Participatory Performance Research Articles

Talking to myself: a dialogue between practice and performance

This playful, performative dialogue, a take on the self-interview format, brings together Julia, a practicing artist and mother, and her performative alter-ego Julia Pond, Founder and CEO of the fictional company BRED. Together, they navigate the blurred lines between professional and personal practice and performance. Departing from Schechner’s definitions of practice as ‘doing’ and performance as ‘showing-doing’, the self-interview problematises the idea that practice, more than performance, has the power to affect our real identities (Spatz 220). It proposes that, rather than ‘performance’ being fake and ‘practice’ being authentic; the two co-affect each other, influencing both artistic and personal spheres. What happens when we must show everything we do? Julia and Julia Pond discuss the performance of subjectivity, individuality or affect that is now integral to contemporary work culture but that might have once been considered the territory of the ‘personal’ or ‘practice’. They consider how the roles we perform each day blur into personal identity, imprinting into the body and mind through daily repetitive labour. This phenomenon can include the performance of mothering as well as performing an artistic identity. Julia Pond and Julia also consider how these themes function in the fictional company BRED’s participatory performance installation, and its excerpt ‘The Manager-festo’ which both embodies and critiques notions of ‘value’ and ‘productivity’ through the body, powerpoint, and bread dough. 

La danse du détour: A collaborative arts performance with people touched by Minamata disease

In May 2019, a group of dancers, photographers and local participants gathered in Minamata, Japan, a community affected by industrial mercury pollution since the 1950s. Philippe Chéhère, Julie Salgues and the Minamata Dance Collective conducted a series of dance sessions with citizens, students, dancers and people touched by Minamata disease in various places of significance in Minamata and explored the potential of movement and its transformation in people and the environment. Through choreographic poetry, they explored the site and the story of Minamata involving 180 people, using dance as a modality of encounter and dialogue. The ten-day dance project culminated in a participatory performance at Minamata Memorial. This case study documents the process of participatory arts by interweaving history, photographs and participants’ voices.

Agency and Intra-textual co-creation in Punchdrunk Enrichment’s Immersive Story Worlds for Children

AbstractRecent immersive theatre practices being developed by UK theatre companies invite children to believe that a book story has come to life and is really happening to them within their school environment. The thrill of being able act within a story motivates children’s embodied agency to physically explore an immersive set installation and acts of creative writing performed during the story experience, which allow children to co-create the narrative alongside the adult practitioners. These acts are fictionalised into the narrative frame of the children as heroic story writers, offering new perspectives on how child co-creation of adult narratives can be enabled intra-textually, within the bounds of the adult-initiated story, rather than extra-textually after it has finished, as is the case with fan fiction. However, it raises questions about the nature and limits of this co-creative agency the experiences purport to elicit from their child participants, especially in terms of their critical agency to manipulate fictional devices presented to them through such a hyper-real aesthetic. Drawing on theories of children’s literature and participatory performance, this article argues that it is the way these immersive productions uncannily overlay real and fictional temporalities that enables the child participants’ critical agency within them. Approaches for further participatory, practice-based research in this understudied corner of children’s reading universes are suggested for harnessing the potential of immersive story worlds to generate research data from within children’s first aesthetic engagement with stories.

Unfolding Microgravity and the Interplay Between Awe, Wonder, Curiosity, and Humility in Artistic Research

Abstract This article discusses how the term ‘curiosity’ emerged as a leading element in the development of the action performance research project Microgravity. The focus is on the effect of curiosity as an activator of movement in a participatory performance in which participants are invited to explore new bodily conditions for the first time (in this case, reduced gravity through a vertical dance technique). I begin with an account of what vertical dance is, its origin, and my personal experience as a vertical dancer. Through the connection between vertical dance and space exploration and an encounter with the terms ‘awe’ and ‘wonder’ (in connection to space travel), I move on to pedagogical and creative decisions regarding ways to create a participatory performance that, due to its complete physical involvement of participants, I now refer to as an ‘action performance’. I will elaborate on the creative partners who joined the research and the interplay of curiosity and humility in relation to the terms ‘awe’ and ‘wonder’ based on the book A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder (Gallagher et al. 2015), which was the initial inspiration for the use of these terms and the establishment of the imaginary universe of Microgravity. I will also employ my own interpretation of these terms as a researcher, drawing on first-hand participatory experiments and data gathered from participants between 2019 and 2022.

