Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration [1st ed.] 9783030385989, 9783030385996

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Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration Edited by  Martin Blain · Helen Julia Minors

Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration

Martin Blain  •  Helen Julia Minors Editors

Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration

Editors Martin Blain Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester, UK

Helen Julia Minors Kingston University London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-38598-9    ISBN 978-3-030-38599-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

Creative practice as research has had a relatively short life in British universities, with the exception, one might argue, of musical composition, whose historical acceptance as an academic activity goes back to music’s membership of the medieval Quadrivium on the grounds that it was, with geometry, arithmetic and astronomy, essentially a branch of mathematics. Musical composition’s established, if anomalous, academic status, underpinned by the role of music as guarantee for the modernist ideology of aesthetic autonomy, has given composers in the academy a privileged position that has often exempted them from engaging with the now extensive debate around artistic practice as research in other fields. Some would say just as well,1 since the intellectual rationale for creative practice as research in UK universities was never thought through systematically. In the tradition of British empiricism, it has simply muddled itself into being as a series of pragmatic responses to the process by which Art Schools and Music and Drama Conservatoires, once considered to offer essentially skills-based training, were gradually brought into the Higher Education system from the 1960s onwards. By the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), post-1992 arts institutions (often now faculties within new universities) wanted a share of the research income cake, and they made a vigorous case for the creative work of artistic practitioners teaching in Higher Education Institutions to be considered as research for the purpose of the RAE. But since then the criteria for what constitutes research in practice have, quite rightly, become increasingly stringent (e.g., the five-­year funded AHRB project, Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP), running between 2001 and 2006 generated v

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‘national frameworks for the encouragement of the highest standards in representing practical-creative research within academic contexts’2). As a result, many artists teaching in universities are now putting themselves through elaborate contortions to justify their work as research according to the new criteria. In the 1996 RAE, the quality of artistic practice was judged largely in relation to indicators of esteem: an exhibition in a major gallery or a BBC commission for an orchestral work being deemed primary evidence of the merit of the submitting artist’s work (with a lot of arguably dubious ‘research’ appointments of high-profile artists being made as a result). The 2014 Research Excellence Framework panels made it clear that such indicators of public or professional esteem are no longer relevant in evaluating the work that is submitted, which was supposedly judged solely on its merit as research that followed the Research Councils’ own criteria of originality, rigour and significance. (All three criteria are necessary; something can be original, for instance, but if it lacks methodological rigour or understanding of its creative or theoretical research contexts it may lack wider significance.) Practical experimentation is, of course, fundamental to scientific enquiry, so is not per se at issue in the legitimation of creative practice as research. What is at issue is the knowledge claims of artistic practice when placed alongside those of scientific research (although anyone who has had dealings with European Research Institutions will be familiar with the slightly estranging terminology of ‘scientific’ in relation to humanities research—one of the reasons, I suspect, that creative practice has taken longer to establish itself on continental Europe).3 The argument for creative practice as research has been supported by a wide range of discussions and publications drawing on new understandings of knowledge (such as theories of embodied knowledge4 or material thinking5) that legitimate artistic practices as modes of understanding and knowledge creation, to which this book, Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, will be a valuable addition. But artists have been undertaking research in their professional practice long before they were required to engage with academic research discourses. The Italian painters of the Quattrocento who investigated the artistic potential of the newly established geometry of perspective; the composers who around 1600 unwittingly invented opera as an outcome of scholarly research into the performance practices of Greek classical drama; Stanislavsky’s development of his ‘System’ for acting; Braque and Picasso working alongside

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each other to forge Cubism; Schoenberg’s development of Serialism: all were undoubtedly engaged in systematic projects of artistic research. These examples all have a number of things in common: a sense of common endeavour, sometimes collaborative and sometimes competitive (as I will show, these are not mutually exclusive); a clear relationship between theory and practice—whether the practice is employed to test a theoretical hypothesis, as was the case with the composers who invented opera in response to the theoretical speculations of Renaissance scholars concerning classical drama, or whether the theory is parallel or post facto, as was the case with the group of lesser Cubist artists around Picasso and Braque who theorised Cubism as it evolved; and a belief that artistic innovation involves issues of cultural meaning and value rather than merely technical concerns (although technical research in the arts is important— e.g., testing new techniques, technologies or materials); Schoenberg did not develop serialism for novelty value—there was, for him, much at stake in challenging the old tonal paradigm. Such work would certainly meet the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s criteria for research: it was led by ‘research questions, issues or problems’ (Jacopo Peri: ‘how might the Greeks and Romans have sung their dramatic texts?’; Braque: how can we paint the space between objects rather than the objects themselves?; Schoenberg: ‘how can we reconstitute musical form on a non-hierarchical basis?’); it was highly aware of its own creative and discursive contexts; and it was driven by the need to find new methods for new problems. I would like to look at two of these examples in more depth. What we now recognise as opera came into being in Florence around 1600, the year of the publication of William Gilbert’s De magnete, which the most recent historian of the scientific revolution, David Wootton, boldly describes as ‘the first major work of experimental science in 600 years’.6 Ten years later, Galileo published The Starry Messenger, the work that decisively challenged Aristotelian science and confirmed Copernicus’s theories. The literary historian Elizabeth Spiller has suggested that the epistemological approaches of literature and science were much closer to each other in the early modern era than today, and entailed a ‘central understanding of art as a basis for producing knowledge’,7 whilst the art historian David Freedburg similarly argues that visual images started to become a form of knowledge production around 1600.8 In opera, the terms used by the composers and librettists of early opera to explain the premises and processes that brought the first surviving opera, Euridice (1600), into being are close to the concepts such as ‘discovery,

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‘invention’, ‘hypothesis’, ‘fact’, ‘evidence’ and ‘experiment’ that David Wootton notes as being distinctive to the mentality of the scientific revolution.9 Wootton explains that in the Renaissance ‘there were fundamentally two types of argument: arguments from reason and arguments from authority’,10 and that increasingly reasoning became prevalent. In his preface in the published score for Euridice (the publication of such scores, and their accompanying theoretical manifestos, is itself a significant marker of practice that was entering into a field of critical discourse), Peri states that ‘for in all human activities, the principle and source must be reason, and he who cannot readily give his reasons gives grounds for believing that he acted on chance’.11 Although there are many examples of chance discovery in science, Peri is following good ‘philosophical’ practice in his preface when he states that he needs to provide a rationale for his experiment, which is based on the evidence of Greek and Roman practice in setting theatrical texts to music (Peri still draws on classical authority, although historical reconstruction remains a valid research methodology to this day). In the brief theoretical statement appended by Monteverdi to his Fifth Book of Madrigals (1605), Monteverdi similarly insists that he does not compose ‘by chance’ (a caso); in other words, that he has a reason for what he does. And he concludes by justifying his practice by appeal ‘to reason and to the senses’ rather than authority.12 In explaining how they came to produce Euridice, Rinuccini and Peri duly articulate what we would recognise as a working ‘hypothesis’ that they need to test in practice. As Rinuccini puts in his own preface to his libretto: ‘It is the opinion of many […] that the ancient Greeks and Romans sung their tragedies throughout in performance’,13 a hypothesis that was based on some plausible evidence offered by the antiquarian scholar Girolamo Mei and others (and which is upheld by a great many modern scholars). Rinuccini and Peri therefore undertook some ‘experiments’ to test their hypothesis: ‘Jacopo Peri, when he heard of the intention of sig. Jacopo Corsi, set to music with so much grace the favola of Dafne, composed by me for the sole purpose of making a test/proof [prova] of that which song can do in our era’. The ambiguity of the word ‘prova’ here is explained by Wootton when he notes that the term can be used to refer both to a practical test and to the demonstration of the correctness of a theory, or what we would call proof,14 both of which are implied here, for Rinuccini and Peri both tested the hypothesis rigorously, and ‘proved’ it by demonstrating the dramatic effectivity of sung drama.

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For evidence of the ‘proof’ provided by their experiment, Peri and Rinuccini mention what we would recognise as a form of peer review, Peri listing the eminent cultural figures who testified to the success of Dafne: the composer Pietro Strozzi, a member of one of the most eminent Florentine families, Francesco Cini, a theatre poet associated with the new musical school, and ‘other most learned gentlemen’, as well as Vittoria Archilei, reigning prima donna of her day, and Giovan Battista Jacomelli (or Giacomelli), its foremost violinist (i.e., prominent representatives of each component of operatic production). The creation of what can be described as a ‘peer-review college’ was one of the most distinctive aspects of the new scientific method. Bruno Latour identifies the novelty of the Anglo-Irish scientist Robert Boyle’s public demonstration of his air pump to a selected community of scientists: ‘Instead of seeking to ground a work in logic, mathematics or rhetoric, Boyle relied on the parajuridical metaphor: credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses gathered at the scene of the action can attest to the existence of a fact, even if they do not know its true nature’.15 As Wootton demonstrates, the early scientists were fully aware of the newness of the new science in which they were engaged, something which, again, the creators of opera were also cognisant of in what Monteverdi dubbed ‘the second practice’. And one sign of this is that, like their scientist contemporaries, they were a part of what Wootton identifies as ‘a new culture of priority claims’,16 which was quite as virulent amongst musicians as were the disputes between Galileo and his many opponents as to who had discovered what, and when. In his introduction to his collection of songs titled Le Nuove Musiche (1601/2), Giulio Caccini, who in fact composed large sections of Euridice, and subsequently published his own version in clear competition with his rival Peri, significantly backdates his innovations by some years to ensure that it is understood that they preceded those by his rivals, in the new monodic style, Peri and Emilio de’ Cavalieri. Cavalieri was just as insistent that it was he who had ‘invented’ representational music, as he claimed everyone knew in a letter of 1600.17 But arguments over priority also indicate recognition of a shared set of problems and challenges. Thus, Wootton describes how, during the seventeenth century, scientists and mathematicians such as Pascal, Gassendi and Mersenne ‘competed with each other and collaborated’18—something that is, again, evident amongst the creators of opera, who perforce worked together, sometimes acknowledged each other’s achievements, but also competed fiercely. The fact that the same libretti were set by different

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composers (Dafne by Peri, Marco da Gagliano and possibly Caccini, Euridice by Peri and Caccini) is another indication that competition might still entail common purpose, for as the sociologist of knowledge Barry Barnes suggests, any form of practice is, in effect, a form of ‘collective action’ to the extent that it always enters into an existing field.19 The art historian Elizabeth Cropper suggests that the claims to novelty and originality made by artists in the circles of Caravaggio and the Carracci in Rome in the early years of the seventeenth century are indicative of a similar revaluation of novelty amidst the ‘jealous and competitive world of scientific and artistic discovery in Rome at the beginning of the century’, which she sees as being driven by the increasing prevalence of market forces in the production and acquisition of artworks, and the tendency for artists and intellectuals to claim what we recognise as modern forms of authorship.20 Today’s academics will recognise the way in which the marketisation of Higher Education has led to similar competition over resources, despite the official rhetoric of collaboration. But even when, as artists-­ researchers, we are not apparently working with others, we cannot escape the fact that we are virtually collaborating to the extent that our work is always mediated by, and engaging with, shared histories and discourses. My other example is Arnold Schoenberg and his quest for non-tonal musical structures. Although Schoenberg cast himself as a lonely pioneer, he was, of course, not alone in exploring non-tonal music, nor even in coming up with serialism (although he may have been alone in deciding that atonality needed a ‘solution’). Schoenberg judged his musical ‘discoveries’ to be on a par with Einstein’s discovery of relativity, but what was much more important in Schoenberg’s case was that there was something at stake beyond the merely aesthetic or practical problem he had set himself. For Schoenberg considered the tonal system to embed social and political hierarchies that he wanted to challenge by giving each note in the musical scale equal weight, rather than its being subordinated as a ‘satrap’ to the authority of the ‘sovereign’ tonic (which he dubbed ‘Napoleon’).21 It may be that Schoenberg’s drawing attention to the ideological underpinnings of musical forms that had hitherto been declared in the ideology of absolute music to be merely abstract was more important as a contribution to our knowledge and understanding of music in the long term (‘significance’) than his discovery of serialism (‘originality’)—despite the extensive impact of the latter on twentieth-century composition. With artistic practice as research, emphasis is placed on the aptness of the research questions, the rigour of the methodology, the thoroughness

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of the contextual research and the acumen of the theoretical conclusions that are adduced. Process, rather than product; generalisable knowledge rather than specific aesthetic experience. While these are essential to the definition and evaluation of practice as research, they may be less relevant to creative practice that is not pursuing research aims. On the other hand, the question of aesthetic quality is often less important in the evaluation of creative practice as research. Indeed, let’s admit it, such practice can lead to some dull artistic outcomes. But, perhaps this does not matter: Peri’s Euridice is ground-breaking as a technical demonstration of the possibilities of sung drama, but it is dry and, dare I say it, ‘academic’ in comparison with Monteverdi’s Orfeo (Mantua, 1607), a passionate masterpiece that showed the true artistic potential of Peri’s more cautious first steps. But Orfeo, which follows the dramatic structure of Euridice closely, and in which Monteverdi was most certainly pitting himself against his Florentine peers in an act of competitive collaboration, almost certainly would not have happened without Peri’s earlier experiments. And, moreover, the methods of monodic composition developed by Peri for sung drama laid down the principles of what we now recognise more generally as modern music, beyond opera. Peri’s Euridice is Original, Rigorous and, above all Significant, even if it is a little dull. University of Sussex Brighton, UK [email protected]

Nicholas Till

Notes 1. See John Croft, ‘Composition is not Research,’ Tempo, 69, no. 272 (2015): 6–11. 2. PARIP (n.d.), Practice as Research in Performance, http://www.bris.ac. uk/parip/introduction.htm (last accessed 12 August 2019). 3. For more information on artistic research in continental Europe, see Kathleen Coessens, Darla Crispin and Anne Douglas, The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009). 4. See Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, 1967); Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson and Francisco J. Varela, eds., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive science and human experience

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(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Marie-Helene Coetzee, ‘Embodied Knowledge(s), Embodied Pedagogies and Performance,’ editor’s introduction to special volume ‘Embodied Knowledge(s), Embodied Pedagogies and Performance,’ South African Theatre Journal, 31, no. 1 (2018): Taylor and Francis online. https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10137548.2018.1425527?scroll =top&needAccess=true (last accessed 10 August 2019). 5. See Paul Carter, Material Thinking: The theory and practice of creative research (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2005). 6. David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A new history of the scientific revolution (London: Penguin, 2018), 7. 7. Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The art of making knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. 8. David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his friends and the beginnings of modern natural history (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). 9. Wootton, The Invention of Science, 2018, 61. 10. Ibid., 297. 11. Jacopo Peri, ‘A Lettori’ Le musiche di Iacopo Peri, nobil fiorentino sopra l’Euridice del Sig. Ottavio Rinuccini: rappresentate nello sponsalizio della cristianissima Maria Medici, regina di Francia e di Navarra (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1600). 12. Paolo Fabbri, Monteverdi, translated by Tim Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48. 13. Ottavio Rinuccini, ‘Alla cristianissima Maria Medici regina di Francia, e di Navarra,’ L’Euridice d’Ottavio Rinuccini (Florence: Cosimo Giunti, 1600), 3. 14. Wootton, The Invention of Science, 2018, 314. 15. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 18. 16. Wootton, The Invention of Science, 2018, 86. 17. Warren Kirkendale, Emilio de’ Cavalieri ‘Gentilhuomo Romano’ (Florence: Leo S. Olschi Editore, 2001), 369. 18. Wootton, The Invention of Science, 2018, 339. 19. Barry Barnes, ‘Practice as Collective Action,’ in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, edited by Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina and Eike von Savigny (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), 17–28. 20. Elizabeth Cropper, The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, imitation, and theft in Seventeenth Century Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 134. 21. Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, translated by Roy E.  Carter (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1983), 128–129.

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Bibliography Barnes, Barry. 2001. Practice as Collective Action. In The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny, 17–28. London/New York: Routledge. Carter, Paul. 2004. Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Coessens, Kathleen, Darla Crispin, and Anne Douglas. 2009. The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Coetzee, Marie-Helene. 2018. Embodied Knowledge(s), Embodied Pedagogies and Performance. South African Theatre Journal 31 (1). Taylor and Francis online. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 .1080/10137548.2018.1425527?scroll=top&needAccess=true. Accessed 10 Aug 2019. Croft, John. 2015. Composition is not Research. Tempo 69 (272): 6–11. Doğantan-Dack, Mine. 2017. Once Again: The Page and the Stage. Journal of Royal Music Association 142 (2): 445–460. Cropper, Elizabeth. 2005. The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation, and Theft in Seventeenth Century Rome. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fabbri, Paolo. 1994. Monteverdi, Trans. Tim Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freedberg, David. 2002. The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kirkendale, Warren. 2001. Emilio de’ Cavalieri ‘Gentilhuomo Romano’. Florence: Leo S. Olschi Editore. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peri, Jacopo. 1600. ‘A Lettori’ Le musiche di Iacopo Peri, nobil fiorentino sopra l’Euridice del Sig. Ottavio Rinuccini: rappresentate nello sponsalizio della cristianissima Maria Medici, regina di Francia e di Navarra. Florence: Giorgio Marescotti. PARIP. (n.d.). Practice as Research in Performance, http://www.bris. ac.uk/parip/introduction.htm. Accessed 12 Aug 2019. Polanyi, Michael. 1967. The Tacit Dimension. New York: Anchor Books. Rinuccini, Ottavio. 1600. ‘Alla cristianissima Maria Medici regina di Francia, e di Navarra’ L’Euridice d’Ottavio Rinuccini. Florence: Cosimo Giunti.

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Rosch, Eleanor, Evan Thompson, and Francisco J. Varela, eds. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wootton, David. 2018. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution. London: Penguin. Schoenberg, Arnold. 1983. Theory of Harmony. Trans. Roy E.  Carter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Spiller, Elizabeth. 2004. Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Acknowledgements

This book began like all good collaborative journeys, as a conversation which sprouted more questions than answers, and more opportunities than time, and as much excitement as concrete ideas. We editors were both, at the time, leading activities in practice as research, and we decided to co-chair a conference which would lead to developing our ideas further. The initial conference, Creative Arts and Creative Industries: Collaborations in Practice, was hosted at the Manchester School of Art and was jointly funded by the Practice Research Unit, Kingston University, London and MIRIAD at Manchester Metropolitan University. Support and conference hosting was co-managed by the former groups as well as with the Royal Northern College of Music. We thank our colleagues and institutions/ organisations, especially Jane Ginsborg, John Mullarkey, Peter Buse and Richard Wistreich, for their support. We also thank especially our keynote speakers, Mine Doğantan-Dack, Anthony Gritten and Roger McKinley. Funding to complete this project has been granted to us by Manchester Metropolitan University and Kingston University, to enable writing retreats in Snowdonia, Wales and Nantwich, England. There are many forms of collaboration represented in this book, through co-authored chapters, or through citations of participants, co-­ creators and performers. As such we would like to thank both the anonymised and named participants in the various projects which follow. Notable for their help in accessing materials are FACTLab, Simon Destruslais, Walter Thompson, Jane Turner and Karen Wood. A constant mentor and inspirational figure for both of us, as editors, has been Robin Nelson. Robin has kindly acted as a keynote presenter of the xv

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Practice Research Unit, Kingston University, during its existence and has led the development of practice as research within the curriculum at Manchester Metropolitan University. His guidance, mentorship and friendship has been important to both of us, and we wish here to thank Robin for his generosity and continued support. Thanks also go to our publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, for their help in bringing this project to fruition, and to the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback in the early stages and latter stages of the project.

