How have theatre and performance research methods and methodologies engaged the expanding diversity of performing arts practices? How can students best combine performance/theatre research approaches in their projects? This book's 29 contributors provide hands-on answers to such questions. Challenging and debating received research wisdom and exploring innovative procedures for rigorous enquiry via archives, technology, practice-as-research, scenography, performer training, applied theatre/performance, body in performance and more, they create a focussed compendium of future research options. Key Features * Created in association with TaPRA, the leading UK Theatre and Performance Research organisation, with chapters produced by specialist groupings. * Provides many detailed project case studies and examples - including successful practice-based PhDs - plus analysis of dynamic couplings between methods, methodologies and skill-sets. * Introduction interrogates crucial qualities of performing arts research that constitute theatre and performance as, variously, single-, multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary. * Contributors include: Maggie B.
Gale (Chair of Drama, University of Manchester); Steve Dixon (Professor of Digital Performance, Brunel University); Joanne 'Bob' Whalley and Lee Miller (University Lecturers and founders Fictional Dogshelf Theatre Company); Simon Ellis and Rosemary Lee (independent performance/dance makers); Roberta Mock (Professor of Performance, University of Plymouth).
Acknowledgements; List of Figures; Introduction: doing methods creatively, Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson; 1: The imperative of the archive: creative archive research, Maggie Gale and Ann Featherstone; 2: Researching digital performance: virtual practices, Steve Dixon; 3: Practice as research: trans-disciplinary innovation in action; Baz Kershaw, with Lee Miller and 'Bob' Whalley, Rosemary Lee and Niki Pollard; 4: Researching Theatre History and Historiography, Jim Davis, Katie Normington, Gilli Bush-Bailey with Jacky Bratton; 5: Researching Scenography, Joslin McKinney and Helen Iball; 6: Performer training: researching practice in the theatre laboratory, Jonathan Pitches, Simon Murray. Helen Poynor and Libby Worth, David Richmond and Jules Dorey Richmond; 7: The question of documentation: creative strategies in performative research, Adam J. Ledger, with Simon K. Ellis and Fiona Wright; 8: The usefulness of mess: artistry, improvisation and decomposition in the practice of research in applied theatre, Jenny Hughes, with Jenny Kidd and Catherine McNamara; 9: Researching the body in/as performance, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck and Roberta Mock; Notes on Contributors; Index.
