Performance as Research

Knowledge, methods, impact

Annette Arlander, Bruce Barton, Melanie Dreyer-Lude, Ben Spatz, Annette Arlander, Bruce Barton, Melanie Dreyer-Lude, Ben Spatz

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351654333
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Theatre

Performance as Research (PAR) is characterised by an extraordinary elasticity and interdisciplinary drive. Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact celebrates this energy, bringing together chapters from a wide range of disciplines and eight different countries. This volume focuses explicitly on three critical, often contentious themes that run through much discussion of PaR as a discipline:

• 
  
  

• Knowledge - the areas and manners in which performance can generate knowledge

• 
  
  

• Methods - methods and methodologies for approaching performance as research

• 
  
  

• Impact - a broad understanding of the impact of this form of research

These themes are framed by four essays from the book's editors, contextualising their interrelated conversations, teasing out common threads, and exploring the new questions that the contributions pose to the field of performance. As both an intervention into and extension of current debates, this is a vital collection for any reader concerned with the value and legitimacy of performance as research.

Chapter 1
On PAR

A dialogue about performance-as-research

Jonathan Heron and Baz Kershaw

Preamble: This dialogue is an experiment in deploying performing as a conduit for discovering some critical qualities of process in transdisciplinarity (TD). It forgoes detailed reference to influential writings and projects that established TD, as well as its growing attraction as a conjunction to well-established fields of scholarly and creative investigation in performance (e.g. Nicolescu, 2008; Daniel, 2009). Aiming to privilege the doing of performance, it reports on an experimental launch into an actual field as one way of making a substantive case for the practices of TD. The dialogue then expands its focus to include a consideration of failing and PAR.¹

On ‘meadow meanders’ and transdisciplinarity

JH: On 17 June 2015 we had a symposium event at the University of Warwick² that focussed on your ‘Meadow Meander’ project. I wonder in what ways this project represents how PAR transcends or transgresses forms of knowledge.

BK: First of all, readers need to understand that a Meadow Meander is a path in a field of meadowland (or other grasses and flowers) that is marked out with a grid of posts, and the grid represents the world. Also, that Meadow Meanders are a key part of my broader long-term project called Earthrise Repair Shop, which explores the notions and practices of performance ecology and – to a lesser extent – performance conservation (Kershaw, 2011). The path is modelled on a global ecological system, deliberately kept secret, but it only approximately follows the model. Visitors are told about the modelling, but not what it is based on, unless they are desperate to know. Also, they can’t see the path because the grass is quite long, so from ground level it looks like an untouched field. So ‘meanderers’ start with a lack of knowledge in approaching this particular outdoor artefact, but also with the knowledge that perhaps it is a rough analogue of some global ecological feature. Therefore, the path is not meaningless, it’s not random, although it does weave around and appears not to be going anywhere specific and ends up back where it started. So it’s a meaningless path in one sense but in another sense it’s saturated with meaning. Anyone entering the path has a problem to solve, but hopefully one that’s been framed in a friendly way so that they can try to work out what it might stand for if they’d like to. However, the meandering of the path is at least as important as its ecological analogue, because its apparent aimlessness constitutes a lacuna or gap in experience for the meanderer that is potentially profound.

Immediately the path is about becoming. Deliberately abandoning knowledge, purposefully leaving knowledge behind, is a major way of becoming that isn’t just about thinking, about what we think we know or don’t know, but also about an embodied experience through which something significant that the traveller engages with is undefinable, inaccessible, mysterious, and so on. That’s a first step towards a transdisciplinary experience.

JH: And from my own experience of meandering in the meadow, there is a sense that it privileges movement as much as cognition.

BK: That’s the aim: an immersive experience which puts the walker/traveller/meanderer into a space that is comfortable because you’re not going to get lost if you stay on the path, even though you might be lost as to where you are metaphorically and otherwise, and what that means. But you’re not completely lost because the path takes you only in the direction that it needs to go. At the same time, you are surrounded by the Earth’s environment – it is an outdoor situation after all – that can range from a field of commonplace agricultural grass, through a wildflower meadow in the countryside, to an urban city square or a former graveyard or an ex-airport or any kind of place where an invisible or indistinct pathway can be made. So you’re always surrounded again by other kinds of saturation experiences. Those environments are always more or less rich and the meanders I’ve made tend to be placed deliberately in contextually dense places (Bottoms, 2015), such as a former urban graveyard of the nineteenth century in Leeds (2012) or a major ex-airport of a twentieth-century city in Berlin (2013). You’re surrounded by matters that you might know something about, but you don’t know why you’re on this path and/or why it’s shaped as it is. The knowledge that you’ve got becomes a kind of free-for-all playground because you can shift your attention from one thing to another to anything that’s around you while you’re walking. But you can also simply forget about all that and just immerse yourself and enjoy the walking and the richness of the environment that you are a part of for its own sake. I am suggesting that is a transdisciplinary ‘space’ (or at least a quasi-transdisciplinary space) (see Kershaw and Nicholson, 2011: 6–12).

