Research
Some thoughts on arts-based research. . .
Note: This piece was presented as part of Have Script Will Travel: Reader's Theatre for Social Change on April 13, 2004 at the American Education Research Association Conference in San Diego, California.
The Phenomenology of Arts-Based Research: A Dramaturgical Perspective
By Joe Salvatore © 2004
I first encountered Lisa Donovan's research when she came to speak to my class at NYU about arts assessment. As part of that presentation, Lisa invited some of my students to read the thoughts of these educators about assessment, and I realized that there was something exciting about the material.
I had studied interview theatre as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, mostly through the work of Anna Deveare Smith. Her Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 had illustrated to me that the power of a person's spoken word, uncensored and in many ways unedited, provided me with more information about creating and performing a character than if I approached the work through the sense memory or emotion memory work that dominates acting technique in this country. The most revealing moments in a person's words are almost always in the places where there is a stutter or a pause, where the speaker gets stuck in the moment. Interview subjects also say the "most profound" things when they aren't trying to be profound.
I began to use the interview theatre technique to develop my own work, both with other artistic collaborators and with students. Lisa and I were part of a project called Voices on Goodell: Inside Out , about a building takeover on the campus of the University of Massachusetts in spring 1997. I then created a performance piece called fag/hag with my performance partner, Kate Nugent in 1999. In that piece, Kate and I explored the relationship between gay men and straight women as a response to the over-simplified stereotypes ( Will and Grace, Object of My Affection ) that we felt were prevalent in the media around this complicated relationship. And in Fall 2002, I created an interview theatre piece with my students in a character study course. That piece was based on the idea of survival and what it means to survive. I have also been interviewed for at least three interview theatre pieces, and I have watched myself be played by a performer. So I have the experience of being on both sides of the research, the actor and the acted if you will, and that perspective is valuable when we talk about this particular piece of research.
On this particular project, I worked as the dramaturg. Dramaturgy is a relatively new phenomenon in the US, having a much stronger tradition in the European theatres. Dramaturgs serve many different functions, depending on the genre of the piece. When working on a classical text, a dramaturg will do research on playwright, time period, culture, social norms, etc. so as to inform the director, designers, and actors about the style of a given play. With a new play, a dramaturg will work with a playwright to refine a text, to make a stronger experience for an audience. In a performance piece, like Ahh-sess, I basically worked with Lisa and Philip to construct a performable text that would allow an audience to hear the voices of the research subjects while also having a theatrical experience. The fact that we were presenting research data in a performance situation meant that we had to consider the following: Will the audience follow the throughline or themes in the work and will the audience understand the point of the material? A director explores this in rehearsal as well, but it's my responsibility as a dramaturg to think about it and monitor it as a piece develops.
Lisa provided the director Philip Taylor and I with a text based on her own initial edits of the original interview transcripts. Lisa had already taken the transcripts of four interviews and turned it into a chorus of six voices. As I worked on the script, I made some modifications in the order of the text, as I felt that the piece needed a stronger ending. When an audience is watching a piece of theatre or performance, there is an expectation that the ending will provide some closure. In the initial draft, the ending seemed vague, so we re-worked it. I also made modifications that would eventually help structure the piece. Philip has already discussed the seven themes that he was able to pull from the text for the staging. This was partially a result of Lisa's initial choices and then my subsequent edits. Then, once the actors started to work with the text, they requested some changes. For example, one actor felt overwhelmed by the number of lines she was learning, so I re-assigned some of her longer speeches. And finally, as Philip worked on the staging, he and the actors made some additional minor edits and changes to accommodate the physicality and movement that became part of the performance. Thus the performance piece Ahh-sess was born.
While the process that I just described is fairly standard with any new performance text, whether a dramaturg is used or not, this process raises questions about the ultimate authenticity of the performed research. In her commentary following the Forum on Arts Assessment at NYU in August 2003, Judith Ackroyd, professor at University College Northampton, aptly raised the question: What do we call this piece? Ackroyd was in the unique position of seeing the piece in two different venues, at the International Drama in Education Research Institute (IDEIRI) in July 2003 and at the Assessment Forum a few weeks later. In its first public performance, the piece was called a "performed ethnography. " In its second performance, it was introduced as "a dramatic commentary on interview data. " Professor Ackroyd picked up on the difference and posed the following in her response at the Forum:
"Ethnography as a research method, privileges the voices of the interviewees. But are these the voices that are dominant in this form? What about the voices of the others involved who have become publicly identified with the piece - the performers? . . . Are the performers' voices silenced voices? If the aim is to foreground the voices of the research participants, then the voice of the performer is an irrelevant voice. What should take priority in this mixed form? The original research or the performance ensemble?"
