Participatory Performance Research Articles

Towards Equitable Artscience Collaborations: Synthesizing Performance Art and Social Psychology for Social Change

Abstract The article proposes a novel model for ArtScience collaborations that is based on more equal collaborations. With better power balance, artists and scientists can together create projects that truly synthesize their fields. Additionally, it is suggested that these collaborations can significantly contribute to social change through socially engaged research. The article focuses on the transformative potential of the collaboration process itself. The presented case study is the authors' collaboration in creating hybrids of participatory performance art and social psychology experiments. It contributes new methodological approaches to the expanding field of ArtScience collaborations.

Meaningful agency in participatory performance: a contextual approach

ABSTRACT Agency is a significant concept in participatory performance: as a participant you are able to take actions that affect the direction or outcome of (part of) the performance and this ability is a key element of the work’s meaning. Contemporary discourse on participatory performance conflates two perspectives of agency: agentive behaviour (where a participant carries out an action that looks to an observer as if they have made a decision) and the experience of agency (as articulated by the participant themselves). However, my original audience research demonstrates that the instances of observed agentive behaviour significantly outnumber the articulations of experienced agency by participants. A new and more nuanced perspective is necessary to understand how agency becomes meaningful in the context of participation. This article sets out an innovative contextual approach to agency, combining theoretical perspectives from cognitive philosophy and phenomenology with insights from original audience research to create the necessary multi-dimensional perspective. In this article, I draw on empirical audience research on 94 participants of Early Days (of a Better Nation) by Coney (2014) to illustrate this relational and contextual approach.

Toward Equitable ArtScience Collaborations: Synthesizing Performance Art and Social Psychology for Social Change

Abstract The article proposes a novel model for ArtScience collaborations that is based on more equal roles. With better power balance, artists and scientists can together create projects that truly synthesize their fields. Additionally, it is suggested that these collaborations can significantly contribute to social change through socially engaged research. The article focuses on the transformative potential of the collaboration process itself. The presented case study is the authors’ collaboration in creating hybrids of participatory performance art and social psychology experiments. It contributes new methodological approaches to the expanding field of ArtScience collaborations.

Analisis Perilaku Kerja Pegawai pada Kantor Kecamatan Teluk Jambe Timur

This research aims to analyze the work behavior of employees at the East Telukjambe Sub-district Office, Karawang Regency, based on the Regulation of the Minister of State Apparatus Empowerment and Bureaucratic Reform of the Republic of Indonesia Number 6 of 2022. This study uses a qualitative approach with a focus on seven indicators of employee behavior, namely Service Orientation, Accountability, Competence, Harmony, Loyalty, Adaptability, and Collaboration. Informants in this study consist of the Sub-district Head, staff members, and the community. Primary data were obtained through direct interviews with respondents, while secondary data were obtained from related literature and documentation. The analysis results indicate that the East Telukjambe Sub-district Office shows positive performance in all the examined indicators of employee behavior. Measures such as clear service policies, employee training, participatory performance evaluation systems, and promotion of collaboration among employees have been taken to strengthen this performance.

EVALUATION STUDY OF THE REALITY OF PUBLIC SPACES IN RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS, THE CASE OF THE LAKHDAR AL-SABAA NEIGHBORHOOD IN AL-IDRISSIYA- DJELFA-ALGERIA

Public spaces are the basic element within residential neighborhoods, by their effective role as they are considered a complement to the dwelling space for users, but it suffers from various problems, as it records a state of deterioration that often reflects a lack of design efficiency with the absence of management features for the actors of this component within the residential neighborhoods. In order to determine the totality of this problems, we conducted an evaluation study of the reality of public spaces in residential neighborhoods by choosing the Akhdar Al-Sabaa neighborhood in Al-Idrissiya, where we studied the extent of efficiency and effectiveness and evaluated the participatory performance of residents within the neighborhood through field analysis and comparing the planning of public spaces within the neighborhood with international indicators in the quality of public spaces. Through this research paper, after reading, comparing, and reviewing, we were able to come up with a number of results and solutions in dealing with public spaces and contributing to raising their quality.

Experiments in Care as a Reciprocal Act

Care is complex: something that must be thoughtfully evoked; that is not necessarily comfortable; that is humbling, vulnerable, and negotiated. Examining the stakes of care in participatory performance, this article traces lines of inquiry around care as labour, as duty, as risk, as choice, as participation, and as an exchange of power requiring consent. Reflecting on the precarity and interdependence of participatory performance, I argue this genre is not only uniquely positioned to foster reciprocal care—it requires it. I outline a model of reciprocal care, defining it as the act of all participants attending to something together—in this case the performance—and collectively creating the conditions of coexistence necessary for this tending. To make these ideas tangible, I refer to two participatory performances I directed. Trophy is a performance installation featuring local community members sharing personal stories of change, housed in glowing tents that transform over the course of the performance. The second, Remixed, is a hybrid deep listening experience, accessed via a progressive web app, that contemplates how we instigate change in our lives, communities, and world. Both productions are tentative experiments in reciprocal care, extending its duty beyond the artist and exploring the conditions through which it is sustained by all participants. I conclude by envisioning the possibilities of reciprocal care as a vital way to operate in the uneven precarity that is our standard collective condition and to be in the unknown together.

