Reading: Practice as Research: Foundations for a Community of Knowledge. Notes.
The weaker epistemological position is what I would prefer to call “practice AND research.” This refers to interdisciplinarity between embodied practice and scholarly research.
How does artistic practice produce scholarly knowledge?
How does scholarly knowledge inform artistic practice?
Each can inform the other, but the two remain distinct.
“Practice AS Research”: PRACTICE = RESEARCH (stronger epistemological position)
what conditions does practice itself constitute a mode of research?”
This necessarily leads to different kinds of questions: First, instead of asking how embodied practice can produce scholarly knowledge,
the question becomes “What kind of knowledge inheres within practice itself?” Second, instead of asking how scholarly research can inform practice, we can ask, “Under what conditions does practice itself constitute a mode of research?”
Comment on the ephemerality of live performance
Yet, I believe this opposition is a kind of romanticization. For the spectator, a given performance may appear ephemeral because it is witnessed only once or twice. Such a practitioner knows that, although every live event is to some extent unique, it is also an instance of a repeatable structure. This structure may be loose or tight, but it must be stable. Even improvisation is founded on stable structures.
A community of knowledge, we might therefore say, is a relationship between institutions of pedagogy and archives of documents.
Now, having briefly articulated this idea of a “community of knowledge,” I want to return to the question of practice as research. Is it possible to conceive of “practice as research” as a community of knowledge in this sense: that is, as a relationship between pedagogy and archive? The pedagogy part is easy, since teaching and training have always been a central part of all traditions of live performance and embodied practice. But what about the archive?
Thus, the alleged “split” between theory and practice is not an ontological difference but rather a result of the history of technology. That scholarly knowledge appears stable is a result of the history of the written and later the printed word. Likewise, embodiment appears ephemeral and lacking in “knowledge” precisely because it has no archive. Only the advent of multimedia technology allows us to conceive of practice as academic research.
Specialisation is a fundamental feature of knowledge. (In fact, I think it might be a good sign if our practice-as-research documents are boring to people outside the field!)
In any case, the performing arts today do not need to be pushed toward mass appeal. We already live in the world of Broadway, Hollywood, and American Idol. Instead, the perform- ing arts today are badly in need of a way out of the demand for mass appeal. They badly need a zone of protection analogous to that which, however partially or awkwardly, protects and distinguishes scholars as producers of knowledge. What academia can offer the performing arts is, therefore, much more fundamental than funding: it is epistemology.
A few conclusions:
- Research is relative to a field of knowledge.
- A field of knowledge is a relation between pedagogy and archive.
- Practice as research is not inherently interdisciplinary.
- The apparent ephemerality of embodied practice in comparison with discursive thought is an artifact of the history of technology.
- Documentation is an epistemological issue.