Considering Ethics in Dance, Theatre and Performance

By Fiona Bannon

This book asks important questions about making performance through the means of collaboration and co-created practice. It argues that we can align ethics and aesthetics with collaborative performance to realise the importance of being in association with one another, and being engaged through our shared imaginations. Evident in the examples of practice visited in this study is the attention given by a number of practitioners to the development of shared, co-operative modes of creation. Here, we can appreciate ethical work as being relational, forged in association with the others as we cultivate ideas that matter.

In looking at a range of work from practitioners including Meg Stuart, Rosemary Lee, Deufert&Philschke and Fevered Sleep, Considering Ethics in Dance, Theatre and Performance explores ways that we rehearse by attending to ethics, aesthetics and co-creation. In learning to listen, to observe, to co-operate and to negotiate, these practitioners reveal the ways that they bring their work into existence through the transmission of shared meaning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319917313

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2018

Fiona BannonConsidering Ethics in Dance, Theatre and Performancehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91731-3_1

1. Introduction: Intertwining Ethics, Aesthetics and Knowing

Fiona Bannon¹  

(1)

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Fiona Bannon

…every person, place and thing in the chaosmos …was moving and changing every part of the time: …the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns

(Joyce 1939: 118).

The ideas examined and expressed in this book recognise the rich possibilities inherent in the ways that we actively engage with one another. This is a situation that Joyce aptly captures as a universe of ‘intermisunderstanding minds’. What is addressed across these pages are ways that we might recognise and affirm values and behaviours that could usefully be adopted in the process of creating and engaging with performance. The increasing identification with—and popular notions of—the processes involved in devising performance are at times differently framed as collaborative, collective, or co-creative practice. This range of terms is in need of our attention. These features of social behaviour are increasingly identified and adopted by a variety of artists, practitioners, and performance groups. They are familiar modes of teaching in the academy in the realms of studio practice and seminar deliberations. They are leitmotifs often quizzed, yet seldom answered in post-show interviews with practitioners and company directors and have increasing currency in conversations that promote interdisciplinarity as a feature of research. What has been sought here is evidence of practice in which groups of performance makers seek to mobilise ethical and aesthetic sensitivities through their investigations of the ever-evolving use and abuse of modes of joint authorship.

What has taken time, in terms of forming and preparing this book, has been the search for traces of practice that capture the shared journeys of people working together, where their preparedness and enthusiasm for being and creating with others is part of the impetus of the practice. At times they resonate with my own inclinations towards making performance whilst in other instances they provide a window onto alternative perspectives. In asking questions of these manners of attention and of our engagement with others, the aim has been to seek ways through which we might recognise the entangled parts of our experience that in turn contribute to informing an ethos of practice. When the processes and/or systems under consideration do not necessarily rely upon the use of spoken or written language , other challenges arise. The quest in seeking access to these modes of communication shared has become one of pursuing attitudes towards the practice of ideas. Together, it is relations found between our ethics and our aesthetics that inform our interactions and that, arguably, bring forth the serendipity of what becomes possible in the process.

With these thoughts in mind, the task became one of casting broad nets, in a search for ways to describe the foundations of relationships that can be recognised as shaping a performance. The aim throughout has been to understand how we can learn to create performance together and to recognise the impact that such encounters can have in terms of enhancing our lived experience. From an educational perspective, learning through processes, which at their core exhibit a character of ‘jointedness’, provides access to personal and social insights that articulate ways of learning to be with—and in turn, learning from—difference. These are ideas that, of themselves, might shape imagination and inform a more inclusive world view.

As such, the discussions explore and contribute to a number of overlapping debates. Each of these considers how we might be said to live well, and to flourish, with respect to our experiences of our daily potential. With this somewhat open approach begins a quest to recognise behaviours that have integrity and could be considered to be fair, informing, and equitable, seen from a position of our engagement with—and our creation of—communication in and through art. What the process involves is a view of ethics that moves away from insistence on any moral imperative as exhibited through the practice of agreed, or even enforced principles.

Instead, what is explored broadens the scope to include an intermingling of our ethical, aesthetic, and relational lives. Together, these arguments form an adaptive framework of ethics, as a practice that emerges through those elements gained from our responsible, responsive, and affective engagement with others. In this sense, the discussion revolves around our capacity to engage with variation, in terms of the circumstances in which we each find ways to facilitate positivity, satisfaction, and fulfilment.

