Alison Richards: for ADSA Executive meeting 7/2/92

Bill Dunstone and I were given the task to come up with some proposals about performance as publication for this Executive meeting; since he can't be here today and we've been restricted to telephone conversation we agreed to divide the task into thinking through some of the issues that need to be raised (me) and putting forward some possible procedures for getting the process moving (Bill).

In this position paper I would like to a) outline the grounds of our discussion and b) present a draft policy for approval at this year's AGM.

Members have requested that the executive address the task of getting performances accepted as bona fide publications within the academic context. Our discussions however have led us to conclude that the two issues of performance as research and performance as publication are linked but separate. Before the specific question of the possible equivalence of performances to other kinds of professional publication is sorted out, we have to look at the problems thrown up by the more general question of the status of performance as research.

Performance as Research

Until recently, the relationship of performance to research could be easily expressed as being equivalent to the relationship between the raw material upon which acts of scholarship were performed, and scholarship itself. Performance could not 'speak' in the arena of scholarship unless cleaned up, represented and written about by the scholar. The act of creation and the act of scholarship were conceived as being separate (although not equal) activities, requiring different skills, different epistemologies and different personnel.

While acts of performance were among those things which were the proper province of the theatre scholar, the scholar was not limited to performances as material; in fact, given the biases of the academy, the location of theatre departments and the epistemological assumptions and notational reach of the act of writing, theatre scholars were more easily directed towards research from texts, from writings about the theatre which already existed, or research based on material evidence such as buildings or archival objects (object texts)around which scholarly supposition could be constructed. Even writing about live performance was a little suspect, as being more proper to the newspaper critic than the serious researcher; the very questions asked by scholars and those involved in the business of making performances were different, and very little flowed back the other way except by grace of that much neglected profession, dramaturgy (and even here, dramaturgs seem to fit in much better where the business of the theatre company is performing 'the classics' i.e. reconstructing performances from texts).

Performance in academic institutions was an 'added extra'; something to make the text live, something to give students what was vaguely called 'experience', a way of supporting the production of plays for one reason or another unlikely to get professionally produced, a means of demonstrating the taste, cultural adeptness or general superiority of the institution concerned, etc. etc.

In those tertiary institutions concerned primarily with teaching rather than research, performance practice served a more immediate function as a means of imparting those skills which it might be expected students would require to fill their jobs adequately upon graduation; here, particularly in teacher training institutions focusing on developmental drama as a classroom tool, a tradition of research through and into practice began to develop which intersected with the language of experimental theatre as laboratory - questions began to be asked about the adequacy of previous traditions of writing, and the extent to which

a) research could be done about theatre/drama practice and

b) research could be done through, or to steal Schechner's phrase by means of performance.

While a growth in the first should certainly be welcomed, and while a thorough approach to researching performance practice inevitably brings up problems of a similar order to the ones I will discuss shortly such as appropriateness of documentary modality or notational form, and epistemological questions to do with the aspect or mode of theatre practice (including its reception) being explored, it is the problems raised by the second which most concern us here.

If we are going to argue that performance is an appropriate mode and method of research, we must be able to articulate why it is better for our purposes than other available or existing academic practices. What can performance do better? What can be demonstrated through performance that is unavailable, clumsy or less clear through any other means?

An immediate problem here is the polyvalent and polysemic character of performance. If I simply show you a performance to demonstrate a point, how can I be sure that you are looking at the thing I want you to focus on, let alone understanding it in the way I intend?

Much of the 'laboratory' work of Grotowski, Brook et al could be classified as research to the extent that it created new kinds of theatre practice; the creation of new knowledge is certainly one of the accepted criteria of research, but could the performances stand alone in creating new knowledge without other work to create new vocabularies, new understandings, new discourses, and related or comparable practices, around them? The explosion of writing surrounding the work of these theatre generators would seem to indicate that some need for commentary and analysis through language was felt, however much one might wish to question the relative privilege and volume of such writing over other (possibly more difficult) means of analysis and further research in visual, diagrammatic or physical/processual modes.

But is the existence of 'laboratory theatre' an argument for accepting performance as research? One criterion for accepting any research practice as valid is its capacity for replication - could we do this with the theatre of Brook or Grotowski even if we had the skills? What would be the point? Can anyone identify 'research questions' in their work, in the usually accepted sense? If this kind of performance is not what we mean by research, will the kind of performance work done by academics tend to vary in significant ways from either classical, experimental or commercial theatre practice? And how do we go about identifying what these parameters might be, and how we might go about evaluating work done within them?

Theatre practitioners frequently point with pride to the fact that no two performances are the same, exactly - does this invalidate research by means of performance, or is it that we need to develop a more sophisticated set of analytic tools, an understanding of the importance of prior agreement on perspective and vocabulary, and methodologies which recognise consistency in structure or generative rules rather than, for example attempting to deal exhaustively with the semiotics or phenomenology of any performance under review?

