TH988 - New Directions in Theatre and Performance Research: Par,2017-18

TH988 - New Directions in Theatre and Performance Research: PaR,2017-18

Yvette Hutchison () & Tim White ()

Aims

The aim of this module will be to familiarise students with research developments in specialist areas within the field of theatre and performance studies. We will be considering how we locate, define and engage with geographic, technological and value networks in a world that is increasingly interconnected and mobile. We will explore these ideas through practice, relating research methods to audiences and differentiated research outcomes. We will engage with intercultural performance and new media as areas for consideration.

Learning Outcomes

This module will enable students to engage in research-led investigation of these ideas involving both primary and secondary material, in and through performance and writing. Students will demonstrate their ability to research through practice, understand how different forms impact on research with, and for, different publics. They will also learn to communicate creative and critical ideas in various ways, and to initiate and sustain intellectual work and discussion.

Class Location and Time: FRIDAY 12.00-15.00 - G55

Assessment:

50% Performance as Research presentation

50% Essay on PaR project

Assessment criteria:

Performance as Research presentation

- evidence of significant research on your chosen topic/ issue
- sufficient and appropriate use of performance to elicit material that addresses clearly addressed your pre-defined research questions
- evidence that you have considered how the content and form of your presentation contribute toward interrogating your pre-defined research questions

- ability to include and reach an appropriate audience

- structuring clear mechanisms for capturing evidence of impact and public engagement with your performance project for later analysis

- ability to analyse outcomes in relation to original research questions

Essay

Clear evidence of significant research, with reference to specific examples that support your overall analysis. Check citation references and include a full bibliography.

Schedule 2017-18

For scanned readings, please see

Week 1 – Introduction: Doing-thinking–Yvette Hutchison () & Tim White ()

Introduce module as a whole, what is ‘new’ in the focus of the module. Assessments, questions we are asking throughout the module. Focus this year is Doing-thinking – PaR.

View and discuss case: Who You Think We Are, a 30 min conversational performance in which we invite audiences to engage with unknown subjects who share images, stories and gestural repertoires to playfully deconstruct the first assumptions we make about people, while considering the deeper paradoxes of cross-cultural living, and how we create, perform and negotiate personal and collective identity and a sense of belonging.

Read: Robin Nelsen. Introduction to Practice as Research in the Arts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 3-19. (1 hardcopy, 1 ebook,

Preparation:Think about what you consider to be research. How this differs from ‘practice’ in theatre.

Week 2: Performance as research (PaR)/ Researching through performance as a ‘new direction’ in theatre & performance research(Baz Kershaw?)

In this session we will introduce and position performance as research (PaR)/ researching through performance, as an approach to exploring contemporary issues.

We will use the performance from the introduction to discuss how research can be built into a performance plan, how the performance development may impact back on the research, and how to draw out and analyse material from the performance-making process, as well as the subsequent audience reception.

We will ask you to begin thinking of a question you would like to research through performance.

Readings:

Kershaw B and Nicholson H (eds) (2011) Introduction, Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1-16.

Kershaw, Baz, et al, Practice as research: Transdisciplinary Innovation in Action, chapter 3. Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 63-86.

Preparation: What do you think are the potentials of using practice as a research approach?

Week 3 –Interculturalism & identity in the age of globalisation (Yvette Hutchison)

In this session, we will be situating personal identity in relation to culture. We will then consider how this affects approaches to cross-cultural engagement with ‘others’, and what we should be mindful of in the context of globalisation. We will then consider how we can research different modes of addressing these issues in and through practice.

Read:

hooks, bell, “Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness” in The Applied Theatre Reader, (eds.) Prentki, Tim & Preston, Sheila, Routledge, 2009, 80-85.

Schipper, Minneke, Introduction to Imagining Insiders: Africa and the Question of Belonging.Cassell, 1-12

Wilkinson & Kritzinger: “Representing the other”, in The Applied Theatre Reader, (eds.) Prentki, Tim & Preston, Sheila, Routledge, 2009, 86-93.

View:

EcoCentrix on Video, summary of EcoCentrix: Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts project in London 2013 (28.05 mins).

