Speaking,feeling,mattering: Theatre as method and model for practice-based,collaborative,research

Abstract

This paper examines uses of theatre for practice-based, collaborative, research. It brings a review of existing work and reflections on my own practice into dialogue with participatory geographies, studies of affect and geographies of bodily difference. This demonstrates in-depth and well-justified relationships between forms of practice and the spatial ways of knowing they engage; the surfacing of otherwise background conditions for critique and intervention; and relations between doing and thinking, as well as collaborating partners, that can open a field of possibilities. This is significant for the broader development and assessment of ‘creative’ or ‘artful’ collaborations in human geography, as I summarise in conclusion.

Keywords

affect bodily difference collaboration creative practice form theatre

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ahmed

(2008) Open forum imaginary prohibitions: Some preliminary remarks on the founding gestures of the ‘new materialism’. European Journal of Women’s Studies 15(1): 23–39.

Allegue

Jones

Kershaw

(eds) (2009) Practice as Research: In Performance and Screen. London: AIAA.

Amoore

(2018) Cloud geographies: Computing, data, sovereignty. Progress in Human Geography 42(1): 4–24.

Amoore

Hall

(2010) Border theatre: On the arts of security and resistance. Cultural Geographies 17(3): 299–319.

Anderson

(2014) Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. Farnham: Ashgate.

Anderson

(2018) Cultural geography II: The force of representations. Progress in Human Geography. DOI: 10.1177/0309132518761431.

Anderson

Harrison

(2010) Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography. London: Ashgate.

Askins

(2009) ‘That’s just what I do’: Placing emotion in academic activism. Emotion, Space and Society 2(1): 4–13.

Askins

Pain

(2011) Contact zones: Participation, materiality and the messiness of interaction. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(1): 803–821.

10.

Balfour

(2009) The politics of intention: Looking for a theatre of little changes. Research in Drama Education. The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 14(3): 347–359.

11.

Beck

Belliveau

Graham

Wager

(2011) Delineating a spectrum of research-based theatre. Qualitative Inquiry 17(8): 687–700.

12.

Berlant

(2008) The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

13.

Berlant

(2012) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press

14.

Berlant

(2013) Lauren Berlant in conversation with Dana Luciano. Social Text. Available at: http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/conversation-lauren-berlant-with-dana-luciano/ (accessed December 2015).

15.

Berlant

McCabe

(2011) Depressive realism: An interview with Lauren Berlant. Hypocrite Reader Available at: http://hypocritereader.com/5/depressive-realism (accessed 27 February 2016).

16.

Biggs

(2011) The spaces of deep mapping: A partial account. Journal of Arts and Communities 2(1): 5–25.

17.

Bissell

(2010) Passenger mobilities: Affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(2): 270–289.

18.

Bissell

(2014) Encountering stressed bodies: Slow creep transformations and tipping points of commuting mobilities. Geoforum 51: 191–201.

19.

Bissell

(2015) How environments speak: Everyday mobilities, impersonal speech and the geographies of commentary. Social and Cultural Geography 16(2): 146–164.

20.

Blackman

(2012) Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation. London: SAGE.

21.

Boal

(2000 [1979]) The Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press.

22.

Boal

(2002 [1992]) Games for Actors and Non Actors. London: Routledge.

23.

Boal

(2005 [1998]) Legislative Theatre: Using Performance to Make Politics. London: Routledge.

24.

Boyd

(2017a) Non-Representational Geographies of Therapeutic Art Making: Thinking through Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan

25.

Boyd

(2017b) Homepage. Available at: http://www.candiceboyd.net (accessed 1 June 2017).

26.

Butler

(1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Psychology Press.

27.

Cerwonka

Mallki

(2007) Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

28.

Cieri

McCauley

(2007) Participatory theatre: Creating a source for staging an example in the USA. In: Kindon

Pain

Kesby

(eds) Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place. Abingdon: Routledge, 141–149.

29.

Clemson

Ntelioglou

(2014) Editorial: New practices, new voices, new methods. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 19(3): 231–240.

30.

Coleman

(2008) The becoming of bodies: Girls, media effects, and body image. Feminist Media Studies 8(2): 163–179.

31.

Colls

(2012) Feminism, bodily difference and non-representational geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37: 430–445.

32.

Conrad

(2004) Exploring risky youth experiences: Popular theatre as a participatory, performative research method. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 3(1): 12–25.

