Playbuilding as Qualitative Research

A Participatory Arts-Based Approach

Joe Norris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781598744767
• eBook ISBN: 9781315422473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is for both art-based researchers and research-informed artists, exploring the theatrical genre known as Collective Creation, or Playbuilding. Performers generate data around chosen topics— from addiction and sexuality to qualitative research—by compiling scenes from their disparate voices. Audience members become involved in the investigation, and the performed scenes do not end the conversation but challenge and extend it. Through discussion and audience participation, the process examines how knowledge is defined and how data is mediated.

15PART I

The Background

In the recent past, narrative construction has burgeoned, with researchers in the field of education experimenting with a variety of literary genres for plotting their data (Barone, 2007, p. 458). The history of qualitative research has been a short one, and the use of arts-based and narrative approaches even shorter. Although many advances have been made since the late 1970s, there still seems to be a need to justify why qualitative research is a legitimate approach to understanding our social world and to articulating those understandings to others. Perhaps that will always be the case, since many researchers take a postmodern approach (Giroux, 1991) to acknowledging the frame (Goffman, 1974) that underpins the research. As Janesick claims, “Qualitative researchers have the obligation to fully describe their theoretical postures at all stages of the research process, just as the choreographer fully describes and explains each component of a dance plan” (2004, p. 8). Part I is a description of the frame.

Chapter 1 questions the distinction between fact and fiction using literacy theory and qualitative research epistemology to challenge the false dichotomy of empirical and speculative approaches. Using Richardson’s 16(1990) claim that all research endeavors are constructed narratives differing in belief, styles, and forms, the chapter builds an argument for why the creation and the performance of plays on a given topic should be considered a genre of qualitative research.

Chapter 2 provides a thorough description of the methods used to generate data, how such data is treated, and the theatrical approaches used to disseminate such research, usually with a live audience, who engage with the researchers in a reconceptualization (Pinar, 2000) of the data presented. Although this chapter contains many details, they are provided more as a buffet than a prescriptive recipe. Researchers are encouraged to adapt as needed.

Chapter 3 provides my personal history with the method: (1) using Playbuilding as a theatrical genre with junior high students; (2) then moving to researching the theatrical approach as the topic of my doctoral dissertation; (3) employing this approach as a teaching tool with groups of university students who, with me, founded Mirror Theatre; (4) coming to the realization that the approach was a form of arts-based research; and (5) integrating theater and research approaches into a Playbuilding methodology. It is also a story of collaboration, as graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, staff, and members of the community participated in devising scripts that explored the human condition. The collaboration extends further into the community as partnerships are formed with a number of social agencies that wish to employ Playbuilding as a pedagogical approach to meet their mandates. Chapter 3 articulates my growth with the methodology over a 29-year period.

Part I articulates the epistemological, theatrical, and methodological features on which Playbuilding was built by providing my history with the methodology.

17CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Toward a Theory of Playbuilding as Research

CAPOTE: On the night of November 14, two men broke into a quiet farmhouse in Kansas and murdered an entire family. Why did they do that? It’s been suggested that this subject is tawdry—it’s not worthy of literature. I disagree. Two worlds exist in this country—the quiet conservative life, and the life of those two men—the underbelly, the criminally violent. Those worlds converged that bloody night. I spent the past three months interviewing everyone in Kansas touched by that violence. I spent hours talking to the killers—and I’ll spend more. Researching this work has changed my life, altered my point of view about almost everything. I think those who read it will be similarly affected. Such a book can only be written by a journalist who has mastered the techniques of fiction. (Futterman, 2006, pp. 45–46)

18Fiction and Research

Could In Cold Blood (Capote, 1965) also be considered a qualitative research project? Does it possess the necessary rigor of data saturation, an in-depth data analysis, enough thick description, and a cogent understanding of the lived-word of its participants? Clearly it does not have an extensive literature review, an explicit articulation of themes, indexing, and conclusions for future practice. But need it be thought of as qualitative research? Like phenomenology, it records the lived-experiences of others, and like biographical and autobiographical studies, it is a “truthful fiction” (Denzin, 1989, p. 23).

In Cold Blood falls under the classification of nonfiction novel (Koski, 1999) or literary nonfiction (Anderson, 1989) that blurs the distinction between fiction and journalism. Research has been conducted, systematically organized, and written in a narrative style. Applegate defines this genre as literary journalism, “a form of writing that combines the literary writing of fiction with the journalistic techniques of nonfiction” (1996, p. xi). The novel represents the lived-world of actual people.

