https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4493-211X
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ABSTRACT
In the context of global research culture, practitioner-researchers in theatre and performance have consistently struggled to best account for the embodied and emergent qualities of their subjects. As methodologies for ‘practice as research’ (PaR) in theatre and performance have developed since the 1990s, artistic researchers have often continued to define themselves against scientific conceptions of thinking, knowledge, and research to highlight the specific efficacies of artistic practice. I argue that this strategy genuinely hinders researchers, and that interdisciplinary approaches that move across the sciences, humanities, and arts are the key to robust accounts of theatre and performance. By revisiting a seminal PaR performance project, Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley and Lee Miller’s Partly Cloudy, Chance of Rain (2002), I suggest how interdisciplinary approaches such as enaction from the cognitive sciences should be integrated into PaR methodologies to better address the complexity and richness of embodiment and emergence in theatre and performance.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Robin Nelson for the ongoing discussions about PaR during the process of writing this article, along with comments on a draft version. Thank you to Scott deLahunta for helping me navigate relevant issues in dance studies and pointing me toward important resources. I am also grateful for feedback on this work from members of the International Network for Cognition, Theatre, and Performance. I also send much appreciation to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Different geographical locations, contexts, and emphases within PaR have resulted in a variety of labels including practice-based research, practice-led research, performance research, artistic research, and artistic research in performance. For definitions and their histories see Nelson (Citation2013, 3–22) and Barton (Citation2017, 4).
2 Thanks go to Xristina Penna for the reminder to include material in this regard.
3 As Nelson (Citation2013, 6–12), Borgdorff (Citation2012, 62–66), and Butt (Citation2017, 32) note – music has been an exception to this.
4 This term resonates with Borgdorff’s notion that Artistic Research is fundamentally about transformations (Citation2012, 196) and Haseman’s conviction that performance should have its ‘own distinctive protocols, principles, and validation procedures’ (Citation2007, 151).
5 27 February 2020 conversation with the author.
6 In a PaR-oriented call to look toward Science and Technology Studies (STS), Gluzman (Citation2017) makes a related case that STS has moved beyond objectivist positivism, which has been complicated by self-reflexive scientists and scholars of science themselves. In the context of AR, Borgdorff (Citation2012) has also marked the changes in science, STS, and the developments of cognitive science, urging artists to take notice.
8 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the perspective that some scholars even today would argue for evidence of ‘disembodied thinking’. To clarify my position, I agree with Cook that there is ‘no such thing as disembodied cognition’ such that while there might be discrete neural activity in cognition, even neural activity is necessarily in the context of a larger body–environment system. Even in more exceptional cases of non-normative existence connected to neural and corporeal diversity, I defend the position that the entire body–environment system is the appropriate unit of consideration for examining artistic work, research, and knowledge as cultural activities. Therefore, I hold that any kind of cognitive activity that appears localized to its discrete neural or brain activity (or perhaps ‘disembodied thinking’) is actually a part of a larger embodied system. While this article enters the debates on PaR through the specificities of ‘embodiment’, this issue points toward the value of having access to a larger umbrella of entry points into these debates such as 4E cognition that recognizes the interrelated nature of action, bodies, environments, and materials.
9 From here on out, when I am referring to these five ideas in a specifically enactive sense, I will italicize them. This is to distinguish them from their more general definitions which will remain unitalicized. I aim to show that in the context of PaR, these generalized understandings of the terms benefit from being hitched to enaction’s specific definitions.
10 I am referring here to the process of autopoiesis. For more on enaction’s debt to the biological concept of autopoiesis, see Maturana and Varela (Citation1992), Thompson (Citation2007), and Stewart, Gapenne, and Di Paolo (Citation2010). I am extending the autonomy of autopoiesis from biology to cognition to artistic (social) meaning-making in line with enaction’s ‘continuity of life and mind’ (Thompson Citation2007, 128–129). For more details on an extrapolation from cognition to theatre, see Murphy (Citation2019, Citation2021).
11 Thompson’s talk at 2016’s A Body of Knowledge conference called specifically on embodied practices in the arts to be incorporated into the enactivist fold (Citation2017). For a discussion on how theatrical practice is both illuminated by enaction and can contribute to its development, see Murphy (Citation2019).
12 Thanks to Bruce McConachie for this observation of my work which helped me make this explicit as a practitioner’s strategy.
13 This resonates with the way that Annette Arlander applies Karen Barad’s concept of onto-epistemology to PaR as a productive point of departure, not just a consequence of practice (Citation2017, 133–151).
14 See also Hansen Citation2019.
15 As confirmed by Nelson in a 16 October 2020 email correspondence.
16 I am grateful to Robin Nelson for helping me access these DVDs during the era of COVID-19 restrictions.
17 I would argue that it is ‘liminal’ as a version of a marriage ritual and ‘liminoid’ as a performance piece. But of course, in Whalley-Miller style it can be both.
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Maiya Murphy
Maiya Murphy works at the confluence of performer training, creation, movement, and cognitive approaches to understanding theatre. She is the author of Enacting Lecoq: Movement in Theatre, Cognition, and Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Her work has also appeared in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Constructivist Foundations, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Survey, Practice as Research in the Arts (and Beyond): Principles, Processes, Contexts, Achievements (Robin Nelson, ed.), The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq (Mark Evans and Rick Kemp, eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (Nadine George-Graves, ed.), and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit, eds). Currently, she is working on her forthcoming book, Practice, Research, and Cognition in Devised Performance (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2024). She is an Associate Professor in the Theatre and Performance Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore and makes theatre with her collective, Autopoetics.