A cautionary note or two, amid the pleasures and pains of participation in performance-making as research.

What do we understand expertise in the creative and performing arts to mean, when a concern we share here is "creative" research in the HE context? What is the "knowledge status" of expertise, in higher education set-ups in which research is more widely understood to involve publishable writing in certain complex registers? What is the epistemic status of expert-creative decision-making processes in performance-making, when making processes tend to be invisible as such to (expert) spectating, and when the expert-intuitive processing that I argue is constitutive to the making, tends to be rapidly modulated in terms of the equally constitutive logics of expert production? In this presentation I ask whether "posthuman" practice-theoretical writers, on the one hand, and modes of enquiry associated with speculative pragmatism, on the other, might not have something to contribute to this discipline-specific enquiry into performance-making processes.