Performance Ethnography Research Articles

Embodied collaborative writing in graduate dance education.

This paper explores how embodied writing can inform teaching, learning, and research presentation in graduate-level dance education in a kinesiology faculty. The focus is on a graduate dance course "The Dancing Body in Motion", which combines the anatomical analysis of the physical body, social theory, and lived dance experiences to promote more embodied and holistic teaching and learning. The authors, an instructor and a student of the course, share their experiences and reflections on the course through an embodied presentation of a dialogue that combines the instructor's lecture notes, the student's learning journal entries, and their reflections both separately and in conversation with each other. Their reflections offer insights into how the body and mind, material and social body, and practice and theory can all be brought together using embodied writing practices, such as a learning journal and performance ethnography, in a dance performance.

Erotic Remembrance in (Digital) Vigils for Asian Migrant Massage/Sex Workers #Songyang and #8liveslost

Abstract: Song Yang, an Asian migrant massage/sex worker in Flushing, New York, fell to her death from a fourth-floor building when police raided her massage spa in 2017, and in 2021 six Asian migrant massage/sex workers were killed in the Atlanta spa shootings by a white supremacist. Their deaths have led Asian American and migrant sex workers and allies to create in-person and online vigils where they transform grief and pain into love and care for sex workers, and challenge racial and sexual forms of violence against Asian women that occur under the guise of anti-sex work and trafficking movements. Based on in-person and digital performance ethnography, this research proposes a theoretical framework of "Erotic Remembrance" to affirm the ways in which spiritual and artistic performances in these vigils spark political action to deconstruct the anti-sex work and human trafficking frameworks and imagine a better world for Asian migrant massage/sex workers.

"Before it is too late": Life, death, street performance and homelessness in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article examines the creation of ‘Before It Is Too Late’, a collaborative performance project created with the Peeps- short for Peoples- living on the streets of Aotearoa, New Zealand, who identify as Māori (Indigenous New Zealanders). The Peeps face profound, persistent, unjust inequalities, inequitable mortality rates, and devaluation of their lives by the wider community. The performance project is centred on the Peeps’ perspectives and is informed by whanonga pono (Māori values) and tikanga (customs), the principles of community-based research, relational ethics, and critical performance ethnography. The project aims to initiate a conversation with health professionals to improve the quality of care provided and to ensure greater respect and dignity in relation to the death of Māori homeless people. We present the drama Before It Is Too Late that has resulted from this collaboration with the Peeps to open a transformative space for their voices, experiences, priorities, and rights to be heard and acknowledged.

Norman and Ishi: A Performative Ethnography

This performative piece is a fictional conversation between Norman Denzin and Ishi, the Yahi Indian, in the Land of the Dead after Norman’s passing. Norman wrote a book about Ishi and was working on a second one when he died.

SJS-Who? Performance Ethnography and a Practice-Based Pedagogy

What is the performative force of practice-based pedagogy? Are there common perceptible outcomes of students engaging in practice-based research (PBR) in a learning environment? This essay utilizes an interview-based performance that is part of a course on performance ethnography to propose three observable features of practice-based pedagogy: intimacy, accountability, and reciprocity. In addition to articulating how PBR aligns with critical performance pedagogy and the performative paradigm, the reflection suggests how one approach to teaching performance ethnography may help to illuminate PBR’s broader methodological contributions.

Respons(A)bility: Weaving Words of Responsibility Through Story

This AuNTIe paper calls for better ways of being and doing in academe than the status quo practices across universities. Mad Native Auntie sits you down for a class in understanding why Indigenous ways of knowing are not tools like interview or survey for academics to colonize as free-for-all methodological use. Auntie addresses the demoralization that occurs when the Indigenous “other” is made teacher of pan-Indigenous epistemology. I discuss my understanding of duty-of-care through research, taking precautions to predict what could be happening for others when applied to the understanding of performance ethnography as course work.

