Volume 9, numéro 1-2, 2023 Performing Practice-Based Research Sous la direction de Peter Dickinson et Ellen Waterman

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In a graduate-level Digital Storytelling course in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, the first project I assign is called a “Collective Experimental Story.” The intention of this project is to introduce students to collaborative storytelling and to explore a platform that enables participatory forms of presentation and co-creation. I enter into this experimental process with students. In Fall 2021, I proposed that the project respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Reading Challenge. From 2008 to 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission produced a report documenting the history and ongoing impacts of the country’s residential school system on First Nations. This report includes 94 Calls to Action, including a call for teachers at all levels to address these histories and their effects in the classroom. Students in my course were excited by this proposal. Over the first seven weeks of the course, we read the report, defined the objective and approach of our project, conducted research and development to identify a suitable platform, and divided tasks. We used Gather Town—an online meeting platform that boasts an old-school pixelated video game interface—to stage a live event. The goal was to share what we had learned and to open space for dialogue. Participants circulated as avatars in our simulated spaces. In this article, four of us who were involved in the project describe our practice-based research process.

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This essay, along with an accompanying podcast, outlines the goals, pedagogy, and implications of the Alchemist Manifesto Podcast’s three-part special series entitled “The Seeds, the Soil and the Cyber Garden.” We argue that podcasting that centres practice-based research can produce heartfelt, communal, and compassionate digital holistic interventions within and beyond the physical spaces of universities and their itinerant knowledge production and distribution. Based on the cross-campus collaboration between CSU Fullerton and CSU Los Angeles in the spring of 2022, we discuss the collaborative pathways generated by working with graduate students Nancy Ocana, Rosa Maldonando, Diana Ponce, Karla Hernandez, Gregory Esparza, Pedro Reyes, Susana Tapia, Felicia Mora, Pedro Martinez, Francisco Najera, Katherine Batanero, and Caroline Romero. Additionally, the essay outlines the series, which features conversations with contributors Roderick Ferguson and Anita Tijerina-Revilla, and our collective efforts to situate podcasting within critical university studies and relational ethnic studies.

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What is the performative force of practice-based pedagogy? Are there common perceptible outcomes of students engaging in practice-based research (PBR) in a learning environment? This essay utilizes an interview-based performance that is part of a course on performance ethnography to propose three observable features of practice-based pedagogy: intimacy, accountability, and reciprocity. In addition to articulating how PBR aligns with critical performance pedagogy and the performative paradigm, the reflection suggests how one approach to teaching performance ethnography may help to illuminate PBR’s broader methodological contributions.

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This article discusses History, Memory, Performance, Place: Activating Davidson’s Submerged Histories, a practice-based course I developed and taught in spring 2020 and spring 2021 at Davidson College, a small liberal arts college twenty miles north of Charlotte, NC, established in 1837 by white slave owners. Drawing together dance, performance studies, and Black studies methodologies, the class centred the body through both practice-based research and critical engagements with power, history, and legacies of white supremacy on campus. Coalescing these three fields amplifies multifaceted practice-based research approaches to antiracist reflective and body-based engagements with history, place, and self. In the class, I brought together embodied creative modalities with archival, historiographic, place-based, theoretical, and dialogic approaches to knowledge production. I facilitated student development of practice-based research projects invested in building new and ongoing relationships to Davidson College’s violent history and its pervasive continuities felt by members of the community in the present. This article considers how practice-based research can be integrated into critical performance pedagogies to contribute to campus historical reckoning projects. Outlining the course methods and integrating student reflections and projects, the article discusses how a process-oriented conception of performance, combined with a “counter-memorial” approach to pedagogy and practice, can underscore ongoing embodied work required to address what one student defined as “plantation energy” on campus.

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Three letters to a small pine tree written as part of an online performance in October 2020 are compiled and edited into a video essay, with reflective and explanatory commentaries inserted after each letter. The video essay serves as an example of how PAR (performance as research) methodologies can “challenge the epistemological assumptions concerning the concept of research” and how they can “reinvigorate academic conventions” of presenting research results in conferences and publications. The most relevant question is whether performance practices, such as writing letters to trees next to the trees, can serve as an aid for an academic as well as an art audience to focus their attention on trees and other beings with whom we share this world.

