Magnat, Virginie

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

broad-based publications look like? Is there a call for a leap into “theatre journalism” thatdoes more than review performances? We might take a cue from the current flourishing oflongform journalism, moving beyond print to online aggregators like longform.org andlongreads.com or from the immensely popular TED talk video series. Social media, of course,is all about mobilizing knowledge and building exchange networks. How best can this oft-dismissed genre of communications technology be employed to foster productive researchexchange partnerships? How can the built-in exponential network structures of “follows”and “retweets” and “likes” be harnessed to the asking of serious and incisive questions? What discipline specific barriers exist to the creation of more community-universitypartnerships? From the standpoint of financial compensation and job security, university-researchers and community partners operate in different realms. These differences are exag-gerated in the arts where community partners are unlikely to be government agencies oreven charitable NGOs. KMb partnerships will need to address essential inequalities betweenthe freelance artist and the full-time, tenured researcher. We might ask questions like: Howdo artist-collaborators get paid? Who holds the money? It may be necessary to revise fundingguidelines so that community partners can be grant holders (Flicker and Savan 33). Likewise,contributors from these two groups are subject to diverse reward structures. We need torecognize that while university researchers are under certain kinds of pressure related totenure and professional promotion, community partners are subject to other pressures (25).What are these pressures for theatre artists/companies? How does research contribute toor detract from these community goals? Also it is not infrequently the case that theatreresearchers are also theatre practitioners and vice versa. What are the benefits/limitationsfor research and for practice when working with such a two-hatted creature? What ethicalimplications come into play in this situation? (With apologies to Dr. Seuss) We have brains in our heads and feet in our shoes, and wecan steer ourselves in any direction we choose. With KMb, there is much to do, with herand me and him and you. Oh, the places that knowledge might go. Honouring the 3 R’s of IndigenousResearch MethodologiesVIRGINIE MAGNATCree scholar Shawn Wilson states in Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods:[O]ne of the great strengths that Indigenous scholars bring with them is the ability to seeand work within both Indigenous and dominant worldviews. This becomes of great impor-tance when working with dominant system academics, who are usually not bicultural. As partof their white privilege, there is no requirement for them to be able to see other ways of beingand doing, or even to recognize that they exist. Oftentimes then, ideas coming from a differ-ent worldview are outside of their entire mindset and way of thinking. The ability to bridgethis gap becomes important in order to ease the tension that it creates. (44)FORUM244 FORUM:  THEATRE?  RESEARCH?  IN?  CANADA? • PP 221-279 • 2014 / 35.2 • TRIC / RTACIn the field of Performance Studies, Dwight Conquergood points to a similar disjunction whendescribing the gap separating performance scholars from performance practitioners as a coun-terproductive “academic apartheid” (153), a practice/theory divide defined by Shannon Jacksonas an insidious “division of labor” privileging those who think over those who do (Professing 111).This lack of communication and understanding between theorists and practitioners severelyundermines performance research endeavours that require building relationships based ontrust, respect, and reciprocity. While Indigenous research principles are designed by and forIndigenous scholars and activists working within their own communities, Wilson states: “Somuch the better if dominant universities and researchers adopt them as well” (59). In myembodied research on the work of women artists from different cultures and generations whocollaborated with Jerzy Grotowski during the theatrical and post-theatrical periods of his prac-tical investigation of performance, I found these principles more pertinent than the method-ologies developed by those whom Wilson identifies as “dominant system” academics (58). Reading Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods while conducting fieldworkhelped me to address the potentially colonialist dimension of ethnographic praxis. In thisbook, Wilson posits respect, reciprocity, and relationality as the three R’s of Indigenousmethodologies, and cites Evelyn Steinhauer’s statement: “respect is more than just sayingplease and thank you, and reciprocity is more than giving a gift” (86). Indeed, Indigenousresearch principles are meant to ensure that the research conducted by Indigenous scholars“will be honoured and respected by their own