Such writing is not uncommon. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) was based on his militia experiences in Spain during its civil war. Away All Boats (Dodson, 1956) was based on his experiences aboard the U.S.S. Pierce and fictionalized as the U.S.S. Belinda. The movie version of the same name took on a pedagogical purpose, since it was used for naval officer training. Up the Down Staircase (1964), written as a teacher’s journal, records the experiences of a beginning teacher. Its author, Bel Kaufman, drew on her own teaching experiences. Unlike the others who drew on their personal experiences, Arthur Hailey undertook extensive research of the automobile industry before writing his novel, Wheels (1971). Writers, directors, actors, and other production crew undertook extensive research in order to realistically create the film I Am Sam (Johnson and Nelson, 2002). Costumes, set, mannerisms, and dialogue were based on actual people and settings. The cast of The Farm Show (Theatre Passe Muraille, 1967), a Collective Creation (Canadian version of Playbuilding), visited the homesteads of Clinton, Ontario, and devised a play about that community. Literature, film, and theater have a long history of employing empirical data, and when they do so, they can be considered forms of “research-informed arts.” Although they employ literary styles unique to their genres and take artistic license, they also maintain a high degree of loyalty to the actual.

“Arts-based research” has a shorter history than does literary journalism. Geertz noted:

In the social sciences, or at least in those that have abandoned the reductionist conception of what they are about, the analogies are coming more and more from contrivances of cultural 19performance than from those of physical manipulation—from theatre, painting, grammar, literature, law, play. (1983, p. 22)

Although he encourages the blurring of genres and the move to interdisciplinary research enterprises, he recognizes that such interdisciplinary work is no easy feat. Each discipline has its own set of canons, and hybridization can be held suspect.

But my point is that some of those fit to judge work of this kind ought to be humanists who reputedly know something about what theater and mimesis and rhetoric are, and not just with respect to my work but to that of the whole steadily broadening stream of social analyses in which the drama analogy is, in one form or another, governing. At a time when social scientists are chattering about actors, scenes, plots, performances, and personae, and humanists are mumbling about motives, authority, persuasion, exchange, and hierarchy, the line between the two, however comforting to the puritan on the one side and the cavalier on the other, seems uncertain indeed. (p. 30)

It is as if one must completely please two disparate parents.

Barone notes that the social science community blurs the distinction between science and art, claiming that “scientific texts are as open to interpretation as literary texts” (1995, p. 171). Banks and Banks believe that fiction should not be considered the antithesis of truth.

The opposite of fact isn’t fiction but something like error. The opposite of fiction isn’t truth but something like objectivity or actuality. Any genre or piece of writing that claims to be objective, to represent the actual, is a writing that denies its own existence, as David Lock said. In other words, no text is free of self-conscious constructions: no text can act as a mirror to the actual . . . . The imposition of fiction into the divide between fact and error doesn’t negate the possibility of a real world: all it does is recognize the impossibility for others to be objective (1998, p. 13)

Consequently, theater, fiction, poetry, film, music, dance, and the visual arts that are grounded in reality should be considered empirical. Denzin recognizes that, since narrative research comes from a particular stance, it is, at best, a biased distortion. He calls stories and biographies “truthful fictions” (1989, p. 23). Richardson goes further, claiming that all research takes a narrative stance, albeit using different styles.

Whenever we write science, we are telling some kind of story, or some part of a larger narrative. Some of our stories are more 20complex, more densely described, and offer greater opportunities as emancipatory documents; others are more abstract, distanced from lived experience, and reinscribe existent hegemonies. Even when we think we are not telling a story, we are, at the very least, embedding our research in a metanarrative, about, for example, how science progresses or how art is accomplished (Lyotard, 1979). Even the shape of the conventional research report reveals a narratively driven subtext: theory (literature review) is the past or the (researcher’s) cause for the present study (the hypothesis being tested), which will lead to the future-findings and implications (for the researcher, the researched, and science). Narrative structures, therefore, are preoperative regardless of whether one is writing primarily in the narrative or logico-scientific mode. (1990, p. 13)

The employment of the arts in research is therefore a question of style. Yes, each medium carries its own message (McLuhan, 1967), but to some degree the issue is more one of semiotics (Eco, 1976) and framing (Goffman, 1974) than of epistemology. Stories that reduce data to abstract definitions are of a different genre than those that display the particular. Neither should be hegemonic.

Barone takes a more ameliorative and perhaps more pragmatic stance. Rather than entering into the art/science debate, claiming the status of arts-based research as a social science, he does insist that “arts-based” is research. “While I decline to fight in the ‘paradigm wars’ to claim the title of science for arts-based educational inquiry, I will enter the struggle to demand the legitimation of educational storytelling of all sorts as research” (1995, p. 177).