Contents

Part I Critical Contexts   1 1 Introduction: Defining the Territory: Collaborative Processes, Issues and Concepts  3 Martin Blain and Helen Julia Minors 2 The Place of Artistic Research in Higher Education 11 Martin Blain and Helen Julia Minors Part II Collaborative Demonstrations in Practice  37 3 Why Collaborate? Critical Reflections on Collaboration in Artistic Research in Classical Music Performance 39 Mine Doğantan-Dack 4 The Aesthetics of Artistic Collaboration 59 Andy Hamilton 5 In the Bee Hive: Valuing Craft in the Creative Industries 75 Alice Kettle, Helen Felcey, and Amanda Ravetz

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CONTENTS

6 The Right Thing to Play? Issues of Riff, Groove and Theme in Freely Improvised Ensemble Music: A Case Study 95 Adam Fairhall 7 Soundpainting: A Tool for Collaborating During Performance113 Helen Julia Minors 8 Collaboration and the Practitioner-­Researcher: A Composer’s Perspective139 Tom Armstrong 9 Creative Industries and Copyright: Research into Collaborative Artistic Practices in Dance165 Mathilde Pavis and Karen Wood 10 Romance and Contagion: Notes on a Conversation Between Drawing and Dance185 Sally Morfill 11 The Good, The God and The Guillotine: Insider/Outsider Perspectives205 Martin Blain and Jane Turner 12 Connecting Silos: Examples of Arts Organisation and HEI Collaborations at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology229 Roger McKinley and Mark Wright Epilogue by Robin Nelson251 Author Index261 Subject Index265

Note on Contributors

Tom Armstrong  studied composition with George Nicholson and Roger Marsh. He read music at York University, completing a DPhil in composition in 1994. Tom’s music has been performed by the Fidelio Trio, Jane Chapman, Notes Inégales, Gemini, the New Music Players, Psappha, the Delta Saxophone Quartet, the BBC Philharmonic and the Feinstein Ensemble, and heard across the UK in venues such as Kings Place, the Wigmore Hall, the Southbank Centre and the Lowry as well as in Europe and China. He is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Surrey and in 2016 directed the AHRC-funded research network Music Composition as Interdisciplinary Practice. Tom’s research stems from his compositional practice and coalesces around three topics: collaboration and the composer/performer relationship, approaches to musical borrowing through processes of ‘ruination’, and revision as a compositional tool—his chamber music CD, Dance Maze (Resonus Classics 2018), is built around this last theme. Martin  Blain is a Reader in Music Composition at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a composer and performer. His work is divided into three discrete areas: compositional practice (development of concert works); laptop ensemble performance practice (currently exploring notions of ‘liveness’ through the work of MMUle (Manchester Metropolitan University laptop ensemble)); and developing practice a­s research methodologies within music composition and performance ­ (developing appropriate PaR methods to disseminate research insights from his practice). Martin was composer and performer on the project The xix

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Good, the God and the Guillotine. He has worked with a variety of leading contemporary music ensembles and soloists receiving performances of his works both in the UK and abroad. Musicians he has worked with include the Apollo Saxophone Quartet, BackBeat Percussion Ensemble, Equivox, and English Northern Philharmonic Orchestra. In addition, Martin has published on collaboration, ‘liveness’ in performance, and practice as research as a  research methodology in a variety of journals and book publications. Mine  Doğantan-Dack  is a musicologist and a concert pianist, internationally regarded as a leading figure in a new generation of artists who are also academic researchers. Mine was born in Istanbul, and studied at the Juilliard School (BM, MM), Princeton University (MA), and Columbia University (PhD). She also holds a BA in Philosophy (Boğaziçi University). Her books include Mathis Lussy: A Pioneer in Studies of Expressive Performance (2002); the edited volumes Recorded Music: Philosophical and Critical Reflections (2009); Artistic Practice as Research in Music (2015); The Chamber Musician in the Twenty-First Century (2020); Re-Thinking the Musical Instrument (forthcoming); and the co-edited volume Music and Sonic Art: Theories and Practices (2018). Mine performs as a soloist and chamber musician, and her playing has been described as an ‘oasis’ and ‘heaven on earth’. She is the founder of the Marmara Piano Trio and received an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for her work on chamber music performance. Mine currently teaches performance and performance studies at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. Adam Fairhall  is a jazz pianist, improviser, composer and scholar based near Manchester, England. He has released five albums as leader or co-­ leader to widespread critical acclaim; his 2012 album the Imaginary Delta was named Album of the Year by influential website Bird is the Worm, and he has received four-star reviews from Jazzwise, Jazz Journal and The Guardian. He is often heard on BBC Radio; his album tracks have been played on Radio 3’s Late Junction and Jazz Line-Up, and he has played on sessions for Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3 and 6Music. Concertzender (Dutch public radio) produced a programme dedicated to his work in 2014, and he has been interviewed for The Wire, Jazzwise and Radio 3. Adam holds a part-time post as Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research is practice-based.

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Helen Felcey  coordinates the MA Design Programme within Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. She is a practicing artist and collaborates on 3D design projects. Recent exhibitions include, Pairings at the Special Collections Gallery (MMU); ‘Helen Felcey/Carina Ciscato’, Blas & Knada, Stockholm; ‘Pots for Light’, Gallery Besson, London. Andy  Hamilton  teaches Philosophy, and also History and Aesthetics of Jazz, at Durham University. He has published many articles on aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, J.S. Mill and Wittgenstein, and the monographs Aesthetics and Music (Continuum, 2007), and Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007), which grew out of interviews with Konitz for The Wire and Jazz Review. He has also published The Self in Question (Palgrave, 2013), and Wittgenstein and ‘On Certainty’ (Routledge, 2014). Forthcoming edited volumes include The Philosophy of Rhythm (with Peter Cheyne and Max Paddison, OUP) and The Aesthetics of Imperfection (with Lara Pearson, Bloomsbury). He is a long-standing contributor to The Wire, Jazz Journal and International Piano magazines. Alice  Kettle  is a contemporary textile/fibre artist, writer and lecturer based in the UK. The vast panels use the power of textiles to narrate contemporary events through rich and intricate stitchwork. Her works use thread to examine the interconnected nature of society using embroidery and craft practices to engage in participatory collaborative projects. Her show Thread Bearing Witness at the Whitworth, Manchester 2018–2019 engaged with refugees and issues of migration. Kettle is currently Professor of Textile Arts at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. She is Visiting Professor at the University of Winchester and Chair of the Embroiderer’s Guild. Her work is represented in various international public collections including the Whitworth, the Crafts Council and the Hanshan Art Museum, Suzhou, China. She has co-authored Machine Stitch Perspectives (2010), Hand Stitch Perspectives (2012), Collaboration Through Craft (2013), The Erotic Cloth (2018) and Making Stories Ibook (2013). www.alicekettle.co.uk Roger McKinley  was the Research and Information Manager at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) Liverpool and is now a Research Associate at Manchester Metropolitan University. His work explores the space where art and science converge, questioning the ways in which artists think about and see the world.

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Helen Julia Minors  is School Head of Department and Associate Professor of Music at Kingston University, London. She is a trumpeter and soundpainter. She co-curated the series, Women’s Voices at Club Inégales, funded by the Arts Council. She has published books, Music, Text and Translation (2013); Building Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Bridges: Where Theory Meets Research and Practice, co-edited with Pamela Burnard, Valerie Ross, Kimberly Powell, Tatjana Dragovic and Elizabeth Mackinlay (2016); Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician, co-edited with Laura Watson (2019). Recent articles have appeared in London Review of Education (2017 and 2019). Recent book chapters in The International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research (2016), Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture (2016), Translating Opera: Eastern and Western Perspectives (2019) and Translation and Multimodality: Beyond Words (2019). Sally Morfill  is an artist and a Senior Lecturer in the Textiles in Practice programme at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Since 2007, she has been a member of Five Years, a collaborative artists’ project based in London, sharing responsibility for the programming of events and exhibitions. She has recently completed a practice-based PhD, making work that investigates the relationship between drawing and different aspects of language, as found in and between speech, movement and writing. Her thesis describes a drawing practice in which translation functions as a primary methodology. Morfill first explored collaborative possibilities in the early 1990s, and has developed a series of collaborative pairings, most recently with Ana Č avić—exploring themes of translation and dialogue through drawing and writing exchanges—and with Chicago-based artist Susan Giles, exploring ways to materialise ephemeral co-speech gesture. She has exhibited both in the UK and internationally. Robin Nelson  Formerly, Director of Research and Professor of Theatre and Intermedial Performance (2010–2015) at University of London, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Robin remains (in semi-­ retirement) a Professorial Fellow. He is also an Emeritus Professor of Manchester Metropolitan University where he worked for many years. Twice an RAE/REF sub-panel member, he has himself published widely on the performing arts and media. Books include Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (2013), Stephen Poliakoff on Stage and Screen (2011), and Mapping Intermediality in Performance (co-edited with S.  Bay-Cheng et  al.) (2010).

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Mathilde Pavis  is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter. Pavis specialises in intellectual property law, with a particular focus on the protection of performance and cultural heritage. She has received several grants from the UK government for her research on these topics. Pavis was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia, 2019) and University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada, 2020) and a Research Fellow at the US Library of Congress’ John W. Kluge Centre (2016). Amanda Ravetz  is Professor of Visual and Social Practice at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her current research interests concern models of validation for social practice; art and visible recovery; experiences of reverie in artistic and psychoanalytic practice. Recent publications include Collaboration Through Craft, co-edited with Alice Kettle and Helen Felcey (2013); ‘The ethnographic turn—and after: a critical approach to the realignment of art and anthropology’ (with Anna Grimshaw); ‘Wonderland: the art of becoming human, winner of the Utopia category’, AHRC Research in Film award 2016; and ‘The Night Manifesto’ in Associations; creative practice and research (2018). Nicholas Till  is a historian, theorist and theatre artist working in opera and music theatre. He worked professionally in theatre for 15 years before becoming an academic, and during 1998–2008, he was co-artistic director of the experimental music theatre company Post-Operative Productions. He has received three AHRB/AHRC awards for artistic practice as research projects, and supervised the first AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award for a composer-in-residence PhD project, at Glyndebourne Opera. He is the author of Mozart and the Enlightenment (1992) and The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies (2012), as well as numerous articles on historical and contemporary music theatre and opera. He is Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at the University of Sussex, where he is Director of the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre, and was recently appointed to the Pierre Audi Chair at the University of Amsterdam to develop research programmes with the Dutch National Opera. Jane Turner  is author of the Routledge Performance Practitioners book Eugenio Barba (2004, 2nd edition 2018); she has also published material on Third Theatre, Balinese theatre, performer training, theatre ethnography, the sublime and contemporary theatre performances. Following her dramaturgical and ethnographic work on The Good, the God and the

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NOTE ON CONTRIBUTORS

Guillotine, she has embarked on a long-term research project with Patrick Campbell examining performer training, dramaturgy and cultural actions employed by the Third Theatre community, particularly in Latin America and Europe. As an academic at Manchester Metropolitan University, she primarily teaches on the Drama and Contemporary Performance degree. Karen Wood  is a Research Fellow in Dance at Coventry University and was formerly lecturing in Dance Practice and Performance at Wolverhampton University. She has been collaborating on the project ‘Invisible Difference’ which charts issues in Dance, Disability and Law. She has written many chapters and articles, including co-authored pieces in Research in Dance Education (2019) and Disability Dance and Law (2018). Mark Wright  is based at Liverpool John Moores University within the Art and Design Faculty. He has been working in collaboration with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), notably on projects including Unlocking Creativity.

List of Figures

Fig. 11.1 R&D block 2: Gillian Lees, Leentje Van de Cruys, Nick Donovan and Andrew ‘Wes’ Westerside; light objects by Rebecca M.K. Makus. (Image courtesy of Proto-type Theater) 220 Fig. 11.2 R&D block 5: Leentje Van de Cruys, Andrew ‘Wes’ Westerside and Gillian Lees. Developing interactive light objects worn by performer-singers by Rebecca M.K. Makus. (Image courtesy of Paul J. Rogers) 221 Fig. 12.1 Installation view Lesions in the Landscape. (Copyright FACT, 2015)239 Fig. 12.2 Amnesia forum #4 image. (Copyright FACT, 2014) 239 Fig. 12.3 Cloudmaker tangible interfaces. (Copyright FACT, 2016) 242 Fig. 12.4 Cloudmaker online screenshots. (Copyright FACT, 2016) 243 Fig. 12.5 Image: Screenshot of MakeFest 2016 Railway Project. (Copyright FACT) 244 Fig. 1 The ‘duck-rabbit’, attributed to Wittgenstein. (Used first by psychologist Joseph Jastrow, the image was made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M Anscombe [Oxford. Blackwell, 1994, 1953], 194.) 256

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List of Tables

Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 8.1 Table 12.1

Thompson and Minors’ collaborative journey Soundpainting gesture types and categories Albumleaves project timeline FACT and HEI, six key issues

115 120 141 232

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List of Musical Examples

Musical Example 6.1 Musical Example 6.2 Musical Example 6.3 Musical Example 8.1 Musical Example 8.2 Musical Example 8.3 Musical Example 8.4

Phrase a106 Phrase b106 A six-note theme 109 96 Beats (original notation) 145 96 Beats (revised notation) 148 Intersecting Planes (original version) 149 Intersecting Planes (revised version) 152

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PART I

Critical Contexts

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Defining the Territory: Collaborative Processes, Issues and Concepts Martin Blain and Helen Julia Minors

Introduction: Aims and Questions Collaboration is an issue at the centre of Performance Arts Research for the collaborative arts practitioner-researcher, but its definition, application and recognition vary. It is understood differently in different practices. Collaborative processes may develop as it occurs between academic researchers in the creative arts and professional practitioners in commercial organisations in the creative arts industries (and beyond), or as it focuses attention and understanding on the tacit/implicit dimensions of working across different media. This edited collection draws on a wide range of creative arts which are all presented as performance (performed in the moment, live or through recorded media) and ensures to illustrate a wide range of definitions, which are combined in the ways in which we see collaboration as a

M. Blain (*) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] H. J. Minors Kingston University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_1

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bringing together of two or more artists, or two or more people (such as someone to commission the work, someone to produce the work, and someone to receive the work). This volume is unique in bringing together such a diverse range of disciplines spanning architecture, art and design, craft, dance, digital media, fine art, installation art, music and theatre. The combination of traditionally understood performance arts, as discussed in this volume (dance, music, theatre, digital media) with those understood as art works and artefacts existing in a less ephemeral manner (architecture, art and design, craft, fine art and installation art), brought to bear in the context of the act of performance is significant. It opens up new questions concerning collaboration which require investigation. This book interrogates the processes of collaboration within Performance Arts Research with the arts understood in its broadest sense in order to encourage the debates surrounding arts practices to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and to develop a dialogue whereby practitioner-­ researchers1 can share their varied models of collaborative research practice. As such, this book aims to explore the diverse range of collaborative processes across the arts, with an emphasis not on the final product (such as the performance, the installation or the artefact) but on the politics and strategies of collaboration from the point of instigation, through the gestation of the work, to the critical reflection of the process. In so doing, it asserts that collaboration is always complex and challenging, and necessarily so. It affirms that collaboration is a bringing together of people, drawing on different skills, insights and perspectives in order to make something new which would not otherwise be possible. It challenges ideas of the lone practitioner-researcher as authority figure and presents contrasting models of why and how practitioners, in collaboration, gain something from analysing and disseminating their research findings. Although each chapter raises its own issues, this book shares the following concerns: 1. What is collaboration for Performance Arts Practices? And, how do the differences in its definitions affect the resulting arts practice? Is collaboration reliant on a hierarchy or can there be an equal partnership between collaborators? 2. What models of collaborative research practice have been developed, and how do they help us critically assess the process? Do they also

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help us to reflect on and assess the final product? In Part One: Critical Contexts, we offer a critique of existing models of practice, and this is followed by a contextual framing of Artistic Research within a Higher Education context. This leads to the proposition of a new collaborative strategy for artistic researchers. This is followed, in Part Two: Collaborative Demonstrations in Practice, by a modelling of the processes and perspectives revealed in this collection via case studies. In this ground-breaking approach, we do not shy away from showing contradiction and rather seek to ask, why are there many models for collaboration and what do these different approaches tell us? 3. What ethical issues emerge during the making of collaborative work? For example, who owns the work? How is a collective authorship documented and acknowledged? When we discuss co-creation, and/or, collective production, what are we referring to which is different to collaboration, and does this somehow integrate the necessity for a particular ethical procedure? Moreover, beyond those creating the work, those assessing the work also need to be aware of the ethical processes and procedures for developing collaborative work. In producing collaborative Performance Arts Practice, we rely, work with and use people; people are a valuable resource, where their identity and insights must be respected. Who conducts the assessment of the collaborative Performance Arts Practice, and what is the criterion for that assessment? How do ethical concerns inform criteria? In asking these questions, this volume necessarily engages with the political, institutional context of the UK, incorporating UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), Independent Research Organisations (IROs) and National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs), and therefore, it also refers to Research Councils (RCs) and notably to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). 4. What are the modes of dissemination? Or rather, how are the practice, research and practice as research outputs shared with a wider audience both within and beyond the academy? In order to ask these questions, we contextualise artistic research outputs and findings in relation to the three key concerns of HEIs within the UK, namely, REF (Research Excellence Framework), KEF (Knowledge Excellence Framework) and TEF (Teaching Excellent Framework).

