A Cautionary Tale of Performance Ethnography

Book cover of Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s Staging Strife: Lessons from Performing Ethnography with Polish Roma Women (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

Cover design by David LeBlanc

Over the last decade, books such as Denzin’s Performance Ethnography, Madison’s Critical Ethnography, collections charting the performance studies field (Davis; Madison and Hamera), and those demonstrating its contributions to community, voice, and change (Kuppers; Pollock Remembering) have done much to facilitate the travel of engaged performance scholarship across qualitatively informed disciplines. Such endeavours have helped make links connecting ethnography, performance, and critical praxis more evident, and have demonstrated what Dwight Conquergood characterized as the shift in ethnography from a textual enterprise of reading cultural performances to a sensory and dialogical one where performance is embodied as epistemology and representational practice (190). Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s Staging Strife builds on this legacy with a case study of the challenges and accomplishments of collaborative, performance scholarship. The International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry has recognized these accomplishments with its 2011 Qualitative Book Award, as did the Canadian Association of Theatre Research naming it as one of the recipients of the 2011 Ann Saddlemyer Award.

Staging Strife is based on doctoral research conducted among Roma women in northern Poland starting in 2001. Kazubowski-Houston’s project was shaped by several objectives: she wanted to focus on ethnic and gendered violence experienced by Roma women in Poland; in addition to a dissertation, the research process was to produce a collaborative work of theatre derived, she hoped, “to break new ground” in ethnographic theatre “by employing physical movement as well as text as a mode of expression” (14); and given the engaged, critical perspective of performance ethnography, the project was “to effect change in the lives of Roma women” (Kazubowski-Houston 24). Kazubowski-Houston developed her sense of ethnographic theatre during her MFA. This approach, influenced by Johannes Fabian’s work in Zaire, allows the researcher to explore questions “by collaboratively developing a theatre performance with research participants” (Kazubowski-Houston 31). One of the project’s distinctive qualities, then, is that it encompasses the process of performance creation: the performance is not solely a representational work crafted after the fact from the research.

Although Kazubowski-Houston identifies as an anthropologist, she brought extensive experience as a working theatre professional to the project. Her Polish background and longstanding interest in Poland’s modernist, theatrical avant-garde was complemented by her partner Shawn’s training in Grotowski’s acting methods at the University of Winnipeg. Together they formed Teatr Korzenie and derived their own brand of avant-garde practice, “Illustrative Performing Technique” (Kazubowski-Houston 34). Without such creative experience, it is unlikely that this project could have been proposed, completed, or turned into a theatre work or monograph.

Staging Strife is accessible and engaging: it carries the reader effortlessly into the unfolding research process. This quality is due in part to a fluid movement between distinct verbal registers: a personal register that articulates both theoretical and experiential engagements shaping Kazubowski-Houston’s perspective; a more evocative, sensory register aimed at bringing the details of her subjects’ lives vividly before the reader; and a scripted, dramatic register representing particular moments of interaction that demonstrate central issues or turning points as the project unfolds. Kazubowski-Houston deploys these registers carefully making each methodological step clear to the reader while preserving the vitality of the temporal experience of doing the research. The writing enacts precepts of reflexive, interpretive autoethnographies that “reveal the presence of their authors, their personal and cultural background, their interactions with the research participants, and their thoughts and feelings during the research process” (Kazubowski-Houston 15).

The book balances its major components through such reflexivity: Kazubowski-Houston’s roles as ex-patriot, doctoral researcher, and theatre professional; the Roma’s socially marginal experiences as they coped with day-to-day concerns about health, violence, income, and discrimination; and the art world politics of the local cultural centre and...