RESEARCH MIXED MODE PRACTICES THEORETICAL PRACTICES PRACTITIO NER KNO W LEDGE Tacit knowledge Em bodied knowledge Phenom enological experience Know -How CO NCEPTUAL FRAMEW O RK Traditional theoretical knowledge Cognitive -academ ic knowledge Spectator Studies Know that CRITICALREFLECTIO N Practitioner action research Explicit knowledge Location in a linage Audience research
It is in this sense that I have pursued a journey with unpredictable stops, during which my actions became a responding performance that was constituted through three processes. The first one takes place in the field. There she collects information; she writes notes, she records herself talking about the experience, she takes pictures and makes short videos. All these tasks vary from experience to experience due to the commitments she has made to each company. With each one she performs a different set of tasks; tasks related to research (looking for videos, bibliography, images), to creativity (bringing content to the pieces and exploring
151McClintock, David et al. “Metaphors for Reflection on Research Practice: ResearchingwithPeople.”
Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 45.6 (2003): 715-731. Print. p.719.
new dramaturgical applications for the technologies used in the shows), to observation (giving feedback), to production (coordinating volunteers, looking for materials, supporting non-actors). So, the records she obtains are of different kinds depending on the tasks she has to develop.
The second set of responding performances takes place in this text. Here she has to find a structure, a framework and registers to convey her concerns and the knowledge she has gained on the journey. She needs to find a way to broadcast all the nuances that form the experience according to her ethical and ecological principles.
Thirdly, there are the responding performances that put her under considerable strain. They are the ones that expose the different positions that trigger this performative narrative. In other words, they are the happenings of the in-between; between the fieldwork and the text. This is where the researcher has to find an unnatural position to broadcast the paradoxes she finds along the way. She calls these responding actionsmicro-method-performances, writing as follows:
Broadcasting memory is a choreographic exercise as it plays between different existential layers. In the practice of research, caring about memory is based on the construction of all sorts of future mementoes. Those are made by the textures of the different supports that we use to document or register practice. They are the log–book of the researcher. In the fragilities, stumbles and disorientations that any process of research entails, we trust them as the links of the chain that will show us the path towards the past, towards experience and towards our body there in it. They are a collection of captured moments which give us an image of the past to return an image in the present from where we try to start the narrative(s) of one specific process, period or event. We often expect that our records will perform as acamera lucida, giving us a free pass to decode not only our movements but also the movements of others, as if all those remembrances could concatenate an explicit and clear sequence
towards the past. Far from that, as in the attempts to reconnect with all previous times through these mementoes we realize that they have become vacuous or detached, as if they were the archeological vestiges of a past which doesn’t belong to us. I don’t mean they are useless or that the act of documenting is a waste of time rather that it’s the other way round; the mementoes stress that in order to communicate we need an unnatural position to start with. This unnatural position materializes in the practicalities of writing as it is the strategy that the body comes across to challenge the emerging tensions of accounting.152
The micro-method-performances perform the search of this unnatural position and they are often found through her mementoes. They have been registered unconsciously and they have emerged – hopefully meaningfully – in the anxiety of an answer. They are materialized through different supports (images, videos, notes, etc.) and they express the paradoxes that the researcher’s body has been dragged into. They often have an autobiographical component, as they intend to perform the in-between of two things that don’t fully belong to her: the creative work of the companies and the text (in which the other participants are also present).
I started this section talking about a photograph I took to enable me to talk about the expectations of the researcher. This picture shows the waiting room of the researcher (the first expectations regarding a project) just as the waiting rooms of the companies’ shows express the possibilities of what is coming next. Each micro- method-performance that appears in this text is also based on a metaphor. A metaphor that performs, reflecting a net-worked relationship between the
152 This extract is part of an article entitled “Micro-Method-Performances: Finding an Unnatural
Position in Post-Hoc Dramaturgy” developed after attending a Symposium organized by BAD co. at the
Museum of Contemporary Arts (Zagreb, 2010) for the 10thanniversary of the company. BAD co. is a
Croatian dance company that works also actively in the production of theoretical and research materials. Different artists, writers and thinkers were invited to participate. The article belongs to a series of contributions called ‘WHATEVER #3 POST-HOC DRAMATURGY: reflections on poetics of presentation and circulation in performing arts’. p.1.
companies’ pieces and the positions of the researcher’s body, a constellated understanding. This metaphorical constellation tries to bring a transparent account of what cannot be performed again. This is an account of a path that cannot be walked because it doesn’t exist anymore. This is the paradox from which I start.