Research Methods In Theatre And Performance

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.

Performance as Research (PAR) is characterised by an extraordinary elasticity and interdisciplinary drive. Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact celebrates this energy, bringing together chapters from a wide range of disciplines and eight different countries. This volume focuses explicitly on three critical, often contentious themes that run through much discussion of PaR as a discipline: Knowledge - the areas and manners in which performance can generate knowledge Methods - methods and methodologies for approaching performance as research Impact - a broad understanding of the impact of this form of research These themes are framed by four essays from the book's editors, contextualising their interrelated conversations, teasing out common threads, and exploring the new questions that the contributions pose to the field of performance. As both an intervention into and extension of current debates, this is a vital collection for any reader concerned with the value and legitimacy of performance as research.

Drama education has been lacking a research methodology. This much needed text provides models constructed by leading researchers in the field and presented at the International Drama in Education Research Institute Conference in 2004. Each chapter in this collection from across the Anglophone world describes a different research methodology. It explains how the methodology was applied to the practice and outlines how teachers and other researchers can employ it in their own contexts. Led by the editor's chapter on the context of research, the contributions include: The Process of Institute Research Stations by Philip Taylor The Reflective Practitioner by Jonothan Neelands Critical Ethnography by Kathleen Gallagher Narrative Inquiry by Bellarie Zatzman A case study by Joe Winston Performance Ethnography by Jane Bacon Post-structuralist Deconstruction by Ian McCormick Feminist Methodology by Sharon Grady The book will be essential reading for research students and teachers because it provides models and approaches that connect with the immediacy of their practice.

Offers a theory and methodology of performance analysis as an alternative to traditional play-analysis. This book carries an underlying theme that theatre performance is a descriptive text generated by the theatre medium and that the process of generating meaning takes place in the actual encounter between a theatre performance and the spectator.

We often know performance when we see it – but how should we investigate it? And how should we interpret what we find out? This book demonstrates why and how mixed methods research is necessary for investigating and explaining performance and advancing new critical agendas in cultural study. The wide range of aesthetic forms, cultural meanings, and social functions found in theatre and performance globally invites a corresponding variety of research approaches. The essays in this volume model reflective consideration of the means, processes, and choices for conducting performance research that is historical, ethnographic, aesthetic, or computational. An international set of contributors address what is meant by planning or designing a research project, doing research (locating and collecting primary sources or resources), and the ensuing work of interpreting and communicating insights. Providing illuminating and necessary guidance, this volume is an essential resource for scholars and students of theatre, performance, and dance.

Research Methods in Performance Studies offers a unique approach for readers to engage with performance research and methods in practice. It examines ways of making performance, researching performance cultures, researching performers who themselves are engaged in research, and conducting research in the context of enduring and emergent themes of performance studies inquiry. This book features the work of eighteen scholar-artists currently working in performance studies who demonstrate—through applied projects—various methods for conducting performance research. The result is a wide array of novel scholarship including activist performance, slam poetry, video performance, stand-up comedy, adaptation for the Broadway stage, naturecultural performance, intersectional performance, performances of cultural and material preservation, and many others. Faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and performance practitioners alike will benefit from the approaches to performance studies research methods articulated by the scholar-artists featured in this collection.