33.

Conway

(2015) Editorial: Aesthetics and participation. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20(1): 1–11.

34.

Cowie

(2017) Performing planning: Understanding community participation in planning through theatre. Town Planning Review 88(4): 401–421.

35.

Crang

(2003) Qualitative methods: Touchy, feely, look-see? Progress in Human Geography 27: 494–504.

36.

Crenshaw

(1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1(8). Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf (accessed 4 June 2018).

37.

Crenshaw

(1991) Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 6: 1241–1299.

38.

Davis

(2009) New materialism and feminism’s anti-biologism: A response to Sara Ahmed. European Journal of Women’s Studies 16(1): 67–80.

39.

Dewsbury

(2000) Performativity and the event: Enacting a philosophy of difference. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: 473–479.

40.

Dolphijn

Van der Tuin

(2012) New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. London: Open Humanities Press.

41.

Eggleton

Kearns

Neuwelt

(2017) Being patient, being vulnerable: Exploring experiences of general practice waiting rooms through elicited drawings. Social and Cultural Geography 18(7): 971–993.

42.

Friere

(2005 [1972]) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

43.

Gallagher

Prior

(2013) Sonic geographies. Progress in Human Geography 38(2): 267–284.

44.

Garrett

(2010) Videographic geographies: Using digital video for geographic research. Progress in Human Geography 35(4): 521–541.

45.

Gergen

(2012) Playing with Purpose: Adventures in Performative Social Science. New York: Routledge.

46.

Gibson-Graham

(2011) A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene. Gender, Place and Culture 18(1): 1–21.

47.

Glassman

Erdem

(2014) Participatory action research and its meanings: Vivencia, praxis, conscientization. Adult Education Quarterly 64: 206–222.

48.

Grosz

(1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

49.

Grosz

(2013) Habit today: Ravisson, Bergson, Deleuze and us. Body and Society 19(2–3): 217–239.

50.

Hall

(1981) Participatory action research, popular knowledge and power: A personal reflection. Convergence 14(3): 6–17.

51.

Haraway

(1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 2nd edn. London: Free Association Books.

52.

Hawkins

(2013a) For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. New York: Routledge

53.

Hawkins

(2013b) Geography and art, an expanding fields Site: The body and practice. Progress in Human Geography 37(1): 52–71.

54.

Hawkins

(2015) Creative geographic methods: Knowing, representing, intervening. Cultural Geographies 22(2): 247–268’

55.

Hooks

(2014 [1984]) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge.

56.

Houston

Pulido

(2002) The work of performativity: Staging social justice at the University of Southern California. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20(4): 401–424.

57.

Hunter

(2009) Theory/practice as research: Explorations, questions, and suggestions. In: Riley

Hunter

(eds) Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 231–236.

58.

Jackson

(2015) The function of criticism at the present time. Los Angeles Review of Books. Available at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/function-criticism-present-time (accessed 26 June 2017).

59.

Jenson

(2014) Welfare commonsense, poverty porn and doxosophy. Sociological Research Online 19(3).

60.

Johnston

Lorimer

(2014) Sensing the city. Cultural Geographies 21(4): 673–680.

61.

Johnston

Bajrange

(2014) Street theatre as democratic politics in Ahmedabad. Antipode 46(2): 455–476.

62.

Johnston

Pratt

(2010) Nanay (Mother): A testimonial play. Cultural Geographies 17(1): 123–133.

63.

Jones

(2014) Musing on the artist-researcher in collaborative practice: Bodies in flight’s do the wild thing! Redux. p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e 1(1). Available at: http://www.p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e.org/ (accessed 29 June 2017).

64.

Kanngieser

(2011) A sonic geography of voice. Progress in Human Geography 36(3): 336–353.

65.

Kaptani

Yuval-Davis

(2008) Participatory theatre as a research methodology: Identity, performance and social action among refugees. Sociological Research Online 13(5).

66.

Kershaw

(1992) The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as a Political Intervention. London: Routledge.

67.

Kershaw

(2000) Performance, community and culture. In: Goodman

De Gay

(eds) The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 136–142.

68.

Kershaw

Nicholson

(2011) Research Methods in Theatre and Performance. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

69.

Kesby

(2000) Participatory diagramming: Deploying qualitative methods through an action research epistemology. Area 32(4): 423–435.

