Thinking again: Enaction as a resource for ‘practice as research’ in theatre and performance

Abstract

In the context of global research culture, practitioner-researchers in theatre and performance have consistently struggled to best account for the embodied and emergent qualities of their subjects. As methodologies for ‘practice as research’ (PaR) in theatre and performance have developed since the 1990s, artistic researchers have often continued to define themselves against scientific conceptions of thinking, knowledge, and research to highlight the specific efficacies of artistic practice. I argue that this strategy genuinely hinders researchers, and that interdisciplinary approaches that move across the sciences, humanities, and arts are the key to robust accounts of theatre and performance. By revisiting a seminal PaR performance project, Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley and Lee Miller's Partly Cloudy, Chance of Rain (2002), I suggest how interdisciplinary approaches such as enaction from the cognitive sciences should be integrated into PaR methodologies to better address the complexity and richness of embodiment and emergence in theatre and performance.