Rehearsal Observation and Spectator-Participation-as-Research in Punchdrunk's The Burnt City

Emma K Cole

Research output: Contribution to conferenceConference Paper

Abstract

This paper draws upon my experience as dramaturg and embedded researcher on Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City to investigate the methodological challenges such hybridity poses to the authoring of rehearsal studies. Rehearsal studies tend to be either first-person accounts authored by makers (e.g. Antony Sher, Complicte) or ethnographic-inspired studies (e.g. Gay McAuley) making claims towards objectivity, with little precedent for those holding a hybrid position. Indeed, McAuley claims that there ‘are serious methodological problems for someone who has a major creative involvement with the production also attempting to observe and analyse the whole process’. Whilst recognising that my dual role necessitated a more filtered access to the R&D and rehearsal process, and created an investment in the company and its artists that further restricted the already impossible goal of impartiality, the principle of rehearsal ethnography and the framework of participant observation remained useful. Here, I propose that rehearsal ethnography can be adapted for documenting theatre making by combining it with the framework of Spectator- Participation-as-Research (SPaR), which combines first-person, phenomenological-based accounts with more traditional scholarly analysis, which replicates the author’s ‘multifarious role within, and in relation to, the performance – as participants inside the work, spectators to their own experience, and analysts reflecting on it in the “aftermath” of participation’ (Aragay and Monforte 2016: 7). I argue that such a methodology has broad potential for academics collaborating on artistic outputs (rather than originating practice-as-research projects), and that it offers further benefits for theatre and performance scholars by facilitating connections between investigations into making a project with the analysis of an audience’s experience of it.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 2022
EventTheatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) 2022 - Essex/Online
Duration: 12 Sept 202214 Sept 2022
http://tapra.org/2022-conference-registration-now-open/

Conference

ConferenceTheatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) 2022
Period12/09/2214/09/22
Internet address

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