If Not Democratic

If someone says your work is democratic, what does that mean to you? And what does that mean for all the works you have made that no one has ever called democratic? This text reflects on participatory performance’s relationship to political forms of organization—from democracy to autocracy. The author has chosen to supply these reflections from within the context of his own body of work and collaborations, first reflecting on what it means to adopt democracy as a form and then pondering upon alternatives as provocations, from more established ‘classical’ forms to those that might be derived from the world around us. Laced through the text’s short sections is a refrain on what the author considers to be a tension between performance’s capacity to manifest a political system and the threat of politicality as a metaphor.

On Uncomfortable Theatre and Cozy Revolution

This article examines the contemporary trend of participatory performance pieces that seek to arouse discomfort in spectators and contemplates the radical potential of pieces that instead solicit coziness. Through it, Lynch highlights and deconstructs common assumptions about affect and politics in participatory theatre. The author begins by delineating the terms of the discussion, defining participatory performance broadly: as works that directly or indirectly invite the physical and/or intellectual participation of their audiences. In doing so, she connects more conventional forms of participatory theatre (which ask for spectators’ physical involvement), with modes of performance like direct audience address that more subtly call for participation and are often left out of discussions of participation and performance. Noting that “cozy” modes of affect associated with warmth and care may more often be scrutinized for their political potential, Lynch argues that performances that employ discomfort as part of their political strategies, which might be similarly limited, are often not subject to the same scrutiny. Using Adam Lazarus’s bouffon piece Daughter as a grounding example, she then explores some of the limits of discomfort as an approach to political engagement. Lynch discusses how discomfort can be deployed in reductive ways that may in some cases undermine the political points these pieces strive to make by centring the status quo and disproportionately distributing discomfort across heterogeneous audiences. Finally, as a counterpoint to the way uncomfortable theatre is often conceptualized, she offers some brief thoughts on what revolutionary theatre that engages with coziness might look like or be.

Creation Practices in Participatory Performance

Creation Practices in Participatory Performance

Theatre Itself or the Theatre for the Audience: The Problem of Taking Part in the Participatory Performance

Theatre Itself or the Theatre for the Audience: The Problem of Taking Part in the Participatory Performance

Seeding the Future (This Is Not a Metaphor): Creative Acts of Public Gardening with Yarrow Collective

In a world beset by climate crisis, how can artists create participatory performance work that moves audiences from distant spectators to become active agents with an awareness of the role they play in a larger ecosystem? On lək̓ʷəŋən territory, colonially known as Victoria, BC, Yarrow Collective creates multidisciplinary installations that invite communities into creative acts of public gardening. In this case study, co-creators Sammie Gough and Laurel Green trace the development of their new work for Pacific Opera Victoria’s Voices in Nature that toured city parks in the summer of 2022. Drawing from a wide variety of influences, they envision the transformative potential of weaving together their artistic practices in an ongoing collaborative relationship with the life cycles of Indigenous plants and pollinators. They confront their own settler-inherited, extractive notions of what a garden should be and explore what becomes possible when gardening is shifted from expert labour to a shared creative act. Yarrow Collective’s installations become meeting places for intergenerational temporary communities that offer ecological resources, hold space for uncomfortable truths, and yield opportunities for ongoing stewardship as both collective journeys and site-responsive living artworks.

Ça a l’air synthétique bonjour hi

Coming from different artistic and cultural backgrounds in theatre, dance, and media arts, Burcu Emeç, Michael Martini, Nien Tzu Weng, and Roxa Hy zoom in on labour, constructed intimacy, and consent within participation in their transdisciplinary performance Ça a l’air synéthique bonjour hi. Considering the notion of participation in its broadest sense—such as in a community, an economy, and politics—what factors can encourage, discourage, or limit it? In order to explore these factors, the four artists turn to the model of a participatory performance. Realizing that many experiences of participatory art contain troubling, awkward, and often non-consensual elements, they interrogate how this form of performance can offer a parallel to larger questions about participation in an economic and political system.