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Does a performance-based film as a creative artifact contribute new knowledge on the topics it adresses partly through its practice and outcomes? The focus of this article is on the performance-based film project STRATA. Under the direction of artist duo Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes (VestAndPage), STRATA brings together artists, performers, scholars, and researchers from the humanities and social sciences through collaborations and interdisciplinary processes. Locations featured in the film include the Swabian Jura caves in Germany, which were used for shelter by Ice Age humans forty thousand years ago. VestAndPage intend to open up a contemporary discourse on the past by engaging performing artists as they confront the concept of deep time and layers of memory in human history. They investigate the human body as a site that exists in continuity with the geological, rather than cut away from it, undertaking site-specific/site-responsive performances within caves and grottos. Working from the a priori assumption that everything in the world is interconnected and coexists with its environment, they take ecological thinking as an entry point to enliven an emerging corporeal epistemology to inform a more holistic and multicultural perspective. In the article, the authors attempt to trace continuities between their research activity on performance, filmmaking, sound and light design practices, and the methodological differences between practice-based research in moving images and academic research in film and image studies. They recount the evolution of their thinking, sensations experienced, practice-based artistic research, and working methods, which draw largely upon phenomenology and heuristic processes.

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This article discusses a research-creation process by three interdisciplinary artists who worked across hearing and deaf experience to reorient aurality in musicking through a process of inter-sensorial exploration. For most musicians listening is unquestionably oriented to the sensory regime of aurality. Increasingly, however, this orientation is being challenged through haptic, kinetic, and visual musicking by deaf musicians, and this inspired hearing flutist and vocalist Ellen Waterman to reorient the role of audition in her improvisational practice. In dialogue with multisensory performance artists and critical theorists Paula Bath (hearing) and Tiphaine Girault (deaf), Waterman embarked on a research-creation project to create Bodily Listening in Place, an instructional score for intersensory improvisation. We discuss our iterative and multi-model practice-based research process, which involved the exchange of sonic, haptic, kinetic, linguistic, and graphic media in response to bodies in place. Photographs, sound, and video examples further explain our process. As is well documented in the anthropology of the senses (Howes), sensory perception is constructed and lived differently in different periods and societies, reflecting the diversity through which people perceive and understand their environments. We argue that, through an expanded conception of listening as attentiveness (Hahn; Oliveros), we can move beyond current normative notions of aurality to develop a broader, intersensory awareness and conception of musicking. Such expanded listening affords a means to further establish the links between people, their histories, experiences, senses of place, and environments.

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An audio essay considering the act of recording, of editing, of the moment and the ways in which they entangle with each other. A proposal of a methodology for listening to the story of the sound around and within us, through the practice of field recording and the myriad ways we might consider the archive, the preferences at play, and the processes we use to extract meaning in field recording practice.

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Weaving occurs as a central theme in my work, as aesthetic motif as well as conceptual frame. In this article, I discuss the “weaving” that forms my approach to artistic research. As artistic research methodology, weaving enacts the generative and relation qualities of feminist epistemologies, through which I locate my own practice, both topically, as a study of emotion and technology, as well as methodologically and politically as invested in feminist approaches to cultural objects and to the knowledge processes that render them meaningful. Through a discussion of my own artistic practice, I demonstrate how weaving operates as an artistic research process that captures the intertwining of academic and creative practice. I argue that it is through the twinned strength and friction of weaving that artistic research creates epistemological possibilities. Weaving is a concept that holds the possibility of multiple threads and thus implies the strength and frictions of things—different contexts, people or concepts—brought together. Weaving is a generative process, a process that creates new totalities through relation while maintaining the discrete identities of the same threads that bind it together.

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This photo essay gathers evidence of the video works Postmemory: Fragments and Postmemory: Crypt, which ran from June 27 to August 4, 2022, at Holocaust Centre North at the University of Huddersfield in northern England. Included here are photographs from the video works and their installation, as well as the complete exhibition program. In an accompanying statement, Spatz positions this work within the broader Judaica project, an extended investigation of contemporary jewish identity developed over the past decade, and in relation to the four themes suggested by the editors of this special issue: ethics, knowledge, affect, and power.

