A cautionary note or two, amid the pleasures and pains of participation in performance-making as research.

What do we understand expertise in the creative and performing arts to mean, when a concern we share here is "creative" research in the HE context? What is the "knowledge status" of expertise, in higher education set-ups in which research is more widely understood to involve publishable writing in certain complex registers? What is the epistemic status of expert-creative decision-making processes in performance-making, when making processes tend to be invisible as such to (expert) spectating, and when the expert-intuitive processing that I argue is constitutive to the making, tends to be rapidly modulated in terms of the equally constitutive logics of expert production? In this presentation I ask whether "posthuman" practice-theoretical writers, on the one hand, and modes of enquiry associated with speculative pragmatism, on the other, might not have something to contribute to this discipline-specific enquiry into performance-making processes

Running in circles, with “music” in mind

What might be some of the implications—for practitioner research into composition, music-making, and performance—of my dogged insistence over the past decade that expert-intuitive process is a vital knowledge practice in art-making? I am aware that some readers, researchers, students, and art-makers might find that observation itself, and/or some of its parts, not only taxing but irrele-vant to her or his own practices and objectives. Some of the terms included in my observation can seem rebarbative, especially to creative practitioners: Why this insistence on “expert,” as in “expert-intuitive”? What should be made of my unadulterated use of the verb “to be”—described by others as “ontologising” (see, for example, Osborne 2000), or to assert existence or being (in place of perception, hypothesis, argument)? And what of “knowledge practice” (or epistemics) when surely what many artists are more concerned with is creativity? Finally, why this insistence on the intuitive—or rather the hyphenated "expert-intuitive”— when research into the nominalised “intuition,” at least, in the late twentieth century, has revealed that uses of the term tend to bring into play notions that are judged to be prejudicial to the pursuit of a reasoned, systematic, and rigorous research undertaking (upon which many judgements of research “quality” and “value” are based)

Still harping on (about expert practitioner-centred modes of knowledge and models of intelligibility)

My presentation starts from a number of practical questions, each of which, if we unpack it, brings with it a number of theoretical perspectives, issues and enquiries. One such question has a precise empirical focus, which is how to establish a digital archive, working with the practitioner herself, in the case of thirty years of Rosemary Butcher’s making new ‘choreographic’ work, where a complication is added, which is that the practitioner herself continues 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 positionequite explicitly in the context of performing arts practice-led-research (and generously funded in large part by the AHRC). My own research has focused in recent years on the question of expert practitioner-specific modes of knowledge and models of intelligibility, on performance-making processes as distinct from the practices of spectating, and on the issue of what might be called the ‘signature practices’ of the expert practitioner. Against this backdrop, a further set of questions is bound up with the issue of digital archive production. First, how might we identify, document and archive disciplinary specificity, in performance-making practices, as distinct from the practices of expert spectating, upon which much performance-documentation tends to be modelled? What is at stake in this question is the issue of the university’s failure, over recent decades, to engage theoretically with disciplinary specificity as such, in contrast with the widely preferred and marketable ‘interdisciplinarity’. Second, what are the identifiers of signature practice, in the named expert practitioner, when and where do they emerge, and can they be/how might they be documented? Third, what constitutes performance-making expertise and is it the case, as I sense that it might be, that we know it when we see it, in the university, rather better than we know how to instruct others to identify it? The expression ‘as I sense it might be’, that I have just used, signals the tentative and speculative nature of my own enquiry and expertise here, and I am flagging up, in case there are any ‘hard-edge’ e-scientists amongst us, the wholly fuzzy nature of my certainties. I am setting up the formula, ‘as I sense that it might be’, to represent a major model of intelligibility that is central to the ways of knowing in this particular field of practice

Just intuitive.