These are clearly not easy questions. In the United States for some years 'practical' degrees such as BFA or MFA have been offered which have included some performance component in lieu of thesis work. However, both the status and professional relevance of many of these degrees remains in doubt - an MFA is not considered the equivalent of an MA when applying for academic positions, nor do the institutions which grant them appear to have established significant bodies of research through performance (at least from the documentation available to me - we could ask Bruce Williams to check this for us).

The strongest claim we can make (and one that it is now possible to make following the entry of postmodernist argument into academic conversation) is that performance itself constitutes a discourse, and/or a set of signifying practices (the usefulness of language as metaphor being itself a possible point at issue) which require independent investigation in their own terms. We simply deny the legitimacy of the assumption that knowledge about performance, or the knowledges which come into being through performance, can adequately be represented within written or logico-verbal systems at all.

A pack of epistemological and methodological problems rear up immediately - if we can't talk about it, or if we can't just talk about it, how can our research exist in any valid exchange relation to other modes of knowledge? How can we be clear about what it is we are researching? How can the results of our research be reliably communicated? Some of these issues are already being addressed through semiotics, through investigations into spatial/kinaesthetic notation in dance and movement studies, through comparison with successful notational forms such as music or mathematics, and through conversation with practitioners in other disciplines of the 'human sciences' such as psychology, anthropology, sociology and so on. In Australia, the work being done at the Centre for Performance Studies in Sydney provides interesting examples of approaches to some of these problems.

Should we all therefore hold off launching into the uncharted territory of research by means of performance until these questions have been thoroughly sorted out? I would argue that we can't afford to. Not only because conversations between different epistemological expeditions, even in different languages imperfectly translated, can possibly shed useful light on the shape of the terrain. Because the most important conversations of all, between the expeditionary scholars and the 'natives', the tribes of practitioners performing away, inventing their own problems and their own solutions in their own 'languages' without so much as a with your leave or by your leave, can't really begin to take place until we do.

I would like to throw in a note of caution here about method, context and location. I have already noted both the tacit hierarchy of gentle/man/scholar/knower and player/(wo)man/material/known. While it may be both possible and appropriate that academic research by means of performance displays both focus and methods distinct from those employed in professional performance practice - while I think for example it is perfectly all right for academic performance research to demonstrate specialisation, to attempt to 'ostend' a particular aspect of practice which might normally be imbricated or obscured within a complex field of signification, to choose to focus on one (or the interaction between selected) variables of process or presentation etc. etc., academics need to exercise both rigour and restraint in assuming that everything they have done up to now under the banner of 'performance' can simply be reclassified as 'research'.

In other words, are the end of year student performance, the semi-pro production of Witkiewicz, the theatre-in-education project and the production of As You Like It in the Botanical Gardens all research? No- not necessarily. They could be, or aspects of them could be. But I think it is dangerous to assume that they are in the absence of the articulation of a research question, explanation of methodology and procedure, clarification of terms, outline of the means and mode of drawing conclusions, and so on.

This is one nub of the complaint being voiced by members about the unfairness of our situation. Given that the preparation of any performance involves so much time and energy (energy that those of our colleagues in more traditional or better established disciplines are presumably freer to devote to the publications that ensure reputation and promotion) why can't we get credit for doing them? Don't we find out just as much? Don't we work as hard if not harder than other academics already? Aren't we being disadvantaged in crucial ways by the very nature of our discipline and preferred practice? etc. etc.

Many of these complaints are entirely justified, and the question of for example whether more weight should not be given to teaching practice within universities is a real one. But I don't think it's the same question as whether or not our existing practices constitute or facilitate research into performance. We may have to change our emphasis and practices - the kind of performance work we do, the way we approach it, the extra thinking, writing, documentation and analysis that forms part of the conception of a performance project, and the processes and time devoted to it. We may certainly need to rethink the volume and focus of the work we do!

I think it is certainly productive to argue that research into for example relational and interactional, emotive/expressive, kinetic/kinaesthetic and other communicative body based capacities used by the performer or in the performer-audience transaction; spatial, gestural, rhythmic/dynamic, aural, and processual aspects of performance - in other words all those knowledges subsumed under the general head of the 'non verbal' - together with experiments into alternative teaching, rehearsal or other preparatory methodologies, can be most immediately addressed through performance itself.

Whether such performances can be enough on their own (at this stage or ever), how much they require the accompaniment of exposition and/or summary in other modes (borrowed from models of reporting research in other disciplines or as the result of our own experimentation and agreement), how research questions are formulated and communicated, and how performances claim a relation to research in their articulation of new knowledge are other questions; questions which bring us to our second topic, the relation of performance to publication.