70.

Kindon

(2003) Participatory video in geographic research: A feminist practice of looking? Area 35(2): 142–153.

71.

Kindon

Pain

Kesby

(eds) (2007) Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place. London: Routledge.

72.

Last

(2012) Experimental geographies. Cultural Geographies 6(12): 706–724.

73.

Latham

(2008) Research, performance, and doing human geography: Some reflections on the diary-photo diary-interview method In: Oakes

Price

(eds) The Cultural Geography Reader. New York: Routledge, 68–75.

74.

Leavy

(2008) Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. New York: Guilford Press

75.

Lorimer

(2003) Telling small stories: Spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28: 197–217.

76.

Longhurst

(2001) Geography and gender: Looking back, looking forward. Progress in Human Geography 25(4): 641–648.

77.

Longhurst

Johnston

(2014) Bodies, gender, place and culture: 21 years on. Gender, Place and Culture 21(3): 267–278.

78.

Lorde

(1984) Age, race, class, and sex: Women redefining difference. In: Lorde

, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: The Crossing Press, 114–123.

79.

Lorey

(2011) State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso undefined.

80.

Lorimer

(2005) Cultural geography: The busyness of being ‘more-than-representational’. Progress in Human Geography 29: 83–94.

81.

Lury

Wakeford

(2012) Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social. London: Routledge.

82.

MacDonald

(2014) The ruins of Erskine Beveridge. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39: 477–489.

83.

Machon

(2009) Sara Giddens and Simon Jones of ‘Bodies in Flight’: The in-betweens, where flesh utters and words move — on flesh, text, space and technologies. In: Machon

, (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. London: Palgrave, 172–183.

84.

Macphearson

Bleasdale

(2012) Journeys in ink: Representing the spaces of inclusive arts practice. Cultural Geographies 19(4): 523–534.

85.

Marston

De Leeuw

(2013) Creativity and geography: Towards a politicised intervention. Geographical Review 103: lii–xxv.

86.

Massey

(2005) For Space. London: SAGE.

87.

Massumi

(2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press.

88.

Mattingly

(2001) Place, teenagers and representations: Lessons from a community theatre project. Social and Cultural Geography 2(4): 445–459.

89.

McCormack

(2005) Diagramming practice and performance. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23(1): 119–147.

90.

McCormack

(2008) Geographies for moving bodies: Thinking, dancing, spaces. Geography Compass 2(6): 1822–1836.

91.

McCormack

(2014) Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces. Durham: Duke University Press.

92.

McCormack

(2017) The circumstances of post-phenomenological life worlds. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42(1): 2–13.

93.

McDowell

Sharp

(1997) Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings. Ann Arbor: Arnold.

94.

McLean (2017) Hos in the garden: Staging and resisting neoliberal creativity. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35(1): 38–56.

95.

Merrimen (2010) Architecture/dance: Choreographing and inhabiting spacing with Anna and Lawrence Halprin. Cultural Geographies 17(4): 427–449.

96.

Mrs

Kinpaisby

(2008) Taking stock of participatory geographies: envisioning the communiversity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33(3): 292–299.

97.

Nagar

(2002) Women’s theater and the redefinitions of public, private, and politics in North India. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 1: 55–72.

98.

Nicholson

(2005) Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre. London Palgrave Macmillan.

99.

Noxolo

(2015) Moving maps: African-Caribbean dance as embodied mapping. In: Lacroix

Barboar

Howard

Misrahi-Barak

(eds) Diasporas and Cultures of Mobilities, Vol. 2, Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée.

100.

O’Conner

Anderson

(2015) Applied Theatre: Research, Radical Departures. London: Bloomsbury Methuen.

101.

Olsen

Hawkins

(2016) Archiving an urban exploration – MR NICE GUY, cooking oil drums, sterile blister packs and uncanny bikinis. Cultural Geographies 23(3): 531–543.

102.

Pain

(2004) Social geography: Participatory research. Progress in Human Geography 28(5): 652–663.

103.

Pearson

(2011) Raindogs: performing the city. Cultural Geographies 19(1): 55–69.

104.

Pearson

Shanks

(2001) Theatre/Archaeology: Disciplinary Dialogue. London: Routledge.

105.

Phillips

(2015) Work and play at the threshold of legibility: Theatre as method and pedagogy in surveillance research. Surveillance & Society 13(1): 57–77.