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Overview of the Book This book is constructed from two parts. In Part One, Critical Contexts, we define, explore and theorise models of collaborative practice in the context of artistic research, as framed by an academic agenda towards wider dissemination and impact strategies. We challenge notions of collaboration in order to illustrate the social, cultural and political demonstrations of four key themes, which are later developed across the case studies. The four themes are understood as constituent elements of all creative collaborative processes and are explored in Chap. 2: The Place of Artistic Research in Higher Education. The four themes representing the place of Artistic Research in Higher Education are: Partnership, Ethics, Performance and Dissemination. Partnership concerns how artists (within both the academy and creative industries) exchange ideas and produce new works for mutual benefit. It sets out the research context, which supports and arguably privileges collaborative research and knowledge exchange, with reference to the strategies of UK funding bodies, institutional policies and necessarily to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework with which all research active HEIs engage. Ethics is explored here to question issues of authorship and ownership in collaborative Performance Arts Practice projects. Necessary to establishing an understanding of collaboration, practitioner-researchers must reflect on the issue of ethics. Performance is explored to chart the processes of doing research and specifically presenting performance (a live event, an art work or happening) as research. The editors claim, like many before them,2 that practice can present new knowledge with its research findings subsequently disseminated to a wider audience. In considering performance we ask not only how it is able to disseminate an expressive art work, a product, but how this can be understood as a research output, worthy of value in terms of a research quality (originality, significance and rigour).3 And finally, the many ways in which research is disseminated are surveyed in order to question how practitioner-researcher collaborators communicate their methods and findings both amongst themselves and to specialist and non-specialist audiences. Nicholas Till sets out a Foreword, which offers an open perspective of the challenges and concerns effecting practitioner-researchers with two historical examples to provoke debate on the issues concerning this book. Then, Martin Blain and Helen Julia Minors co-write the first two chapters, Chap. 1, Defining the Territory: Collaborative Processes, Issues and Concepts, which sets out the definitions of collaboration as presented in

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this volume and refines the concept in order to show how it is manifest in institutional contexts. Then Chap. 2, The Place of Artistic Research in Higher Music Education, explores the four key themes in turn, before establishing a range of collaborative research models, which the following case studies reveal. Part Two, Collaborative Demonstrations in Practice, presents a diverse range of collaborative processes in and through practice. Some of the chapters are co-authored, and others though sole authored present conversations and primary source evidence of collaborative research practice with which they have been involved. The authors all work within, or in collaboration with, academic institutions. The authors are all in some way involved in practice either as performers (demonstrated through the role of musicians, dancers, actors and so on), leaders (those making the decisions in the creative process, such as choreographers), creators (those producing the stimulus for the collaboration such as composers, improvisers, fine artists, grant writers) or analysts (those charting the collaborative process, documenting the event, such as curators and dramaturges4). Of course, many of the authors wear multiple hats, and as such the processes and roles are not so easily defined. There is a multi-layered, multimodal approach to collaboration which is complex. The between-ness of the collaborative process is central to the chapters included in this volume, in the sense that each chapter takes a particular example of a project, performance or activity, and interrogates the collaborators’ different roles and different approaches to facilitate new thinking and making. As Peter Dayan5 notes in his assessment of the inter-art aesthetic (in reference to the start of twentieth century), there ‘is no unproblematic collaboration’. This would suggest that each case study presented in this volume will contribute to a deeper understanding of the collaborative arts process. Part Two begins with three chapters, which set out definitions of collaboration and assesses the aesthetics of collaboration. Interestingly, these first two chapters set out contrasting models for why and how collaborative arts practitioner-researchers work. In Chap. 3, Why Collaborate? Critical Reflections on Collaboration in Artistic Research in Classical Music Performance, Mine Doğantan-Dack offers a controversial model, which reveals a process of social interaction, with a ‘performance turn’, but which sets out the need for researchers and practitioners forming collaborative partners in order for the product to be critically assessed. Chapter 4, The Aesthetics of Artistic Collaboration, uses architecture as an exemplar for how collaboration mirrors the structure of society. Andy Hamilton uses an analogy of vernacular language to consider collective production and unconscious collaboration. His model sets out the opposing poles of

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the sole genius and shared co-creation. Whereas Hamilton shows the need for practitioners to also be researchers and to be collaborators with themselves, wearing multiple hats, Doğantan-Dack separates these roles in her exposé. Chapter 5, In the Bee Hive: Valuing Craft in the Cultural Industries, offers a case study of the Pairings project. Alice Kettle, Helen Felcey and Amanda Ravetz explain how their aim to emerge from the boundaried practices of craft informed a new approach to collaboration. They raise questions of authorship and ownership by outlining the practicalities and policies of the project. The next three chapters engage with issues of improvisation in diverse ways, where collaborative acts in the moment require us to question ethics and so to consider the ethics of communication, as well as the hierarchy imposed by notions of ensemble leadership. Chapter 6, The Right Thing to Play? Issues of Riff, Groove and Theme in Freely Improvised Ensemble Music: A Case Study, explores the ethics of using strict rhythmical musical content within the context of free improvisation. Adam Fairhall, as a pianist and jazz improviser, explores the communication dynamics of jazz bands within which he has played. Helen Julia Minors, in Chap. 7, Soundpainting: A Tool for Collaborating During Performance, continues the discussion of improvised approaches through a case study of Soundpainting, whereby multidisciplinary works are created in the moment with a leader, the Soundpainter, communicated through a signed coded gestural language. Considering issues of authorship and dialogue, she illustrates how members of the performing group each contributes to the authorship of the resulting work. Chapter 8, Collaboration and the Practitioner-Researcher: A Composer’s Perspective, explores the process through which a composer worked with a performer on the development of a new work. Tom Armstrong presents a case study of his own music, which was premiered by the trumpeter Simon Desbruslais. He refers to the ‘master [principle] score’ as a version of the work and basis for development, situating his discussion to illustrate how their perspective and different roles in HEIs affect their creative roles and collaborative process. Institutional pressures are shown to impact their working relationship. He presents a case study of professional practice. Whereas the previous three chapters focused on music primarily, the next two chapters explore collaboration through dance. Chapter 9, Creative Industries and Copyright: Research into Collaborative Artistic Practices in Dance, by Mathilde Pavis and Karen Wood, explores the ménage à trois of the researcher, practitioner and creative industries,

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assessing authorship and ownership, specifically by challenging the issue of Intellectual Property in a situation where there are clear creative leaders and a hierarchical structure guiding the collaborative process. This chapter is significant in its inclusive approach to dance and the differently-abled. Sally Morfill in Chap. 10, Romance and Contagion: Notes on a Conversation Between Drawing and Dance, takes an insider perspective to a creative collaboration, to negotiate what is understood as a romantic project. The notion of translation is used to address a collective enterprise and to explore how individual identities are revealed in the final work. The next two chapters take an insider-outsider perspective. Chapter 11, The Good, The God and The Guillotine: Insider/Outsider Perspectives, explores the processes that led to the development of collaborative strategies within this multi/interdisciplinary arts project. Focusing on their respective positions as ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, Martin Blain and Jane Turner consider the efficacy of different types of collaborative approaches tried out over the course of the project in relation to what, following Andy Lavender, they define as ‘concentric circles of collaboration’. The circles of collaborative decision-making are then critically aligned with Kant’s notions of ‘interested’ and ‘disinterested’ aesthetic judgement, as well as Noël Carroll’s taxonomy for qualifying aesthetic experience. The resulting critique provides useful insights into creative development and collaborative decision-making processes in performance-making projects. Chapter 12, Connecting Silos: Examples of Arts Organisation and HEI Collaborations at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, illustrates how National Portfolio Organisations and Independent Research Organisations function in terms of collaborative projects and research validation. Roger McKinley and Mark Wright use case studies from FACTLab (an Independent Arts Organisation), in Liverpool, to illustrate how knowledge exchange and cultural knowledge can be shared and developed in new ways. This book contributes to the growing body of work on Performance Arts Research by interrogating specifically the collaborative process of a wide range of creative artists. As iterated above, the chapters are all about collaboration, but moreover the content creation of the chapters is in varying ways collaborative, as are the case studies they discuss. Each chapter shows how their particular processes of collaboration were undertaken. Following his ‘How-to’ approach to ‘practice as research’, Robin Nelson6 here provides an epilogue to this book in which he reflects on the current state of play with regard to Performance Arts Practice, offering observations on recent activity.

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Notes 1. Ludivine Allegue, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw and Angela Piccini, eds., Practice-as-Research (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Robin Nelson, Practice as Research: Principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, eds., Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). 2. Nicholas Cook, ‘Performing Research: Some institutional perspectives,’ in Artistic Practice as Research in Music, edited by Mine Doğantan-Dack (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 11–32. 3. Research Excellence Framework REF 2018/01, ‘Draft Guidelines on Submissions’, https://www.ref.ac.uk/publications/draft-guidance-on-submissions-201801/ (last accessed 18 August 2019). 4. Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Art: Arts based research practice (New York: Guildford Press, 2009), 138. Dramaturge as a term was coined in 1958 by Goffman. 5. Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 6. Nelson, Practice as Research, 2013.

Bibliography Allegue, Ludivine, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, and Angela Piccini, eds. 2009. Practice-as-Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cook, Nicholas. 2015. Performing Research: Some Institutional Perspectives. In Artistic Practice as Research in Music, ed. Mine Doğantan-Dack, 11–32. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dayan, Peter. 2011. Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond. Farnham: Ashgate. Leavy, Patricia. 2009. Method Meets Art: Arts Based Research Practice. New York: Guildford Press. Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Research Excellence Framework (REF). 2018. Draft Guidance on Submissions. Bristol: Higher Education Funding Council for England. https://www.ref. ac.uk/media/1016/draft-guidance-on-submissions-ref-2018_1.pdf. Accessed 18 Aug 2019. Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean, eds. 2003. Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, rpt. 2010. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1994. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe. Oxford. Blackwell.

CHAPTER 2

The Place of Artistic Research in Higher Education Martin Blain and Helen Julia Minors

There are many books and articles,1 which discuss practice as research (PaR), practice-led research and artistic research, notably spanning theatre and music. The field remains one of hot debate concerning issues of how to document and share the research process and product. But despite many authors exploring the processes of practice as research or artistic research, few explicitly tackle the issue of how artistic practice might be articulated as research through the process of collaboration. This book not only suggests, below, new strategies of collaborative working (rather than a model as has occurred often) but also shows a wide range of collaborative approaches which navigate the impetus of the creative artists, from challenging the notion of the sole genius to celebrating and embracing distributed creative practices within specific settings.

M. Blain (*) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] H. J. Minors Kingston University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_2

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Anthony Gritten, in exploring ‘Artistic Practice as Research’ (APaR) identified the crux of the issue: that Performance Arts Research, PaR, or APaR, must assert and share its own value. The value must have a quantifiable impact, which can be registered in numeric terms, whether it be economic, participant numbers or metrics which determine change. Gritten argues that: the in-folding of research into practice is no more than APaR (Arts Practice as Research) attempting to pull itself up off the ground by its own hair or bootstrap (to adapt metaphors used by Kant and Bakhtin), attempting to engage in a momentous act of self-determination by means of which it can afford itself—indeed, must afford itself—artistically productive potential and aesthetic merit as a form of practice.2

Is the notion of research in the arts considered comparable to traditional (written) modes of research? It might seem ‘old hat’ to ask this question, but groups such as the Practice Research in the Arts Group (PRAG-UK) or the Practice Research Working Group sub-committee of the Royal Musical Association (RMA) have during meetings, when debating issues around how to articulate a research enquiry for the purposes of national research audits, received vocal opposition to the suggestion that 300-word Research Excellence Framework (REF) statements should be submitted for all practice submissions.3 Within the Arts and Humanities there remains a division between traditional forms of written research and that presented through practice notably when collaboration is at the heart of the research enquiry. The main difference is the live nature of some art forms and communicative practice within the process, especially in developing performance art. In establishing new ways to communicate, on many levels, theatre is ahead of the curve in that they have a body of scholarship on PaR developed over the last three decades.4 What has been written by scholars is a justification for how and why an artist’s work might be considered as research in specific instances, as well as a justification for historical and contextual accounts of the problems and issues behind the notion that practice, in some communities, ‘is’ still considered to be the research, as Keith Sawyer suggests in commenting that musicologists ‘justified their neglect of “performance practice” by assuming that it was a relatively trivial task, primarily a technical one’.5 However, what is not often discussed is the process through which collaborators make choices of what to retain and what to abandon during the process of collaboration. The processes of success as well as failure are not seen by the public or exposed in research dissemination (the rehearsal process usually

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takes place behind closed doors). We argue that an insider to the process is more likely to have a greater understanding of the work: they can see the rationale and the artistic purpose for choosing which aspects of the work (the creative threads) should be carried forward. Thus, the insider commands a position to offer the artistic community particular creative insights into the process of making and developing artistic practice and this we see as complementing the position of the outsider, who is able to offer different insights into, and reflections on, the creative process under scrutiny. Both the insider and outsider perspectives can collectively offer a rich tapestry of research-driven insights to the processes of creating and experiencing performance arts practice. The insider perspective might be seen as forming collaborative networks, as the practitioner-researchers discover creative solutions to creative problems as they work together. The outsider perspective might focus on the development of a specific role: for example, an actor might be employed to learn and embody a script, but in this role and in certain contexts do they operate as collaborators? Whereas in the sciences it is also common practice to disseminate research findings that share insights into the failure of a project, in collaborative art work this is not necessarily the case. However, Sara Jane Bailes in her book Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure examines the notion of failure in performance as a creative strategy and suggests that there is ‘potential to expand our understanding of the social’6 through acknowledging the discords, problems and challenges in bringing a new creative work to fruition. We are aware that in the case studies that follow, some creative problems and ‘failures’ are critiqued and acknowledged, but for the most part, authors understandably share the successes and findings of their respective projects in the ways in which a successful collaboration has been achieved. We chose Artistic Research here in our title because artistic research, applied internationally, is understood to place the artists at the forefront of the work. For example, in Sweden, a doctoral candidate will already have developed a career in their creative field and will be able to demonstrate precedence in the professional field, prior to applying for and undertaking a doctoral position (unlike in the UK, PhD positions in Sweden are advertised and appointed to as a working position, and within this structure a candidate cannot self-fund).7 We prefer Artistic Research for this volume on collaboration because we feel it is important that one of the main outputs of the research will be an artistic work (a work which can be presented in performance), which can exist without writing and justification, but can

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also co-exist with other forms of documentation making it an articulated piece of research. The documentation, as required for the REF (identified in the REF Main Panel D supplementary criteria as ‘contextual information (previously called a portfolio)’),8 can be useful when attempting to articulate the research dimensions of the work in terms of its originality, significance and rigour. But the work itself is a valuable source which reminds us that unlike the often-presented practitioner as an academic and researcher, the practitioner can be a professional artist (as well as an academic). Whilst this notion may be common practice in theatre and dance, fine art and craft, it is less well formed in the music research community. Interestingly, the project of performance is understood as a form of dissemination in music, theatre and dance, but is less understood in fine art and craft and so on. In this volume, we readdress the balance by asserting that all arts can be presented as performance, through the live event, or happening. We advocate that academics who create research can also be professional artists. The practice does not have to be used solely to represent research findings. The authors in this book include, amongst others, composers, choreographers and performers, who are professionals in those fields but who also work within HE in the UK. As suggested above, whilst there have been many attempts to articulate contrasting approaches to an understanding of artistic research, there has been very little work undertaken in developing strategic approaches to collaboration? Music has been late to the party, as identified by Mine DoğantanDack,9 which has led to a position whereby some professional performers (who may or may not also work as an academic within a Higher Education Institution [HEI]) who may have a significant creative input into the creation of a performance output may feel excluded from the wider research process. Similarly, the curator or musicologist might be leading on analysing the work of others but may not experience a sense of collaborative working within a wider project: it is for those members of the group, should they want to engage in a research enquiry, to ask why this is so? For example, how might the performer be more ‘research’ active? How might the curator or musicologist work productively within a collaborative project? In theatre, the notion of the dramaturge has moved from a defined individual role to one which is embodied and embedded in the role of all, to ensure the creative problems are resolved through co-­creation. For participants working within disciplines where artistic research is still in its infancy, this volume offers a variety of collaborative strategies that can be applied and adapted across and within disciplines. The REF is not going away (rather its revisions

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following the Stern review ostensibly require all colleagues with a ‘significant responsibility for research’ to submit research outputs to the REF10) and the metric driven institutional accountability will only increase as justification for resources becomes more stringent. REF is a UK national audit of research, a temperature check if you will at a specific moment in time, but its rewards in terms of future research funding can be significant. It is therefore beneficial to engage in the process, be transparent and share process and practice more widely, not only to acknowledge that collaboration can be beneficial to those who take part in group projects but also to justify why this may be so. It seems surprising that so much literature, referenced throughout the book, has defined, refined, justified and modelled practice but has not explicitly engaged with the processes of collaboration (it is, however, often implicit). Is it because this relies on the sharing of multiple voices? This kind of creative journey can be messy, full of risks and failures— it is not the consistent, concise story of identifying only the originality of the research finding(s), the significance of the work to the wider community and the methodological rigour of the research enquiry (as required by REF). The somatic experience cannot be easily quantified. The dialogue between practitioners when engaged in collaborative activities, therefore, might be captured in more varied ways (shown in the following chapters). Things which might be captured include documenting the formulation of strategies for planning the collaborative process, as well as acknowledging from the start what the research potential contained within the project is. Collaborative artistic research projects we argue need careful planning and documentation of the overarching process (more below). As Brad Haseman proposed in his ‘Manifesto of Performative Research’, research can be expressed in nonnumeric data, in forms of symbolic data other than words in discursive text. These include ‘material forms of practice, of still and moving images, of music and sound, of live action and digital code’.11 In other words, he proposes that artists present their findings in the mode in which they present their art form. We propose a multi-layered approach whereby this is not only optimal but also aspirational (how can it be done?). We show, through these case studies, that it is necessary and rewarding to share a wider range of documentary evidence of the collaborative process, in order to illustrate the diverse range of research enquiries and research insights that are exposed through the complex process of collaboration. The context of research in HEIs is ultimately determined presently by economic, political and educational factors. The REF, Knowledge Excellence Framework (KEF) and Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)

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all import a metric-driven system of accountability, which relies on an evidence-­ based approach to articulating research, research-informed knowledge exchange and research-informed teaching. These three excellence frameworks measure outputs and dissemination in terms of the impact the work has had on specific bodies, such as industry, government, local communities and so on. Within this context, artistic work is not undertaken within HEIs for an ‘art for art’s sake’ approach. To be employed as an artist and academic, research is usually part of an employment contract, and as such there is an expectation that practice work undertaken as part of an academic employment contract (and articulated as a research enquiry) will be submitted to REF. To develop creative work as part of an HEI employment contract there is also likely to be expectation that the work will have a research dimension (articulated within the REF criteria for originality, significance and rigour) and be embedded within the teaching practice of the practitioner-researcher, thus illustrating to students the contemporary relevance of artistic work within academia and the professional world of the arts—here HEIs are particularly interested in showcasing how they are developing and nurturing employability skills within the student community.