Such experiences may evolve as counter proposition s to vulnerability, dispossession, doubt, or questions of worth that foster judgmental, rule-driven ideals and the diminishing of selves. Exploring ethics in this way moves us to consider interrelational practices of sensitivity that can be seen through the ties that we share with those with whom we are close, whether in terms of our work, our community, our neighbourhood, our familial associations, or other personal relations. In seeking to look at the in-between spaces of creative practice, what has been sought are ways to reveal relations forged in the shaping of our dynamic responses to our life experiences.

In the transmission of ideas that are often shared in a gesture or a silence, the exploration has presented challenges in terms of finding ways to capture complex nuances in words. Experience in the studio demonstrates the extent of the difficulties we face when we seek to address the growing expectation of revealing practice through trails of documentation. This, in turn, is met by a tradition that is reluctant to attempt to capture the multifaceted dimensions that contribute to the forming of a work at the point of its completion. Though this is often thought to accommodate the framing of ideas, and thereby disseminate the ideas that were honed in the process with greater ease, it presents challenges. These challenges are often characterised in terms of considering how to represent the intra-active manner of forming a work and to articulate the difficulties inherent in attempts to understand the inside of processes from an outside perspective. So, the quest in the early chapters has been one of asking questions about what should not be taken for granted and what should be recognised as being significantly integral to the process of co-working before we presume to embark upon any such journey.

Given that an important ambition is to speak to the lived experience of generating and forming ideas in the process of creating a performance, it is worth noting the impact that chance has played in the process. It was in such moments of opportunity, whilst attempting to thread parts and wholes together through a broad disciplinary discussion that I came to recognise significant directions for travel. The challenge has been to stay close to the intentions and choices made by the artists who, by a dint of their work, often come to share each other’s thoughts and methods than would have otherwise been the case. In these ways, we might have the opportunity to appreciate the whole process as being greater than the sum of its parts.

Resisting a drive towards ‘rationalizing’ thought has been important and in tune with the project itself. Learning to wait, to allow time for recognition of ideas and to seek debates embracing approaches to practice that are confused, complex, chaotic, and disorderly resulted in the recognition of themes that in turn reveal, individual and common human relatedness. Here, I take my lead from Deleuze in terms of performance and writing when he says, ‘… writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience’ (Deleuze et al. 1998b: 1).

Engaging in this project has brought to light a concern to find ways to observe, to consider, and to shape the generation of ideas as they tumble into existence. These are often driven, and at the same time, hampered by the constraints of the structures of language . As one writes, decisions are made and other potential connections can be lost. It becomes difficult to hold onto the rich complexity of the threads involved, and yet, it is these very threads that contribute to and are part of the entanglement of our relations. In the creation of performance works realised through forms of collective action , it is the inherent attention to praxis of complex relationality , through affirmative ethical interaction that underpins the exploration here. Writing, and at the same time retaining a sense of other possibilities with respect to the sharing of ideas or shaping of different thoughts remains a difficult challenge. It is made more difficult when exploring modes of transfer from ideas found or made beyond words. The movement of these ideas are in moments of dynamic, spatial, human, contextual phrasing. They are the essence of the work, yet often remain unspoken and not repeated.

However, given the complexity of the times in which we live, there is value in exploring the increasing attention given to what are differently described as collaborative, co-creative, or participatory-led ventures with respect to the making and the dissemination of performance. The purpose is to examine aspects of adopted approaches to creating performance in terms of the ethical, the aesthetic, and the lived experience of things that matter. The focus falls on the ways that we work, play, learn, and interact with one another, and through which, shape artistic responses to our experience of the world. In the process we chance to grasp new opportunities in ways we might benefit from developing our abilities to ‘… transform chaotic variability into chaoid variety’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 204).

It is in recognising the potentiality of what I see as affirmative ethics that the discussion leads to a place wherein ‘World-making’ is a way of learning to be, self-in-relation. Such an ethical approach concerns the manner of engagement, the manner of individual and group behaviours and the chosen values that are put into active use in the complex process of creating shared responses through performance. For all that we are, we are identifiable as, ‘…continually more or less intermisunderstanding minds’ to echo the observation of Joyce in Finnegans Wake (Joyce, 1939). So, the decision is to look within the complexity of the environment of collaborative practices, to where there are opportunities to unravel thoughts and make new understandings available.

