Practice-as-research

I begin by offering a brief overview of the methodological concerns of PaR, locating it within both established and emergent research paradigms. I then go on to suggest that we need to understand the entanglement of PaR with epistemologies that are crucially embodied, emphasizing the significance of motility and materalities in PaR. Here, experiential and embodied knowing is brought into focus through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s (2011: 17) notion of ‘materials-in-motion’, encompassing the work of the feet, as well as the hands and the head. Through these ideas I foreground the significance of expert skill in PaR, an area that has to date received little attention. PaR is elaborated here as a form of enskilled, in-process research. I note that, in its embracing of subjectivity and intuition, PaR is sometimes messy, but always reflective and reflexive, in its methods. In the final section I offer a framework for PaR enquiries and discuss the often multi-modal and multi-voiced outcomes of choreographic PaR to propose that the artistic researcher, via purposeful strategies of emplacement, position their epistemic materials for diverse publics.

Hardback Published: 21-03-2019
Paperback Published: 12-11-2020