Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies

What is Performance as Research? How is it related to Practice as Research or Practice-based Research in the arts? This book maps out a landscape for Performance as Research in a way that acknowledges the legacies and influences of other practice-based research models and the particular influences of the field of Performance Studies. The intention is to delineate Performance as Research in the US more clearly, and in so doing contribute to discussions around similar work in the UK, Australia, Canada, Finland, China, and elsewhere. The essays in the first section offer perspectives for understanding the interrelated but different developments of Practice as Research and Performance as Research within different geographical and disciplinary contexts, and for comparing the institutionalization of such research approaches in the arts and new humanities. The central section offers a series of essays on useful research terms, and the final section provides examples of Performance as Research work in a broad range of courses in the humanities, from music to theatre, from the visual arts to performance art, new media, and technology, and concludes with a series of commentaries on the scholarly interactions and contributions of such research productions.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Acronyms Contributors Introduction PART I: LAY OF THE LANDSCAPE -- GEOGRAPHIES, LEGACIES, DISCIPLINES 1 Performance Practice as Research: Perspectives from a Small Island; B.Kershaw Working on the Middle Ground: A Case-Study of Institutional Inter-Action about Practice-as-Research; S.Jones Troubling Performance: Local, National and International; R.Gough Using Performance as a Practice as Research tool in Africa; J.Plastow Rating the Theatre Practitioner: A South African Case-Study; T.Hauptfleisch Performance as Research in Australia: Legitimating Epistemologies; B.Haseman Locating the Artist-Researcher: Shifting Sites of Performance as Research [PAR] in Canada; L.Levin Social Performance Studies [in China]: Between the Real and the Virtual; W.H.Sun & F.C.Fei Artistic Research - From Apartness to the Umbrella Concept at the Theatre Academy, Finland; A.Arlander An Actor Prepares: Performance as Research [PAR] in the Theatre; I.Watson Making a Dance/Researching through Movement; S.L.Foster Performance as Research [PAR] in North American Ethnomusicology; S.J.Graham The Three Configurations of Studio-Art PhDs; J.Elkins Approaching Knowledge, Research, Performance, and the Arts; A.J.Sabatini PART II: CARTOGRAPHIES -- TERMS FOR FINDING/CHARTING THE WAY(S) Action Research; K.Yasuda Disjunction: Performing Media Space; N.Kaye Embodiment; P.Lichtenfels Environment; B.Kershaw Lab/Studio; S.R.Riley Medium; S.Kelly Oral History; D.Pollock Site-Particular; I.Noe Situated Knowledge; L.Hunter PART III: MAPPING PAR IN THE US -- COMMUNITIES, CLASSROOMS, STAGES, AND HOLODECKS When Is Art Research?; S.Jackson The Oral History Project: Practice-Based Research in Theatre and Performance; L.D.Nielsen University Gamelan Ensembles as Research; H.Spiller Performative and Pedagogical Interventions: Embodying Whiteness as Cultural Critique; J.T.Warren Open up the Box: Pedagogy, Action Research and Art; K.Yasuda Searching for Spalding Gray: PAR Pedagogy, an Undergraduate Ensemble, and 'The Edinburgh Project'; R.Malague Valuing Performance/Practice as Academic Knowledge; L.Hunter Performed Research: Audience as Investigator; M.Arsem Miss Translation USA Goes to Cuba: Performance as Research toward a Performative Ethnography; S.R.Riley Acting (on) our own Discomforts: BLW's [Media] Performance as Research; J.Wyman Theory/Practice as Research: Explorations, Questions and Suggestions; L.Hunter Dramaturgy: Conceptual Understanding and the Fickleness of Process; J.D.Rossini Collisions in Time: 21st Century Actors Explore Delsarte on the Holodeck; S.M.Carnicke Living on the Edge: Alternate Controllers and the Obstinate Interface; J.B.Rovan Select Bibliography Index

About the Author :
SHANNON ROSE RILEY has a PhD in Performance Studies and Critical Theory and an MFA in Studio Art and Art History. She is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Coordinator of the Creative Arts Program at San Jose State University, USA. Her scholarly work has been published in several peer review journals and her performance art and visual work has been staged and exhibited internationally. LYNETTE HUNTER is Professor of the History of Rhetoric and Performance at the University of California, Davis, USA. Previous positions include the Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Leeds (UK) and Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London. She has published numerous books and edited collections in the areas of rhetoric, literature, and performance studies. She is also a performer with an international reputation for theory as performance.