Partnership Partnerships fall within specific contexts: the institutional context, and the personal research context. These determine funding sources, the strategy for the research and the anticipated output. The reach of the academy to industry and third sector organisations is not only desirable but also actively expected in the current knowledge economy. There are three main reasons for this: (1) REF seeks impact in real economic terms, impact which extends beyond the academic institution in quantifiable terms, providing specific REF12 audit guidance13; (2) Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) and the associated Knowledge Excellence Framework (KEF) raises questions not only of the transfer and exchange of knowledge in a reciprocal fashion, but also of economic income for HEIs and for the business economy; and (3) the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) looks at metrics notably concerning student employability, including Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) figures, which chart the employment or study status of graduates six months after completion, until 2018, after which this audit was replaced by the Graduate Outcomes audit, which is conducted approximately 15  months after

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graduation.14 TEF includes Degree Apprenticeships15: ‘a degree apprenticeship is a job, which combines work with higher-level learning’.16 One of the benefits is to ‘strengthen links with employers’.17 KEF ‘is intended to increase efficiency and effectiveness in use of public funding for knowledge exchange (KE)’ to demonstrate how universities have made ‘achievements in serving the economy and society for the public, businesses and communities’.18 KTP ‘serves to meet a core strategic need and to identify innovative solutions to help that business grow’.19 The TEF, developed into the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework, is designed to measure the quality of teaching and learning experiences.20 For TEF a grading system is applied, first at the institutional level TEF (Gold being the top level, while Bronze is the base level). At the time of writing we have seen two rounds of institutional TEF and a pilot round of department-level TEF, but no formal departmental level has yet been published. Similar to REF, during the consultation period there were concerns raised whether practice and rehearsal time would be acknowledged within a system arguably designed for STEM subjects. To this end, MusicHE (formerly National Association for Music in Higher Education), and other similar organisations, responded with a request that different types of teaching, including rehearsals and studio sessions, should be understood as being of equal weighting to academic lectures.21 In line with REF, whereby research deemed to be of ‘world-­ leading’ quality, in terms of its originality, significance and rigour, is allocated additional funding—TEF will, for the first time, link the funding of teaching to quality, not simply quantity.22 Funders are promoting the creation of new partnerships, but why? What is to be gained from such research partnerships and what do they look like? As outlined in Chap. 3, all current funding bodies for the arts offer funding based around collaboration, with an expectation that some form of partnership will exist. Research funders and institutions promote the benefit of research collaboration, notably the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has offered a number of funded networks which are project-based research clusters formed from a small group of researchers across institutions, based around a series of events. Partnerships are seen to maximise the exchange of skills, knowledge and resources. In addition, the AHRC Knowledge Exchange and Partnerships aims to ‘increase the flow, value, and impact of world-class arts and humanities research from academia to the UK’s wider creative economy and beyond’.23

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The notion of partnership is one of equality, where all aspects of the work are shared equitably. But in research terms, partnerships are usually referred to in line with funders and the financial aspects of the project. Its potential for impact, beyond the academy, has value, not because of the new knowledge created within the institution, but because of the potential to share that knowledge more widely to benefit a wider range of people, notably to benefit the knowledge (and by extension, national) economy. Definitions of partnership are significant within the context of collaboration, because it denotes particular working processes and relationships between those participants which are formalised (contracted, documented in funding applications, or allocated weighting in contracts). As such, the notion of partnerships helps us to infer the wider, more diverse working definition of collaboration. It exists in a continuum, explored below, whereby two or more people come together under an agreement to work together to benefit their mutual aims. It denotes a coming together, by choice, to meet the aims of a planned and carefully formulated project, business or strategy. As soon as ‘partnership’ is inserted into a contract, it also denotes how authorship and ownership are shared and quantified. As a term usually used in business, it is perhaps a more refined word than the variable concept of collaboration. But what is important for the purposes of this volume is that partners come together to work towards a specific aim in an equitable relationship with shared responsibility. The AHRC iterates the benefits of working in partnerships: ‘partnership can stimulate, generate and reward all parties … through new ways of thinking and working, developing and delivering research’.24 As Bakhtin proposed, no one creates in isolation. We are, in some ways, all contributing to the same human narrative; partnerships are essential to guiding us to new experiences and so to the potential creation of new knowledge. ‘The way in which I create myself is by means of a quest: I go out to the other in order to come back with a self. I “live into” another’s consciousness; I see the world through that other’s eyes’.25 Within UK HEIs, research networks and partnerships are encouraged between university, business and charity organisations and beyond. The partnerships are built from people, but partnerships which are pan-­ institutional are those deemed to be more likely to receive external funding. Why is this? Does the different perspective bring something new?26 Chapter 12 explores a number of examples to illustrate the varying forms of such partnerships and their potential.

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To state the obvious, partnership is a particular part of collaboration which expects certain formal agreements, rather than informal, unplanned collaborative processes, and which expects equity within the relationship. The transfer of knowledge should be multidirectional and for mutual benefit.

Ethics Raising the issues surrounding research ethics is necessary, but for collaborative work it is in fact vital. There are questions concerning research ethics when developing a research enquiry that involves people, that involves processes of change throughout the duration of the project which affects people (including audiences) and, moreover, that involves establishing how issues around authorship and ownership will be ascribed within co-created works. As Paul Carter has noted: ‘collaboration is a microcosm of the new relation or worldly arrangement we desire to create’.27 The process and the reasoning behind what is done needs first to be strategised and considered in terms of the project’s ethical responsibility and ethical impact. As Carter makes clear through a range of examples, including that of the Hydrogen bomb: ‘The ethics of invention reside not in the truth of what is found but in the interest of what is done’.28 Ethical guidance is always considered for research projects in the fields of arts research that involve an element of psychology, education and performance sciences, as it involves change imposed on people. But in the context of collaborative work in performance, ethical procedures need to be embedded as part of the strategy towards collaboration to include those who are part of the creative process, as well as those who will experience the work in performance. ‘The concordat to support research integrity’, published by Universities UK, offers clear guidelines on the ethical responsibilities of researchers when conducting research. Commitment #2 states that, ‘[w]e [Universities UK] are committed to ensuring that research is conducted according to appropriate ethical, legal and professional frameworks, obligations and standard’.29 The concordat also states that, ‘[f]unders of research will expect researchers and employers of researchers who receive funding to conform to the ethical, legal and professional standards relevant to their research’,30 and in relation to collaborative research the concordat states

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that, ‘there needs to be clear agreement on and articulation of the standards and frameworks that will apply to the work’.31 Aaron Williamon, Jane Ginsborg, Rosie Perkins and George Waddell have written an exemplary overview of how research ethics arose out of the experiments done on prisoners of war during World War Two.32 Their work details each practitioner-researcher’s responsibility to think through, in advance of the project, how they will be working with, using and affecting others. As they note, it is essential to follow ‘codes of ethical conduct’ to ensure that ‘moral duty to treat human participants with respect’33 is followed. The British Educational Research Association’s (BERA) ‘Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research’ (2011) also offers a detailed overview of the core issues surrounding ethics in relation to research, especially considering how projects involving children, vulnerable adults and institutions require even greater care and consideration.34 BERA defines research ethics as: ‘an ethic of respect for: the person, knowledge, democratic values, the quality of educational research and academic freedom’.35 Whilst collaborative research practices have been conducted on an informal basis, recent practices would indicate that a more formalised understanding of ethical processes and procedures would benefit the community. More time spent on ethical considerations at the beginning of the project would benefit all as this would encourage practitioners to consider issues of power, autonomy, ownership and accountability. All creative practitioners have a responsibility to their fellow collaborators and audiences. Professional responsibility should not be seen as a restriction to developing collaborative practice; rather it should be seen as a necessary procedure to inform and guide fellow collaborators and audiences on all necessary aspects of the creative and performance process. For example, it is ethical to inform an audience of what they are about to receive, in terms of sensitive materials contained in the performance. There are a range of ethical issues which impact on collaborative work such as (1) ownership and authorship (that includes who owns which elements of the work’s intellectual property) is an issue for all co-created work, as discussed in Chaps. 2, 5, 7, 8, 10 and 11; (2) affect needs consideration, in terms of the ways in which a new work or happening will impact an audience, spectator or participant, discussed in Chaps. 5 and 6; (3) the Ethics of Invention, specifically the ways in which ideas and innovative contributions are recorded, documented and acknowledged, discussed in Chaps. 7, 9, 10 and 11; and (4) power, autonomy and agency are a key concern when creativity is distributed and shared, as discussed in Chaps. 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 11.

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We have a professional (as well as moral) responsibility to work in an ethical manner, discussed throughout the book but specifically in the Foreword and Chap. 6. The responsibility extends to considering how one deals with sensitive material (which may relate to political, societal or society concerns). In addition, issues around copyright and censorship also are of concerns when developing collaborative work; these issues are discussed in Chap. 9. Of course, it is also important to be aware of, and work within, government legislation: within the context of working within the UK, organisations have policies to support protected characteristics, anti-­slavery policies and policies for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).36 Within this context, projects need to ensure that appropriate risk assessments are submitted to their respective institutions and that the nature of any reward or remuneration is plotted and contracted appropriately. The editors of this volume have some experience with ethical procedures both through applying for research ethical approval and as members of our respective Faculty Research Ethics Committee and/or as Research Leaders within departments. As such, we both work using ethical check lists developed within our institutions, which include a guidance sheet to check whether human participants are involved, how the research will affect those involved in the research process and what kind of effect the research will have on participants and audiences. Not only how participants are briefed, informed and debriefed about the activity is vital, but also participants in projects should have the option to withdraw from the project at any time. What precautions are going to be taken? If the research includes people, how will they be protected? (We do not discuss research that uses animals, chemicals and so on, but of course these issues extend much more widely for scientific research.) Informing the participants— and delegates and audience members of those experiencing the final product—how their data will be used, such as the use of their image and/ or audio recordings in dissemination activities, needs to be fully documented. So, in a collaborative context, ethical issues are a central part of setting out not only who owns the resulting work, who benefits financially and otherwise from the work, but also how the project considers all aspects of the creative process. Such planning is one of the reasons why below we assert that it is necessary to consider a strategy of collaboration, which extends beyond the previously published models. As cited above, Carter’s work on practice reveals a need to consider ethics, but moreover his concept of ‘material thinking’, or Nelson’s concept of ‘doing-thinking’, we claim, provides intellectual and conceptual spaces

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for issues of ethical responsibility to be considered and developed as appropriate.37 Expanding on these concepts would ensure that collaborative partners would be better protected if, and when, things do not go as planned. As Dayan noted in his assessment of the ‘interart’ aesthetic (referring to the interconnections and relationships that might exist between the arts), there is ‘no unproblematic collaboration’.38 But, it should also be noted that such problems can become creative opportunities, and with a shared strategy in place from the start of the project, potential ethical issues can be resolved as early and as quickly as possible; as such, we propose that ethical responsibility in a collaborative artistic research context should go beyond compliance.

Performance Collaborative artistic research practices are introducing new types of outputs within the arts research communities, that are submitted to REF, and represent the new modes of performance and performance practices. These new modes are the result of new innovations across all the creative arts and engage in wider forms of collaboration, dialogic approaches and so on, often engaging more widely with digital technologies and digital practices within live performance settings. As such, performances that involve such diversity would benefit from developing a strategy for documenting and capturing the production as well as the research processes. Arts practices engage a number of different art practitioners such as lighting designers, composers, performers, actors, technicians, curators, designers and costumers (see, e.g. the range of artists involved in Chap. 11). In Chap. 10 we see how embroidery is explored as a way of notating movement, and therefore capturing the performance process within a new product. The notation is inserted by the dancers—as such the notation is asserted as a performative act. Similarly, Chap. 6 shows how filmed footage from rehearsals was created into a form of dissemination which shared the process as product in a performance documentary. Performance is expanding its reach in creating new combinations of multimodal and interdisciplinary works. Works can be pluralistic, in that they are not restricted by artistic modes and genre labels, inviting more experimental collaboration, intercultural collaboration and exchanges with third sector and industry partners. As such new modes of performance move beyond a postmodern approach to collaboration. However, as Sawyer confirms, despite the change in mode: ‘All performance requires

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a group dynamic to work effectively’39; collaboration and ‘group genius’, as opposed to the sole genius, is celebrated.40 When developing our research methodology, it is useful to question: how do we do what we do when creating performance? In presenting our creative process(es) as a research enquiry, the case studies that follow demonstrate and illustrate the ways in which each project has developed bespoke methods and practices to document key decision making, the ways in which the dialogic process functioned, as well as the ways in which the artistic research was undertaken and documented as a rigorous research process. Whilst the REF has decided to call what was previously known as a portfolio ‘contextual information’, we have decided to retain the term portfolio to describe the document that contains all supplementary materials. The portfolio which supports the trace of the live performance (such as a recording, images and/or other forms of documentation) also details the creators’ perspective of their originality, by outlining what is new, what goes beyond previous practice and why it is significant to the field and beyond. The overlap of academic artistic  research and professional practice-­ research is of course significant. A pianist recording a CD for release will look at the recording for its aesthetic value, for its production technique and for what makes it original and marketable, whereas the academic practitioner-­ researcher is likely to be guided by a different agenda: a research enquiry, a question, to find out something which was unknown at the start of the process and which has been found out as a result of the process. Whilst new knowledge may result for both types of practice, it is the latter, the practitioner-researcher, that would benefit from developing appropriate documentation that makes explicit the work’s originality, significance and rigour in relation to REF criteria. The authors in this book understand performance to mean: a live event shared in many ways through theatre, concerts, CD recordings, films; a happening, a moment of exchange where collaborators do something significant together; musicking,41 integrating the audience into part of the event as creative participants; sharing through doing; craft as performance, integrating the process of design and doing in the space; integrating non-­ traditional performance activities into performance events, for example, embroidery-dance collaboration; bringing together different disciplines to explore performance opportunities; looking to redefine performance not only as a final product but as an opportunity for doing something together to create, share, learn and produce. For

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the purposes of assessing the collaborative process, this performance term is seen as a continuum of ever-­changing activity—performance making, performance doing-thinking.42 Others have also considered the place of performance within the context of assessing research outputs. Kathryn Whitney has remarked on the ‘tension [which] nevertheless exists between the aspiration to incorporate the study of music in performance within the research culture of academia and the desire to learn more about it on its own terms’.43 Shannon Rose Riley discusses the division of theory and practice in theatre departments within the USA noting the fairly recent inclusion of theoretical approaches, which has not been the case for visual arts.44 While, Baz Kershaw looks at the issue of ‘knowledge production’ in performance, confirming that ‘the “findings” of performance practice as research are likely to be always already provisional’.45 A performance situated in the moment and re-­ performed will always vary and change. Performances which are too polished would need rehearsal time to bring back the risk, immediacy and sense of uncertainty in order for an audience to feel part of an unfolding drama, rather than experiencing something akin to watching a dictated version of a prior performance. Kershaw remarks that ‘performance can be most usefully described as an ideological transaction between a company of performers and a community of the audience’.46

Dissemination For a collaborative work of art, documentation comes in varying forms, from stage plans to musical notation, mise en scene, libretti, risk assessments to financial planning. These documents and evidence of process are not only important for an individual to show their own research process, they are also significant in a collaborative context, whereby they serve multiple roles: they share ideas amongst the collaborators, documenting the creative conversations with all involved in a production of a work; they share the threads of ideas; they not only reveal what threads were taken through the performance but also share what was dropped and why. The documents are a multi-layered way of sharing process, both for the insiders, involved in the work, and the outsiders, who may be assessing the work as a piece of research or supporting the production in terms of front of house requirements and so on. REF assessors utilise these ­submitted documents to understand the research articulation more fully. It is for the practitioner-researcher to provide appropriate documentation for assessment.

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REF, KEF and TEF have been established to enable universities to deliver their three-fold mission of ‘generating knowledge through research, transmitting knowledge through teaching, and translating knowledge into practical uses through knowledge exchange’.47 At the core of each of these activities lies the challenge of how to best disseminate knowledge. Developing dissemination strategies for the findings of a practitioner-­ research enquiry has become particularly important and necessary in recent years. As part of a Government initiative for greater accountability of public funding for research, Research Councils and other Government-­ funded bodies, who actively support the development of arts practices, now require an articulation of a proposed dissemination strategy at the application stage of the funding process. For example, applicants for funding within the AHRC structure, ‘are encouraged to disseminate [their] research and its outcomes to as wide an audience as possible and where appropriate to engage in communication, dissemination and exploitation activities throughout the period of the project’.48 There is an expectation that the research (the process that has led to the development of a final product in the form of an artwork) as well as the art work itself will be shared and discussed with a variety of both academic and non-academic audiences, and the mode of dissemination will be appropriate for each selected audience. Modes of dissemination might include (but not be limited to) such activities as pre-/post-performance discussions between artists and members of the audience; education workshops; documentation in the form of digital recordings (online streaming platforms, DVDs, CDs) and social media outlets (website, blog); academic conferences in specialist and related research areas; and the mode of primary dissemination related to the art work (live performance, exhibition). For the purposes of REF, whilst it may be possible for an art work to stand alone as evidence of a PaR enquiry, with its ‘research outcome(s)’ clearly articulated through the practice, this may not be the case for all arts practice. However, what documentation is to be included and what is not to be included as evidence of a research enquiry remains an issue for some practitioner-researchers. As Nelson suggests, ‘it may be helpful, particularly in an academic institutional context where much rides on judgement made about research worthiness, for other evidence to be adduced’.49 At the time of writing, the Higher Education Sector is preparing for a national research audit50—it may therefore be useful to consider what documentation for an REF output submission might look like. The REF definition for research is ‘defined as a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared’51; the:

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sub-panels will assess the quality of submitted research outputs in terms of their ‘originality’, ‘significance’ and ‘rigour’, with reference to international research quality standards.52 This element will carry a weighting of 60 per cent in the overall outcome awarded to each submission.53

For outputs where ‘the research process is not evident in the submitted output’,54 REF documentation states that submitting units are ‘strongly encouraged to submit a statement of up to 300 words’.55 In addition, for artistic research submitted to the REF, it is advisable to also include contextual information. REF explains: Both the item [the artwork] and the contextual information may include moving image, sonic, visual or other digital media or written text, as appropriate, to enable the panel to access the research dimensions of the work and to assess its significance, originality and rigour. The 300-word statement should be used to indicate what is the output and what is the contextual information.56

Research dimensions are described as the research process, the research insights and the dissemination.57 Strategies for developing appropriate documentation will be context specific, particularly as the REF definition of research suggests by implication that ‘new insights’ could occur at any stage during ‘the process of investigation’, so where claims for ‘originality’, ‘significance’ and ‘rigour’ are made by the practitioner-research, the subsequent evidence should be included in the documentation. This could include (but not be limited to) a peer-reviewed publication where the research worthiness of the practice has been fully articulated.58

