Research Methods in Theatre and Performance (review)
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The fifth installation in Edinburgh University Press's Research Methods for the Arts and Humanities series, Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, edited by Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson, assembles case study-based essays detailing current research practices in the United Kingdom. Contributors range from independent practitioners, to up-and-coming academics, to established scholars offering a diversity of research methods. Some chapters adapt traditional approaches by using techniques made possible by the increased influence of performance studies; others integrate newer, practice-based methods, joining the recent push toward destabilizing the boundaries between research and practice in favor of legitimizing practice as research within academe. In fact, destabilizing boundaries is one of the collection's primary projects, as Kershaw and Nicholson express a common concern among contributors to "establish imaginative uses of methods that trouble the boundaries between creative practice and critical analysis, between epistemology and ontology" (2).
The editors do not break the collection into explicit sections, but they do offer a rough framework of thematic groupings of chapters that, together, shed light on "crucial qualities of theatre and performance research" (4-5) challenging the field today: multi-/inter-/trans-(disciplinarity), research unpredictability, and ephemerality/ materiality. True to the editors' stated mission, the book presents a fruitful combination of both theory- and practice-based approaches to research, rather than privileging either theory or practice. Readers will find extensive case studies that demonstrate and explicate theory in practice. At the same time, the book offers concrete advice (even an occasional step-by-step guide) on the benefits and potential pitfalls of undertaking the methods suggested. Research Methods in Theatre and Performance is most useful in its refusal to separate theory from practice and in the variety of perspectives it provides, so that the methods of practitioners and scholars benefit from equally thoughtful consideration.
The first three chapters take up issues of multi-/inter-/ trans-(disciplinarity). Maggie Gale and Ann Featherstone's "The Imperative of the Archive: Creative Archive Research" discusses multidisciplinary approaches to archival research, drawing on Diane Taylor's theory of the archive and the repertoire and incorporating ideas about best practices when working with digital archives. Steve Dixon reflects on interdisciplinary work combining new media and live performance in "Researching Digital Performance: Virtual Practices." Finally, in "Practice as Research: Trans disciplinary Innovation in Action," Kershaw and two collaborative teams of performance scholar-practitioners argue for "practice-as-research" grounded in multi-modal inquiry and communication.
The stand-out in this section—and the chapter that most clearly and thoroughly sheds light on the values of the thematic grouping—is Dixon's "Researching Digital Performance." This essay best exemplifies multi-/inter-/ trans-(disciplinarity), because in each of its three case studies, research and practice are intertwined—as are traditional, embodied stage techniques and new media production. Dixon's work is multidisciplinary, in that it requires, as Kershaw states in the book's introduction, "a collection of skill-sets and knowledge-domains" (7; emphasis in original); it is interdisciplinary, in that it requires proficiency in both technological and theatrical production to create what Kershaw calls "the in-between (or liminal) qualities of performance" (ibid.). Finally, Kershaw would characterize Dixon's work as transdisciplinary, because the ideas in the essay are "the result of performance" (ibid.; emphasis in original). Dixon takes up the question of how to engage "digital performance," an interdisciplinary practice that he defines as "theatre/performance events where computer technologies play a key role in content, techniques, aesthetics, or form of delivery" (42). The take-away for Dixon—and, I would argue, for the other two essays in this quasi-section—is that the work he discusses is important because it "combines elements of old and new research methods in the quest to forge original theses and performance events" (59). This statement might just as well be a thesis for the cluster of the first three chapters.
The next three chapters roughly constellate around the notion of productive unpredictability in...