JH: I would like to stay with that idea of transdisciplinary methods, which we’ll be addressing further in the next section of our dialogue. You’ve described this space as a playground, and in certain forms of play there is a ‘not-yet-knowing’ (Borgdorff, 2012: 194), which I see as an interplay between knowing and a kind of wilful ignorance. So I wonder how this might relate to transdisciplinary research as an alternative form of knowing and how we might encourage play within a research process.

BK: I think you have to start by turning that question on its head in a sense, because the kind of unknowing that you enter into in a transdisciplinary space is radically different than the kind of unknowing or ignorance that any significant research question or hunch might provide for you. From that point of departure the implication, just before you start your research process proper, is that you’ve got a problem that you can’t extract a question from. So therefore you’re stepping into the unknown, unless you decide you know where you’re stepping from as a continuation of historical knowledge. That is clearly not a first step into a potential transdisciplinary space, where you don’t even have those reference points, or even those questions and hunches that you don’t yet know the answers to. The radical difference, I think, is similar to that between your becoming aware of an environmental lacuna – say as produced by a heavy mist or a black hole – and you actually entering into it, being part of or integral to that lacuna. Because in engaging a transdisciplinary space, at least initially, nothing is known for sure. Therefore it’s a very open, flexible, and complex – but also a very common and simple (because apparently empty) – kind of space to explore. Possibly that refracts what Borgdorff calls ‘not-yet-knowing’, which you link to play: a type of non-thing, which practice as researchers might encounter in some kinds of play and improvisation, as you suggest. An embodied, immersive experience, through which your attention has to be totally focussed outwards towards the environment, at least initially, for a large portion of the time.

One paradigm for those processes could be Gregory Bateson’s view that ‘In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored’ (Bateson, 2000/1972: xxiv). That’s a very hard place to define because you’re trying to avoid defining ‘things’; you need to do this in order to discover other ‘things’ that you might never have encountered if you hadn’t entered that kind of ‘non-space’. ‘Wilful ignorance’ might be one way among many to account for transdisciplinary affects/effects, but ‘radical failure’ might account for it even better: ‘Fail again. Fail better’ (Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983: 1).

JH: There seems to be a very important distinction here between multidisciplinarity (where various disciplines contribute to a process without blurring epistemic boundaries), interdisciplinarity (where disciplines still claim to know through an exchange between different disciplines or ways of knowing), and TD, which you’re describing in terms of practical or ludic knowledge, which seems to be a completely different thing.

BK: TD is some sort of awareness of un-knowledge, which is a completely different kind of experience than learning about knowing through multi- or interdisciplinarity, because by definition you can’t define what (or why) it is. Your experience evokes a kind of un-learning, achieved through some sort of deliberate immersion in a state of complete ignorance or, perhaps more accurately, you become involved in an unavoidable lacuna. One’s experience is different if you’re ‘outside’ such un-learning, as with various types of multi/interdisciplinary space, and the knowledge they create can become a prelude to TD. When you first ‘enter’ a transdisciplinary space its inherent lack of definition is an inevitable vector for experiencing its uncanny qualities (Kershaw et al., 2011: 63–85).

JH: This raises some fascinating questions about the terms of engagement between the disciplinary academics and the non-disciplinary artists, and the possibility of being ‘undisciplined’ when we approach our practice (see Halberstam, 2011).

BK: Let’s go back to traditions of theatre to consider that. It’s often relatively easy to say historically what different disciplines are engaged in a particular theatre production and/or building, because in that sort of making you have contrasting knowledge domains which are coordinated in relation to each other and that, perhaps inevitably, creates knowledge. So in the usual situation of theatre you’re not escaping knowledge directly through inter-disciplinarity, at least in the ways that you can in what I’m describing as a radically transdisciplinary space. I say ‘radically’ because in such a space you have no option but to experience it, at least initially, as un-knowledge.