Towards a Strategy of Collaboration Artistic practice is a ‘process of investigation leading to new insights effectively shared’59; as such, how might this definition of research inform a new strategy of collaboration in performance? With an awareness of the need to incorporate a range of partnerships, with a clear ethical strategy integrated, alongside a plan towards dissemination, we do not create a model to fit all, as we recognise that the diversity of collaborative projects, as illustrated in this book, does not fit in a singular model. Rather, a strategic approach to collaboration is proposed below, based on a continuum of collaboration—which recognises that collaborative processes might

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change and develop—which is proposed to enable artistic researchers to reflect on their critical enquiry, their process and their product. It also needs to recognise documenting and capturing all aspects of their process and product at the start of the research enquiry. Previous models, referenced across the book, might be considered in three categories. Some offer a way to consider the hierarchy of collaboration which details the position of each creative artist (whether working alone or in collaboration). For example, Hayden and Windsor propose three categories: ‘Directive’ in which there is an artist leading the decision making, ‘Interactive’ in which the level of dialogue and negotiation is explored and ‘Collaborative’ in which there is a co-creative practice whereby creativity and leadership is distributed.60 In developing how we can understand these relationships between creative artists, Alan Taylor proposes a model whereby the structure of the relationship is categorised according to four working processes61: ‘Hierarchical’ in which specific participants make decisions and allocate tasks to the other group members; ‘Consultative’ in which ‘participants contribute to the same task’, but there remains some hierarchy in who makes the decisions; ‘Cooperative’ in which the ‘tasks are divided […] but decision-making is shared’; and ‘Collaborative’ in which the process of doing, the decision making and the leadership are shared and so distributed amongst the group.62 Other models have looked at the micro and macro methods of collaboration, within which the above models showing the status of the individual could be understood to sit. Smith and Dean propose an iterative model for practice as research which shows a cycle of research on which artistic researchers can start anywhere on the model. It shows how the researchers engage in research processes at different points in the model.63 This macrolevel model is expansive, and we interpret the possibility to read other models which explore the micro-level process within this. For example, Nelson’s praxis details the context of the research and offers a methodology for iterating what participants bring to the collaboration (in our reading from the lens of this book), in terms of ‘know-what’, ‘know-how’ and ‘know-that’.64 Nelson’s model sits nicely within Smith and Dean’s iterative model where one is to ‘[d]evelop chosen ideas’, to consider forms of dissemination. In establishing a new artistic research collaboration, the collaborating group of people or organisations will form a mini social microcosm, or as Chap. 6 details, a ‘micro-society’, whereby a community comes together to establish its own frameworks, its own language, its own mechanisms for doing, learning, developing and sharing. Similarly, Chap. 11 explores the

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notion of a mini social microcosm through the formulation of ‘concentric circles of collaboration’, which are conceived as three contrasting types of collaborative relationships at play. Within this construction of a social microcosm of practice, the processes that led to the development of collaborative strategies are further examined in relation to how aesthetic judgements were made. As such, considering how we develop ideas towards a strategy of collaboration, we propose a strategic framework which could be used by collaborators to support them in checking they have considered a range of issues which their artistic research projects will ultimately take them on. It is not intended to be comprehensive for all projects or to refine and detail a single project. Rather, considering the case studies contained within the book, we detail the framework such a strategy might take, which could help future projects. The following are the key stages of developing a collaborative project plan: informal networking, discussions and idea-sharing will occur prior to these steps, and are a crucial part of any collaborative project. The first key stages are intended to support the project development. A. Project Development Step 1: Create a vision statement which details what the collaborative group wishes to achieve together and their mutual relationships. This might include the direction of the work, akin to a roadmap. This vision statement, as all good strategies, should not be shelved as a document, but should remain live to be updated as the project progresses to show the current group aims, and so might remain open ended. Everyone in the group might be part of writing the vision statement and might have a say in the final agreements. Step 2: Utilising the vision statement, the practicalities of a mission statement now needs to be co-created in which the aims are defined and refined and the process towards fulfilling these aims are outlined. The aims will be cross-referenced to the kinds of outputs the project might produce. This is a requirement for most funding bodies. Step 3: To ensure that everyone in the group is included and feels respected, the core values of the collaborative group need also to be iterated in a shared agreed statement. These values might include a contractual agreement considering how authorship and ownership are to be ascribed (these may also be developed throughout the project, but some form of initial agreement needs to be made). They should consider how

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any reward, such as monetary payment, investment or return, is to be allocated and distributed. Steps 1–3 might be informal in the initial stages and formalised as the project develops. The early informal stage of any project encompasses the networking of the group, discussing ideas informally, which may lead into the process whereby the vision is positioned, and later developed. Once there is a mutually understood verbal agreement that people wish to do something together, these strategic steps may then be useful. Step 4: It would be useful for the collaborative group to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the vision and mission statements, as well as the opportunities they afford. The threats, concerns, problems and unknowns should also be considered in detail. Step 5: We suggest that early in the collaborative process, there is a plan made for the mechanisms of documentation, which charts how the process of thinking, experimenting, making, doing, changing and so on are captured, for example this might be in the form of a group blog. (This strategic document is part of this process.) It needs to detail the forms of documentation (how the details are captured) and outline the responsibilities of everyone in the group regarding capturing their individual and their reflective and reflexive shared contributions. Modes of documentation may also develop over time so this can be seen as a fluid organic process. Step 6: The mechanisms through and by which decision making is done need some form of agreement. A partnership agreement which details responsibilities, processes for making decisions and ways in which changes are documented might be made. Conflict resolution discussions early might mitigate major problems later in the collaborative process. B. Regulatory Requirements Step 7: The approach to maintaining research ethics needs to be documented, including any briefing statements, GDPR data statements, policies on anti-slavery and so on. Research ethical approval is an institutional requirement. GDPR policies are a legal requirement. Funding bodies and employers of researchers expect researchers to follow such good practices. We would advise those working within a collaborative

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context to go beyond ethical compliance. This will ensure that not only are the relevant parties protected but also the group has made a shared commitment to each other and to the values of the project. Step 8: This step continues the previous one by outlining any risk assessments for the spaces and places within which the group will work. This is required of all public spaces. C. Content Development Step 9: Decide on the mode of primary dissemination such as a performance type, artefact and so on. Step 10: Explore pathways which outline all possible modes of dissemination and consider innovative dissemination pathways as appropriate for your project. These might show how the process and product can be shared in a variety of ways which enable the product to be shared more widely. Step 11: Create a plan for group reflection and debrief which will enable everyone to reflect on their individual and group process, practice and product, to define the contribution, findings and significance of the work conducted. This may lead to developing a new project and therefore a new cycle of this strategy of collaboration.

Summary Focusing on the process(es) of collaboration within artist research projects, which have a defined research enquiry, this book integrates a diverse range of examples of collaborative processes with a range of voices, emphasising the voice of the insider as part of the collaborative process while incorporating that of the outsider also in sharing reflexive and reflective practices. The development of the strategy towards artistic collaboration contributes what we hope might guide new projects, sharing here the lessons we have learned, mutually, from these shared projects. The significance of the volume resides in the intersectionality of practices and processes. This bringing together of disciplines and crossing boundaries is deliberate and asserts our belief that to expand our understanding of artistic research we could usefully expand the reach of our own academic and practice dialogue stretching beyond usually determined disciplinary boundaries.

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Notes 1. Ludivine Allegue, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw and Angela Piccini, eds., Practice-as-Research (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds., Practice as Research: Approaches to creative arts enquiry (London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2007, rpt 2010); Mine Doğantan-Dack, ed., Artistic Practice as Research in Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015); Jane Ginsborg, ‘Research Skills in Practice: Learning and teaching practice-based research at RNCM,’ in  Research and Research Education in Music Performance and Pedagogy, edited by Scott Harrison (Amsterdam: Springer, 2014), 77–89; Hazel Smith and Roger T.  Dean, eds., Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 2. Anthony Gritten, ‘Determination and Negotiation in Artistic Practice as Research in Music,’ in Artistic Practice as Research in Music, edited by Mine Doğantan-Dack (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 74. 3. ‘Guidance on Submissions (2019/01),’ https://www.ref.ac.uk/publications/guidance-on-submissions-201901/ (last accessed 18 August 2019); The RMA and PRAG jiscmail history is available here: https://www.jiscmail. ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=RMA-PRAC-RESEARCH;c8e0dee0.1809 (last accessed 18 August 2019); Practice Research Advisory Group, https:// prag-uk.org/ (last accessed 8 August 2019). 4. Martin Blain, ‘Practice-as-Research: A method for articulating creativity for practitioner-researchers,’ in Creative Teaching for Creative Learning in Higher Music Education, edited by Elizabeth Haddon and Pamela Burnard (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 79–92. 5. Keith Sawyer, Group Creativity: Music, theater, collaboration (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2003), 16. 6. Sara Jane Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), abstract. 7. See https://studyinsweden.se/plan-your-studies/degree-programmes/ phd-studies/ (last accessed 7 August 2019). 8. ‘Panel Criteria and Working Methods (2019/02),’ https://www.ref.ac. uk/media/1084/ref-2019_02-panel-criteria-and-working-methods.pdf (last accessed 18 August 2019), 48. 9. Doğantan-Dack. Artistic Research Practice as Research in Music, 2015. 10. REF, ‘Defining Significant Responsibility for Research: An inclusive approach,’ https://www.ref.ac.uk/about/blogs/defining-significant-responsibility-forresearch-an-inclusive-approach/ (last accessed 18 August 2019). 11. Brad Haseman, ‘A Manifesto for Performative Research,’ Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy themed issue ‘Practice-Led Research,’ 118 (2006): 103.

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12. https://www.ref.ac.uk/media/1164/ref-2019_04-audit-guidance.pdf (last accessed 10 August 2019). 13. Ibid. 14. See https://www.hesa.ac.uk/support/definitions/destinations and https:// www.hesa.ac.uk/innovation/outcomes (last accessed 12 august 2019). 15. See https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/skillsand-employment/degree-apprenticeships/ (last accessed 12 august 2019). 16. https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/skills-andemployment/degree-apprenticeships/degree-apprenticeships-for-highereducation-providers/ (last accessed 12 August 2019). 17. Ibid. 18. https://re.ukri.org/knowledge-exchange/knowledge-exchange-framework/ (last accessed 12 august 2019). 19. http://ktp.innovateuk.org/ (last accessed 12 august 2019). 20. ‘Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework,’ https:// www.gov.uk/government/collections/teaching-excellence-framework (last accessed 17 August 2019). 21. NAMHE, ‘TEF Green Paper Response,’ https://wonkhe.com/blogs/ green-paper-responses/ (last accessed 18 August 2019). 22. TEF, ‘Policy Paper: TEF fact sheet,’ https://assets.publishing.service.gov. uk/gover nment/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/550232/Teaching-excellence-framework-factsheet.pdf (last accessed 17 August 2019). 23. See https://ahrc.ukri.org/innovation/knowledgeexchange/ (last accessed 17 August 2019). 24. See https://ahrc.ukri.org/documents/guides/partnership-working-inthe-arts-and-humanities/ (last accessed 17 August 2019). 25. Katrina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1984), 78. 26. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/183544/2001part1-foreword2001.pdf (last accessed 17 August 2019). 27. Paul Carter, ‘The Ethics of Invention,’ in Practice as Research: Approaches to creative arts enquiry, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 17. 28. Ibid. 29. Universities UK, ‘The Concordat to Support Research Integrity,’ 2012, https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/repor ts/ Documents/2012/the-concordat-to-support-research-integrity.pdf (last accessed 15 August 2019), 13. 30. Ibid., 14.

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31. Ibid., 12. 32. Aaron Williamon, Jane Ginsborg, Rosie Perkins and George Waddell, ‘Research Ethics’. Performing Music Research: Methods in music education, psychology and performance science (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, in press). 33. Ibid., 2. 34. British Education Research Association, ‘Ethical Guidance,’ https://www. bera.ac.uk/researchers-resources/publications/ethical-guidelines-foreducational-research-2011 (last accessed 19 July 2019). 35. BERA, 2011, 4. 36. See https://eugdpr.org/ (last accessed 18 August 2019). 37. Paul Carter, ‘The Ethics of Invention,’ in Practice as Research, 2010; Robin Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts, 2013. 38. Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 3. 39. Sawyer, Group Creativity: Music, theater, collaboration, 2003, 13. 40. Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The creative potential of collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2007). 41. Christopher Small, Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 42. Nelson, Practice as Research, 2013, 22. 43. Kathryn Whitney, ‘Following Performance Across the Research Frontier,’ in Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, criticism, practice, edited by Mine Doğantan-Dack (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 112. 44. Shannon Rose Riley, ‘Why Performance as Research? A US Perspective,’ in Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances, edited by Robin Nelson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 175. 45. Baz Kershaw, ‘Practice as Research Through Performance,’ in Practice-­Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts, edited by Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 123. 46. Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical theatre as cultural intervention (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 16. 47. Creative Industries Mapping Document, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creative-industries-mapping-documents-2001 (2001) (last accessed 18 August 2019). 48. See, AHRC, ‘Research Funding Guide,’ https://ahrc.ukri.org/documents/ guides/research-funding-guide1/ (2019), 63. 49. Robin Nelson, ‘Practice-as-Research and the Problem of Knowledge,’ Performance Research, 11, no. 4 (2006): 112. 50. REF2021.

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51. REF 2021/01, see https://www.ref.ac.uk/media/1092/ref-2019_01-guidance-on-submissions.pdf (last accessed 13 August 2019), 90. 52. REF2021 has provided supplementary assessment criteria for originality, significance and rigour, see ‘Panel Criteria and Working Methods: Main Panel D supplementary criteria  – level definitions,’ 38–39 (REF 2021/02), https://www.ref.ac.uk/media/1084/ref-2019_02-panel-criteria-and-working-methods.pdf (last accessed 13 August 2019). 53. REF 2021/02, 7. 54. REF 2021/02, 48. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 49. 58. There have been a number of PaR research projects that have explored modes of dissemination: In 2007–2009, the University of London ran a project: Practice-as-Research in Music Online (PRIMO (www.jisc.ac.uk/ whatwedo/programmes/reppres/sue/primo.aspx)). In 2001 and 2006, Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP) was a five-year AHRB project that ran between 2001 and 2006 aiming to ‘develop national frameworks for the encouragement of the highest standards in representing practical-­ creative research within academic contexts’ (http://www.bris.ac.uk/ parip/introduction.htm). Practice-as-Research Consortium North West (PARCNorthWest) invited postgraduate research students, project partners and other interested parties to share experiences and exchange knowledge and to explore the development of appropriate methods for the dissemination of research where practice remains a substantial element of the research inquiry. This resulted in arts practitioners from across a wide range of arts disciplines coming together to share their research insights and to ­discuss issues in research dissemination. http://parcnorthwest.miriadonline.info/ (last accessed 18 August 2019). 59. REF 2021. 60. Sam Hayden and Luke Windsor, ‘Collaboration and the Composer: Case studies from the end of the 20th century,’ Tempo 61 (2007): 28–39. 61. Alan Taylor, ‘“Collaboration” in Contemporary Music: A theoretical view,’ Contemporary Music Review, 35, no. 6 (2016): 562–578. 62. Ibid., 570. 63. Smith and Dean, Practice-Led Research, 2010, 20. 64. Nelson, Practice as Research, 2013, 37.

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Bibliography Allegue, Ludivine, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, and Angela Piccini, eds. 2009. Practice-as-Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bailes, Sara Jane. 2010. Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure. London/ New York: Routledge. Blain, Martin. 2015. Practice as Research: A Method for Articulating Creativity for Practitioner-Researchers. In Creative Teaching for Creative Learning in Higher Academic Music Education, ed. Pamela Burnard and Elizabeth Haddon, 79–92. Farnham: Ashgate. British Education Research Association. Ethical Guidance. https://www.bera.ac. uk/researchers-resources/publications/ethical-guidelines-for-educationalresearch-2011. Accessed 19 July 2019. Carter, Paul. 2010. Interest: The Ethics of Invention. In Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts, ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, 15–25. London/New York: I.B. Taurus, 2007, rpt. Clark, Katrina, and Michael Holquist. 1984. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Dayan, Peter. 2011. Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond. Farnham: Ashgate. Barrett, Estelle, and Barbara Bolt. 2007. Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. London/New York: I.B. Taurus. Ginsborg, Jane. 2014. Research Skills in Practice: Learning and Teaching Practice-­ Based Research at RNCM.  In Research and Research Education in Music Performance and Pedagogy, ed. Scott Harrison, 77–89. Amsterdam: Springer. Gritten, Anthony. 2015. Determination and Negotiation in Artistic Practice as Research in Music. In Artistic Practice as Research in Music, ed. Mine Doğantan-Dack, 73–90. Aldershot: Ashgate. Haseman, Brad. 2006. A Manifesto for Performative Research. Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 118: 98–106. ———. 2007. Rupture and Recognition: Identifying the Performative Research Paradigm. In Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt. London/New York: I.B. Taurus. Hayden, Sam, and Luke Windsor. 2007. Collaboration and the Composer: Case Studies from the End of the 20th Century. Tempo 61: 28–39. Kershaw, Baz. 2009. Practice as Research Through Performance. In Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, ed. Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, 104–125. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 1992. The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention. London/New York: Routledge. Doğantan-Dack, Mine, ed. 2015. Artistic Practice as Research in Music. Aldershot: Ashgate. National Association for Music in Higher Education (NAMHE). TEF Green Paper Response. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/green-paper-responses/. Accessed 25 Aug 2019.

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Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2006. Practice-as-Research and the Problem of Knowledge. Performance Research 11 (4): 105–116. PRIMO.  Practice as Research in Music Online. http://primo.sas.ac.uk/eprints. Accessed Nov 2015. Research Excellence Framework (REF). Defining Significant Responsibility for Research: An Inclusive Approach. https://www.ref.ac.uk/about/blogs/defining-significant-responsibility-for-research-an-inclusive-approach/. Accessed 18 Aug 2019. Panel Criteria and Working Methods (2019/02). https://www.ref.ac.uk/ media/1084/ref-2019_02-panel-criteria-and-working-methods.pdf. p.48. Accesses 18 Aug 2019. Riley, Shannon Rose. 2013. Why Performance as Research? A US Perspective. In Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances, ed. Robin Nelson, 175–187. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sawyer, Keith. 2008. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York: Basic Books. ———. 2003. Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean., eds. 2003. Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, rpt. 2010. Taylor, Alan. 2016. ‘Collaboration’ in Contemporary Music: A Theoretical View. Contemporary Music Review 35 (6): 562–578. Teaching Excellent Framework (TEF). 2019a. Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/teaching-excellence-framework. Accessed 17 Aug 2019. ———. 2019b. Policy Paper: TEF Fact Sheet. https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/gover nment/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/550232/Teaching-excellence-framework-factsheet.pdf. Accessed 17 Aug 2019. Universities UK. 2012. The Concordat to Support Research Integrity. https:// www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/2012/ the-concordat-to-support-research-integrity.pdf. Accessed 15 Aug 2019. Whitney, Kathryn. 2015. Following Performance Across the Research Frontier. In Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice, ed. Mine Doğantan-Dack, 107–125. London/New York: Routledge. Williamon, Aaron, Jane Ginsborg, Rosie Perkins, and George Waddell. (in press). Research Ethics. In Performing Music Research: Methods in Music Education, Psychology and Performance Science. New York, Oxford University Press.