Complicating the Lone Voice Through Rewriting in Role

Rewriting in role emerged out of the necessity to make sense of multiple versions of the same event and create a coherent narrative. It became, however, a vital experimental method that challenges the authoritative voice, aligns with critical pedagogy, and invites the reader into a dynamic discourse. This methodological innovation is akin to performative ethnography, factionalization, writing as inquiry, and others; rewriting in role is a deliberate and transparent process of rewriting existing data through fictional characters. It generated an entertaining, juicy, and embodied rendering of events to stage and analyze research, not as inert knowing but as active questioning.

“Defining Ourselves for Ourselves”

Black girls have long created their own subversive and creative forms of curriculum and pedagogy. I explore adolescent Black girls’ suggestions for teaching and learning about Black girlhood online based on a virtual summer arts program called Black Girls S.O.A.R. Through performance ethnography, we contended with our conceptualizations of Black girlhood and identity sense-making. The co-researchers suggested that storytelling, learner-centered pedagogy, and intentional community-building must be central in virtual pedagogy and saw reclaiming girlhood and self-care as two essential topics for teaching Black girlhood content. I also reflect on the tensions and possibilities of co-constructing participatory learning environments with Black girls, particularly as it relates to disrupting power and adultism.

“I rewrote their story and you can, too”: Black girls’ artistic freedom dreams to create new worlds

For Black girls, whose histories are often taught in schools through deficit-based narratives, the need to create and reauthor their personal and communal stories is a resistant act that gives their stories permanence in the present and the future. This article explores how Black girls leveraged creative expression to freedom dream in a virtual summer arts program. Theoretically grounded in Abolitionist Teaching and Critical Race Feminism, this study explored eight adolescent Black girls’ (co-researchers) experiences in Black Girls S.O.A.R. (scholarship, organizing, arts, and resistance), a program aimed to co-create a healing-centered space to engage artistic explorations of history, storytelling, Afrofuturism, and social justice with Black girls. The study utilizes performance ethnography to contend with the following research question: (1) How, if at all, do adolescent Black girls use arts-based practices (e.g., visual art, music, hair, and animation) to freedom dream? Analyses of the data revealed that co-researchers used arts-based practices to reclaim personal and historical narratives, dream new worlds, and use art as activism. In this, co-researchers created futures worthy of Black girl brilliance—futures where joy, creativity, equity, and love were at the center. I conclude with implications for how educators and researchers can employ creative, participatory, and arts-based practices and methodologies in encouraging and honoring Black girls’ storytelling and dream-making practices.

Humanity and animality in Chinese martial arts

What does it mean to learn from animals in Chinese martial arts? How does the training process emulate natural qualities? What is the relationship between humanity and animality in the Chinese cosmos? To answer these questions, I divide this article into three parts. Firstly, I specify the research problem, referring to my experiences as an Eagle Claw kung fu apprentice and my notes from a performance ethnography on Chen taijiquan. Secondly, I approach the issue of humanity and animality from the perspective of Tim Ingold to investigate how (and if) this distinction operates in Chinese correlative cosmology as defined by Anne Cheng, Cyrille Javary and François Jullien. Thirdly, to clarify the nature of animality in martial arts learning, I establish connections between Ingold’s debate and philosophical concepts from Yuk Hui. In conclusion, I argue that the animal patterns adopted in Chinese martial arts are not imitative but rather emulative of the principles operating in the Chinese cosmos, serving as an integrative path.

