Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration

By Helen Julia Minors

This volume explores the issue of collaboration: an issue at the centre of Performance Arts Research. It is explored here through the different practices in music, dance, drama, fine art, installation art, digital media or other performance arts. Collaborative processes are seen to develop as it occurs between academic researchers in the creative arts and professional practitioners in commercial organisations in the creative arts industries (and beyond), as well as focusing attention and understanding on the tacit/implicit dimensions of working across different media.  



                         

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jul 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030385996

Book preview

Part ICritical Contexts

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.)Artistic Research in Performance through Collaborationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_1

1. Introduction: Defining the Territory: Collaborative Processes, Issues and Concepts

Martin Blain¹   and Helen Julia Minors²  

(1)

Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

(2)

Kingston University, London, UK

Martin Blain (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Helen Julia Minors

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

CollaborationArtistic researchPerformanceDisseminationPartnershipEthics

Introduction: Aims and Questions

Collaboration is an issue at the centre of Performance Arts Research for the collaborative arts practitioner-researcher, but its definition, application and recognition vary. It is understood differently in different practices. Collaborative processes may develop as it occurs between academic researchers in the creative arts and professional practitioners in commercial organisations in the creative arts industries (and beyond), or as it focuses attention and understanding on the tacit/implicit dimensions of working across different media. This edited collection draws on a wide range of creative arts which are all presented as performance (performed in the moment, live or through recorded media) and ensures to illustrate a wide range of definitions, which are combined in the ways in which we see collaboration as a bringing together of two or more artists, or two or more people (such as someone to commission the work, someone to produce the work, and someone to receive the work). This volume is unique in bringing together such a diverse range of disciplines spanning architecture, art and design, craft, dance, digital media, fine art, installation art, music and theatre. The combination of traditionally understood performance arts, as discussed in this volume (dance, music, theatre, digital media) with those understood as art works and artefacts existing in a less ephemeral manner (architecture, art and design, craft, fine art and installation art), brought to bear in the context of the act of performance is significant. It opens up new questions concerning collaboration which require investigation.

This book interrogates the processes of collaboration within Performance Arts Research with the arts understood in its broadest sense in order to encourage the debates surrounding arts practices to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and to develop a dialogue whereby practitioner-researchers¹ can share their varied models of collaborative research practice. As such, this book aims to explore the diverse range of collaborative processes across the arts, with an emphasis not on the final product (such as the performance, the installation or the artefact) but on the politics and strategies of collaboration from the point of instigation, through the gestation of the work, to the critical reflection of the process. In so doing, it asserts that collaboration is always complex and challenging, and necessarily so. It affirms that collaboration is a bringing together of people, drawing on different skills, insights and perspectives in order to make something new which would not otherwise be possible. It challenges ideas of the lone practitioner-researcher as authority figure and presents contrasting models of why and how practitioners, in collaboration, gain something from analysing and disseminating their research findings.

Although each chapter raises its own issues, this book shares the following concerns:

1.

What is collaboration for Performance Arts Practices? And, how do the differences in its definitions affect the resulting arts practice? Is collaboration reliant on a hierarchy or can there be an equal partnership between collaborators?

2.

What models of collaborative research practice have been developed, and how do they help us critically assess the process? Do they also help us to reflect on and assess the final product? In Part One: Critical Contexts, we offer a critique of existing models of practice, and this is followed by a contextual framing of Artistic Research within a Higher Education context. This leads to the proposition of a new collaborative strategy for artistic researchers. This is followed, in Part Two: Collaborative Demonstrations in Practice, by a modelling of the processes and perspectives revealed in this collection via case studies. In this ground-breaking approach, we do not shy away from showing contradiction and rather seek to ask, why are there many models for collaboration and what do these different approaches tell us?

3.

What ethical issues emerge during the making of collaborative work? For example, who owns the work? How is a collective authorship documented and acknowledged? When we discuss co-creation, and/or, collective production, what are we referring to which is different to collaboration, and does this somehow integrate the necessity for a particular ethical procedure? Moreover, beyond those creating the work, those assessing the work also need to be aware of the ethical processes and procedures for developing collaborative work. In producing collaborative Performance Arts Practice, we rely, work with and use people; people are a valuable resource, where their identity and insights must be respected. Who conducts the assessment of the collaborative Performance Arts Practice, and what is the criterion for that assessment? How do ethical concerns inform criteria? In asking these questions, this volume necessarily engages with the political, institutional context of the UK, incorporating UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), Independent Research Organisations (IROs) and National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs), and therefore, it also refers to Research Councils (RCs) and notably to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

4.