Data for local decision-making, not a mere reporting requirement: development of an index to measure facility-level use of HMIS data

Background Well-functioning health management information systems (HMIS) enable decision-making at all health system levels. This study develops an index to measure the use of HMIS data at the facility level. Methods We used two rounds of cross-sectional data collected from 305 health facilities in Ethiopia in 2019 (pre-COVID-19) and 2020 (post-COVID-19). We constructed a summative, 10-item index using exploratory factor analysis and 2019 index development data; and used Cronbach’s alpha to assess reliability. To examine content validity, we mapped items against a previously published conceptual framework and consulted Ethiopian experts. We then employed one-way ANOVA and t-tests comparing the mean index scores overall and by key facility characteristics between 2019 and 2020. Results The 10-item index loaded on one factor (Cronbach’s alpha=0.74), and the index scores did not differ significantly by facility characteristics in 2019. The mean index score increased from 7.2 in 2019 to 7.9 in 2020 (P<0.01). During this period, more facilities received feedback on HMIS reports from facility leadership (19.3% difference); received actionable recommendations on performance targets and resource allocation (7.5% and 12.3% difference, respectively); and reviewed maternal deaths (15.1% difference); conversely, the proportion of facilities that held participatory performance review meetings monthly or more often decreased by 13.8% (all P <0.05). Conclusions We propose a facility-level HMIS data use index and document an upward trend in HMIS data use in Ethiopia immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. Future research should further evaluate and refine the proposed index to support the measurement of HMIS data quality and utilization in Ethiopia and like settings.

Effect of Grit on Exercise Self-Efficacy and Participatory Performance in Elite Athletes

Effect of Grit on Exercise Self-Efficacy and Participatory Performance in Elite Athletes

Performances of Memory

The public space of post-socialist Europe has been marked by contested collective memories in the aftermath of violent invasions and national wars following the collapse of state socialism. This becomes even more evident in the Balkans. What forms of collective resistance can be activated in the aftermath of past atrocities? More crucially, what is the role of actions within communities that have witnessed and survived past atrocities? Examining the relationship between live art and the activist potentials of memory politics, this article explores two contemporary participatory art performances that were created in the aftermath of the Bosnian War (1992–5): Što te nema (Why are you not here?) (2006–20) by artist Aida Šehović and Our Family Garden (2021) by artist and activist Smirna Kulenović. By analysing the distinct ways in which Šehović and Kulenović employ participatory practices of remembering and collective care in their performances, the article also engages with activist interventions such as that by Women in Black (Žene u Crnom), who employ in their protests practices of public mourning. The article argues that such participatory performances that enable collective remembering in the public space function both as acts of affective resistance in the aftermath of violence as practices of care in securing a possible present.

Vowing Moral Integrity

The artist and analytic Kant scholar Adrian Piper has been aptly described as “one of the most important and influential cultural figures of our time. The award-winning work of installation and participatory performance art, Probable Trust Registry: Rules of the Game #1-3, implicitly poses philosophical questions of interest to contractarian philosophy and its critique, including whether through an art installation one can execute a genuine, morally binding commitment to be honest, authentic, and respectful of oneself. Especially for audiences who closely identify with her experiences, Piper’s artwork, like that of other important artists, has powerfully catalytic ethical potential. Motivated by admiration for the artist and a perceived conflictual relationship between women of color and conventional discourses of moral solidarity, I offer three different ways to understand Piper’s Probable Trust Registry. I suggest that Piper’s thought-provoking artwork, which implicitly nods at John Rawls and Charles Mills, can be interpreted as asking its audiences to agree to selections from a menu of rules that, in the alternative, embrace universal moral imperatives, predict future moral integrity, or vow moral integrity.

Expectations and Participatory Performance of Husbands in Improvement of Anxiety Disorders in Pregnant Women: A Qualitative Study