Come Correct: Itineraries of Discovery in Black Women's Ethnographic Practice

AbstractThis methodological reflection invokes the legacy of Black women anthropologists, who have approached ethnography not as encounters with “The Other” but as part of African Diasporic projects. As two U.S. Black women ethnographers, who understand our fieldwork contexts in West Africa as sites of return, re‐discovery, and struggle, we situate our work within Black feminist genealogies, which refashion anthropological tools to re‐map and reconstitute relations and recognition amongst those we call our kinfolk. We draw on “co‐performative witnessing” (Madison 2007) and “mutual comradeship” (Burden‐Stelly 2018) as counter‐modalities of ethnographic praxis, which follow in this tradition of disrupting and re‐routing the disciplinarily legitimized stakes of ethnography. Specifically, we re‐narrate gatherings, by which we mean moments of being “gathered,” or collected and corrected in love. Within our respective “itineraries of discovery” (Walker 2015) in Liberia and Nigeria, we were confronted with dilemmas of personal and professional benefit in youth performance ethnography and challenged to relinquish political neutrality in activist ethnography. We conclude by amplifying the call of Black women anthropologists and our kinfolk interlocutors that when we come to our ethnographic work, physically, intellectually, and relationally, that we also “come correct.”

Queer Spawn

<i>Queer Spawn</i>

Zhuiniu Water Buffalo Ritual of the Miao: Cultural Narrative Performed

The zhuiniu 椎牛 ritual is one of the most elaborate of the Miao people of western Hunan, China. Zhuiniu means “kill the buffalo with a spear” and traces its origins to the worship of spirits and natural elements. Sponsored by a family to repay the spirits, the ritual was a village-wide event that culminated with the sacrifice of a water buffalo and a community celebration. The zhuiniu, estimated to be several thousand years old, is rapidly vanishing from cultural memory. In July and August of 2018, six master badai-spiritual specialists of the Miao—were gathered in La Yi 腊乙, a village in the Wuling Mountain by the cultural bureau of the Xiangxi Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Hunan Province to reenact and document the ritual. Using performance ethnography as research methodology, the author employs on-site observations, interviews, field notes, audio, and video to document the reenactment and describe its significance in the words of its practitioners. This essay argues that the zhuiniu has no definitive expression but is an adaptative and interpretative cultural narrative adjusting to circumstances and practice. The ritual exists today as it had historically, in many and varied expressions and interpretations shaped by local need, geography, and subject to the vagaries to orally transmitted forms of practice. Although fragmentary in performance expression and interpretation, the zhuiniu ritual narrative serves as a mythologically-based script that organizes a series of dramatic events that invites community awareness and interaction. In so doing, this sacred ritual has sustained its importance in conveying, embodying, and encoding a spiritual, social, and cultural record of Miao cosmology, culture, and history. Performatively conveyed—using song, music, costumes, dance and movement, props, and set pieces—the zhuiniu has been efficiently and sensorially reimagined in order to reiterate and reaffirm cultural knowledge. With rural modernization, dissolution of cultural context and need, and the aging of its practitioners, the traditional role of the zhuiniu is now in question.

Artistic Practices as a Site of Human Rights: How Performative Ethnography Can Facilitate a Deeper Contextual Understanding

AbstractThere has been, in the past two decades, more scholarly attention for how rights-holders understand human rights norms, and how these understandings interact with pre-existing notions of (social) justice. This attention for rights-holders’ lived experiences can be linked to the growing influence of socio-legal and legal anthropological perspectives, as well as to that of emancipatory research methods, such as participatory action research. What these perspectives and methods have in common is their interest in how people experience and express their rights in practice, and how they give meaning to them. Remarkably little attention, however, has been paid to the question of how we try to understand this process of meaning-making. The dominant modes of engagement tend to (a) emphasize the spoken or written word, and (b) presume—the possibility of—an accessible verbal narrative. The shortcomings of engaging exclusively on the basis of verbal language becomes clear when considering the lived experience of certain particularly vulnerable groups, such as displaced people who are coping with ongoing violence and trauma or who have been forced into silence for years. Not everyone can speak freely about their lived experience or can tell a coherent story about it, and adopting an—exclusively—word-driven engagement strategy may reproduce existing power relations. Based on preliminary fieldwork with refugees from Syria in the Shatila refugee camp, we argue that a performative ethnography rooted in collaborative making and artistic practice is a promising way to engage with and understand how people make sense of their lived experience, as it allows research participants to express themselves using those (skilled and artistic) practices most familiar to them. We reflect on how a practice-driven mode of engagement may shed a different light on how people make sense of questions related to justice and their rights.