A key argument here is that in the qualities of the lives that we live, we can come to realise ways through which we may positively benefit from our interdependence . In making art, the same complexities are evident; it is a situation to be explored and recognised for the struggles through which we learn. Striving for and through independence is a trait fostered in many of us from an early age, though arguably, part of this includes the honing of our ability to benefit from our interrelatedness , as beings-in-common . For it is the manner in which we learn and think with imagination and in which we give our attention that shapes the ways in which we might continue to prosper together. These common experiences of the world make it evident that the only way to seek to explore the realities that challenge us is by addressing questions of our ethical relations. We, in turn, learn to prosper in the process of coming to recognise and to realise ourselves through the knowledge that we gain with, and of, others. As bell hooks (2015) suggests, we can rewrite ourselves in the process of coming to understand more of ‘another’ with whom we engage through our working relations.

Therefore, these debates concern the complex associations between people who are engaged in generating ideas, through the giving of their attention to the manner of their exploration, and ultimately, to the articulation of the accumulated ideas as performance. It becomes a question that concerns dialogic practice. Where we ask about the benefits in learning through attending to our human entanglements. What is important here is investigation of these possible futures in terms of ways of working and of appreciating the contributions made when we learn through being with our complex selves, and embracing the possibilities of changing our futures.

The jounrey has meant revisiting modes of improvisation and performance making that call for a certain intellectual agility on the part of the players involved as well as a willingness to engage with each other and with the unforeseen and unforeseeable emergent ideas. Whilst this may seem familiar in terms of what could be expected of an improvisational environment, it is something that is not always evident or overtly addressed in collaborative work.

Looking Towards Practice

Collaboration , is of course, claimed to exist in many guises, and not always aligned with an aim to empower all those involved. It takes time to recognise traces of process that address or even discuss the potential of empowering our ‘situatedness ’.

In writing the book, I have found benefit and support in the work of Bronwyn Davies  (2011), who speaks of our ability to come to know through the writing process itself. The task of learning ways to shape the book became a process through which to keep my own knowing of the context open and available to change. Davies encourages an experimental and experiential approach to writing, ‘… in which the world is not reduced to what [is already known]’ (Davies 2011: 198). As a consequence, I have noticed that the process of writing has itself enabled me to move between ways of knowing. I have learned to embrace a broadening range of intersecting possibilities, ideas, and motivations. Some of these emerge as new lines of thought whilst others resonat with my lived experiences.

What remains important throughout the discussion is a developing association with ethics as a rational and social process. In this way, the journey is, in effect, an exploration of social and creative encounters that occur between individuals when they operate as beings-in-common . In the many events that often go undocumented, there are embodied experiences shared between practitioners that affect the ongoing relations and future trajectories of the work and of those who experience the performance. The significance of this transmission of relations is that it is in such circumstances that we learn to pay attention to small detail and to capture thoughts half-shared, remembered, or forged as features of the micro-practice that many of us know to be embedded in studio processes. They occur during the making processes, in the performance itself and thereafter; they linger as part of us as we move along.

Exploring this area of work has become a means by which to understand relations that are forged through dialogue as ethical practice and to understand how, in turn, these processes come to shape our identities. In these ways, it has become evident that there is benefit in revisiting longstanding questions that concern what can be learned in making work for performance. To do this, we need to address learning how to think, and thereby, to recognise the significant life-shaping events that are found in the relational processes that occur in these settings. For, it is in being alert to all that happens between us that we can trace and enrich the currency of what it is to be alive. When Hélène Cixous asks, ‘Why do we live?’ she answers with respect to the importance of the relationships that happen between us, saying that we live,

I think: to become more human: more capable of reading the worlds, more capable of playing it in all ways. This does not mean nicer or more humanistic. I would say: more faithful to what we are made from and to what we can create… (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997: 30).

Acknowledging the opening statement from Joyce in the context of Cixous, the experience of writing has served to reinforce the timelessness of our need to engage with the challenges of our own complacency, in respect of revising both our individual and our shared world views. As I write, we are faced with increasing levels of unpredictable and complex change in the nature of our life expectations, our fast-changing modes of communication, and our responsibility for actions that are often perpetrated in our names. In John Dewey’s reference to what he called ‘The Public’ (1927), he draws together the potential affect and consequences that we jointly share in relation to our actions. His Public refers to the context of our experiences, a location that is constantly forming, dissolving, and reforming. As an entity, it is in a fluid state made of multiple, often-interchanging groups that are themselves engaged with varied ever-changing situations, ideas, and events. Within this sphere, we may each belong to a range of social groupings due to the complex ways that many of us live our lives. It is these many and varied associations that offer distinct opportunities for us to enhance and develop our social and multifaceted sense of our selves rather than to thinly remain aligned with any presumed absolute.