Purpose. Husbands’ participation is important in the success of maternal health programs. This participation is emphasized in all dimensions including mental health. This study was conducted to examine the husband’s expectations and participatory performance to improve anxiety in pregnant women. Design and Methods. A descriptive qualitative study was conducted via targeted convenience sampling in two public and private maternity care centers. 30 women who were 13–38-week pregnant were diagnosed with anxiety disorder in a Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM-5 (SCID-5), and 16 husbands experienced a semistructured in-depth qualitative interview. Data were extracted by the conventional content analysis using MAXQDA software (version 18). Findings. Husbands’ expectations and participatory performance to reduce the anxiety of pregnant women were produced in three themes of emotion, behavior, and cognition in terms of the men’s and women’s perspectives. Approximately 70% of subthemes were common among women and men which included emotion (emotional psychological support, strengthening verbal communication, receiving attention and love, and creating a field of entertainment), behavior (following up on mother and fetus’s health, participation in housekeeping, compatibility to mood changes, material and financial provision, and companionship during childbirth), and cognition (increasing the knowledge in the field of pregnancy and the ability to resolve conflict). However, the men’s and women’s themes had some differences. Practice Implications. While men emphasized adjusting communication expectations and making positive changes in lifestyle, anxious women emphasized the themes of receiving attention and love, well-posedness, companionship in childbirth, and loyalty as important factors influencing the improvement of their disease.

Atarraya: listening to human and non-human voices in post-conflict Colombia

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Atarraya, a participatory performance piece by Carolina Caycedo in collaboration with ; a group of social organisations affected by hydroelectric and mining megaprojects in Colombia. It argues that oral history-informed art practices offer an alternative space to communicate painful experiences and demand better futures, engaging broader and more diverse audiences. By analyzing the performative elements of Atarraya, such as the inclusion of human and non-human voices, the article shows how in the face of the transitional justice system in Colombia, it is necessary to understand listening as a critical component of oral history-informed performance.

Faire équipe avec des plantes ? Quatre performances participatives et leurs au-delà

« Nous ne sommes pas seuls », et les humains se doivent de découvrir leurs alliances avec les plantes, suggèrent Lena Balaud et Antoine Chopot. Dans les quatre performances étudiées, les spectateurs découvrent des plantes in situ et interagissent avec elles. Mais dans quelle mesure ces formes participatives peuvent-elles s’appuyer sur la participation des spectateurs pour éveiller des imaginaires d’alliances anthropo-végétales, en commençant à les développer durant la performance ? Hypothèse et analyse prennent appui sur quatre dispositifs très dissemblables, deux parcours audioguidés sollicitant les interactions sensibles et poétiques des participants avec des plantes, un troisième qui fictionnalise radicalement les végétaux rencontrés, et un quatrième qui invite les spectateurs à devenir des parlementaires des organismes. Les dispositifs suggèrent des modalités du faire équipe avec les plantes également très variables : d’une sculpture sensible de l’environnement à la guérilla, en passant par l’aménagement de nos villes et même l’instauration d’une démocratie. Mais les vecteurs des alliances sont toujours pluriels, en appelant à la sensibilité, à la transmission d’informations et à l’action, si bien qu’ils semblent se compléter et donner lieu à des expériences marquantes. Ils favorisent divers modes de mises en relation, ainsi que les passages de la cognition ou de l’action aux savoirs incarnés.

Evocations: Honouring The Memory of Women Artists

The life and work of women artists has been, more often than not, neglected and excluded from history. There are artists, groups, authors and institutions around the world who have made and continue to make efforts to shed light on excluded artists by showing their work in exhibitions, compilations, websites or social media accounts. The ongoing project Evocations aims to honour some of those forgotten artists through the creation of artwork inspired by them. Until now, this project has consisted of four participatory public performance art pieces and a collective exhibition honouring eleven women artists who have not been properly recognised for their achievements. By undertaking these participatory performances in public space locations the art, ideas and lives of these women are drawn into the daily life of contemporary Mexico.

‘Keep people safe’: Designing a participatory performance within the strict parameters of social distancing in Australia

This article recounts designing and performing an intimate encounter with strangers during the pandemic. At the end of 2020, as Australians emerged from a long period of ‘lockdown’, the celebrated Sydney Opera House again opened its doors to the public. Commissioned to create a new work for the Sydney Opera House’s Antidote Festival, I designed a ‘touch’ performance that met the Australian Government’s COVID-19 protocols for social distancing at indoor events. Instead of being frustrated by the restrictions, I used the health and safety rules as if they were conceptual instructions. Surprisingly, I was reminded of the 1960s and 1970s conceptual artists whose experimental capacity was borne from instructive limitations. Seeing the restrictions as an opportunity, I discuss how the physical limitations ushered in by COVID-19 (along with the heritage status of the Sydney Opera House) provided the parameters for conceiving a scene and an experience that was everything the pandemic denied – public, participatory, intimate and physical. I also reflect on what I learned in the process and how needing to keep people safe brought profound ethical understanding.

