Research-based Performance Research Articles

Verbatim theatre as a creative approach to health professions education research translation.

Traditionally, the impact and outcomes from health professions education research (HPER) have focused on academic outputs, whereas in the humanities, research translation is conceptualised more broadly and creatively, including research-based performances like verbatim theatre. Translating HPER findings through the emotive and embodied nature of a verbatim theatre performance provides a unique opportunity to translate research data and create alternative learning spaces for rich and valuable insights that aligns with transformative pedagogy. In this paper, we describe the background of verbatim theatre, a form of performance, which draws on a research participants' testimony and lived experience and how we used this creative approach to translate HPER findings. We discuss the experiential process of bringing an interdisciplinary team together, health professions academics and an academic playwright to craft a verbatim theatre script that provided space to honour the breadth, depth and diversity of participant voices from a large (n = 100) qualitative research study exploring professionalism and sociocultural factors in health professions education (HPE). Furthermore, we discuss the powerful potential of drawing on research-based performance to create alternative, safe and non-threatening learning spaces to resonate with and experience HPER in new and transformative ways. Finally, we offer reflexive insights on the key opportunities and challenges we encountered in translating HPER into a verbatim theatre performance. Verbatim theatre presents an innovative and creative way to communicate and translate HPER. This paper offers research and pedagogical insights in translating research into verbatim theatre to support transformative pedagogy and practice in HPE. In conclusion, we encourage other health professions researchers to consider this dynamic and creative approach to transforming HPE.

Intercultural Theatre: Cognition and A Research-based Performance

Intercultural Theatre: Cognition and A Research-based Performance

Skrøbelige liv som værk

In this article I discuss how the performance lecture Precarious Life uses artistic and research-basedstrategies to examine a double metaphor: How terror works as an autoimmune disease, and how an autoimmune disease works as terror in the body. My inquiry should not be seen as a doubling of the artistic process but rather as an unfolding of the conflict between art and research: Does researchbased performance create knowledge, art or both? My strategy in the performance lecture is clear: to say a number of truths in order to create a space for thinking. At the same time, I challenge the authenticity, we connect with knowledge: Does the spectator believe as much in me as in a researcher? Does the spectator believe the autobiographical aspect? What levels of knowledge are communicated to the spectator? In conclusion, I outline the contours of research-based performance.

Choreographic Gestures of Resurgence and Repair: Arkadi Zaides’s research-based performance project: Necropolis

With the Institut des Croisements, choreographer, dancer and curator Arkadi Zaides unfolds a continuing engagement in human rights issues. His latest performance, Necropolis, considers the ‘movements of people who are systematically and brutally stopped by border policies’ (Zaides in Noeth 2020: 51). The starting point of every performance is extensive research into local cases of deaths of migrants. An important aspect of Necropolis lies in the choreographic gestures of care for these dead, performed by everything and everyone involved in the research-based performance and the long-durational performance project. In this contribution, I trace the critical, reparative and resurgent potential of these choreographic gestures of care for and with the dead. With the notion of resurgence, which I borrow from anthropologist Anna Tsing, I expand the notion of repairing to agency of ‘dead’ material. Following Donna Haraway’s New Materialist rendering of Tsing’s concept of resurgence, the choreographic gestures of resurgence and repair in Necropolis are of particular value in the scorched, parched, drowned and infected landscape we currently inhabit.

PreScribed (A Life Written for Me): A Theatrical Qualitative Research-Based Performance Script Informed by General Practitioners’ Experiences of Emotional Distress

This paper includes the script from a research-informed, theater-based production titled PreScribed (A Life Written for Me), which depicts the life of a distressed General Practitioner (GP) who is on the verge of breaking down and burning out. The authors provide context for the collaboration between artist and researchers and report on the creative methodological process involved in the co-production of the script, where research findings were imaginatively transformed into live theater. The researchers provide their reflections on the process and value of artistic collaboration and use of theater to disseminate research findings about emotions to wider audiences. It is concluded that qualitative researchers and artists can collaborate to co-create resonant and powerful pieces of work which communicate the emotions and experiences of research participants in ways that traditional academic dissemination methods cannot. The authors hope that sharing their experiences and this script as well as their reflections on the benefits of this approach may encourage researchers and artists to engage in this type of methodological collaboration in the future.

With our Clipped Wings: a research-based performance on gay men’s identities devised through narrative portraiture

ABSTRACT With our Clipped Wings is a performance that showcases the research findings of the doctoral research project “Understanding gay men’s identities through narratives of their erotic and romantic relationships.” The performance delivers compelling narratives through which participants in this research described in their own words what being gay means to them. It offers an intimate opportunity to observe the ways in which gay men have been trapped in oppressive social dynamics, environments, and discourses that have facilitated sexual encounters but have clipped their wings to love.