PART II

Collaborative Demonstrations in Practice

CHAPTER 3

Why Collaborate? Critical Reflections on Collaboration in Artistic Research in Classical Music Performance Mine Doğantan-Dack

The twenty-first century has witnessed some profound transformations in the institutional ethos of arts and humanities research. One of the most significant changes in this connection has been the sharp decline of the romantic image of the lone researcher and artist, breaking through the frontiers of knowledge or creating works of genius independently, through moments of intense insight. In an article published in The Independent in 2007, which evaluated the shift in the humanities towards the idea of collaborative research and noted that ‘privately many academics are distinctly hostile to the idea, with many suspecting that it is a model more suited to scientific research’,1 the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) then-director of research, Tony McEnery, asserted that the AHRC is: not saying that collaborative research is the only way, or even the right way to do research. Rather, we are simply allowing those people who are

M. Doğantan-Dack (*) University of Cambridge, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_3

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interested in engaging in this kind of research the opportunity to do so… For example, as a linguist, if I am writing about morality in early modern literature, the most appropriate research method is probably the lone scholar model, whereby I absorb material, reflect on it and write about it.2

In spite of McEnery’s claim, during the intervening decade collaborative research has come to represent the institutionally expected mode of scholarly investigation within arts and humanities, such that currently there is no funding scheme within AHRC’s main funding modes that would support individual scholarship: Research Networking, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP), Leadership Fellows and Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement schemes require collaboration by definition, and both the standard and early careers routes for Research Grants explicitly state that they are not intended to support individual scholarship and research. The factors behind the demise of the once-cherished model of the lone researcher and creator in the arts and humanities are complex. It is undeniable that the problems that currently face humanity globally are too complex to tackle without collaboration across sectors, disciplines and nations. It is also clear that the accelerated process of globalisation, the increasing professionalisation and specialisation of scientific research, the growth of interdisciplinary endeavours and the unprecedented rise of communication technologies over the last couple of decades have in effect generated the pragmatic necessity to collaborate across sectors and nations in order to be able to manage the worldwide exchange of knowledge and information. Consequently, even in the hard sciences,  which typically have been social rather than solitary enterprises,3 recent economic, technological and social developments led to an unprecedented level of research collaboration. However, not all the consequences of such collaboration have been positive: for instance, the commodification of knowledge that results from the process of knowledge management replaced the traditional intrinsic value of the kinds of knowledge arts and humanities generate—knowledge of culture, of the human subject, of self as sources of creativity and enlightenment—with an instrumental value that regards and uses them for competitive and economic advantage, and political power. They have been incorporated into the so-called knowledge economy, which functions by bringing together industry, commerce, research, government and public sectors through ever widening collaborative networks. Arguably, the most significant factor behind the recent decline of the lone researcher in

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the arts and humanities has thus been economic. In an academic environment that actively promotes collaboration with the consumers of knowledge, academics are expected to seek and achieve economic and social impact beyond academia through collaborative means for any new knowledge and insight they might produce. Pressure to work collaboratively is maintained also by the funding bodies for academic research. Hence, it is with increasing frequency that we hear and use such terms as ‘impact’, ‘knowledge exchange’ and ‘knowledge transfer’—terms that are jointly prompting, in effect, the social construction of an ideology of collaboration, which promotes, among other things, the view that collaborating is always better than not collaborating, and should be encouraged continuously. As ‘the latest (the last) scion in the family of knowledge in Western society, a descendant that is currently in a frank phase of growth through trial and error’,4 practice-based research—or artistic research as it is more commonly known in Continental Europe—which brought expert art practitioners and their professional knowledge and artistic expertise into academia, has not been immune from these sweeping developments. Being embedded within institutional contexts that promote a culture of collaboration, artistic researchers are expected to undertake collaborative enquiry as part of their academic work duties. Similar to academic researchers in other areas, they are supposed to establish collaborative ties with ‘stakeholders’, for example, in the creative industries, to ensure that their research and creative work positively impact the economy and society. Within such an academic environment, the panacea for research-related issues of various kinds—including epistemological, aesthetic and ethical questions—is sought in the magical notion of ‘collaboration’. But what exactly is involved in collaboration, and is it conceptualised similarly across disciplines and in non-academic contexts? When we talk about scientific collaboration, artistic collaboration or collaboration between the practitioner and the theorist—for example, between the music performer and the musicologist—are we talking about the same phenomenon? Is there a generally accepted, unifying understanding of the notion of collaboration that is widely shared? As Sylvan Katz and Ben Martin have noted in an article titled ‘What is Research Collaboration?’ and published in 1997, ‘the concept [of collaboration] has been largely taken for granted as though we all know what exactly is meant by the term’.5 Although they made this statement more than two decades ago, it seems to me that we are not currently much wiser about the meaning of the concept, particularly since there has not been any systematic philosophising about it.6 Indeed, writing in 2016, John C.  Morris and

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Katrina Miller-Stevens open their edited volume titled Advancing Collaborative Theory by still writing that: ‘The term “collaboration” is widely used but not clearly understood’.7 In everyday parlance, many people seem to use it interchangeably with ‘cooperation’ or ‘social interaction’,8 or even ‘networking’ and ‘communication’. As Arthur Himmelman noted: ‘It is ironic that the term collaboration is not well understood because it is used to describe so many kinds of relationship and activities. In a way, it suffers not from lack of meaning…but from too much meaning’.9 According to Houston, the term ‘collaboration’ is in fact relatively new in that until the 1950s no entries existed on collaboration in library catalogues.10 Paul Roe notes that it was a pejorative term mostly used to refer to wartime collaborators with the enemy,11 and it is during the second half of the twentieth century that it started to appear in cultural discourses as a positive value, through the ground-laying challenges that were posed by postmodern philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) to the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous individual as the basis of moral and political value. As the dominance of the ideal of self-determining individual became problematic, the philosophical grounds for the notion of the socially and discursively constructed self—the notion that one cannot be or become a self on one’s own12—were prepared. To quote the words of one scholar writing at the end of the twentieth century: Whether from a Marxist view of the ideological regulation of classes, a psychoanalytical understanding of the role of the subconscious, or a post-­ structuralist version of subjectivity as discursively produced, the notion of the free-willed, rational and autonomous individual has become highly suspect.13

During the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, the signs for the approaching decline of the lone researcher and creator were also noticeable in another context: under the influence of the posthumously published and translated works of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934), who argued that one learns and acquires knowledge through social and cooperative engagement, research in psychology started to challenge the notion of learning and creativity as functions of the individual mind, instead proposing that we are social beings through and through. In that sense the processes taking place in our individual minds are more social, or socially determined, than we actually realise or

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would like to believe. The argument is that thinking is not confined to the individual mind, and that we always think through social interactions, hence collaboratively; that even when we work alone we are in effect collaborating, since we are always connected to other researchers through the intellectual, historical, cultural contexts we work in. Whenever we read an article, or view and evaluate a creative work by another researcher, we enter a collaborative relationship with him or her. It is argued that in this sense, one can describe the research community as one big collaboration. Accordingly, in both research and art making, ‘the myth that insight emerges suddenly and unpredictably’ persists only because ‘most people aren’t consciously aware of the social and collaborative encounters that lead to their insights’.14 In spite of its charm, however, such a stance only exacerbates the difficulty of defining ‘collaboration’, since it collapses, for all practical purposes, the distinction between individual and collaborative endeavour. However useful it might be from a psychological, developmental and sociological point of view, defining collaboration so loosely, and identifying almost all thinking, learning and creating as collaborative is not helpful, in my view, in understanding the nature of diverse kinds of collaboration, or indeed in addressing the question I pose in the title of this chapter, namely ‘why collaborate?’ in the context of artistic research in classical music performance. The processes involved in collaborative research vary with the requirements of the particular discipline in question: for example, the work patterns and the expectations regarding division of cognitive labour in the case of collaborating theoretical physicists would be different from those involved in creative collaboration in the performance arts, which in many cases would require a division of physical artistic labour as well. Highly interdisciplinary research collaborations usually call for a much wider range of research skills, as well as more complex logistics management to coordinate the research processes and activities. Furthermore, different research contexts generate different issues that collaborating partners would need to deal with: for example, interdisciplinary collaboration in the humanities might appear, at least on paper, like ‘a kind of noble platonic ideal of intellectual dialogue and exchange’15; yet, in practice ‘the notion of group authorship’ in humanities research continues to pose significant difficulties.16 As Zollman noted, in arguably all cases ‘collaborating comes with a cost… Whether collaboration is helpful or harmful depends on how these costs and benefits are weighed’.17 Consequently, it is not practically informative to attempt to offer a one-size-fits-all conceptualisation and

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definition of research collaboration that would work equally adequately in different research and collaboration contexts. Even though there is thus no consensus on the processes and procedures of collaboration as it happens in diverse contexts, the ideology of collaboration currently pervading academia nevertheless draws all academic disciplines together under the same model of collaboration that institutional discourses promote: a model originating in the business world and driven by the values of the market. Accordingly, there is an ever-­ growing pressure for researchers to produce ‘exploitable’ outcomes. In the context of arts and humanities research, a substantial number of successfully funded research projects involving collaborative activities have had some relevant digital content that could swiftly find applications in creative industries, making the discourses and ideology of collaboration that currently steer research appear justified.18 But what about arts practices that continue to rely predominantly on physical, cognitive and affective human labour for art making rather than any digital technology, such as classical music performance, and the research that grows out of such practices? For artistic researchers in music performance, is the business model of collaboration, which seeks exploitable outcomes that could be profitably applied in the business sector, appropriate, or even desirable for the future development and sustainability of their academic, disciplinary role and status? In suggesting some answers, it is useful to first consider the disciplinary background against which music performers recently started to enter academia and the traditional roles that have been assigned to them in musicological disciplines. A significant part of the intense debates that emerged over the last decade about the young area of artistic research concerns the fundamental challenges it poses by its nature to the epistemological paradigms of traditional research.19 For example, the subjective nature of the creative process, which is an integral aspect of the research methodology, the non-linguistic mode of presentation of the (tacit) expert knowledge that shapes the artistic processes involved in the research, and the ‘messiness’ of the path from initial creative hunches to rigorous research outcomes complicate and challenge the typically linearly oriented, hypothesis-based and conceptually and linguistically shaped processes of empirical research. Artistic research also disturbs the working practices of the more critically- and hermeneutically-oriented traditional researchers in the arts and humanities, who, although culturally and historically aware, focus their enquiries on rather than in the arts and creative practices, and thus

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less on the singular, the personal and the idiosyncratic. Musicology, which developed both rigorously quantitative and meticulously hermeneutical methods to study various musical phenomena, has consequently found some of its foundational assumptions defied by the recent entry of expert music performers into academic scenes. Especially since there has not been much sustained and cross-pollinating dialogue between musicologists and performers during the twentieth century, a certain clash of two cultures has been unavoidable.20 Especially since the recent rise of Music Performance Studies as a discipline, the dismissive attitude of traditional musicology towards performances, and by implication towards performers throughout the twentieth century, has been well documented.21 The majority of empirical research that involved performers during this period treated them as laboratory subjects,22 and emerged from music psychological investigations. Music psychology, as a sub-discipline of psychology, is an area firmly embedded within scientific research, embracing since its beginnings quantitative methods of enquiry, complemented more recently by qualitative approaches. Psychologists have been interested in music performance as representing a complex skill, which at the professional level involves highly developed and specialised cognitive, motor and affective processes. A significant proportion of research produced in this area continues to be about music performances, rather than performers as such, which means that during the research process music psychologists interact largely with artefacts, typically recorded performances, rather than with performers as human beings making music. To be sure, there have been many studies that involve human performers in laboratory conditions, playing and recording music on MIDI keyboards, or performers providing research data for psychologists who document their practices through questionnaires, interviews and observational case studies. Nevertheless, the interactions between music psychologists and performers in all these cases remain just that: interactions and not collaborations. However, there have been some studies, where researchers and performers interacted in a more sustained manner throughout the life-span of a project so as to establish a more or less collaborative relationship: one such project that is frequently referenced was undertaken by a concert pianist, Gabriela Imreh, and two psychologists, Roger Chaffin and Mary Crawford, resulting in a book titled Practicing Perfection.23 This project explored how an experienced pianist organises practice and employs practice strategies in the process of memorising a piece for performance. The three collaborators noted the

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difficulties they faced in working together, difficulties arising from ‘differences in epistemological viewpoints, domains of expertise, and social positions’.24 Accordingly, the difference they were most aware of resulted from their observation that ‘the norms of psychological research positioned Gabriela, the pianist, as a subject rather than an active agent in the research’.25 Furthermore, they all had different goals: The three of us started this project with different goals. Gabriela wanted to gain understanding of her memorization process—to know in a more systematic way what works for her—to make her practice more efficient and rewarding… Roger hoped to extend the scientific literature on expert memory to a new and interesting domain and identify characteristics of expert practice. Mary shared their goals and also hoped to examine the process of interdisciplinary collaboration by using Gabriela’s and Roger’s research as a case study.26

Although this project did involve a certain degree of collaboration between a practising artist and music psychologists, it nevertheless does not represent an instance of artistic research: while the pianist’s practice was an integral part of the project—the project would not have materialised without her contribution—the focus was on a certain psychological process, that of committing music to memory, and not on the creative artistic processes or outcomes. The project did not lead to any artistic outcomes, but to a scholarly text. The pianist was researching her own processes from an objective stance as it were, thus employing a set of values that are typically associated with scientific research: understanding and explaining how a phenomenon works, rather than making something that works; working with reproducible procedures rather than with singular, idiosyncratic ones; aiming to add to existing scientific knowledge by obtaining evidence rather than to also enrich the variety of human experience by creating, through practice, something to be experienced  aesthetically; and the list can be extended. Consequently, the project could have been carried out equally efficiently through the participation of another pianist rather than Gabriela Imreh, who was not present in the project necessarily through her artistic signature and identity. Perhaps more significantly, in the final outcome of the project, that is, in the co-authored book, the pianist’s performerly discourse is quoted, analysed and interpreted within the ­context of a scientific discourse shaped by the psychologists. In other words, the performer’s discourse is embedded within the researcher’s discourse. It is telling, in my

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view, that although in this particular case, the performer’s name appears as a co-author on the book cover due to her sustained and essential involvement in the project, in the great majority of psychological research on performance, the performer’s identity is almost invariably anonymised. I have stated elsewhere that this creates a knowledge-political issue, or a power hierarchy based on knowledge creation and ownership27: this kind of research, while certainly having the potential to contribute new knowledge about the activities of performers and the nature of musical performances, does not represent the performer as an equal partner in the production of knowledge and formation of the dominant disciplinary discourse. And it is precisely in this sense that it is difficult to speak of full-blown research collaborations in reference to these studies involving psychologists and performers. My aim here is not to deny the many important things we have come to know through the extensive and impressive music psychological research literature about the cognitive, motor and affective processes behind music performance: without it, our understanding of the practice strategies of performers, of the nature of the motor skills involved in playing musical instruments, the acoustical properties of expressive performance and so on would be infinitely poorer. Nevertheless, because performers, until recently, have not been involved in research projects as artists whose practices and discourses would have equal force in shaping the aims, methods and outcomes of the research, the particular aesthetic, ethical and epistemological values that shape the artistic practice of musical performance, and consequently the artistic identity of the performer, remained unarticulated. In fact, in some cases, these values and identities were simply misrepresented, mainly because of lack of familiarity with them on the part of academic researchers. Even those who otherwise have been highly influential in  effecting a disciplinary ‘performative turn’ and overthrowing the dominance of the textualist paradigm in musicology, which throughout the twentieth century assigned a derivative and secondary role to performers and performances,28 have at times contributed to such misrepresentation by presenting the performer’s activity and expertise through the musicological lens. I have discussed elsewhere the effort to assimilate musical performance into something else in order to embed it in a knowledge domain in which the musicologist is able to exercise his or her theoretical expertise.29 As one example, I have quoted Nicholas Cook’s assertion that the recent interest in the study of music-as-performance has been ‘part and parcel of the shift within musicology as a whole towards

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reception history; performance is self-evidently a form of interpretation, in just the same way as are critical or historical writing about music, iconographic representations, or TV and film adaptations’.30 The problem with such a formulation is that: the embodied-aesthetic quest that drives a musical performance does not overlap in any significant sense with the features defining the kinds of interpretations mentioned by Cook: indeed, there is an all-important ontological disparity between musical performance and critical writings, film adaptations, etc. in that the former is an action, constituted by the intentional movements and gestures of the performer driven by artistic principles and aims, while the latter are not.31

While the musicologist’s attempt to represent musical performance in terms of what is familiar to him or her appears harmless, it nevertheless marginalises and diminishes the value of the artistry and expertise involved in making musical performances. Lest any of my readers finds this particular example outdated and no longer representative of the status quo, it is worth emphasising that finding more recent instances of musicological discourses that continue to marginalise, and in some cases even patronise performers is not difficult. To cite but one example, a book published in 2016 with the express aim of establishing connections between music theory and performance— Jeffrey Swinkin’s Performative Analysis: Reimagining music theory for performance—continues to use language that subjugates performance to music analysis. In one of the most acutely hegemonic, and indeed offensive passages, the author reasserts his assumption, which reappears in different guises throughout the text, that music performances are epistemologically and aesthetically creditworthy when their sonic features are justified by a rational, analytical, discursive knowledge basis32: Soloists, chamber ensembles, and orchestras who can learn music efficiently, play fluently, and concertize regularly are a dime a dozen. What we are going for [through our close analytical scrutiny of the score in preparing for a performance] is something else: we are seeking to engage pieces in a richer, fuller way—to recognize many more of their potentialities and to realize them in an embodied, affecting, palpable way.33

Consequently, it is under academic circumstances that have not yet entirely eradicated the twentieth-century perspective ascribing them an inferior role within the discipline that performers have been entering academia as artistic researchers. We are yet to assess if and how the rising

