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Reviewed by:
  • Navigating the Unknown: Notes from a Lonely Planet
  • Edward C. Warburton
Navigating the Unknown: Notes from a Lonely Planet edited by Christopher Bannerman, Joshua Sofaer, and Jane Watt. 2006. London: Middlesex University Press. 304 pp., photographs, and illustrations. £25.00 paper.

A friend once suggested to me that there are two kinds of dancers: tourists and explorers. Tourists desire recreation, treating travel as a glorious distraction from everyday life, an avocation to be enjoyed for its salubrious qualities. Explorers seek meaning, embarking on journeys of discovery without guide or predetermined destination. In his view, dancer- explorers strive to learn the languages of dance; they dance as a vocation. Dancer-tourists, on the other hand, drop in and out of our world, accumulating movement vocabularies like frequent flyer miles but only skimming the surface of the culture, the art of dance. Dance-makers are no different, he opined; [End Page 104] it is rare to find one who bothers to step off the beaten path. After reading the collection of essays and statements in Navigating the Unknown, I can say with some certainty that the authors, artists, and editors of this volume are of the explorer variety. They know what it means to seek authentic experience, somewhere new. Reading it reminded me of my friend’s advice: if one troubles to travel, one ought to make the most of it.

The particular approach to the phenomenon explored in Navigating the Unknown—that is, the various processes that practitioners in the performing arts employ in their creative work—has little precedent in the research literature. To be sure, a lot of ink has been spilled on creativity in the arts and sciences by academics and research scholars. But in large part, they have emphasized the creative habits of mind, unique tools and methods, and personal dispositions that presage novel work. The method of inquiry is usually an investigation of a big “C” creator’s frames of mind and original product from a distance (Gardner 1993; Runco 2007). This present volume represents a very different approach. The original research project was formed in 1999 by Chris Bannerman, professor of dance at Middlesex University, United Kingdom, and directed under the aegis of ResCen, the Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts. Participants employed a range of investigatory methods, including making creative work, ongoing introspection and reflection, and what appears to be structured, in-depth group interviews as a means for (re) presenting the artists-participants together with the subjective, empathetic, and critical lens of the researchers-editors.

Navigating the Unknown summarizes the past several years’ worth of work. The statements of the six participating artists, their notes and thoughts as well as transcripts of their group interviews, are coupled with editors’ and guests’ essays in three distinct sections: In/tuition, Navigating, and Making Manifest. It is highly unusual in academic work, even in the most sensitive of portraits, to get direct access to the artists themselves and to hear their voices as they struggle to articulate not only how to solve problems but also, more importantly, how to find new ones. As a result, the territory imagined here is more “lonely planet” than “road less traveled.” A “road less traveled” implies a “road to be traveled,” a discernible way forward, something more than a rough foot path. In contrast, this book successfully captures the often lonely and sometimes risky business of getting off the proverbial tour bus in a strange land with uncertain destination.

For me, the palpable sense of exploration and risk made for a pleasurable—if heady and metaphor-heavy—read. Think long road trip with some smart, opinionated, loquacious colleagues. This is not to say that this volume provides a straightforward portrait of artists at work or easy theoretical framings. There is no small requirement for writers, editors, and readers of a volume on creative process in the performing arts. For readers, the task is perhaps the most difficult of all: one must explore with the explorers. One must be comfortable delaying gratification, trusting one’s instincts and intellectual compass to take you down some unfamiliar paths, even as one strives to make sense of the joint...

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