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This essay explores the author’s process of trying to understand how to responsibly forge a relationship with traditional song heritage given conditions of ethnocultural rupture. Weaving together Slovácko folk songs transcribed by the author’s great-grandfather, an archival recording of the author’s grandfather, audio/video documents of her own embodied performance, dreams, folk tales, and analysis, the piece meditates on the many facets of “living song” (živá píseň). The author explores her process of learning how to approach the life of song, and how songs might be cared for. The performance of practice-based research is posited as a means to confront and dismantle patriarchal white supremacy within one’s body and spirit, thereby making possible the recovery of exiled strands of self and the forging of ancestral connections.

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This essay investigates the negative consequences of higher education’s ableist obsession with individualism, objectivity, and results, positing practice-based research as a powerful crip alternative to traditional academic models. While traditional models of scholarship aim to separate knowledge from the body that created it, practice-based research locates the body as the source of wisdom, a source to be recognized and celebrated. This essay makes legible the messy bodily experience I had during its writing and intertwines it with an explanation of the autoethnographic research process I undertook to better understand my disabled embodied self during a multi-year creative research process. I situate my experience creating "Awaiting Tiresias" within a tradition of disabled scholar-artist-activists who seek to create time and space for themselves within higher ed. Alison Kafer defines this experience in Feminist, Queer, Crip as reimagining “notions of what can and should happen in time” and “bend[ing] the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” (27). Indeed, crip scholarship prioritizes the health of those who engage in it and the transformations that occur through the research and dissemination process instead of results. This essay argues that through its commitment to challenging assumptions, participating in ongoing and collaborative research methods, and recognizing the central role of the researcher’s body in the research process, practice-based research serves as a crip intervention in ableist scholarship practices.

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How are “hunch” and “intuition” passed on, and what kinds of knowledge are they? This essay examines Dancing Grandmothers (2011), a contemporary dance piece by Eun-me Ahn Dance Company, to study the piece’s production and transmission of embodied knowledge. The work’s dramaturgy of imperfection foregrounds makchum (random dance) as an important site of knowledge. The raw aesthetic of makchum revives the connection with the physical unconscious by decolonizing cognitive and embodied knowledge. I borrow from Ben Spatz’s epistemology of embodiment to analyze the “amateur” dance portion of Dancing Grandmothers, a section of the work that goes on stage without a rehearsal, and its invitation for the audience members to respond in embodied listening. Dancing Grandmothers is a form of decolonizing from within, where knowledge shifts mainly through remapping the perceptual rhetoric. It attempts to let the bodies speak for themselves, in equal authority with the dancers who co-create the piece. On top of contributing to a cognitive turn, the joy of dancing central to the performance conveys that animation, vitality, and revival are essential parts of knowledge, generating new energies by stimulating the senses.

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A community-based project, the Participatory Creative Music Hub (the Hub) was developed by the Canadian New Music Network (CNMN) to research, create, and distribute an online resource to inspire creativity in music and sound for all. In addition to inspiring people of many backgrounds to create their own music, the process of building and sharing the Hub has helped to develop a sense of community among diverse creative practitioners across Canada. In doing so, it has raised questions about both the aesthetic and social values of music. In recent years, on an organizational level, CNMN’s focus and scope has transitioned from a primarily industry-focused network dedicated to building professional networks and opportunities to an outward-looking, knowledge- and resource-sharing network actively cultivating a more inclusive member base and connecting with other sectors. The Hub is one of the CNMN’s recent initiatives that is working to redefine the place of music in Canadian society and shift ideas around who can and does make New Music across Canada, and where, how and why people make music. In this article, we propose that the Hub also performs socially engaged practice-based research that models an expanded imaginary for creative music and sound in contemporary Canadian society.

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This article brings together two perspectives on the field of creative technologies and explores its place in practice-based research. Case studies are drawn from maker culture projects, pedagogical work in developing creative technologies programs in tertiary institutions, and socially engaged art projects taking up creative technologies methodologies. The article also contains an embedded research instructable, with prompts for engaging with communities, arts institutions, and industry. This article shares hopes for creative technologies as a form of practice-based research that can disrupt exclusive art and research cultures to make room for difference and value diverse kinds of innovation.