The acceptance of the status of the arts as research is ongoing. Obtaining even the tenuous legitimacy held by literary journalism has not been easy. As late as 1997, Eisner, a pioneer in arts-based research, building on the optimistic “promise” of Geertz, argues for its place in the academy by tracing its roots and examining both its promises and perils. He outlines the advantages of arts-based approaches claiming that they:

(a) shape experience and . . . enlarge understanding. Whether you use a story, create a film, employ a diagram, or construct a chart, what such tools have in common is the purpose of illuminating rather than obscuring the message . . . . (b) provide a sense of particularity that abstractions cannot render . . . (c) “productive ambiguity.” By productive ambiguity, I mean that the material presented is more evocative than denotative, and, in its evocation, it generates insight and invites attention to complexity . . . . (d) increase the variety of questions that we can ask, . . . and (e) allow us to exploit 21individual aptitudes. Neither the literal nor the quantitative are [sic] everybody’s cup of tea. (Eisner, 1997, p. 8)

He concludes by inviting us to go to the edges, a better vantage point to see the stars and the seas.

Arts-Based Research

Saks (1996) moves to the specific, asking whether novels could be accepted as dissertations, a question debated at more than one American Educational Research Association’s Annual Meeting. Dunlop (1999) and Sameshima (2006) pragmatically addressed the challenge by having their novels accepted as dissertations at the University of British Columbia. Both were subsequently published (Dunlop, 1999; Sameshima, 2007). The nonfiction novel is a recent genre in the research community.

In addition to the novel, theater and other performing arts have made similar gains in the research community. Mienczakowski’s study of health workers and clients in a detoxification unit produced data that was represented in theatrical form. The participants validated the performance through preperformance observations of the play. The performance, Busting, “adapted verbatim accounts of informants into an authentic, validated, polyphonic narrative that expressed informant agendas of concern in their own words” (1995, p. 361). Portions of Meyer’s research on principals (2009) were scripts, which were performed as part of his doctoral work. Bagley and Cancienne (2002), Blumenfeld-Jones (2002), and Snowber (2002) suggest “dancing the data.” Saldaña (2005) has amassed a collection of studies that he calls “ethnodrama.” He has compiled eight studies that dramatize the data. In all these cases, data was traditionally generated and translated into an “alternative form of representation” (Eisner, 1997). Although the scripts can be read like a nonfiction novel, they are written so that they can be performed.

Playbuilding as Research

Although Playbuilding shares similar epistemological underpinnings with the nonfiction novel and with ethnodrama, it is different in both process and intent. First, the intent is not to report findings but to provide evocative texts (Barone, 1990) that invite live audiences to engage in discussion for the mutual learning of all. Through audience participation, it takes both a democratic and pedagogical approach. It “dialogically inserts itself into the world, provoking conflict, curiosity, criticism, and reflection” (Denzin, 2003, p. 261). Second, its method does not follow a customary format. Traditionally, the research process is divided into three distinct, 22albeit overlapping, acts. First, is data collection (generation), followed by data analysis (interpretation), and concluded with dissemination (performance). Such is the case with ethnodrama, where data is traditionally collected, analyzed, and then disseminated through an “alternative” form of representation. With Playbuilding, data is generated and interpreted in a different manner, and, at times, these three phases are simultaneous.

The Method

Although this chapter focuses on the theories that underpin Playbuilding, it first provides a short description of the method, so that the abstract conversation can be connected to concrete experiences. Chapter 2 discusses the method in detail, and Chapter 3 provides a history of Mirror Theatre that supplies a context for the research. Some readers may find it useful to first read one of the script chapters (Chapters 4 through 14) to obtain an understanding of the theatrical research process that is being discussed.

PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH In Playbuilding, as in a focus group or a “collective memory group” (Lesko, Simmons, and Quarshie, 2008), a team of actors/researchers/teachers (A/R/Tors) (Irwin and de Cosson [2004] use a similar term, a/r/tographers to define those who work in any of the arts) are assembled to discuss a topic of mutual concern. The topics are endless, but most often they focus on a specific social issue, such as prejudice, bullying, equality, and respect, conflict resolution, gender politics, or human sexuality. However, unlike most focus groups in which the participants consider themselves solely as data sources, with Playbuilding, they are collaborators who play an active role in the writing and the performing of the data.

The first meeting/rehearsal typically begins with the question, “Why are you here?” Some are interested in the topic; some enjoy this genre of theater; and others are just...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• PART I The Background
• PART II The Scripting
• PART III The Performance Workshop
• Appendix A
• References
• Index
• About the Author