Participatory Political Violence: The Sensorial Toll of the Truckers’ Convoy

In February 2022, people local to downtown Ottawa were caught in the grip of a three-week alt-right occupation that called for the end of public health measures—at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—and the overthrow of parliament—in a government town. As hundreds of protestors in heavy-duty transportation trucks rolled into Ottawa, blockaded the streets, and with the help of a well-funded, off-site logistical network, settled in with food and fuel, their demands literally idled in the impassable streets. Their populist message of “freedom” was supported by a predominantly white male-dominated group of protestors. Idling their diesel engines and blaring air horns day and night outside the House of Commons, and nearby Centretown neighbourhood, the self-described “Freedom Convoy,” repurposed public nuisances into tactics of the alt-right. This article examines how the Convoy used such tactics to stage a sensorium of participatory political violence in the nation’s capital. It telescopes on Centretown residents, Zexi Li and Victoria De La Ronde, who testified as part of the Public Order Emergencies Commission about the harassment they endured during the occupation. Their testimony reveals how decibel-breaking noise, and noxious diesel fumes, not only overtook the streets but also entered their dwellings, filling their homes with commotion and sulfur, making it impossible to seek respite from the convoy. The airing of populist grievances through coordinated acts of honking and idling speaks to an ontological shift in political violence in Canada toward participatory performances of insolence that ultimately mask broader extremist agendas.

Participation as Intimate Act: Audience Reflections on Strategies of Consent in Roll Models

Immersive, interactive, and participatory performances often promise co-creative or otherwise unique roles for spectators, who may be called upon to directly interact with performers, explore performance sites, or help shape plot. The nature of much of this heightened participation is important to note: audience members might be expected to be visible onstage, make choices that affect the show, offer personal information, or engage directly with actors, in an ask for labor that is resultantly accompanied by increased risk, vulnerability, and relationality. This article uses the case study of Roll Models, a longform improv show that enacts a short adventure campaign in the style of Dungeons & Dragons on stage, in order to characterize audience participation as an intimate act. Building on previous scholarship aimed at assessing consent, intimacy, and participation in immersive theatre and live action role-play (Villarreal 2021, Biggin 2017, Machon 2013), we query not only into what participation, consent, and on-boarding processes were present in the performance, but also how audience members themselves viewed such mechanisms, understood and learned their role in the performance, and related to actors and each other.

The Performic Cycle: release and reorganise

ABSTRACT This article explores the critical potential of theatre practice as research in interdisciplinary environmental contexts. It does this with specific reference to The Performic Cycle, a practice as research methodology that brings environmental adaptation thinking into conversation with vital materialist and critical disability scholarship through experimental participatory performance practice. The Performic Cycle emerged through a series of neurodivergent-led theatre practice as research projects (The Panarchy Projects, 2017-2020), and has since then been tested out in a number of participatory, interdisciplinary and cross-art-form environmental contexts.

Curating in an ecological framework through sensuous pedagogy

In this article, I take up the educational turn in curating and recontextualize it in my current curatorial practice that seeks to cultivate ecological awareness in its participants, defined as developing relationships between human and other-than-human beings through a process of sensuous pedagogy. With a post-qualitative approach, I analyse my own working process of curating the exhibition Habitat at Agder Kunstsenter in Kristiansand, Norway, in 2022. Partly taking place in the nature park Lista and in the city of Kristiansand, I made a framework for the exhibition that questions and explores our notions of inhabitation for both human and more-than-human beings. As one of the specific projects in the Habitat programme, I further explore the process of curating the participatory performance work CITY MATTERS with artist Tora Balslev. It is a personal account of how we experienced and created sensuous pedagogy between human and more-than-human beings in Kristiansand.

The blurry lines between popular media and party propaganda: China's convergence culture through a linguistic lens.

There is a growing body of scholarly evidence that media convergence blurs the boundary between media production and media consumption and obscures the lines between institutions and individuals. Media convergence in the context of China has garnered attention in communication studies and in cultural studies. However, there is a scarcity of research on convergence culture from a linguistic perspective. Recent research has generated initial evidence that state media appropriates a pop-cultural social address for clickbait and information management in China's digital media space. However, the patterns and perceptual reality of linguistic convergence remain unexplored. This study investigates popular and party uses of xiaojiejie 'little older sister', a familiar expression of fictive kinship reborn as a viral personal reference and social address in China's convergence culture. Analysis of the Target Group Index in the Baidu search engine suggests xiaojiejie is gaining ground over its predecessor among young Chinese. Trends analysis of its usage in WeChat public accounts showed that the term has spread from popular media to state media, which employs the viral address to drive clickbait and disguise propaganda. An online survey of young Chinese WeChat users (N=330) on their perception of xiaojiejie headlines from WeChat public accounts showed that respondents could not tell state media uses from popular uses, providing perceptual evidence of the blurry boundaries between popular and state media uses of the viral address. The findings demonstrate the reality of linguistic convergence driven by participatory performance and its perceptual consequences in China's convergence culture.