‘I am because you are’: A critical reflection on composing choral music to promote social inclusion for asylum seekers in Ireland

This article presents a critical reflection from a composer embedded in a national community-music project centred around asylum seekers. This reflection-on-action is contextualized within wider scholarly discourse in community music, including the notion of ‘hospitality’ and the generic features of participatory performance. An account is given of the research and analysis that informed the composer’s process for the choral work, the Song Seeking Songbook (2019). This collection of six pieces is tailored to the specific context of the project, which aimed to provide a stimulating basis for musical engagement in order to promote social inclusion. The effective pre-existing repertoire is explored to identify the key musical features that helped articulate the core principles of composition. A selection of the newly composed songs is discussed to demonstrate how these principles were deployed in the final composition.

Goodnight, Sleep Tight

ZU-UK artists and associate analyse care in immersive work through case-study of Goodnight, Sleep Tight (ZU-UK, 2016-19), a performance exploring intimacy and childhood, merging VR input with live, physical performer-participant interaction, and a desire to understand human loneliness through the medium of touch. The analysis exhibits excerpts of ZU-UK Artistic Director Persis-Jadé Maravala’s instructional and explanatory materials, used to train performers who deliver Goodnight, Sleep Tight by embodying the role of a maternal carer. Reflecting on these excerpts through the lens of collapse theory (Spagnola 2022) and psychology and healthcare research into breath and physical touch as communicative methods of social care (Goetz, Keltner & Simon-Thomas 2010; Van der Kolk 2015), Guillery, Lopes Ramos and Maravala put forward a case for the social role of performers and performance-makers as agents of metaphorical palliative care: generating spaces in which individuals experiencing the effects of collective grief for a social order in ‘catabolic crisis’ (Spagnola 2022) can safely contemplate and process a twenty-first-century sense of an inherently moribund reality from a perspective of co-presence and compassion, given and received. This role arises as a necessity within political systems that allocate minimal value to forms of mutual, interpersonal, psychospiritual and sociocultural care (Kolcaba 2003) despite acute need as these systems themselves collapse. Through case-study of Goodnight, Sleep Tight, it is also possible to trace derivation of these methods of care within ZU-UK’s work from practices rooted in the makers’ Indian, Zoroastrian, Brazilian and working-class cultural heritages - pertaining to rhythm, collective synchronicity, and performer-bodies as hosts and guides as opposed to objects of consumption. Considered as a response to the disintegration of Western capitalist hegemony, ZU-UK’s work and this article claim the subversive importance of these fundamentally marginalised aesthetic priorities within the current participatory performance landscape.

How Little is Enough? Porous & Embracing Dramaturgy for Transformative Encounters

The article gives an insight into the dramaturgical tools that are applied in the site specific and participatory performance Island, that was performed in Hrísey, an island north off the coast of Iceland in 2020. The project is a part of the artistic PhD research How Little is Enough? Sustainable Methods of Performance for Transformative Encounters, at Malmö Theatre Academy, University of Lund, that explores sustainable methods of creating transformative encounters with an audience  through participatory and site-specific artworks, with a particular focus on how minimal and sustainable the framework for the encounter can be. The article asks what dramaturgical tools can create condition and provide triggers for transformation through minimal means and introduces two dramaturgical tools, POROSITY and EMBRACE, that can be understood as enablers for transformative experiences. While Cathy Turner who coined the term porous dramaturgy, uses these two terms to describe the same tool, this article argues that porosity and embrace have separate functions. The video unpacks the distinction between these dramaturgical tools and disseminates how they appear and can be understood in the performance, Island.

Violeta Luna: Dramaturgia sonora y performatividad de la desaparición en Requiem#3

Requiem#3: Body Graves (2019) is part of the Requiem project, a series of interventions in which Violeta Luna explores the representation of violence as a ritual and uses her body as a territory for political-social dialogue. This participatory performance draws attention to those who are buried in mass graves in Mexico and seeks to rescue their existence from oblivion, while questioning institutional impunity and involving the viewer in the search efforts. In a context in which the task of locating the remains of loved ones falls on civil society, the piece highlights how the disappeared and their families are victims of the ineffectiveness of the "narco-machine" that has become the Mexican State. Requiem#3 constitutes a performativity of disappearance, in which ritual, visual, and auditory aspects converge within a framework of necrotheatricality and transform the auditorium into a communitas. Music and sounds combine with body movements and acting objects to transform the stage into an altar that highlights the (un)burial of memory.