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Practice-based research that meaningfully engages with very young children (ages eighteen months to five years) as co-researchers presents wonderful opportunities to co-imagine possibilities together, but it also presents challenges related to communication, a democratic process, and children’s agency. In this article, we discuss how The Urban Wildlife Project uses Flight: Alberta’s Early Learning and Care Framework to help our creative team have a relationship-centred process. We discuss how Flight’s core values of play and playfulness inform our process, how Flight’s “Cycle of Co-Inquiry” and emphasis on understanding children’s meaning-making honours children as citizens, and how several key concepts--including “co-,” a specific conception of children and childhood, play and play-informed meaning-making, and making magic--enable us to include very young children as co-researchers in our co-creation and co-imagination practices.  To illuminate how the process works, we offer two examples of how we are using Flight to inform our practice-based research processes with the early years demographic, and to create meaningful immersive theatre experiences for all participants.

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Working with popular street cultures in the Global South offers scope for practice-based research (PBR) to go beyond its application with creative practitioners in the galleries and theatres of the Global North. We start from an account of a “reasoning session” with reggae sound system owners, selectors, and engineers staged as a PBR event in Kingston, Jamaica. Such popular music cultures across the Global South have their own specialist apparatus for playing recorded music and—most important for a PBR investigation—their own embodied, situated, and tacit knowledge systems. These include the sophisticated arts of selecting music, tuning up a sound system, and the value of the culture for the communities from which they originate, as well as strategies for current challenges, such as police harassment and lack of government recognition or support. Accessing such grassroots knowledge systems requires not only a good rapport with local practitioners but also close cooperation with their own organizations and with local university researchers. Such PBR also demands sharing research findings—for example, by screening the documentary film we made of the reasoning session for its participant. It is concluded that practitioners’ ways of knowing as revealed by PBR can help challenge conventional ideas about the nature of knowledge itself.

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Documenting practice as research is a graphic attempt to carry the materiality of practice to an audience, while articulating focuses on communicating the practice in language generic to academic research. The former holds a promise of opening the field to what has not been discursively recognized, by sociosituated people presencing unseen, unheard, obscured, erased ways of living and valuing. The latter is already on sociocultural ground. Which one we use is a critical choice: to articulate to a wider audience, or to engage through documenting with a usually much smaller group of people who will collaborate on being with a not-known materiality.

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One of the practice-based research methods that excites me the most today is to work with writing as a practice, and as a practice-based research method. The technology of writing can be very misleading, especially when that writing is typed using a word processing program. When using this tool, writing looks the same whether it represents a stream of consciousness, a first draft, or a final proof. Because of this, I have found that I hold myself to the standard of the final version, which of course completely freezes me up. If we are always aiming for the final version, there is not much room for thinking, making errors, going sideways and backward and forward again. There is only the guaranteed feeling of failure.

In response, graphic designer Juliette Bellocq and I have developed a set of writing exercises that address these two limitations, as I have come to know writing from my training as an academic. In this piece, we share our exercise, 1,000 Ways Home. It is a non-linear process of thinking and writing. It also offers the alchemy of communicating in the presence of another person who pays close attention. We call our process speak-to-write.

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A manifesto for practice (or, how practice animates thought, and thought practices).

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Livestreaming as research-creation for music studies introduced students to research-creation and the felt experience of extralinguistic concepts. As a way of both rethinking the divide between musicology and music performance and engaging in much needed critical reflection on how music teaching has always been done, research-creation in audiovision creates a laboratory for extralinguistic musicology. By connecting research-creation literature with practical training in the production of audiovision music studies, dominant image of thought emerges and a new machinic image of thought is introduced. If music studies is to find its way beyond the disciplinarity of inherited models, it will do so along with a wider engagement in a diversity of what it means to teach and what it means to do research. This is, at its core, a question of what image of thought will be allowed.

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This article is a short reflection on practice-based research from the core of practice, which includes a list of recent research hubs in Canada.

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This article looks at artistic research from an Australian perspective, with an emphasis on the role professional doctorates have played in developing this field. In 2017, I co-wrote "Two Decades of Artistic Research: The Antipodal Experience," which examined the state of artistic research in Australia at that time. Six years later, revisiting this body of work, I am reminded of how important the training of doctoral candidates is to the expansion and maturation of artistic research. In this writing, I share some best practice theses from the discipline of music, and share some of the tensions and successes in how universities measure creative research output.