‘The Greatest Love of All’: an ethnodrama celebrating the continuing and evolving culture of the drama teacher

ABSTRACTThe main content of this article is an ethnodramatic text (J) or research-based performance text which was based on interviews recorded with 50 Victorian educators who each have had 30 or more years of drama teaching experience. The interviews were conducted by Drama Victoria as part of the Drama Australia MAMA project. Aligned with the data on which it was based, the script highlights some of the key shifts and milestones in drama education in Australia since the 1980s. A brief introduction precedes excerpts of the script, which explains the context of its development, the nature of the data, and an outline of the research and artistic processes employed when writing the play.

Research, teaching and performance evaluation in academia: the salience of quality

The workload of most academics involves two main activities: research and teaching. Despite the dual nature of the work, career advancement usually chiefly depends on research performance. Since academics are rational actors, warnings are beginning to emerge that current predominantly research-based performance evaluation systems may be detrimental to creativity and innovation in teaching. This paper investigates the substance of these warnings by revisiting the relationship between research performance and teaching quality. Using a large cross-disciplinary sample of academics within a research-oriented university, we find, consistent with prior evidence, that research productivity is not related to teaching quality, whereas research quality is positively related with teaching quality. These findings discount fears that research-based performance evaluation in academia may be detrimental to teaching quality.

De-stressing race: documenting the ‘trauma of freedom’ in post-apartheid South Africa from the viewpoint of a black female born during the national state of emergency (1985–1990)

This study is as an examination of the everyday experience of freedom as a traumatic one in our democracy. The awareness of freedom as a concept is identified as the cause of the distress that has been termed the ‘trauma of freedom’ – a term first heard in a lecture by Achille Mbembe, which he described as the internalization of the lack of freedom, and that when the individual is confronted with freedom, the result is trauma. This article reflects on the research-based performance or encounter entitled D.I.D I?, devised by me in association with my cast member Ayanda Zama-Seoka Seoka as part of my Master's degree in Theatre Studies.1 D.I.D I? was named in accordance with Grotowski's terminology. The processes undertaken inform a social and theatrical perspective on how to act, or how to exist, authentically, when the body, and more specifically the externally and/or internally racialized body, seems to betray the vision the person has of being. Born between the years 1985 and 1990, the chosen cast member and I are both black women who have only vague recollections of the apartheid era that nevertheless, in part, moulds our current identity. I depict my (re)search as a Sartrean existential project, for which I have used a practice-as-research mode of exploration to discover the stories that give meaning to my being as a free being in post-apartheid South Africa.

Multicomponent Training of Teachers of Students With Severe Disabilities

Over the last decade, the obligation of general and special educators to utilize evidence-based instructional practices has become more prominent. Research increasingly suggests the failure of didactic teacher training alone to ensure implementation with fidelity of these practices by teachers in their classrooms. Multicomponent training (MCT) strategies utilizing didactic presentations, followed by coaching with role-play and specific performance feedback, offer a useful strategy for training teachers of students with severe disabilities in the evidence-based practices of their field. This pilot study successfully demonstrated the efficiency, feasibility, and acceptability of a school-based MCT strategy in the training of four teachers of students with severe disabilities in the use of simultaneous prompting (SP). The MCT strategy utilized demonstrated the efficacy of a research-based performance feedback process. Implications for the comprehensive and rigorous training of teachers of students with severe disabilities are discussed.

Staging Ethics: The Promise and Perils of Research-based Performance

While performance can be an effective vehicle for knowledge transmission, Christina Sinding , Lisa Schwartz , and Matthew Hunt examine the ethical blind spots that can sometimes emerge in research-based performance.

Staging Ethics: The Promise and Perils of Research-based Performance

While performance can be an effective vehicle for knowledge transmission, Christina Sinding , Lisa Schwartz , and Matthew Hunt examine the ethical blind spots that can sometimes emerge in research-based performance.

Performing New Orleans: Toward a Political Poetics

This essay documents an embodied model for doing scholarship in and about post-Katrina New Orleans. It suggests lived experience as human capital that provides a public good for rebuilding communities. Specifically, a research-based performance (“Performance and New Orleans: Citizenship, Identity and Housing”) serves as a case study for situating scholarship between theory and practice as a “political poetics.” The essay draws on performance theory and the values of public scholarship to negotiate the challenges of authenticity and motive that confront scholars working in New Orleans. The essay also argues for performance as a means of reaffirming human value and exposing the complexity that surrounds the problems of African American citizenship, identity, and housing in New Orleans 5 years after the storm.

Retail productivity assessment using data envelopment analysis

Current approaches to retail productivity measurement have long been controversial because of difficulties in identifying the level of retail services. Data Envelopment Analysis, an operations research-based performance evaluation methodology, is introduced as one solution for resolving this problem and assessing managerially useful measure of store-level retail productivity. Data Envelopment Analysis measures relative-to-best performance efficiency of retail outlets characterized by multiple inputs and outputs. In an empirical illustration, using data collected over time from retail stores belonging to a restaurant chain, the potential applications and strengths of Data Envelopment Analysis in assessing retail productivity are highlighted.