One of the key issues in higher degree performance-as-research projects is the nature of academic writing itself - as a major mode of 'documentation' of research practices - and how to acquire it if you have been trained in performance-making rather than writing-productive practices. My first point today relates to the question of mastering research-writing register/s in the context of expert practices. A second key issue concerns the status of expert performance-making practices in that same higher degree context. In arguing that, within the university context, we might usefully approach these as epistemic practices, which operate in terms of a range of different imperatives, I am attempting to signal that the tenacious old "theory vs practice" divide is non-productive - and avoidable - in practice-as-research contexts. But we need to begin saying so, providing the appropriate argument. My third point will be that we need to begin to identify, in writing, how expert practitioners work, as distinct from producing spectator-based interpretations of that work. I am proposing that expert performance-making practices tend to work, to a significant degree, at a particular interface, where the operations of expert intuition meet the operations specific to the logics of performance-production

Positive negatives: or the subtle arts of compromise

How slippery a term 'collaboration' is. Definitions aplenty tend to return to the notion of 'working together' (or 'co-working'), and on this sort of basis we should be able to conclude that in all performance-making collaborations are vital because performance tends to involve the input of a wide range of practitioners, working together. Amongst these practitioners we can list stage, sound and lighting designers, stage manager and many others who work alongside both performers and-in general terms-a lead decision-maker. Does this model fit widespread understandings of the meaning of the terms collaboration or 'Collaborative Theatre' ? The lead decision-maker might be the stage director or choreographer, familiar to many performance-making traditions, or might equally be one key member of a performance collective-as is the case of the long-established and internationally-renowned UK company Forced Entertainment and key decision-maker Tim Etchells, and, in theory at least, the Théâtre du Soleil, Paris, and the central decision-making role of Ariane Mnouchkine. However, few of the chapters included in this collection seem to be concerned with collaborations viewed from this default perspective. Instead, collaborative performance-making in many of these chapters seems to assume the status of a particular genre or mode of performance-making

Chasing expertise: reappraising the role of intuitive process in creative decisionmaking

What are some of the implications for the ways we think about contemporary dance-making, today, if we start from the premise that while art-making is a mode of work, expertise in that mode of work is rarely thematised in Dance writing - even though that expertise is widely celebrated in the world or worlds of dance and performance? I asked in the early days of the 21stC why terms like “performance mastery”, “virtuosity” and “disciplinary expertise” figured so rarely in performance and dance studies writing, even though each of these plays its role in judgements made every day in the working environments as well as the performance spaces of dance/performance. Today I want to talk about the vital role of intuitive process in creative decision-making in performance, a role that tends to increase (rather than diminish) as the practitioner’s own expertise increases. Intuitive process, from this perspective, is a vital knowledge practice (epistemics) in art-making, rather than the poor and frivolous cousin of rational and analytic thought

Signs of life, signs of the times: and if all artists are semioticians?

I have used the term “artists” in my title, but I have added the term “expert practitioner” in order to raise the issue of expertise in the experienced performance-maker. I have often indicated that the theorisation of practitioner expertise, from a practitioner-centric perspective, continues to be singularly absent from the larger body of Performance Studies writing produced over recent decades, despite the fact that an engagement with precisely that expertise tends to be implicit in academic judgements of practitioners’ work that is considered to be of interest. While a research enquiry into training for performance has emerged over recent years, I find it curious in its limitations: it stops short of expertise and how one might acquire, develop and evaluate it, and its theorisation still tends to take an anonymous “the performer” as its object, rather than the performance-maker as researching subject. Meanwhile a research-focused account of the creative processes specific to named, “signature” practitioners continues to be relatively rare, in part, as far as I can tell, because some of us, in the university, fail to acknowledge the research-methodological rationale for such an enquiry in all of its detail. Signature practices, where those practices are effectively inseparable from the engagement and the person and the sensibility of a named practitioner, aspire to a singularity that social sciences-influenced theoretical writing finds hard to contemplate. I want to attempt to set up and pursue a number of lines of enquiry today, one of which, plainly, has to do with the currently fashionable and relatively under-theorised time and times (in comparison with many writers’ engagement with the strongly visual spaces, places, bodies and faces of performance). I propose to show you two short professionally produced pieces of performance work. Both clearly “have something to do with” the contemporary real: in the first, Rosemary Butcher’s Six Frames: Memories of Two Women, the piece was made in a research as well as a professional framework, as a result of an outside commission. The second, a staging to camera of Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children, was made in what emerges as a relatively curious professional context – i.e. by the daily newspaper The Guardian. Churchill’s piece has the curious distinction of being the dramatic work most recently banned by the BBC. I want to show you, in addition, a few recently published examples of visual art practice, by cartoonist Steve Bell, each of which is professionally and one might say almost urgently embedded in the everyday. I want to look at the ways this particular and popular artist figures the political real, while also intruding explicitly, into that figuration, those semiotic complexities that an onlooker might interpret, in everyday terms, as indices of or pointers to attitude, ethos, political position, and critical intervention through an everyday mode of cultural production