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culture and ideology of collaboration may have motivated or facilitated the creation of favourable conditions within Higher Education for the introduction of expert art practitioners into academia; what is more evident is that the music performer as artistic researcher is currently positioned within a field of conflicting interests both in terms of established disciplinary agendas and perspectives that at times resist or struggle to understand the epistemological, aesthetic and ethical foundations and values of the performing artist’s practice, and also in terms of a culture of collaboration that demands allegiance to certain market values rather than to artistic truth and enquiry.34 For the artist researcher, entering collaborative research with non-academic ‘business’ partners can lead to ‘detachment from the process and experience of building close relationships based upon trust rather than contracts, negotiation of values as well as costs, and sometimes the final control or use of the outcomes’.35 Wherein lies, then, the principles that the music performer as artistic researcher can draw from in forging a sustainable path within such an academic climate? Can collaboration help pave their way? And what kinds of collaborative enquiry— and model of collaboration—might play a role in shaping this path? The first point to note in connection with these questions is that while the backbone of artistic research is artistic practice, in the sense that it is born, lives and breathes through art making for public dissemination and critique, as well as through expertise in sensuous knowing and evaluation of artistic processes and outcomes, in order to be identified as artistic research, artistic practice needs to have disciplinary, institutional concerns. In other words, artistic researchers have to be self-aware that they are situated not only within the cultural-historical contingencies of the particular art practice they are involved in, but also within an institutional context that includes continuous negotiations regarding working methods, standards of research dissemination and standards of quality assessment. The artistic researcher is oriented not only to the artistic and aesthetic but also to the academic. This particular kind of orientation, which the arts practitioner outside the academia does not typically adopt, includes negotiating with academic researchers the discourses, the methods and the identities that the artist brings to the table, as well as navigating through the wider educational and economic institutional agendas: negotiating not only a space for the representation of the subjective, value-driven discourse of the artist but also a key role in shaping the disciplinary discourse; negotiating a subject position, that is, a discursive location from which to speak and act as a performer, in contrast to accepting a role or part to be adopted and

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acted out within research projects designed by non-practitioners; and proposing and promoting new models of collaborative enquiry that take into account the requirements and values of the artistic practice forming the core of particular research projects. There are, consequently, both epistemological and political reasons for artistic researchers in music performance to collaborate—both with non-­ practising academics and with non-academic partners. The epistemological motivation lies in the knowledge background and novel perspective, as well as the creative research methods that the expert performer can bring into the discipline: the need to make the artistic values and subjectivities of the performer heard and known, and to set right the disciplinary misrepresentations of these values and perspectives, is a central impetus for collaboration. There are, however, stronger reasons, in my view, for artistic researchers in music performance to pursue collaborative engagements with academics and creative industries—reasons that are rather political and have to do with power relations and institutional change. As I have mentioned earlier, the current model of collaboration constructed and maintained by the discourses of Higher Education Institutions and Research Councils of the UK comes from the business world and has at its core the values of the market, which include increasing competitiveness of the collaborating group; commercialising knowledge, research and expertise; maximising financial gains; producing more, and more quickly while retaining high standards of quality; attracting as wide an audience as possible and quantifying impact; and being constantly creative. Think of the academic-political implications of  the formulation promoted by Creative Works London funded by the AHRC: Business + Knowledge = Innovation! In a climate shaped by this ideology of collaboration, certain values at the core of artistic practice, which constitute the creative, epistemological and ethical fibre of artistic research, are being pushed further and further back such that attempting to bring them to the foreground in a funding application, or as part of an academic institution’s strategic planning, would in all likelihood provoke indifference at best, and embarrassment or even contempt at worst: for example, the notion of wisdom, as distinct from knowledge, and various values associated with wisdom, including empathy, honesty, justice, existential awareness of one’s place in society and a critical stance of the status quo. Surely these are some of the basic values and concepts that artists work with daily, and in that sense should they not be part of artistic research? Because the driving force behind artistic practice, which is the foundation of artistic research itself,

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is the ‘other’ of market values—even though artists do develop and exercise some entrepreneurial skills—there is the need to develop a model and discourse of creative collaboration for artistic research that gives priority to its foundational values and seeks a renewed understanding of the role of the artist in the twenty-first century. My position is that if artistic researchers in general, and music performers as artistic researchers in particular, are to thrive and build a sustainable future in academia, they do need to collaborate especially with non-practising academic researchers, since in the absence of such collaboration artistic research might become isolated from other academic disciplines and create an increasingly inward looking context, ultimately losing the potential to play an equal role in policy making and strategic development within the institution it is embedded in. Furthermore, without collaborative institutional support, in order to survive at all, artistic researchers can easily be sucked into the business model of collaboration, which in the long term would once again conspire against their values; artistic research would become another commodity for the market economy. By collaborating with academic researchers—with musicologists and music psychologists, for example—music performers open up creative, academic and collaborative space for the practice of their artistic values that is experientially, and politically, different from the space they occupy when collaborating with other artistic researchers: in the latter case, the collaborating partners are already based in similar value systems epistemologically, which would not allow as many opportunities for the mutual development of alternative collaborative models that would place artistic values on a par with academic values. It is only when the artist researcher and the academic are able to mutually influence one another by collaborating, that is, by striving together—as the etymology of the term ‘collaborate’ suggests—that they will play a role in bringing about positive change in institutional policies and strategies with regard to arts and humanities research as well as artistic research. In such collaborative endeavours, the starting point would not be what each of the partners knows, so that they can exchange knowledge, but what each of the partners values. The artist researchers would need to find a balance between an exclusive focus on their subjectivities as the origins of their research and the objective interests of the academic researcher, and the latter would need to find a balance between their pursuit of intersubjective and generalised knowledge and the subjective, interested and valorised positioning of the research undertaking. By collaborating with academic partners, music performers as artistic researchers would establish alternative voices,

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retain the critical function of artistic practice within the research, keep the subjective and value-laden elements of the research always in view and resist becoming another commodity for the market. As Henk Borgdorff has recently argued, they can: contribute from within—by showing that there are good reasons to champion and bolster within academia the alternative culture of knowledge […]. Here, too, there is considerable work to be done. The challenge is to find and mobilise allies at all levels within the world of academic research and the science system—in theory and in practice, conceptually and strategically, for the debate on values and criteria and for the material and procedural infrastructures. Natural allies can be expected in the humanities and social sciences, for instance in cultural studies and anthropology. But beyond that, exchanges of ideas and research strategies with people from areas like physics or engineering could also help strengthen the enhanced and expanded culture of knowledge.36

In all collaborative endeavours the music performer as artist researcher undertakes within academia, there is an important knowledge-political issue that goes beyond the epistemological complexities artistic research poses and that needs to be addressed: while researchers are expected to produce ‘excellent’ research outcomes, artistic researchers are expected to produce ‘excellent’ artistic and research outcomes, for example, in the form of performances and publications. Although there is no consensus regarding the nature of the textual component of the research outcome, an artistic outcome that does not make its research agenda clear through a mode of presentation that is distinct from the art work is problematic as far as funding applications and research assessment exercises are concerned.37 The most important implication of this state of affairs has to do with time: time that the music performer needs to maintain and widen the expressive, aesthetic boundaries of the artistic expertise that he or she has developed and sustained usually over a very long period of time. While the idea of the lone researcher and artist may have declined over the last couple of decades, music performers are still lone labourers when it comes to keeping up and widening their artistic skills; they still toil very much on their own in the practice room, and it is these moments and spaces of individual physical, cognitive and emotional labour behind artistic expertise that disappears quickly in current models of collaborative enquiry. While music making does have an arguably irreducible social, and collaborative, component38—a significant part of musical expertise and artistry is learned through musical collaborations—there, nevertheless,

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remains these necessarily individual times and spaces where the music performer continuously renews and reaffirms the physical, cognitive and emotional conditions for the collaborative enquiry to develop effectively and successfully; these are times and spaces that have existential significance for the performing musician, yet are not explicitly acknowledged and supported by current collaborative models. Academia needs to recognise that with artistic practice at its core, artistic research undertaken by the music performer requires, if it is to produce ‘excellence’ in art making and in research, the extra time and personal space for the performer within the academic context. The ‘I’ of the artist researcher needs to be supported as much as the ‘we’ of the collaborating research partners. Consequently, there is a need to develop new strategies for creative collaborative enquiry that recognise the dual-orientedness of the music performer as artistic researcher—to the artistic and the academic—and support his or her individual moments and spaces of practice as part of the collaboration: what is needed is thus a recognition that the subjective and individual are still as important as the intersubjective and collaborative. It is such recognition that will put the music performer as artistic researcher firmly on a par with non-practising scholars in shaping the future of the discipline of music studies. While we have come a long way in the twenty-­ first century in establishing the practice of music performance as a valid source of knowledge and insight in academic studies of music, we still have some way to go to ensure that the performer-researchers themselves co-­ lead with their non-practising colleagues the evolution of the discipline’s institutional political agendas and values.

Notes 1. Suzanne Lynch, ‘Learning to Collaborate: No more lonely scholars?,’ The Independent (4 October 2007). https://www.independent.co.uk/student/student-life/learning-to-collaborate-no-more-lonely-scholars-394217.html (last accessed 25 October 2018). 2. Ibid. 3. Hajdeja Iglic, Patrick Doreian, Luka Kronegger and Anuška Ferligoj, ‘With Whom Do Researchers Collaborate and Why?,’ Scientometrics, 112, no. 1: 153–174. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486904/ (last accessed 30 July 2019). 4. Kathleen Coessens, Darla Crispin and Anne Douglas, The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 44.

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5. J.  Sylvan Katz and Ben R.  Martin, ‘What is Research Collaboration?,’ Research Policy, 26, no. 1–18 (1997): 7. 6. As an exception, see Nils Randrup, Douglas Druckenmiller and Robert O.  Briggs, ‘Philosophy of Collaboration,’ paper presented at the 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2016) https://www. researchgate.net/publication/300415409_Philosophy_of_Collaboration (last accessed 20 August 2019). 7. John C.  Morris and Katrina Miller-Stevens, Advancing Collaborative Theory: Models, typologies, and evidence (New York: Routledge, 2016). 8. Dave Pollard, ‘Will That Be Coordination, Cooperation, or Collaboration?,’ (2005), http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/03/25/will-that-be-coordination-cooperation-or-collaboration/ (last accessed 25 August 2019). 9. In Patricia Montiel-Overall, ‘A Theoretical Understanding of Teacher and Librarian Collaboration,’ School Libraries Worldwide, 11, no. 2 (2005): 28. 10. Robert W. Houston, ‘Collaboration-See “Treason”,’ in Exploring Issues in Teacher Education: Questions for future research, edited by G. E. Hall, S. M. Hord and G. Brown, 327–410 (Austin: University of Texas), 331. 11. Paul Roe, ‘A  Phenomenology of Collaboration in Contemporary Composition and Performance,’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of York, UK. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/9941/3/485137.pdf (last accessed 25 October 2018), 20. 12. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 13. Alastair Pennycook, ‘Cultural Alternatives and Autonomy,’ in Autonomy and Independence in Language Learning, edited by Phil Benson and Peter Voller (London: Longman, 1997), 38. 14. Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The creative power of collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 94. 15. Lynch, ‘Learning to Collaborate,’ 2007. 16. Ibid. 17. Kevin J. S. Zollman, ‘Learning to Collaborate,’ in Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge, edited by Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Conor Mayo-­ Wilson and Michael Weisberg, 65–77 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 65. 18. AHRC 2014. See also the AHRC’s ‘Digital Transformations in the Art and Humanities’ programme. 19. Coessens et al., The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto, 2009. 20. Nicholas Cook, ‘Performing Research: Some institutional perspectives,’ in Artistic Practice as Research in Music, edited by Mine Doğantan-Dack (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 11–32. 21. Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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22. John Rink, ‘The State of Play in Performance Studies,’ in The Music Practitioner, edited by Jane W. Davidson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 37–51. 23. Roger Chaffin, Gabriela Imreh and Mary Crawford, Practicing Perfection: Memory and piano performance (New York: Psychology Press, 2002). 24. Ibid., 247. 25. Ibid., 262. 26. Ibid. 27. Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘The Art of Research in Live Music Performance,’ Music Performance Research, 5 (2012a): 32–46. 28. Dillon R. Parmer, ‘Musicology as Epiphenomenon: Derivative disciplinarity, performing, and the deconstruction of the musical work,’ repercussions, 10, no. 1 (2007): 1–49. 29. Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘Practice-as-Research in  Music Performance,’ in Sage Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses, edited by Richard Andres, Stephen Boyd-David, Erik Borg, Myrrh Domingo and Jude England (London: Sage, 2012b), 259–275. 30. Nicholas Cook, ‘Performance Analysis and Chopin’s Mazurkas,’ Musicae Scientiae, XI, no. 2 (2007): 183–207, 184 [emphasis added]. 31. Doğantan-Dack, ‘Practice-as-Research in Music Performance,’ 2012b, 263. 32. Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘Once Again: Page and stage,’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 142, no. 2 (2017): 445–460. 33. Jeffrey Swinkin, Performative Analysis: Reimagining music theory for performance. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2017), 137. 34. Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘Artistic Research in Classical Music Performance: Truth and politics,’ PARSE – Journal of Art and Research (University of Göthenburg, Sweden, 2015). 35. Lisa Mooney Smith, Knowledge Transfer in Higher Education: Collaboration in the arts and humanities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 140. 36. Henk Borgdorff, The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on artistic research and academia (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 9. 37. Cook, ‘Performing Research’, 2015. 38. Nicholas Cook, Music as Creative Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Bibliography Borgdorff, Hendrik. 2012. The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Chaffin, Roger, Gabriela Imreh, and Mary Crawford. 2012. Practicing Perfection: Memory and Piano Performance. New York: Psychology Press. Coessens, Kathleen, Darla Crispin, and Anne Douglas. 2009. The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

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Cook, Nicholas. 2007. Performance Analysis and Chopin’s Mazurkas. Musicae Scientiae 11 (2): 183–207. ———. 2013. Beyond the Score: Music as Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. Performing Research: Some Institutional Perspectives. In Artistic Practice as Research in Music, ed. Mine Doğantan-Dack, 11–32. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2018. Music as Creative Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doğantan-Dack, Mine. 2012a. The Art of Research in Live Music Performance. Music Performance Research 5: 32–46. ———. 2012b. Practice-as-Research in Music Performance. In Sage Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses, ed. Richard Andrews, Stephen Boyd-David, Erik Borg, Myrrh Domingo, and Jude England, 259–275. London: Sage. ———. 2015. Artistic Research in Classical Music Performance: Truth and Politics. PARSE. Journal of Art and Research 1 (1). http://parsejournal.com/ article/artistic-research-in-classical-music-performance/ ———. 2017. Once Again: The Page and the Stage. Journal of Royal Music Association 142 (2): 445–460. Houston, W.  Robert. 1980. Collaboration-See ‘Treason’. In Exploring Issues in Teacher Education: Questions for Future Research, ed. Gene E. Hall, Shirley M. Hord, and Gail Brown, 327–410. Austin: University of Texas. Iglic, Hajdeja, Patrick Doreian, Luka Kronegger, and Anuška Ferligoj. 2017. With Whom Do Researchers Collaborate and Why? Scientometrics 112 (1): 153–174. Katz, J.  Sylvan, and Ben R.  Martin. 1997. What is Research Collaboration? Research Policy 26: 1–18. Lynch, Suzanne. 2007. Learning to Collaborate: No More Lonely Scholars? The Independent, October 4. https://www.independent.co.uk/student/studentlife/learning-to-collaborate-no-more-lonely-scholars-394217.html. Accessed 25 Aug 2019. Montiel-Overall, Patricia. 2005. A Theoretical Understanding of Teacher and Librarian Collaboration. School Libraries Worldwide 11 (2): 24–48. Morris, John C., and Katrina Miller-Stevens. 2016. Advancing Collaborative Theory: Models, Typologies, and Evidence. New York: Routledge. Parmer, Dillon. 2007. Musicology as Epiphenomenon: Derivative Disciplinarity, Performing, and the Deconstruction of the Musical Work. Repercussions 10 (1): 1–49. Pennycook, Alastair. 1997. Cultural Alternatives and Autonomy. In Autonomy and Independence in Language Learning, ed. Phil Benson and Peter Voller, 35–53. London: Longman. Pollard, Dave. 2005. Will That Be Coordination, Cooperation, or Collaboration?  http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/03/25/will-that-becoordination-cooperation-or-collaboration/. Accessed 25 Aug 2019.