What are the modes of dissemination? Or rather, how are the practice, research and practice as research outputs shared with a wider audience both within and beyond the academy? In order to ask these questions, we contextualise artistic research outputs and findings in relation to the three key concerns of HEIs within the UK, namely, REF (Research Excellence Framework), KEF (Knowledge Excellence Framework) and TEF (Teaching Excellent Framework).

Overview of the Book

This book is constructed from two parts. In Part One, Critical Contexts, we define, explore and theorise models of collaborative practice in the context of artistic research, as framed by an academic agenda towards wider dissemination and impact strategies. We challenge notions of collaboration in order to illustrate the social, cultural and political demonstrations of four key themes, which are later developed across the case studies. The four themes are understood as constituent elements of all creative collaborative processes and are explored in Chap. 2: The Place of Artistic Research in Higher Education. The four themes representing the place of Artistic Research in Higher Education are: Partnership, Ethics, Performance and Dissemination. Partnership concerns how artists (within both the academy and creative industries) exchange ideas and produce new works for mutual benefit. It sets out the research context, which supports and arguably privileges collaborative research and knowledge exchange, with reference to the strategies of UK funding bodies, institutional policies and necessarily to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework with which all research active HEIs engage. Ethics is explored here to question issues of authorship and ownership in collaborative Performance Arts Practice projects. Necessary to establishing an understanding of collaboration, practitioner-researchers must reflect on the issue of ethics. Performance is explored to chart the processes of doing research and specifically presenting performance (a live event, an art work or happening) as research. The editors claim, like many before them,² that practice can present new knowledge with its research findings subsequently disseminated to a wider audience. In considering performance we ask not only how it is able to disseminate an expressive art work, a product, but how this can be understood as a research output, worthy of value in terms of a research quality (originality, significance and rigour).³ And finally, the many ways in which research is disseminated are surveyed in order to question how practitioner-researcher collaborators communicate their methods and findings both amongst themselves and to specialist and non-specialist audiences.

Nicholas Till sets out a Foreword, which offers an open perspective of the challenges and concerns effecting practitioner-researchers with two historical examples to provoke debate on the issues concerning this book. Then, Martin Blain and Helen Julia Minors co-write the first two chapters, Chap. 1, Defining the Territory: Collaborative Processes, Issues and Concepts, which sets out the definitions of collaboration as presented in this volume and refines the concept in order to show how it is manifest in institutional contexts. Then Chap. 2, The Place of Artistic Research in Higher Music Education, explores the four key themes in turn, before establishing a range of collaborative research models, which the following case studies reveal.

Part Two, Collaborative Demonstrations in Practice, presents a diverse range of collaborative processes in and through practice. Some of the chapters are co-authored, and others though sole authored present conversations and primary source evidence of collaborative research practice with which they have been involved. The authors all work within, or in collaboration with, academic institutions. The authors are all in some way involved in practice either as performers (demonstrated through the role of musicians, dancers, actors and so on), leaders (those making the decisions in the creative process, such as choreographers), creators (those producing the stimulus for the collaboration such as composers, improvisers, fine artists, grant writers) or analysts (those charting the collaborative process, documenting the event, such as curators and dramaturges⁴). Of course, many of the authors wear multiple hats, and as such the processes and roles are not so easily defined. There is a multi-layered, multimodal approach to collaboration which is complex. The between-ness of the collaborative process is central to the chapters included in this volume, in the sense that each chapter takes a particular example of a project, performance or activity, and interrogates the collaborators’ different roles and different approaches to facilitate new thinking and making. As Peter Dayan⁵ notes in his assessment of the inter-art aesthetic (in reference to the start of twentieth century), there ‘is no unproblematic collaboration’. This would suggest that each case study presented in this volume will contribute to a deeper understanding of the collaborative arts process.

Part Two begins with three chapters, which set out definitions of collaboration and assesses the aesthetics of collaboration. Interestingly, these first two chapters set out contrasting models for why and how collaborative arts practitioner-researchers work. In Chap. 3, Why Collaborate? Critical Reflections on Collaboration in Artistic Research in Classical Music Performance, Mine Doğantan-Dack offers a controversial model, which reveals a process of social interaction, with a ‘performance turn’, but which sets out the need for researchers and practitioners forming collaborative partners in order for the product to be critically assessed. Chapter 4, The Aesthetics of Artistic Collaboration, uses architecture as an exemplar for how collaboration mirrors the structure of society. Andy Hamilton uses an analogy of vernacular language to consider collective production and unconscious collaboration. His model sets out the opposing poles of the sole genius and shared co-creation. Whereas Hamilton shows the need for practitioners to also be researchers and to be collaborators with themselves, wearing multiple hats, Doğantan-Dack separates these roles in her exposé. Chapter 5, In the Bee Hive: Valuing Craft in the Cultural Industries, offers a case study of the Pairings project. Alice Kettle, Helen Felcey and Amanda Ravetz explain how their aim to emerge from the boundaried practices of craft informed a new approach to collaboration. They raise questions of authorship and ownership by outlining the practicalities and policies of the project.