For Dewey, it was this developing sense of self that was in need of our attention in terms of our individual growing awareness and responsibility for the consequences of our actions. From his perspective, there exists a ‘…continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognised to constitute experience’ (Dewey 1934: 3). Performance work is often about reflecting, sometimes exaggerating the continuity of our presence, proximity, and purposes. It is the manner of how we might access these attributes that underpins much of the discussion in the following chapters.

Broadening the Debate

In the increasing demand for our attention and our desire to embrace the events of a changing world, how can we deal with the complexities and seeming chaos of choices available to us? We often hear that important instrumental values of behavioural experiences are forged through modes of social interaction . I argue that this contention aligns well with our experiences when making and sharing performance. The idea suggests that those involved in such ventures have the opportunity to learn about themselves in the context of how they relate with others through various modes of social communication. Through what is inevitably a form of social engagement and something that often addresses vital practice in/of human narratives, how do we recognise the frames of relational learning that they offer? Do we even realise the inherent benefit with respect to enhancing our intelligibility and critical engagement in learning to mediate chaos? These questions are akin to the ideas explored by Karen Barad who, in writing Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), considers ethics by asking ‘What do we need to facilitate advancement, in terms of understanding more of what it is to be human and to be in relation with the planet?’ Here, she takes up an argument fostered by Rosi Braidotti who, in echoing Deleuze and earlier Spinozan thought, suggests that in

…. an ethics of mattering… [we need] to take account for our part in the meshworks of life in which we are entangled, an awareness of one’s condition of interaction and the capacity to affect and be affected to enable life to flourish (Braidotti, in Lester 2016: 64).

For Barad and Braidotti, there is a need for us to move beyond the challenges of our complacent, separate selves with respect to our world view, by appreciating more thoroughly what it is to be human and to be in constant relation with each other and with the earth. It is ever more apposite that we work to negate what are constructed divisions, and foster those things that we share and cherish and through which we can generate shared wisdom. It is Braidotti’s suggestion that what we need is to ‘… invent a form of ethical relations, norms and values worthy of the complexity of our times’ (Braidotti 2013: 86); this is taken up here in reference to experiments in performance practice.

This has entailed a search for ways to foster transformative debates that soften artificial disciplinary boundaries and thereby generate critiques of existing practice and our constructions of knowledge. It is through our own emerging knowledge that we can learn to accommodate the complexities of our contexts and in turn recognise our experience as selves-in-relation. For in considering our public lives, it is incumbent upon us to acknowledge that our human acts have consequences both for ourselves and for others. In these ways, we are responsible for the acts that we choose and for the consequential outcomes that they/we generate. Similarly, relational and sustainable learning thresholds are of key importance in terms of the identity that we claim to be part of performance practice. For, as Karen Barad suggests,

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating (Barad 2007: ix).

If this is the case—and it surely is—then to be effective in forming and maintaining any such intra-relating group is no straightforward task. This returns us to John Dewey and his reference to ‘The Public’, where he draws attention to the potential affect and consequences of our actions. Here, we might renew our appreciation for the modes of transmission and attunement that enhance our human interactions, and in turn, come to intensify our forms of experience.

A Turn to Ethics

As we start the journey, it is worth acknowledging that the only way to embrace these complex fields of debate is through understandings of the relations found where we meet, and that these relations are to be found through engagement with our ethics of living. For Walead Beshty , when thinking of changes in engagement with arts, in respect of art as a social contract, he argues that

A turn to ethics is a turn to the affirmative question of art, not art as negation, allegory or critique, but the description of an art that operates directly upon the world it is situated in… (Beshty 2015: 19).

In the particular nature of this exploration, the intention is to consider ways in which we might recognise and utilise ethics as an interacting aspect of artistic performance practice and to seek evidence for such opinion in the work of a range of practitioners who make collaborative performance. This, in turn, indicates working with an interdisciplinary approach that softens any perceived boundaries in our ways of thinking giving consideration to what is appropriate or possible to think about in these acts. In the creation of performance works that are realised through collective action , attention is necessarily drawn to the praxis of relationality . This is a key aspect of immersed and specific social relations. Turning to ethics in such situations facilitates an approach through which we can explore, care for ourselves and for others with respect to the synergies and responsibilities that we jointly share in co-working .