106.

Pratt

Kirby

(2003) Performing nursing: The BC nurses union theatre project. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Human Geographies 2: 14–32.

107.

Pratt

Johnston

(2007) Turning theatre into law, and other spaces of politics. Cultural Geographies 14(1): 92–113.

108.

Pratt

Johnston

(2013) Staging testimony in Nanay. Geographical Review 103(2): 288–303.

109.

Pratt

Johnston

Banta

(2017) A traveling script: Labour migration, precarity and performance. The Drama Review 61(2): 48–70.

110.

Puar

(2009) Prognosis time: Towards a geopolitics of affect, debility and capacity. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19(2): 161–172.

111.

Puar

(2012) ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory. PhiloSOPHIA 2(1): 49–66.

112.

Puar

(2017) The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press.

113.

Raynor

(2017) Dramatising austerity: Holding a story together (and why it falls apart…). Cultural Geographies 24(2): 193–212.

114.

Raynor

(2017) (De)composing habit in theatre-as-method. GeoHumanities 3(1): 108–121.

115.

Richardson

(2015) Theatre as safe space? Performing intergenerational narratives with men of Irish descent. Social & Cultural Geography 16(6): 615–633.

116.

Rodenburg

(2015) The Right to Speak: Working with the Voice, 2nd edn. London: Methuen Bloomsbury Drama Books.

117.

Rogers

(2010) Geographies of performing scripted language. Cultural Geographies 17(1): 53–75.

118.

Rogers

(2012). Emotional geographies of method acting in Asian American theater. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102(2): 423–442.

119.

Rogers

(2017) Advancing the geographies of the performing arts: Intercultural aesthetics, migratory mobility and geopolitics. Progress in Human Geography. DOI: 10.1177/0309132517692056.

120.

Rose

(1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

121.

Rose

(2016) A place for other stories: Authorship and evidence in experimental times. Geohumanities 2(1): 132–148.

122.

Savage

Silva

Beer

(2013) Genre, boundary drawing and the classificatory imagination. Cultural Sociology 2(7): 145–160.

123.

Schechner

(2005) Performance Theory. London: Routledge.

124.

Shaw

DeLyser

Crang

(2015) Limited by imagination alone: Research methods in cultural geographies. Cultural Geographies 22(2): 211–215.

125.

Simpson

(2013) Ecologies of experience: Materiality, sociality, and the embodied experience of (street) performing. Environment and Planning A 45(1): 180–196.

126.

Skinner

Masuda

(2016) Mapping the geography of health inequality through participatory hip hop. In: Andrews

Kingsbury

Kearns

(eds) Soundscapes of Well-Being in Popular Music, 2nd edn. Abingdon: Routledge.

127.

Sklar

(2001) Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

128.

Spry

(2001) Performing autoethnography: An embodied methodological praxis. Qualitative Inquiry 7(6): 706–732.

129.

Swanton

(2010) Sorting bodies: Race, affect, and everyday multiculture in a mill town in northern England. Environment and Planning A 42(10): 2332–2350.

130.

Thompson

(2006) Digging up Stories: Applied Theatre, Performance and War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

131.

Thompson

(2009) Performance Affects. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

132.

Thrift

(2007) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge.

133.

Thrift

(2011) Lifeworld Inc.: And what to do about it. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(1): 5–26.

134.

Thrift

Dewsbury

J-D

(2000) Dead geographies and how to make them live. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: 411–432.

135.

Tolia-Kelly

(2001) Cultural geographies in practice: Intimate distance, fantasy islands and English lakes. Ecumene 8: 112–119.

136.

Vasudevan

(2007) Geographies of experiment. Environment and Planning A 39: 1790–1793.

137.

Veal

(2016) A choreographic notebook: Methodological developments in qualitative geographical research. Cultural Geographies 23(2): 221–245.

138.

Vickery

(2015) Beyond painting, beyond landscape: Working beyond the frame to unsettled representations of landscape. GeoHumanities 1(2): 321–344.

139.

Wilson

(2017) On geography and encounter: Bodies, borders, and difference. Progress in Human Geography 41(4): 451–471.

140.

Wylie

(2005) A single day’s walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30: 234–247.

141.

Wylie

(2006) Smoothlands: Fragments/landscapes/fragments. Cultural Geographies 13(3): 458–465.