Get Up and Tie Your Fingers Eyemouth: Listening for dialogic resonance within a co-produced community performance

This article addresses concepts and theories of listening and the impact these can have on community theatre-making. The article draws on Jean-Luc Nancy’s analysis of listening as resonance (écouter) rather than listening to hear meaning (entendre), and considers his concept of renvoi (a return, send back, repeat). Get Up and Tie Your Fingers Eyemouth was a participatory performance work that the authors of this article – theatre director Fiona MacPherson and dance artist Liz Pavey – together with musician Eleanor Logan, realized with multigenerational cast in Eyemouth, Scotland. We analyse how listening techniques became the primary model of rehearsal activity and approach to performing which Fiona developed with the narrators in this production. An emphasis on listening supported the development of new methods of ensemble storytelling fostering a collective creative agency in how participants worked with the script and explored the musicality of the dialogue. These innovative methodologies question conventional and hierarchical delineation of artistic roles in performance making and storytelling challenging traditional notions of ownership in theatre practice. Our analysis considers listening as an embodied and emplacement activity particularly within the context of a coastal location. We argue that an attention to listening can foster aesthetic and somatic sensibility and awareness of interrelationship of self and environment. The article concludes with initial analysis of how we have been furthering our exploration of the application of listening practices to performance making within our subsequent collaboration with the Eyemouth community, Eyemouth: People and The Sea.

Performing Resilience: Anchorage and Leverage in Live Action Role-Play Drama

Abstract The concept of resilience is frequently described within neoliberal discourses as the ability of individuals to bounce back from shocks and reflexively adapt to changing circumstances. In ecological sciences, however, resilience is more commonly understood as the capacity of systems to radically transform themselves, when their usual mode of operation is challenged, rather than simply reverting to their original state. This article considers how live action role-play, as a form of participatory performance, might support ecological resilience by enabling players to actively reflect on their cultural practices in constructing the systems of their play and develop new capacities in the process through intersubjective exchanges with diverse others.The notion of performing resilience is concretised through discussion of artistic research residencies at Trumpington Community Orchard in Cambridge in 2017 and the Peartree Bridge estate in Milton Keynes in 2018. These projects explored how encounters with unfamiliar spaces and beings might enable participants to play with their resilient changeability. Specifically, the article addresses the value of spatial reflexivity in building resilience, proposing spatial defamiliarization as an aesthetic strategy for transcending the immediate familiarity of habitual practices, expanding participants’ horizons of perception and imagination. These arguments yield a theoretical model for cultivating resilience through participatory performance termed anchorage-leverage. This model suggests that habit can provide the foundation for potential transformations of cultural practices as existing capacities are reconfigured by new relational connections, conferring new affordances that enable participants to radically reconfigure the ecologies in which they play and live.

Dramaturgies of Emergence: Decentralized Collaboration of Participatory Theatre

adrienne maree brown (Emergent Strategy) says that “relationships are everything.” The recent popularity of participatory theatre shows in Canada demonstrates just how true that is. These performances make direct audience interaction an essential feature of their dramaturgical design, with audience actions fundamental to propelling the performance experience. As these dramaturgies proliferate, they have given rise to a specific form of participatory theatre focused on decentralized collaboration and democratic audience agency, which I call dramaturgies of emergence. In emergent participatory performances, relationships manifest as networks of people – audience and artists – working together in a decentralized mode of iterative collaboration. With algorithmic dramaturgies to guide them, this autopoietic participant network generates the aesthetic and experiential aspects of the performance, and distinguishes emergent dramaturgies from other forms. By distributing the act of generating performance, it decentralizes agency over that creative process, distributing it throughout the networked participants to create outcomes no single member could generate alone.
 These dramaturgies of emergence embrace both relational modes of the established scientific process of emergence, and the political values of decentralization, playfulness, adaptability and collective leadership associated with the form by brown and others. By embracing these processes and values as their core mode of making meaning in a social setting, dramaturgies of emergence embrace the fundamental relationality of theatre, and ask us to playfully engage in those relationships. They allow audiences to authentically represent themselves in art while still creating something that is fundamentally collective, and provide a democratic mode of collaborative creation much needed in the often highly individualistic society we find ourselves in today.
 
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