The next three chapters engage with issues of improvisation in diverse ways, where collaborative acts in the moment require us to question ethics and so to consider the ethics of communication, as well as the hierarchy imposed by notions of ensemble leadership. Chapter 6, The Right Thing to Play? Issues of Riff, Groove and Theme in Freely Improvised Ensemble Music: A Case Study, explores the ethics of using strict rhythmical musical content within the context of free improvisation. Adam Fairhall, as a pianist and jazz improviser, explores the communication dynamics of jazz bands within which he has played. Helen Julia Minors, in Chap. 7, Soundpainting: A Tool for Collaborating During Performance, continues the discussion of improvised approaches through a case study of Soundpainting, whereby multidisciplinary works are created in the moment with a leader, the Soundpainter, communicated through a signed coded gestural language. Considering issues of authorship and dialogue , she illustrates how members of the performing group each contributes to the authorship of the resulting work. Chapter 8, Collaboration and the Practitioner-Researcher: A Composer’s Perspective, explores the process through which a composer worked with a performer on the development of a new work. Tom Armstrong presents a case study of his own music, which was premiered by the trumpeter Simon Desbruslais. He refers to the ‘master [principle] score’ as a version of the work and basis for development, situating his discussion to illustrate how their perspective and different roles in HEIs affect their creative roles and collaborative process. Institutional pressures are shown to impact their working relationship. He presents a case study of professional practice.

Whereas the previous three chapters focused on music primarily, the next two chapters explore collaboration through dance. Chapter 9, Creative Industries and Copyright: Research into Collaborative Artistic Practices in Dance, by Mathilde Pavis and Karen Wood, explores the ménage à trois of the researcher, practitioner and creative industries, assessing authorship and ownership, specifically by challenging the issue of Intellectual Property in a situation where there are clear creative leaders and a hierarchical structure guiding the collaborative process. This chapter is significant in its inclusive approach to dance and the differently-abled. Sally Morfill in Chap. 10, Romance and Contagion: Notes on a Conversation Between Drawing and Dance, takes an insider perspective to a creative collaboration, to negotiate what is understood as a romantic project. The notion of translation is used to address a collective enterprise and to explore how individual identities are revealed in the final work.

The next two chapters take an insider-outsider perspective. Chapter 11, The Good, The God and The Guillotine: Insider/Outsider Perspectives, explores the processes that led to the development of collaborative strategies within this multi/interdisciplinary arts project. Focusing on their respective positions as ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, Martin Blain and Jane Turner consider the efficacy of different types of collaborative approaches tried out over the course of the project in relation to what, following Andy Lavender, they define as ‘concentric circles of collaboration’. The circles of collaborative decision-making are then critically aligned with Kant’s notions of ‘interested’ and ‘disinterested’ aesthetic judgement, as well as Noël Carroll’s taxonomy for qualifying aesthetic experience. The resulting critique provides useful insights into creative development and collaborative decision-making processes in performance-making projects. Chapter 12, Connecting Silos: Examples of Arts Organisation and HEI Collaborations at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, illustrates how National Portfolio Organisations and Independent Research Organisations function in terms of collaborative projects and research validation. Roger McKinley and Mark Wright use case studies from FACTLab (an Independent Arts Organisation), in Liverpool, to illustrate how knowledge exchange and cultural knowledge can be shared and developed in new ways.

This book contributes to the growing body of work on Performance Arts Research by interrogating specifically the collaborative process of a wide range of creative artists. As iterated above, the chapters are all about collaboration, but moreover the content creation of the chapters is in varying ways collaborative, as are the case studies they discuss. Each chapter shows how their particular processes of collaboration were undertaken. Following his ‘How-to’ approach to ‘practice as research’, Robin Nelson⁶ here provides an epilogue to this book in which he reflects on the current state of play with regard to Performance Arts Practice, offering observations on recent activity.

Bibliography

Allegue, Ludivine, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, and Angela Piccini, eds. 2009. Practice-as-Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cook, Nicholas. 2015. Performing Research: Some Institutional Perspectives. In Artistic Practice as Research in Music, ed. Mine Doğantan-Dack, 11–32. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Dayan, Peter. 2011. Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond. Farnham: Ashgate.

Leavy, Patricia. 2009. Method Meets Art: Arts Based Research Practice. New York: Guildford Press.

Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Crossref

Research Excellence Framework (REF). 2018. Draft Guidance on Submissions. Bristol: Higher Education Funding Council for England. https://​www.​ref.​ac.​uk/​media/​1016/​draft-guidance-on-submissions-ref-2018_​1.​pdf. Accessed 18 Aug 2019.

Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean, eds. 2003. Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, rpt. 2010.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1994. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe. Oxford. Blackwell.

Footnotes

1

Ludivine Allegue, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw and Angela Piccini, eds., Practice-as-Research (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Robin Nelson, Practice as Research: Principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, eds., Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003).

2

Nicholas Cook, ‘Performing Research: Some institutional perspectives,’ in Artistic Practice as Research in Music, edited by Mine Doğantan-Dack (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 11–32.

3

Research Excellence Framework REF 2018/01, ‘Draft Guidelines on Submissions’, https://​www.​ref.​ac.​uk/​publications/​draft-guidance-on-submissions-201801/​ (last accessed 18 August 2019).

4

Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Art: Arts based research practice (New York: Guildford Press, 2009), 138. Dramaturge as a term was coined in 1958 by Goffman.

5

Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

6

Nelson, Practice as Research, 2013.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.)Artistic Research in Performance through Collaborationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_2

2. The Place of Artistic Research in Higher Education

Martin Blain¹   and Helen Julia Minors²  

(1)

Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

(2)

Kingston University, London, UK

Martin Blain (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Helen Julia Minors

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

CollaborationArtistic researchPerformanceDisseminationPartnershipEthicsREFStrategy

There are many books and articles,¹ which discuss practice as research (PaR), practice-led research and artistic research, notably spanning theatre and music. The field remains one of hot debate concerning issues of how to document and share the research process and product. But despite many authors exploring the processes of practice as research or artistic research, few explicitly tackle the issue of how artistic practice might be articulated as research through the process of collaboration. This book not only suggests, below, new strategies of collaborative working (rather than a model as has occurred often) but also shows a wide range of collaborative approaches which navigate the impetus of the creative artists, from challenging the notion of the sole genius to celebrating and embracing distributed creative practices within specific settings.

Anthony Gritten, in exploring ‘Artistic Practice as Research’ (APaR) identified the crux of the issue: that Performance Arts Research, PaR, or APaR, must assert and share its own value. The value must have a quantifiable impact, which can be registered in numeric terms, whether it be economic, participant numbers or metrics which determine change. Gritten argues that:

the in-folding of research into practice is no more than APaR (Arts Practice as Research) attempting to pull itself up off the ground by its own hair or bootstrap (to adapt metaphors used by Kant and Bakhtin), attempting to engage in a momentous act of self-determination by means of which it can afford itself—indeed, must afford itself—artistically productive potential and aesthetic merit as a form of practice.²

Is the notion of research in the arts considered comparable to traditional (written) modes of research? It might seem ‘old hat’ to ask this question, but groups such as the Practice Research in the Arts Group (PRAG-UK) or the Practice Research Working Group sub-committee of the Royal Musical Association (RMA) have during meetings, when debating issues around how to articulate a research enquiry for the purposes of national research audits, received vocal opposition to the suggestion that 300-word Research Excellence Framework (REF) statements should be submitted for all practice submissions.³ Within the Arts and Humanities there remains a division between traditional forms of written research and that presented through practice notably when collaboration is at the heart of the research enquiry. The main difference is the live nature of some art forms and communicative practice within the process, especially in developing performance art. In establishing new ways to communicate, on many levels, theatre is ahead of the curve in that they have a body of scholarship on PaR developed over the last three decades.⁴

What has been written by scholars is a justification for how and why an artist’s work might be considered as research in specific instances, as well as a justification for historical and contextual accounts of the problems and issues behind the notion that practice, in some communities, ‘is’ still considered to be the research, as Keith Sawyer suggests in commenting that musicologists ‘justified their neglect of performance practice by assuming that it was a relatively trivial task, primarily a technical one’.⁵ However, what is not often discussed is the process through which collaborators make choices of what to retain and what to abandon during the process of collaboration. The processes of success as well as failure are not seen by the public or exposed in research dissemination (the rehearsal process usually takes place behind closed doors). We argue that an insider to the process is more likely to have a greater understanding of the work: they can see the rationale and the artistic purpose for choosing which aspects of the work (the creative threads) should be carried forward. Thus, the insider commands a position to offer the artistic community particular creative insights into the process of making and developing artistic practice and this we see as complementing the position of the outsider, who is able to offer different insights into, and reflections on, the creative process under scrutiny. Both the insider and outsider perspectives can collectively offer a rich tapestry of research-driven insights to the processes of creating and experiencing performance arts practice. The insider perspective might be seen as forming collaborative networks, as the practitioner-researchers discover creative solutions to creative problems as they work together. The outsider perspective might focus on the development of a specific role: for example, an actor might be employed to learn and embody a script, but in this role and in certain contexts do they operate as