Experiencing the infra-ordinary : the power of imaginative spaces

Examining The Infra-Ordinary Lab (IOL), a site-specific participatory performance that invites participants to a multi-sensory exploration of the 'genius loci' of Holešovická Tržnice, this article explores the importance of active, imaginative, and embodied experience in performing arts, in contrast to our increasingly screen-based lives. It questions the hierarchy of our senses and highlights some of the historical context behind this. It discusses the politics of drawing attention to the 'infra-ordinary aspects' (PEREC 2008) of our surroundings and the vital importance of protecting the wild space of our imagination and our freedom to 'feel', outside of the dominant consumer narrative. The article is written in a form of a dialogue which reflects various aspects of the projects in a deliberately multi-faceted, fragmentary and rhizomatic way.

Addressing Urgencies of Democratic Interaction in the Public Spherean: Attempt to Facilitate Disagreement on Audience Dramaturgies of Disagreement

In the research project 'Dramaturgies of Disagreement in Contemporary Theatre,' I examined how theatre performances dramaturgically work with substantial disagreement within audiences and non audiences. In the first part of this article, I present and discuss the cultural politi cal context, the societal backdrop, and the agenda of this research. I argue for the need to deal critically with normative prem ises and closures in this research. In the second part, I exemplify how a move from a normative point of departure towards a more descriptive approach may be realised. I start this part by presenting the applied sociological theory of communities of disa greements (Iversen 2014), before I describe, analyse, and compare three Norwegian par ticipatory performances from recent years. I propose the metaphorical terms of theatre as either arena , laboratory, or catalyst for communities of disagreement to highlight differences between the dramaturgical approaches. I further examine how the rela tion between the limited public space of the theatre and the wider public sphere is con ceptualised differently in the three cases. Finally, I relate the analysed dramaturgies to a spectrum of political theory that spans from deliberative to agonistic democracy to further illuminate and facilitate legit imate disagreement on dramaturgies of disagreement. Art does not need any justification. Yet public funding of the arts in democratic societies is dependent on such justifica tions. And no public funding results in poor conditions for the arts. That means, art is dependent on justifications after all. As a theatre researcher, I contribute to the form ation, affirmation, and negotiation of such justifications, whether I am aware of it and intentionally partake or not. The Nordic welfare states are known for their (relatively) extensive support of the arts. However, the traditionally pre sumed societal consensus on this support has been showing signs of weakness for a while. Hence, the Arts Council Norway and the Danish Arts Foundation11 have called attention to the need for renewed strategies of legitimisation. Their latest research pro gramme, 'Arts and Social Communities,' has been motivated by this need. My research into dramaturgies of disagreement in con temporary theatre has been funded by this programme. What I present and discuss in this article reflects my experiences of con tributing to this programme.

Create to Collaborate: using creative activity and participatory performance in online workshops to build collaborative research relationships

BackgroundCreative methods/practices have been highlighted as helpful to develop more collaborative, equitable research partnerships between researchers and communities/public-participants. We asked artist partners to design four online workshops, one on each research priority area: school environments and mental health; wellbeing within the Somali community; air pollution; health data. We aimed to understand whether creative processes can enable public-participants and researcher- participants to meet in a neutral space to discuss a research theme and begin to build collaborative relationships through more equal engagement. Ideas could be taken forwards with seed funding, providing opportunity for collaboration to continue beyond initial workshops.MethodsDifferent artist partners designed and facilitated four workshops. Evaluation data was collected on each workshop using participatory observation and fieldnotes, alongside chatlog data, and one-to-one interviews with 21 workshop participants, providing a contextually rich, comparative evaluation across four diverse workshops. Analysis was thematically driven.ResultsArtist partners took different approaches to designing workshops. The workshops began with introductory games and activities, and there was less emphasis on introductions of people’s roles, with the intention to avoid hierarchical dynamics. Whilst public-participants enjoyed this, some researchers found it challenging and reported confusions over their workshop roles. Disrupting usual practice and challenging norms was not always an easy experience. There were examples where emergent, co-created knowledge was enabled. However, it was more challenging to facilitate longer-term collaborative research projects from the workshops due to different stakeholder priorities, and lack of staff time/ less sense of ownership for further work.ConclusionsCreative activities can influence and impact the types of conversations between public-participants and researchers in a way that changes and challenges power dynamics, shifting towards public-participant driven discussion. Whilst deconstructing hierarchies is important, supporting researchers is key so that any discomfort can be productive and experienced as a vital part of co-production. Longer term collaborative research projects were limited, highlighting a need for facilitation beyond initial workshops, and a sense of ownership from workshop participants to take things forwards. Workshops like these may lend themselves well to research prioritisation. However, taking community-led ideas forwards within research funding landscapes remains challenging.