In an attempt to answer her own questions, Ackroyd suggested that Ahh-sess might be considered an adaptation, because "we can see how the performance may be like a critical essay about the research. " She then proceeded to present models of adaptation based on film and adaptation theory, citing Wagner's text The Novel and the Cinema . Wagner defines a form of adaptation called commentary, in which " an original is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in some respect. It could also be called a re-emphasis or re-structure. " It seems that when Ahh-sess took on the description of dramatic commentary, it became easier to identify it as an adaptation.
What I find fascinating about this entire conversation is that the responsibility for the "authenticity" of the research is placed on the researcher or the artists creating the work, a piece of arts-based research. But as an artist, primarily a maker of theatre and performance, I see my job as presenting material to an audience and allowing them to respond to the issues that I raise or the questions that I pose. The power of Ahh-sess is not the conclusions it draws, but rather the questions that it raises and that the audience leaves the performance space with after the fact. I do not disagree with any of Professor Ackroyd's comments. In fact, I am grateful for her definitions. But her comments and her view of the piece actually point to a larger question. Why must we as arts-based researchers have to justify the "authenticity" of the work that we are doing? I think that it's safe to say that in any research there is bias and a layer of removal as we use the data to draw conclusions and present them to an audience. The parameters of a performance mean that there are more layers, and we (as audience) need to be aware of those layers as we look, listen, and take in the research. What I'm saying is that the audience shares the responsibility for "authenticity" with the researcher/artist/performer.
One of the things that we must consider in any live performance event is the phenomenology of that event. In a traditional theatre experience, like The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, the phenomenology of that event is driven by a performance triad: audience-character-actor. When a director is staging this play, she or he must consider the relationship between those three elements. Does the actor become the character or does s/he show the character? Will the actor ever bleed through the character? Will the audience see that bleed? Is the audience meant to be passive observer or active judge of the action? These are decisions that we must make when we are creating the work. How a production chooses to deal with this relationship can be called scripting the audience. We are making decisions about how the audience will experience the work.
In a piece of performance, the relationship will often change, as performance will often rely on the voice of the writer/performer rather than an unseen playwright. In the Wilde example, we are aware that a playwright wrote the work, but he is not present on the stage for an audience to see. In a performance piece, the writer will often be the performer, in the post-modern sense of the blurring of boundaries. Therefore, we can't help but see the performer who may also be the writer and who may be playing her or him self and playing other characters. But we know that this will be the case when we enter the performance experience. As an audience member, we know what we've gotten ourselves into. We are aware of the relationship that we have entered. The phenomenology becomes a diad: audience-performer.
In the case of Ahh-sess, a piece that I would say is closer to performance than to traditional theatre, the phenomenology of the performance event is actually more complex. In this piece of arts-based research, we need to look at a performance pentagon: audience-character-performer-researcher-interview subject. If a researcher has chosen to use performance to present her/his research, it is our responsibility as audience members to enter that experience understanding the nature of this pentagonal relationship. To use Judith Ackroyd's term, the experience is "layered. " We are dealing with multiple layers of removal and engagement. Performers are engaging with original interview material that has been transcribed by a researcher. The performers then make an interpretation, and that interpretation is presented to an audience. Then the audience has to decide what it thinks of the data and/or the conclusions that they've just experienced. This last step is vital for arts-based research because in my mind when we attach the word "art" to something, it implies that interpretive gaze of an audience, one that considers metaphor, symbolism, and possibly even abstraction.
I began this section of our presentation with an overview of how I functioned as the dramaturg on this project, which illustrated and highlighted the multiple perspectives of the collaborators that have enhanced the performance of this research. I want to end with something of a challenge. It seems to me that the question of credibility is really at the heart of our discussion of arts-based research. Can we really trust conclusions that are being presented in an artistic form from data that has been collected through qualitative research? My answer is yes, we can trust the conclusions as long as we are cognizant of the lens through which we as audience view that research. And that's not to say that it's a lens of doubt. Rather, it should be a lens that allows us to the see the depth of perspective and the layering that has gone into the interpretation of the data. The real challenge then is: Are we as audience members able to "read" this performance of arts-based research that has been presented?