Navigating the Chaos of Liminality: A Narrative and Performative Exploration of Teenagers Telling Cancer Stories

Abstract: Through combining a critical performative (auto)ethnography with performative writing, I explore the world of two teenage cancer patients as they share their stories online. I allow my own experiences as a former teenage cancer survivor to inform and shape my analysis, intertwining fragments of my own cancer journey with theirs. In doing so, I seek to create a sense of co-presence, a shared story of “we,” not just “me.” The narrative elements and self-presentation of each patient reveal their struggles in coping with sociocultural forces. This leads to a methodological intervention, mapping a performative framework in which the patients either embody liminality’s redress through reintegration into normative society or embody schism by embracing a nonnormal body.

Discovering effective requirements elicitation techniques using a multivocal ethnographic framework

Effective requirements elicitation (RE) interviews are vital to the success of information systems development. Unfortunately, the factors that lead to effective RE interviews are often vaguely and contentiously delineated. In this paper, we describe our development and use of a multivocal, ethnographic framework employed to discover a rich set of critical success factors for effective RE interviews. Our interpretive framework emphasises performance ethnography along with other ethnographic techniques that are rigorously described and used to yield practical results. We then discuss and elaborate on our relevant findings that include eight critical success factors and practical lessons learned. We close with a discussion of our work and its place within the larger context of RE research in the information systems field.

‘Jack was just Jack’: performance ethnography of one trans student’s secondary school experiences

ABSTRACT This paper presents an ethnodrama that explores the school experiences of one transboy. To do this, the author weaves a series of life-history interviews into a single performance script that may create unique opportunities for examining different learning environments and support structures while offering insights into the school experiences of one transboy. The manuscript includes a performance script that invites the reader to engage in the participant’s story as he navigated school. Drawing from the potential of dramatic performance, the playscript may offer possibility for affective and actionable reader responses.

An Autoethnographic Performance: The Researcher’s Story of Hysterectomy and Menopause as Act of Resistance and Activism

One year after beginning a large-scale research inquiry into how young people construct their identities I became ill and subsequently underwent abdominal surgery which triggered an early menopause. The process which was experienced as creatively bruising called to be written as “Artful Autoethnography” using visual images and poetry to tell a “vulnerable, evocative and therapeutic” story of illness, menopause, and their subject positions in intersecting relations of power. The process which was experienced as disempowering called to be performed as an act of resistance and activism. This performance ethnography is in line with the call for qualitative inquirers to move beyond strict methodological boundaries. In particular, the voice of activism in this performance is in the space between data (human voice and visual art pieces) and theory. To this end, and in resisting stratifying institutional/medical discourse, the performance attempts to create a space for a merger of ethnography and activism in public/private life.

Venus Hottentot: performance ethnography, the audience and resisting racism

ABSTRACT Sara Baartman (Venus Hottentot) was an African teenager lured to Europe to perform for audiences in 1810; her genitals and brain were posthumously dissected, pickled and museumized. In 2016, ‘Venus Hottentot: A Short Play’ was staged at The University of MA, Amherst, and the audience participated in free writing at the end of the performance. The paradigm for the play and audience research is performance ethnography, which emphasises using research and writing as a political act to destabilise colonial power. I analyze the audience’s writing and make recommendations for resisting racism against Black bodies in theatre practice and activist scholarship.

Performance as narrative medicine

ABSTRACT In what follows, I show how the process of creating, rehearsing, and presenting a performance ethnography allows me, my family, the witnessing audiences, and readers to view performance as a productive metaphor for the lived experience of familial chronic illness. First, I join my work with ongoing scholarly conversations about performance ethnography and narrative medicine. Next, I demonstrate how to document and analyze a performance process using several principles of narrative medicine. Finally, I make a case for performance as narrative medicine as a pedagogical and medicinal practice.