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This article is an exploration of the ideas galvanizing our practice-based research. Structured as a dialogue between a director, sound designer and lighting designer, this piece explores how the nexus of queerness, affect and performance informs each of our specialist areas. We articulate how affect and queer theories drive our individual enquiries and use our experience of working together on the Australian premiere production of Lachlan Philpott’s promiscuous/cities to consider the relationships between our disciplines. We focus on moments of transition—common components of any theatre piece—as a way of interrogating how this interdisciplinary dialogue works within the development of the work and performance outcomes. Throughout this dialogue, we ask what the state of transition does for each of us when we make or see a piece of work—whether this be an experience of temporal instability, a rhythmic movement into a new state or a form of punctuation—and we consider how we can approach affect and queer thinking through these transitional moments. These moments of possibility are what excite us and push us to consider the potential of our individual practices through the experience of collaborative performance-making.

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In this forum piece, I explore the potential of listening as a performative act by focusing on the experiences and skills essential to the practice of DJing. I find the field of remix studies a fruitful arena to expand and explore the possibilities of music studies beyond the silos of contemporary musical analysis and scholarship.

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In this contribution to the forum on Practice-Based Research (PBR), the author reflects on PBR "moves" throughout her career, identifying three moments when she could feel her practice change, in very personal and embodied ways. She reflects on the "personal turns" and the unanticipated methods and information that emerged.

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In this forum article, I begin to contour the triad of partly overlapping ethical spheres that I operate within when crossing practice-based and empirical research in the performing arts. I also begin to suggest a few approaches that may help me and others navigate these spheres. The ethical spheres I contour are (1) situational and relational ethics; (2) equity, diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility (EDIA); and (3) institutional ethics protocols. This triad is, furthermore, considered with reference to an ethically complex research program titled “strengths-based dramaturgies of accessibility in the performing arts.”

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In this short piece, I start to tease out the challenges of examining a field of performance that, in theory, deeply understands place but has insufficiently faced the impacts of climate coloniality on place, in part due to the fact that the field has largely been defined and developed by white researchers in the Global North. Specifically, by looking at a recent project called VINES, initiated by me and Brandy Leary, I dig into the site performance field’s investment in workshop-oriented practice-based research to consider what it might mean to intersect posthumanist research methodologies with Indigenous methodologies that emphasize relationality, reciprocity, and accountability.

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The Seventh Fire is an immersive audio performance that sources traditional, oral Anishinaabe stories and societal roles as a way to evoke ceremony in the everyday. I use the experience of creating this new form and premiering this work as an opportunity to reflect on principles of reciprocity that underscore and infuse any practice-based inquiry, as well as propose some necessary structures of care to support these principles.

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With widespread global lockdowns in our recent collective memory, we know what it is like to be isolated from one another and what it might mean for shared touch or breath to be forbidden. In a violent political climate, still feeling the aftershocks from the COVID-19 pandemic, how might we reassess what intimacy can look like? Attending to mass loss and grief, I turn to the work of queer, contemporary artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres to consider to how the sensorial and material coincide with individual and collective affect. Moving through essay and interview forms, this piece looks at Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s first solo exhibition in Canada, Summer/Winter, curated by Rui Mateus Amaral at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto in 2022. This timely exhibition began as Summer, but as time progressed, the show transitioned into Winter, altering the composition of many of the installation artworks. In conversation with Amaral, we explore interpretive possibilities, curatorial practices, transitional tensions, significance of place, and life-affirming grief present in the show. Amaral’s curatorial choreography considers how spectators orient themselves in relation to the artworks and, in turn, how they might reorient themselves towards one another and the world outside of the museum walls. Through theoretical vignettes, in conversation queer of color theorists and performance scholars, this piece explores the generative possibilities of loss in Gonzalez-Torres’s work and how we might turn to the past to imagine more kind and pleasurable futures in the present. By engaging deeply with Gonzalez-Torres’s artwork and Amaral’s curation, this piece thinks through the affective, choreographic, political, and relational registers of Summer/Winter to envision otherwise possibilities for how to care for one another.