Further reading:

Pavis, Patrice, Introduction, “Towards a theory of Interculturalism in Theatre?”in The Intercultural Performance Reader. Routledge, 1-21.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Torsten Jost and Saskya Iris Jain(eds.).The politics of interweaving performance cultures: beyond postcolonialism.Routledge, 2014.

Please Bring to class

• Things that you think define you as a person – objects, clothes, anything …
• Examples ofwhat you consider to be interesting intercultural performances

Come prepared to discuss different aspects of identity and culture.

Please identify key issues for you in each of the readings and video clip, and be ready to discuss how the universality and post-colonial approaches to interculturalism compare with one another in relation to this example.

Propose ways of working ‘in practice’ to move some of these ideas forward in ‘new directions’.

Week 4 –Posthuman and technology (Tim White)

Posthuman: potential,predicament,practice

In this session we seek out the posthuman and postorganic topia proposed by a collection of artists, writers and practitioners, including Jennifer Hayley (The Nether), Stelarc, Eduardo Kac and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. From these possibilities we then consider how practice can be deployed as a means of researching the many concerns that arise.

Read:

Becker, Barbara. "Cyborgs, Agents, and Transhumanists: Crossing Traditional Borders of Body and Identity in the Context of New Technology." Leonardo 33.5 (2000): 361-65. Print.

Causey, Matthew. "Posthuman and Postorganic Performance: The (Dis)Appearance of Theatre in Virtual Spaces." Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2006. 47-67. Print.

Garoian, Charles R., and Yvonne M. Gaudelius. "Cyborg Pedagogy: Performing Resistance in the Digital Age." Studies in Art Education 42.4 (2001): 333-47. Print.

McNeill, Laurie. "There Is No "I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography." Biography 35.1 (2012): 65-82. Print.

View:

Stelarc. "Stelarc: Alternate Anatomical Architectures - Extruded, Empty and Absent Bodies - Video (10'01")". 12/1/12. <

Warwick, Kevin. "Cyborg Life: Kevin Warwick - Video (7'48")". 12/1/12. <

Further Reading

Foster, Thomas. "Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks: Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Five-Worlds Theory." PMLA 117.1 (2002): 43-67. Print.

Hayley,Jennifer The Nether. Faber and Faber. London. (2014). Print.

Haraway, Donna "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge (1991): 149-181. Print.

Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer. "Becoming-Animate: On the Performed Limits of “Human." Theatre Journal 58.4 (2006): 649-68. Print.

Simon, Bart. "Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures." Cultural Critique.53 (2004): 1-9. Print.

Week 5 –Proposals for your own explorations of a question, using PaR methodology

Workshop on proposals that are to be submitted by Tuesday of week 5, including technical needs.

Read:

The National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement,

Research Councils UK, accessed 14/06/17.

YH & TW Tate documentation

Discuss: Potentially use Who You Think We Are as an example of how we did this … issues, process, pitfalls, outcomes.

Help you define CLEAR research question, what might constitute an appropriate performance approach.

How you plan to build in public engagement, i.e. consider potential audiences and how to reach them.

Any possible Impact from your research?

Week 6- Rehearsals, development of materials for practical presentations

Week 7 – Present Work-in-progress PaR projects

Oral feedback, suggestions for further research, structure, etc by tutors and group.

Responsibility of the researcher to document their work – TW JNU paper?

Week 8 – Assessed presentation

Week 9 –Feedback to assessment & Impact and public engagement discourses

Discuss the manner in which you engage audiences affects reception, feedback and the impact of your research. Discuss howyour aims and questions were taken into consideration when you planned and executed your project. Evaluate the Impact and public engagement of your PaR project in the presentation, potential follow-up impact, activities?

Reading: Review – assessment criteria, Research council sites from week 5.

Week 10: Academic dissemination of PaR findings

Discuss modes of writing: how to ‘write-up’ performance as research – for a journal. Bring draft essays to class.

Read:

‘Conceptual Frameworks for PaR and related pedagogy: From ‘hard facts’ to Liquid knowledge’, in Robin Nelsen,Practice as Research in the Arts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 48-70. (1 hardcopy, 1 ebook,