What is also significant here is consideration of meanings found where dialogue is used as a facilitating idea. This is a concept that enables the possibility of agreed change without predetermined control of the ways in which it might come about or the imposition of preemptive limitations on what may ultimately be the result. For it is through explorations of mutuality that are found by exploring dialogue that we gain access to appreciating difference in terms of the opportunities to engage with varied perspectives, and thereby forge negotiated outcomes. Arguably, in achieving these goals, we can reframe the possibilities and understanding of ethics as an active feature of our social, collaborative practice.

The discussion frames the possibilities of collaboration seen through an ethical lens in which the dialogic is seen as a system of our complex relations that facilitates opportunities to create responses to ideas and experience. Bringing into focus relations found in the methods we use to create performance, allows us to re-language ethics as a means of transmission and exchange. In this way, ethics concerns our manners and our responsibilities with respect to our engagement, behaviours, and values. It is these behaviours that are put into active use in the complex process of creating responses to lived experiences in art making. The crux is to consider what can be learned when we recognise ethics to be at the heart of how together we can investigate possible futures. For it is in the complex relations formed between people that we can engage in the practice of ethical collaborative art making.

With education systems continuing to be political and ideological battlegrounds, it is problematic to encourage a risk-adverse generation. Though we may feel that people thrive on certitude, we live in a world which exhibits perpetual flux. It seems more likely that attitudinal flexibility, intellectual agility, the ability to listen, and the skills to adapt are the traits that inform our sense of relations between what it is to be an individual and what it is to be a member of a community.

What performance-based experiences contribute to this debate is significant. It is through learning informed by responsible and creative processes that we are able to follow streams of inquiry that embody theory and practice, triggered by the recognition of our interconnections. The journey identifies threads of collective imaginings that, when drawn, together can inform and shape our practice. Whilst for all of us it is our experiences that act as our guides, this does not mean that one should follow or act without question. The ambition is to explore what it means to work in close relation with other people. Whilst this includes sharing responsibility for each other and for the work created, it simultaneously asks questions about our individuality and our cooperative behaviour. The central discussion considers ways by which we might recognise ethics as an exacting and an integral part of performance making, bearing in mind that,

Ethics is about all manner of behaviours towards being-in-community with others, and towards ourselves. It clearly concerns co-creation , collaboration , self-expression , self-determination, and collectivity , all of which are integrated through a shared reliance and simply stated, it tells us to ‘do as you would be done by’.

Ethics is about our ability to operate within the realms of the possibility of change.

Ethics is about considering our stance towards ourselves, the contexts in which we live, and the considerations of how we each interrelate with others in our moments of experience. We may not know what might happen in the next moment, but with the ability to know ourselves, and the ways that we respond to ‘not knowing’, we have the opportunity to experience how we think.

Ethics is about appreciating that through sharing what we have in common, we can benefit from the fortunes to be found in shaping our responses to our lived experiences together.

Ethics is present in the metaphors that a performance might evoke as much as it is the embodied vision realised in the form of the work.

Ethics is ultimately the presence of reflective self-consciousness that enables us to share a collective imagination and a responsibility for ourselves and for others.

We all adopt varying ethical stances with respect to the ways that we relate to our changing contexts. What the recurring conversations ask of us is that we consider attitudes towards ethics that inform our own behaviour; the attitudes towards ethics that we recognise in the work of the practitioners we admire; the attitudes towards ethics that informs our own practice; the attitudes towards ethics that identify how we work with others as we develop artistic responses to lived experience.

Our ethical inspirations identify us through the nature of the responses we make to the contexts in which we live. It is our aesthetic sensibilities that inform our attention, reflection, and willingness to act with respect to changes in our behaviour and the behaviours of others. From shared common positions, we can learn to recognise agreement and disagreement, and come to be aware of shared ambitions, experiences, or determinations. In these ways, we can learn to meet difference and to follow trajectories in which we recognise simultaneously both drive and ambition. It is often in the process of working with others that we can learn to attend to changes in our sense of responsibility.

What these situations consequently address is our familiarity in terms of taking responsibility for the ways in which we establish bonds with the others with whom we work. Part of this process includes recognising similarity and difference in terms of our discreet identities. There are, of course, always instances in which we have to acknowledge the need to attune to individual and collective points of view. In many working contexts, it can be difficult to find what we might call, common ground . Indeed, such an idea itself can lead to situations in which what we create is, in a sense, compromised, where the meeting place itself is somewhat alien from all opinions or practices.

Having common ideas as a starting point does not necessarily mean that you can recognise a middle ground. It may mean that you eventually have to find new ground,