people” (59). Such research criteria are so funda-mental to Indigenous communities that they “will not allow entry by researchers, Indigenousand non-Indigenous alike, until they have met the community’s conditions” (59). Accordingto these principles, researchers must engage in a “deep listening and hearing with more thanthe ears,” and develop a “reflective, non-judgmental consideration of what is being seen andheard,” as well as “[a]n awareness and connection between logic of mind and the feelings ofthe heart.” Ultimately, researchers bear the “[r]esponsibility to act with fidelity in relationshipto what has been heard, observed, and learnt” (59). In my experience of conducting embodiedresearch on experimental performance practice, fieldwork has been more about doing thantalking. Because intuition is inherent to creativity, a deep sense of trust is necessary, yet ittakes time to achieve such trust. Investing oneself as fully as possible in this long-term processis an important way of demonstrating commitment, and as time passes, trust increases alongwith the responsibility that comes with receiving someone’s trust. Wilson goes on to suggest that, from an Indigenous perspective, research is ceremonybecause it is about making connections and strengthening them, a process that takes “a lot ofwork, dedication and time” (89–90). The multi-sited fieldwork I conducted from 2008 to2012 was predicated on establishing and sustaining the type of relationships that Wilson iden-tifies as necessary conditions for conducting research. The ethical research principles advo-cated by Indigenous scholars have guided me throughout the research and writing processand enabled me to develop a range of writing strategies to engage with questions pertainingto positionality, lived experience, and embodied ways of knowing. Honouring these principleshas also required me to strive for reciprocity, relevance, and accessibility as part of the goalsthat I prioritized in the dissemination of my research through my monograph Grotowski,Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women (Routledge 2014) andits companion Documentary Film Series (Routledge Performance Archive).TRIC / RTAC • 35.2 / 2014 • PP 221-279 • FORUM:  THEATRE?  RESEARCH?  IN?  CANADA? 245FORUMWithin the discipline of anthropology, Indigenous and feminist ethnographers havecompellingly articulated alternative ethnographic models that account for the lived experi-ence of researchers and research participants. In the Chicago Guide to CollaborativeEthnography, Luke Eric Lassiter notes that American Indian scholars were among the firstto produce a radical critique of ethnographic fieldwork and to “call for models that moreassertively attend to community concerns, models that would finally put to rest the lingeringreverberations of anthropology’s colonial past” (6). Indigenous and feminist anthropologistsraise related epistemological and methodological questions about ethnographic authorityand the politics of representation because they share similar concerns about the ways inwhich conventional methodologies enable researchers working from within the academy toauthoritatively speak for the Other (56, 59). A particularly challenging aspect of my projectwas that the women whose creative work I was investigating often anchor their artisticresearch in traditional cultural practices that can provide access to embodied experiencesof spirituality. Such practices have existed throughout the world for thousands of years, yettheir spiritual dimension, when not simply dismissed as a form of false consciousness, hasbeen left entirely unexamined by post-structuralist analyses of cultural processes. Bycontrast, I have found in Indigenous research methodologies alternative theoretical frame-works that are inclusive of spirituality. Although the women involved in my project havedeveloped diverse perspectives, the latter are often situated at the intersection of theatre,tradition, and ritual. Moreover, spirituality in their work often entails a connection to nature,and their teaching promotes a search for balance between human and non-human life thatprivileges experiential ways of knowing, which I relate in the third chapter of my book to anecology of the body-in-life grounded in the organic processes of the natural world.Embodied experience, spirituality, and relationship to the natural world are fundamentalto Indigenous conceptions of knowledge, and for Indigenous scholars the purpose of researchis “not the production of new knowledge per se” (Denzin et al., 14), but the development ofpedagogical, artistic, political, and ethical perspectives guided by Indigenous principles andinformed by the conviction that “[t]he central tensions in the world today go beyond the crisesin capitalism and neoliberalism’s version of democracy” (13). For according to Native Canadian,Hawaiian, Maori, and American Indian pedagogy, “[t]he central crisis [. . .] is spiritual, ‘rootedin the increasingly virulent relationship between human beings and the