A cautionary note or two, amid the pleasures and pains of participation in performance-making as Research (revised 2019) [keynote]

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 critical-methodological enquiry into the ethical implications of this sort of research focus and application. The terms ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’, used in some accounts of ethnographic research, give some sense of some of the wider ethical implications: traditionally, the ethnographer is likely to be ‘non-indigenous’, 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. 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 ‘auto-ethnographic’ tradition and terminology as their model. On the other hand, one example of ‘distributed collaboration’ in professional performance-making terms is provided by the UK choreographer Rosemary Lee’s 1992 ‘large scale participatory works’, which drew on the participation of untrained (community) dancers of all ages, who worked with a small number of trained dancers and a professional choreographer to produce work staged in a public space. Might one of those community-member dancers actually have been a ‘practitioner’-participant-as-researcher? It is more likely, as far as I am concerned, that either the choreographer herself, or one of the experienced dancers, could have played the role of practitioner-researcher, participating in and helping to guide those processes, and reflecting on these after the event, sometimes drawing on practice logs and sketches to authenticate the enquiries premises and processes

Nothing like...falling...

This article for the journal Performance Research was commissioned by editor Richard Gough for inclusion in the 100th edition of Performance Research Volume 23:4 (June 2018). It responds to the issue "On Falling", published by Performance Research in 2013 (Volume 18 Issue 4). In "Nothing like falling" I include an account of falling downstairs as 'everyday action', and contrast it with performed falling, by an expert practitioner, which is 'nothing like falling'. The one signals a complete loss of control, the other a heightened control or mastery of human bodywork within the set-up or set-ups specific to expert performance-making. Some writers in Performance Studies have argued, on the basis of renewed interest in the work of Erving Goffman (published in the 1950s), that everything is performed (in the everyday as well as onstage), and there has been a tendency to equate performances of everyday life with those of perrformance makers. In this paper I argue for the radical separation of everyday and expert performances, where the latter are characterised by both invention and expert control

Expert-performance-practitioner-centred modes of knowledge and models of intelligibility: disciplinary specificity and the digital submission

The ongoing focus, in the university, on inter-disciplinarity has tended, over recent decades, to encourage many researchers to overlook the disciplinary specificity of expert or professional performance-making practices in the performing arts, and to erase issues of disciplinary specificity from the discourses many of us produce and reproduce in the contexts of research. Alongside this development in discourse production we tend to find widespread ‘difficulties’ when it comes to the inclusion – in, for example, higher degree research ‘documents’ - of other modes of presentation of expert practice. In this chapter I ponder some of the implications of this neglect or erasure, for those of us who seek to document performance-making in the higher degree context, and how some of us might begin to argue for and effect change in a key area of contemporary higher degree practice: the digital thesis produced, submitted and assessed in the postgraduate/higher degree context and set-ups. An enquiry through expert practices, into the practices bound-up in digitised presentations of research is thus, by very definition, an epistemic enquiry, praxiological in nature