Performance as Publication

Are all performances publications?

I would argue that they undoubtedly are - the question is what sort of publications they are, and to what extent and how a performance might be considered the equivalent of a refereed article accepted for publication by an academic journal.

Important questions here are intention, form and style, methodology, standards of execution and peer review procedures.

Not all writing is a publication; not all activity in the mode of performance is a performance, although once you have made the decision to perform to an audience larger than yourself you have tacitly accepted the audience's right to exercise judgement on that performance. Under normal circumstances, the only control a performer has over what assumptions an audience will bring to their reading of a piece or their viewing of a performance is through existing intimate knowledge of them and/or their sociocultural context (often involving prior capitulation to known prejudices, although there is always the choice to challenge, confuse, destabilise, mystify, seduce or transform- one of the characteristics of the exchange between artist and audience which distinguishes it from the ideal of academic discourse). Part of the context of the publication of an academic article however is the conscious attempt to set up a set of conventions and procedures which will assure that as far as possible there is an agreed basis on which claims can be tested, and judgement exercised.

Not all writing gets published, and not all writing is an academic article whether published or not. We need to be clear about what criteria we will apply in order to decide on the acceptance or otherwise of performances offered as academic publications, as well as the basis on which any further processes of assessment and debate might be carried out.

I think the process of deciding acceptability, and the process of providing assessment, need to be kept conceptually separate. While of course a great deal of debate, advice and substantial revision may go on during the refereeing process for normal academic publication, during which prejudices of various sorts may well be active, the criteria for final acceptance ought to be whether or not the work in question conforms to certain basic requirements such as clear statement of research aims and methods, and displays a sufficiently high standard of execution, not whether there is complete agreement with the argument being put forward.

This of course presents a difficulty for performance. If the resources involved are small, it may indeed be possible to present a performance in work-in-progress format, responding to criticism and comments from referees in order to work up to final submission standard. But sheer logistics such as large casts, assembling other resources, not to mention the physical availability of referees may mean a 'make or break' situation likely to be extremely stressful to all concerned. I would suggest therefore an approach which emphasised extensive discussion between researcher and referees beforehand, establishing a common understanding of intention, process and the conventions and criteria appropriate to the particular situation, together with agreed mechanisms for reporting back to other interested colleagues.

The focus should be at this stage on whether or not the work in question is of the type and standard of a professionally academic (not necessarily a professionally theatrical) publication. Questions of theatre skills may well be important - since performance is a material event in time and space the form must be appropriate and the capacity to manipulate theatrical elements in order to demonstrate the point or points at issue evident - but the focus of an academic publication is not necessarily the same as that of other types of publication.

There should be a clear research aim, and a clear statement of the relation the performance being viewed has to that aim. Again I think we should be rigorous but flexible here. Academic standards are often criticised for being narrow, unimaginative or rigid; I assume it's not our intention to be restrictive, but rather to facilitate the conditions under which knowledge about and through performance practice can best be revealed and exchanged.

The performance may be whole or part of the publication project; the performance may become the basis for publications in other modes, or for further research procedures; the performance may itself constitute the argument, or it may be that a choice has been made in favour of demonstrating an argument in performance mode in preference to other means of communication. The performance may be an example of the results of applying a set of systemic or generative rules, it may be an example of an alternative interpretive approach or method, or it could be a 'performance' of a workshop or rehearsal process which either (as above) is the publication or is to be considered as embedded in other argument, writing, photographs, videotape etc. but not substitutable for by them.

The vexed question of the assessment of 'creativity' and the necessary subjectivity of judgements upon it should not be so much at issue if the focus on aim, method, execution etc. is maintained. Publication through performance may well include the submission of creative material - one would hope that all research can be considered creative activity! -which may or may not be central to the research question being posed through the performance. Crucial points are

• the clarity with which the particular research question or questions can be articulated, - the degree of clear understanding reached between researcher and referees as to the appropriate conventions and criteria which will be brought to bear on the task of viewing and assessing the performance, and
• the perceptual and analytic skills and knowledge the referees can bring to the task.

Those of us involved in supervising students' performance and research projects are accumulating a solid body of expertise in this area - we need however to be clear about what standards a peer review process will seek to establish. These I think should be allowed to emerge as the result of experience and discussion rather than being imposed too rigidly at this stage. There are however some basic criteria which I've attempted to put a form to in the recommendations below.

Bill Dunstone has agreed to coordinate initial referee panels: we are suggesting that these panels be given the brief to establish model procedures and guidelines, and report back to a research committee which will aim to report on progress at the next conference.

Alison Richards
for ADSA Performance as Research Subcommittee