rest of nature’” (Grande,qtd. in Denzin 13). In response to this crisis, Indigenous activists propose a “respectful perform-ance pedagogy” that “works to construct a vision of the person, ecology, and environment”compatible with Indigenous worldviews (Denzin 13). There are important parallels betweensuch a conception of pedagogy and the teachings of the women involved in my project, espe-cially since experience as a way of knowing is central to their post-theatrical approaches toperformance, which often cross the boundaries of aesthetic and ritual performance.Linking experiential ways of knowing to cultural practice and spirituality has significantimplications for research itself: in her book Kaandossiwin: How We Come to Know, KathleenE. Absolon (Minogiizhigokwe) describes Indigenous ways of searching for knowledge bystating: “[W]e journey, we search, we converse, we process, we gather, we harvest, we makemeaning, we do, we create, we transform, and we share what we know. Our Spirit walks withus on these journeys. Our ancestors accompany us” (168). Absolon relates hunting for knowl-edge to ethics instilled in the land and transmitted across generations, and points out thatFORUM246 FORUM:  THEATRE?  RESEARCH?  IN?  CANADA? • PP 221-279 • 2014 / 35.2 • TRIC / RTAC“Indigenous ethics are implied in life itself and exercised through the teachings” (25). Duringmy interview with Cree performer, director, and writer Floyd Favel, who worked with RenaMirecka, a key founding member of Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre, we discussed Westerncultural constructions of the Indian Warrior, which Favel contrasted with the NativeAmerican warrior ethic as a commitment to taking care of others within a communal society. Substituting the actions of searching, gathering, harvesting, creating, transforming, andsharing for the notions of fieldwork, informants, data collection, and the dissemination ofresearch outcomes simultaneously foregrounds the embodied dimension of the researchprocess and the researcher’s responsibility for practicing her craft and developing her expert-ise ethically. From this perspective, the researcher is cast in the role of the ethicalwarrior/care-giver, which is inevitably more demanding than playing the stock character ofthe academic. Since the call of Indigenous scholars to change research from within the acad-emy can be perceived as an impossible task, it is helpful to be reminded by Bagele Chilisathat it is precisely because “all research is appropriation” that the way in which it is conductedalways has consequences. She points out that when “benefits accrue to both the communitiesresearched and the researcher,” conducting research can be reconfigured as a two-way trans-formative process that she identifies as “reciprocal appropriation” (22). More productivecollaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers might thus be on thehorizon if we can learn from each other how to respectfully engage in reciprocal appropria-tion. Absolon stresses that “[t]he academy is being pressured to create space for Indigenousforms of knowledge production, and change is occurring,” which leads her to contend:“Without a doubt we continue to establish channels to have an impact on making Indigenousways of knowing, being and doing a solid methodological choice within the academy” (166-67). Creating space for such epistemological and methodological possibilities will entailresisting dominant theoretical frameworks that pre-determine research outcomes, andacknowledging that each step of the research process is part of a larger collective journey.How we come to know might then perhaps no longer be experienced as a competition forknowledge between individuals striving for academic recognition, but as a relational processdependent on mutual trust, collaboration, and healing.“Theatre Research in Canada”ANNIE GIBSONAs the publisher at Playwrights Canada Press, I find that there is great variety in the kindsof writing that crosses my desk every day. We mainly publish Canadian-authored plays butalso scholarly works about Canadian theatre. One of the limitations of publishing about livetheatre is that it is impossible to recreate the entire experience of seeing a play in the book.We do our best, sometimes including photographs and even CDs with recorded music, butin an instance where the staging or casting choices or even lighting has been particularlyunique, reading the script simply doesn’t have the same impact. The insight that an intro-duction or companion essay can offer is therefore invaluable when it comes to furthering areader’s understanding of the script before them. TRIC / RTAC • 35.2 / 2014 • PP 221-279 • FORUM:  THEATRE?  RESEARCH?  IN?  CANADA? 247FORUM

Honouring the 3 R's of Indigenous Research Methodologies

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Honouring the 3 R's of Indigenous Research Methodologies

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University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals