“Introduction: Ahr-tik-yuh-leay-ting Ahr-tis-tik Ree-surch”

When Natalia Esling and I first began to imagine this theme issue of Canadian Theatre Review focused on Articulating Artistic Research, we were, fittingly, faced with the need to clearly articulate the territory we have set out to explore. What, precisely, do we mean by Artistic Research? This is a task that, in fact, began for me several decades ago, one that has evolved consistently over a wide range of different contexts, and one that, perhaps by definition, will continue to do so moving forward. As a performance creator who has also been employed within academic institutions, to some degree and in one or another capacity, for the past thirty years, the dual preoccupations expressed in the paired terms “Artistic Research” have been interwoven in a complex conceptual dance throughout this entire period. It is, without question, a complicated choreography. With this collection of documents, I believe Natalia and I have accumulated a substantial set of gestures in this attempt at articulation.

For our purposes, this is how we described Artistic Research in the invitation to contribute that we shared widely:

In this context, “Artistic Research” is meant as an umbrella concept that includes a range of approaches to research that use creative practice as a primary means and method of inquiry. These include the distinct approaches ‘performance as research (PaR), ‘practice-based research’ (PBR), ‘research-creation’, ‘arts-based research’, and numerous other associated practices. In many cases, what’s being studied is artistic practice itself through focused exploration or intensive training. In others, creative practice is used as a way of investigating non-artistic (or not exclusively artistic) subjects, as in many ‘practice-based research’ projects.

Of course, all of these terms are context- and culture-specific, with diverse and at times conflicting definitions. However, across all of these contexts, Artistic Research is usually not—or, at least, not primarily—carried out in the service of a specific production or project. While its outcomes may later be applied to a final product, its benefits exceed a particular context, and the knowledge/experience it generates can be shared and applied in other situations and by others.

Our aim is to include a broad spectrum of these approaches in our issue in the hope of articulating, with increased precision and clarity, the distinctions and commonalities among them, and to showcase some of the most vital examples of this activity in Canada, which we will position within an international context. In particular, we’d like to compare Artistic Research done in university settings with that done outside of academia, in the hope that this will be illuminating for participants in both contexts. While the primary focus of the issue will be on theatre, we welcome proposals from across performance disciplines.

The effort to define Artistic Research (hereafter AR) has a range of motivations; all are context-specific and most, not surprisingly, involve access to resources. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate how significant a factor financial support is and has been in shaping both the attitudes toward AR and its various practices. Intriguingly, in some cases it has actually been necessary to assure potential funding bodies that research was not what one was doing. For instance, the Canada Council for the Arts’s long-standing, near-complete aversion to research as a qualifying stand-alone (i.e., non-project based) activity has only recently and only selectively been rescinded.¹ In the majority of contexts, however, the attempt to articulate Artistic Research has been the work of artists and artist-scholars working within academic contexts. Particularly in the last two decades, creative arts faculty members have increasingly found it necessary to justify both their basic inclusion within post-secondary institutions and, specifically, their access to funding made available for research activities. Tasked—as a fundamental part of their job description—with conducting research into their areas of specialization, these faculty members have regularly discovered themselves disadvantaged by a prevailing inability on the part of their institutions to recognize the validity of what they do.

The irony of this situation is as conspicuous as it is vexed...