal materialities while remaining ‘new’ and draw on Jakub Zdebik’s writing on the productive function of the diagram in art-making (Deleuze and the Diagram, 2012) as well as Lyotard’s “autostructurisation” or ‘working through’ strata of materials.
Butcher’s making new ‘choreographic’ work, where a complication is added, which is that the practitioner herself continued (until 2016) to
make new work in the time of archive production. This is new work that the act of archive production itself might have its impact upon.
I am supposing that some of the problems thrown up by this particular exercise of archive production might have implications for archive production in the performing arts more generally, not least because the Rosemary Butcher undertaking is positioned quite explicitly in the context of performing arts practice-led-research.
constitutes practical activity as spectacle, leading researchers to "insist on trying to answer questions which are not and cannot be questions for practice". Correspondingly, Bourdieu adds, a "theoretical disposition" is thereby brought to bear on practitioners' work, which disposition tends to "invite …a quasi-theoretical attitude" from practitioners. This attitude, in turn, and tellingly, "tacitly excludes reference to a whole range of tactical operations". In this presentation I look very briefly at some of the issues raised by Bourdieu's observations, when these are tested against the early 21stC focus on performing arts/practice as research.
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performance mastery and virtuosity referenced as such in those registers of writing. It is rare, even in the case of those writers who consistently engage with expert practices and practitioners from their own position as expert spectator. For the sake of my argument today, I propose to take "practitioner expertise", "professional" or "expert"
practices and/or "disciplinary mastery" as tokens, to mark out not simply an other of Performance Studies writing, but an other with which Performance Studies writers tend nonetheless to be familiar - as expert spectator - in practice. My central argument, in brief, is that performance expertise and performance virtuosity have been failed by writing, hence by many performance-theoretical writers - not least when we draw apparently productive metaphors into writing in this contested field.
Metaphors can figure as fancy footwork within discursive turns, hence my interest here in dancing. But I'm going to argue that the widespread use of metaphoric models in performance writing means that writing has turned, turned and turns again, around an excluded other that is a performance expertise and mastery which continues however to drive those of us who continue to go to the theatre or performance event. Each turn serves to mask, and thereby to perpetuate the existence of an absence at the centre of much performance writing in the university:
what is missing is an account of performance mastery, how to identify it as such; how to account for what that mastery makes spectators do, and how to grasp the role of that complex multi-participant mechanism in the
economy of performance production itself. My simple suggestion here will be that it is the historically conditioned habitus of those of us who are writers - that "durably installed generative principle of regulated
improvisations"(78), "laid down in each [of us] by his [or her] earliest upbringing"(81), involving a particular"harmony of ethos and tastes", and particular "dispositions of those whose aspirations and world-view they
express" - that stands in the way of our writerly engagement with performance expertise and mastery as such. I am going to attribute to expert performance-practitioners a difference in habitus, thereby wilfully re-othering them, for the sake of my political argument.
In order to attempt to persuade you of this case, I can't avoid looking back at writing, for the simple reason that looking back at writing is one of the things professional writers in the university tend to do. Our writing is rarely forward-looking or predictive, at least where creative practices are concerned. I am going to suggest again that those of us who are writers need to re-appraise some curious aspects of writing itself, from the perspective of our own professional expertise, as well as reappraising some of the claims that writing makes on its own behalf. But I want also to draw on a rather different field of recently-published research to signal possible future directions for a writing about arts-practitioner expertise. I am going to use the terms 'brain' and 'mind' to signal, respectively, the other and her familiar.
I want to attempt to pose a number of questions today which seem to me to keep coming back in the historically-peculiar context of expert art practices' and practitioners' entry into the higher and research degree context of the UK university. These questions will also inevitably entail a critical review of issues relating to the professional practices of writing and publication in that university context, where it continues to be the case that publishable writing in certain "thetic" registers and projects provides the measure against which other modes of research practice are tested. In order to look forward, since this critical backward-looking can be tiresome, I want in addition to focus on questions relating to new work, under the heading of "eventful articulations", or "chasing angels".
The different writers included here, who come from a number of professional fields, bring together a range of different approaches to and engagements with Rosemary Butcher's work. All have written about that work since the year 2000, and in each case the writing itself can be situated in historical terms (because the work goes on changing). Most of the essays or interviews included are concerned with the relationships between spectating and interpreting aspects of Butcher's work. Most write from the position I myself take up, which is that of the expert spectator-writer. In one case, in place of that spectator-observation, the writer has had access to the performance-making processes and to rehearsal....Overall, these different accounts allow us to obtain a composite picture of an artist still [until July 2016] at work, still changing, still challenging the British art scene. Despite the insight obtained, however, it seems to me that the sense of mystery or difficulty...remains in place.
Wherever the font changes, below, so too did the time of reflection, the observer, as well as the position from which the observation is made. In this chapter, we seek to articulate something of the weave of thought-as-choreographic-action with which this book has sought to engage. Wherever passages are marked “RB”, these are the most intimate reflections on the work in question. At the same time, it should be noted that we are asking the impossible here: that ‘the visual artist’ speak her practice - which, as choreographer/philosopher she has systematically preferred not to.