JH: And does this model of TD represent a more ‘sustainable’ approach to knowledge, as has been recently suggested by Robert Frodeman (2014: 7)?

BK: Although you’re in what I’ve been calling a ‘space’ (other metaphors could serve just as well), although you’re in a transdisciplinary domain and you don’t know where (or even what) you are, that transdisciplinary zone is not a vacuum. It’s not entirely empty of, let’s say, ‘things’; it’s potentially full of ‘things’ because you’re still presumably aware of becoming a part of what’s around you (Kershaw, 2009a: 4–5). But you don’t know the reality or the unreality of what you’re in, in the same way as generally one does in–let’s call it ‘everyday life’–because you leave behind normative assumptions. A transdisciplinary space encourages you or causes you to abandon assumptions that you usually make about the nature of what’s around you. Its ‘nature’ is there, still, but you can’t know what its ‘nature’ is without engaging with it interactively or, as I prefer to say, econnectively (Kershaw, 2012: 11).³

This is where you leave knowing behind and enter an environment in which you are freer to shift between thinking (cognition) and not thinking (ignorance, abandoning knowledge). You’re free to move in and out of those modes of becoming, and many others. That then gives you more latitude for how you engage with whatever is around you, which you can do from many different kinds of angles than those that exist in normative, everyday situations where we’re conventionally imbued by ‘knowledge’, even constructed from knowledge. The difference is that in a transdisciplinary space you are entering into a relationship with your surroundings that potentially leaves you more open to what is happening in those surroundings and the forces, energies, and so forth that are circulating there. In this relationship the environment is likely to be influencing you as much as you are influencing it. TD becomes a meta-interactive space and experience where the nature of what’s around you announces itself to you in ways that you haven’t otherwise conceived of, or experienced, before. In other words, the environment becomes in you, as it were, fl owing through you. And also you become part of that environment in unpredictable ways because it is performing you even as you perform it (Kershaw, 2015).⁴

On ‘formless hunches’ and failure-as-resistance

JH: My own PAR project⁵ began with a ‘formless hunch’ (Peter Brook, 1987: 3) rather than the framing of a question. I responded to your definition of PAR as ‘a method and methodology in search of results across disciplines: a collection of transdisciplinary research “tools”’ (Kershaw, 2009a: 5). From this perspective, I conducted practical experiments that crossed disciplinary boundaries (including the arts, humanities, sciences, and philosophy). My PAR therefore engages with theatre practice in order to address experimental performance studies, specifically in relation to TD. While theatre has been one of the greatest resources for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary encounters between the arts and the sciences, as scholars including Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (2006) and Helen Nicholson (2011) have shown, it has also failed to be consistently transdisciplinary. While a significant part of my work has focused on the experimental theatre of Samuel Beckett, Peter Brook, and Joan Littlewood, my broader analysis considered performance practice in relation to the ‘not-yet-knowing’ of artistic research (see Borgdorff, 2012). How does this relate to your own interest in TD?

BK: Your description underlines in various ways the crucial function of indeterminacy in attempts to encounter TD through theatre and performance studies, and even in drama as well. While Peter Brook’s ‘formless hunch’ seems like something akin to intuition or ‘intuitive feeling’, its oxymoronic status works to compromise the more common meanings of ‘hunch’ as a push or nudge toward, say, an entirely undefined encounter. Thus the strengths of theatre as a multi- or interdisciplinary phenomenon – especially as it connects with scientific investigation – become a problem of unsustainable access to transdisciplinarity. The genealogical strengths of theatre historically become a weakness in attempts to completely abandon knowledge and knowing, beyond Borgdorff’s ‘not yet knowing’. For theatre, in almost all its guises, makes the past a burden that it has commonly looked for over its shoulder, so to speak, even as it may aim to totally dispel it. I interpret your primary PAR focus on Beckett as an acknowledgement that he is one of the few theatre makers to strip back the art form to a point of un-disciplinarity, which could well be considered as crucially articulated to TD as a paradoxical shadowing of its profound potentials for ambivalence and indeterminacy.

JH: I found that both performance-as-research and transdisciplinary research enable cultural and epistemological transgressions th...