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Randrup, Nils, Douglas Druckenmiller, and Robert O. Briggs. 2016. Philosophy of Collaboration. Paper presented at the 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300415409_ Philosophy_of_Collaboration. Accessed 20 Aug 2019. Rink, John. 2004. The State of Play in Performance Studies. In The Music Practitioner, ed. Jane Davidson, 37–51. Aldershot: Ashgate. Roe, Paul. 2007. A Phenomenology of Collaboration in Contemporary Composition and Performance, Ph.D. dissertation, University of York. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/9941/3/485137.pdf. Accessed 25 Oct 2018. Sawyer, Keith. 2008. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York: Basic Books. Smith, Lisa Mooney. 2012. Knowledge Transfer in Higher Education: Collaboration in the Arts and Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Swinkin, Jeffrey. 2017. Performative Analysis: Reimagining Music Theory for Performance. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zollman, Kevin J.S. 2018. Learning to Collaborate. In Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge, ed. Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Conor Mayo-Wilson, and Michael Weisberg, 65–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

The Aesthetics of Artistic Collaboration Andy Hamilton

Collaboration Versus Individual Genius Art, high art in particular, is the product of a nexus of relations. These include producers of artistic materials, buyers of artworks in the marketplace, patrons and art lovers as well as artists themselves. The focus of this book is on collaborative processes within, and between, and across the arts, the academy and creative industries (as outlined in Chaps. 1 and 2). My concern is with Western art (as discussed in Chap. 3) in the modern era, but in philosophical aesthetics one should as far as possible address other eras and practices. The Romantic conception of the individual artistic genius remains dominant in Western culture, and in those cultures that seek to emulate it. Modern and modernist aesthetics assumes an individualised artistic vision. But it can also embrace modes of collective (or collaborative?) production. This chapter explores the aesthetics of artistic collaboration, addressing its relation to the concept of individual genius (a concept also referred to in Chaps. 1, 3 and 8). As Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson write, ‘[m]odernist aesthetics is certainly predicated upon the concept of an individualized vision or oeu-

A. Hamilton (*) Philosophy Department, Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_4

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vre, but it also subsumes under the Western canon modes of collective production in ancient and medieval cultures, as well as from tribal cultures and contemporary Western consumer culture’.1 In later modernism and postmodernism, this individualised concept has been under attack; group practices and collaborations have increased dramatically. But even Kenneth Clark, in Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, the BBC TV series, questioned the individualist vision when he wrote: ideally it needs two people to make a picture: one to commission it and the other to carry it out. The artist who has to paint in a vacuum tends to paint either solely for himself and a few friends, or for an imaginary, synthetic public… The ideal patron doesn’t simply pay an artist for his work. He is a man with enough critical understanding to see the direction in which the artist ought to go.2

Often collaboration turns out unequal, however, amounting to a disguised individualism. For instance, an individualist bias is evident even in the touring exhibition entitled Chuck Close: Prints, Process and Collaboration, at Sydney Museum of Contemporary Arts Australia (MCA) and elsewhere. Close’s paintings are labour-intensive and time-consuming, and his prints more so; a painting can take months, while a print, from conception to final edition, takes more than two years. Close mostly adopts a hands-on approach in creating his prints, carving lino blocks, drawing on and applying acid to etching plates, and directing the intricate handwork involved in pulp-paper multiples. He enjoys collaborating with master printers, but, importantly for the theme of this chapter, states the limits to this process: ‘[l]ike any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions’.3 ‘It is a very different attitude than coming into an atelier, drawing on a plate, and giving it over to printers to edition’, Close continues, ‘[m]y prints have been truly collaborative even though control is something that I give up reluctantly’.4 His printmaking methods involve a process of experimentation and ingenious problem-solving in collaboration with expert printmakers around the world. Close explores radically different treatments of the same image, benefiting from accidents and mistakes that can take the work in unexpected new directions. This process encapsulates the artist’s working methodology whereby ideas are generated by activity in a process-led method of subtraction, addition and reversal, creating new

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forms of visual perception within his work. The Sydney exhibition highlighted this fact by featuring proofs from different stages of the printing process, illustrating the genesis of the final work.5 That Close subscribes to a Romantic, individualist conception of art is shown by the admission, ‘[m]y prints have been truly collaborative even though control is something that I give up reluctantly’.6 According to the Romantic conception, the highest art is that created by the solitary genius, who must retain ultimate control and responsibility. This is counter to recent Research Council calls (outlined in Chaps. 2 and 3). In the postmodern era, philosophy and the humanities tend to be sceptical of this conception of genius, often reducing its attribution to a superstitious expression of wonder. This denigration is misplaced, and ‘genius’ does have a definite sense insofar as it refers to a genuine phenomenon. It is outlined plausibly in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (secs. 46–49). Kant assumes that the genius is solitary, but his account is an otherwise moderate one that rejects the proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang notion of genius advocated by Herder.7 Genius is central to his account of art: ‘fine art is possible only as the product of a genius’8 who ignores ‘classical rules’, and pursues an exemplary originality (CrJ sec. 46). The genius is a rule-­ giver, but not a rule-follower. Kant regards the artistic genius as ‘nature’s favorite’9 (‘ein Günstling der Natur’), gifted to make objects of great complexity and unified structure without conscious attention to rules. Kant is regarded by Adorno as offering a ‘taste’ aesthetic; this is the traditional formalist picture of Kant, which neglects the Critique of Judgment beyond the Four Moments. But he does advocate such an aesthetic to the extent of holding that ‘taste’ must ‘clip the wings’ of genius in order for art objects to be made at all. Kant’s key claim is that ‘[g]enius is the innate mental predisposition… through which nature gives the rule to art’.10 His argument proceeds as follows: ‘[e]very art presupposes rules’,11 that is, it is intentional, not random. ‘On the other hand, the concept of fine art does not permit a judgement about the beauty of its product to be derived from any rule whatsoever that has a concept as its determining basis’,12 this is Kant’s view of free beauty as not based on a determinate concept, for which criteria of application can be specified. (Contrast, for example, the concept of ‘chair’—its criteria specify something for sitting on, with legs, a certain height, and so on.) ‘Hence fine art cannot itself devise the rule by which it is to bring about its product…[So] it must be nature in the subject (and

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through the attunement of his powers) that gives the rule to art; in other words, fine art is possible only as the product of genius’ (sec. 46).13 Kant continues with the following argument: (1) Genius is a talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given … hence the foremost property of genius must be originality… (2) Since nonsense too can be original, the products of genius must also be models, i.e., they must be exemplary… (3) Genius itself cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products, and it is rather nature [through the talent of the artist] that gives the rule to art… (4) Nature, through genius, prescribes the rule not to science but to art (sec. 46 emphasis added).14

This argument rests on certain distinctive Kantian ideas. There is the aforementioned idea that attributions of beauty do not rest on determinate criteria—they have no ‘determining basis’. There is also Kant’s assumption that natural beauty is superior to artificial or artistic beauty. Kant expands on claim (2) that products of genius are exemplary: ‘the other genius, who follows the example, is aroused to it by a feeling of his own originality’,15 and does not simply imitate. However, ‘for other clever minds his example gives rise to a school, that is to say a methodical instruction according to rules’ (sec. 49); imitators produce derivative works. Geniuses do not themselves make up the rule for others to follow. They create a body of works from which others can extract a set of rules to follow—as Aristotle did in the Poetics, and as European music theorists did to create the concept of sonata form in the nineteenth century. Kant’s account of genius is one of a number of developments that constitute a revolution in the world of the arts during the later eighteenth century. For any writer on aesthetics, these revolutionary developments must be regarded as crucial. Aesthetics is a sub-discipline within Philosophy, which deals with fundamental conceptual questions about the arts and natural beauty, which the particular arts themselves may not entirely be able to address. But that does not mean that its approach should be ahistorical. It must recognise that discussion of aesthetic questions underwent revolutionary change in the eighteenth century, that is, in the era of modernity, coinciding with radical changes in the world of the arts. These developments were expressed, in some ways incompletely, in the work of

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Kant. A central question is whether they constitute a major evolution within an already existing aesthetic realm, or whether, as some seem to believe, they involve the very invention of that realm. There had been philosophical work on beauty from ancient times, but Kant grasped the nature of the aesthetic in a way that previous writers had not. Arguably, however, aesthetic judgement is non-esoteric and has always existed. Whenever someone has been attracted to a person’s or object’s beauty, it seems, aesthetic judgement is involved. Before the eighteenth century, the aesthetic was a genuine but instrumental or non-autonomous good; it was Kant’s achievement to separate the realms of the good, the true and the beautiful—although he re-­ implicated them at a deeper level. But what this separation involved is not easy to comprehend. It is often suggested that when the Greeks judged a person’s beauty, they also brought in their moral qualities, and it is commonly assumed that they did not recognise the aesthetic as a distinct good.16 Now certainly, work on a Greek funerary vase is not art for art’s sake, the creation of a beautifully crafted artefact is not an end in itself, but it is art for morality or religion’s sake; that is, the aesthetic was a genuine but instrumental or non-autonomous good. The separation of the good, the true and the beautiful is connected with the appearance in the eighteenth century of what art historian Paul Kristeller termed the modern system of the fine arts, and the consequent possibility of functionless or autonomous art. According to Kristeller’s view, Plato and the Greeks did not think of poetry and drama, music, painting, sculpture and architecture as species of the same genus, all practised by ‘artists’ in our current overarching sense of the term; they did not separate art from craft. The appearance of the modern system, and emergence of high arts, was a protracted and complex process. In the nineteenth century, when many artistic occupations were professionalised, painters rose in status while engravers and those tainted by industrial repetitiousness fell. But cartoons in Punch magazine of the period show the fragile status of the painter in bourgeois society—butlers show them the tradesman’s entrance, although there had to be upward mobility for that to be amusing. The appearance of the modern system of the arts was associated with greater artistic individualism; pre-eighteenth-century conceptions of art were more collaborative. Thus we learn from John James that the design of the east end of the Cathedral of St Denis in Paris, the historic burial place of French monarchs, was ‘the result of a fluke of [religious and other] appointments and opinions’.17 There was ‘constant interaction

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between client and master mason, site-based masters and visiting masters, and masters and carvers, rather than a single design concept’.18 West adds that the east end of the cathedral: cannot be explained simply as an aesthetic creation of a single genius; to do so, as older architectural history has tended to do by falling back on ‘great man’ explanations of complex buildings, is to ignore the historical complexity of designing, making and using a religious building.19

She continues by stressing the essentially collaborative nature of the architectural enterprise: [i]nstead of a single ‘moment’ of artistic production in northern France that sparked off the ensuing centuries of Gothic architecture, we now see the importance of groups of masons, working within and between regions, taking innovation and experimentation with them between different patrons.20

Collaboration in Architecture The accumulated actions of those involved are embodied in the form of a pre-modern building; just like a political tradition, which cannot truly be said to belong to any one originator, the historic building ‘organically’ comes into being through the interventions of a historical cross section of society in a particular place or region. Architecture is seen as a product of a particular place, the stuff which makes a place what it is. A building, produced collaboratively, belongs to its context and the societies which inhabit an area, and so one can read it as belonging to the society which makes use of it. Permission given to a variety of styles in a building need not imply a conservative ethos; additions might have been motivated by a desire for newness, while constraints on spending ruled out more extensive rebuilding. Architecture remains an essentially collaborative art, though as with other arts, the role of the auteur has become gradually more prominent since the eighteenth century. Where there is an auteur, we are more likely to speak of ‘high art’. For instance, in the case of film, the auteur concept, embodied in the director, arose from the 1930s or 1940s onwards; the result is ‘arthouse’ cinema, which can be considered high art. Even proponents of auteur theory must concede that film is a collaborative art, ­however. Some auteurs, Mike Leigh for instance, allow their cast to ad lib,

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even to improvise the whole film, scriptless, as they go along. Music is a parallel case. Somewhat later than in film, the auteur concept appeared in music recording, becoming fully established in the 1960s; here, however, the auteur was essentially a collaborator, if often a primus inter pares. The role of producer George Martin was essential to the later work of the Beatles, while Frank Zappa used recording technology to subversive effect; in Jazz, Miles Davis and producer Teo Macero deployed post-production techniques. The terminology of high, popular and vernacular art is much debated, but vernacular art is ordinarily understood to be non-­autonomous and not self-consciously high art.21 It is opposed to academic, ‘high-style’ or ‘polite’ architectural tradition. The collaborative approach that the English parish church exemplifies constitutes a form half-way between vernacular housing and the French medieval cathedral. The term ‘vernacular’ originally referred to language; it comes from the Latin vernaculus, and ‘the vernacular’ is the native language, contrasted with a lingua franca such as Latin understood only by an educated elite. From the mid-nineteenth century, writers began to borrow the term from linguists and refer to ‘vernacular architecture’, but it was used widely only with the formation of the Vernacular Architecture Group in England in 1954.22 However, ‘vernacular’ also means ‘ordinary, everyday’, making the concept paradoxical, because ‘architecture’ is a high art term. Normally the two senses, ‘native’ and ‘ordinary’, coincide. (‘Native language’ implies ‘ordinary language’, but in architecture a native high style is possible; Scruton intensifies the paradox through his espousal of classical vernacular, which he defines as a vernacular arising from Classical (Greek and Roman) architecture—as discussed in Hamilton (2012).) Examples of vernacular architecture include Apulian trullo houses, Amish barns, Pueblo dwellings, Yemeni high-rise mud houses, Polynesian grass huts and the Italian hilltop town.23 All of these are both ‘everyday’ and ‘native’. Today, the term refers to everything not designed by professional architects, and where the creator or creators are anonymous. Minor imperfections and improvisation are essential features; effort and event are primary and the object disposable and secondary: ‘[v]ernacular building is unconcerned with progress and not overly committed to efficiency; it is building as group craftwork or group ceremony’.24 Vernacular artefacts and styles evolve in response to inchoate needs and desires, unconditioned by theoretical rationality; they involve well-proven solutions to old problems.25

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The contrast between building and architecture is a problematic one: the boundary between buildings that are architecture and those that are not is necessarily vague. Buildings are artefacts, and building is an art with a small ‘a’—a craft. Buildings that are architecture are not only artefacts, but artworks—‘Art’ with a capital ‘A’. As Ballantyne points out, vernacular architecture is ‘ordinary buildings put up by ordinary people’,26 which were not originally viewed as architecture but which, for cultural reasons, we now do. By a parallel process, ordinary artefacts, such as Neolithic pottery or stone axes, have become regarded as a vernacular art. (Note that we do not regard artefacts as high art, unless they were regarded as special in their own society—as those from the Sutton Hoo trove, for instance, were.) Should one say ‘become regarded as art’, or just ‘become art’? They amount to the same thing, but not for the reasons given by the institutional theory.27 The preceding facts are highly significant for aesthetics. All high arts originate in collaborative vernacular activities and practices that constitute ‘art’ with a small ‘a’, art in the sense of ‘craft’. Cave painters, traditional musicians playing on simple percussion instruments, participants in ritual precursors of drama, these are all ‘vernacular’ practices in the same way that building and arranging one’s dwelling is a vernacular precursor of architecture. The development of individual artistic genius is analogous across the arts. The profession of architect was a late arrival, in the eighteenth century—though not significantly later than that of artist, in fact. Architecture is in no way unique among the arts in being, in pre-modern times, that is, before the Renaissance, an artisanal practice. The distinction between artist and craftsman made its appearance during the Renaissance, notably in the writings of Alberti, who, with other humanists, attempted to elevate painting, sculpture and architecture by treating them as liberal arts. This was an early manifestation of the modern system of the arts discussed earlier, and the idea of artistic genius was undeveloped.28 There was still an apprenticeship system, in which apprentices tried to conform to the style of their masters. With architecture as with design, science, philosophy and other humane concepts or practices, one can distinguish broad and narrow senses. ‘Broad sense’ architecture existed before the concept, and certainly before the term or profession, appeared.29 The term ‘architecture’ appeared relatively late in English and is absent from medieval writing, and from Shakespeare; it occurs in Sidney’s Arcadia (1580) as a recondite expression for special artifice. In the Elizabethan era, the craft of building was conducted as it

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had been for centuries, by master craftsmen or artisans apprenticed or trained in a quarry or workshop. Most important was the principal freemason, who produced and executed a ‘platt’ (plan) and ‘uprights’ (elevations), deferring to varyingly detailed instructions from his employer.30 In the case of important buildings—those in learned, polite or high style—we know these masons’ names. The distinction between architect and builder/ master mason emerged properly in Britain after 1700; only from the mid-­ eighteenth century, following the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768, was architecture regarded as a profession. Comparable developments occurred earlier in Italy and France. A vernacularity thesis holds that a particular art form is essentially vernacular. In fact, the transition from craft to art occurred much later in music than in painting and architecture. Architecture is no more vernacular in essence, therefore, than any of the other so-called high arts. Scruton probably holds a weaker version of the vernacularity claim—that architecture is ‘a natural extension of common human activities’ whose trajectory extends to creating buildings arising from an artistic conception.31 He does not totally reject the role of architectural genius. But when he writes that ‘a city is not the work of geniuses’,32 it would be truer to say that it is not solely so. There is a continuum between the most highly planned, Edinburgh’s New Town or Haussmann’s Paris, or destructively, Mussolini’s Rome or Ceausescu’s Bucharest, and the most adventitious and haphazard. Edinburgh’s Old Town grew unplanned up and down the hill, while the New Town was planned and ‘classical’. I have argued that the weaker vernacularity thesis does not distinguish architecture from the high or fine arts; rather, it is a truism that applies across them. So either it is interpreted in a way that does not distinguish architecture from the other high arts; or else it has to deny the obvious historical role of artistic genius in architecture. It might be that the classical vernacular has a hybrid status between every day and polite—and there is clearly a continuum between high and everyday style. Summerson, for instance, characterises ‘classical vernacular’ as a style of everyday architecture ascending in quality, and acquiring the classical idiom of more affluent buildings. High-style features, especially decoration, were often absorbed into vernacular traditions. The addition of ornamental moulding does not make an English farmhouse polite; conversely, mud-walling in the service wing does not make a Palladian house vernacular.33 In Durham, to take another instance, the houses in Old Elvet and the Bailey probably count as vernacular, although their fronts can be dated and they were

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attempting to be grand. (These issues are developed further in Hamilton (2012).) Buildings, like other artefacts, originate in extensive economies of collaboration. This fact is stressed in Beth Preston’s very interesting discussion of material culture.34 For her, collaborative action is not merely the sum of individual intentions. Material culture is typically produced and used collaboratively, and improvisation’s anarchic, disruptive and creative presence is manifested at every level. All skilled action is at some level improvised beyond a supervisor’s instruction and therefore creative. Her discussion runs counter to the stress by philosophers from Aristotle to Marx, and Collingwood, who over-emphasise the role of planning, design and intention—thinking that Preston terms ‘Centralised Control’. Intentions and plans are, for her, effects of material culture, not the cause. Her account can be criticised for over-reacting to the dominant planning model, but it is a salutary over-reaction.

Conservatism, Conservation and Organic Unity We have seen that most English parish churches of medieval foundation were not built according to a single design, but developed over the ages by addition and subtraction. In the Middle Ages there was no profession of architect, and apparently little idea of an intentional, uniform schema generated prior to construction. The building evolved over generations without reference to a blueprint, and often without stylistic consistency. There is an interesting parallel between this organic development of English churches, and a conservative model of political development; the church as a building, and society, are treated as organisms, as opposed to mechanisms. The medieval church building is inherently conservative, and except for the rare extraordinary intervention, changed very slowly. A large proportion of English churches had been founded by at least the late twelfth century, many appearing in the Doomsday census of 1089. Elements from these early buildings often survive in the doorways or the base of towers, showing typical rounded arches and massive walls of the Norman style. Additions over time could include reconstructed windows, a new baptismal font, tomb sculptures, or carved wooden choir stalls for the clergy, showing different stylistic eras.35 The Architectural Monuments survey of Northamptonshire comments that:

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Architectural work carried out on churches in the 17th century was very conservative in character. It always respected earlier work and made little departure from the Gothic style. In some instances accurate replacement of medieval detail was attempted.36

In the nineteenth century this conservative attitude changed; radical rebuilding of medieval churches was undertaken by such architects as George Gilbert Scott. It was in response to such developments that a conservation movement began, which consciously formulated a conservative ideology. The Camden Society, in early Victorian Cambridge, was concerned with the ‘proper’ and edifying construction and restoration of Gothic churches and other public buildings. Later in the century, William Morris’s anti-scrape campaign introduced the idea that good buildings of different periods should be cherished, and tend to complement one other. Morris argued that one should take delight in the history of old public buildings, and not seek to restore them to some pristine state of perfection. The link between conservation and conservatism is suggested by Scruton in his discussion of public space.37 Scruton advocates a public art form on an urban scale, in the manner of treatises on urban decorum from the Renaissance onwards, which subordinate the style of the individual building to the whole. Unlike models that achieve this subordination by conscious planning, Scruton envisages a process akin to the self-ordering of an ideal competitive market. He applies Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand to the emergence of urban order, rejecting the utopian, social revolutionary visions of Gropius, Le Corbusier and other modernists who sharply separate architecture and ‘mere’ building in a way opposed to Scruton’s vernacularism. A district of London such as North Kensington, where planning was at best rudimentary, and which has few ‘public spaces’ in the planner’s sense, is ‘eminently public’, Scruton argues.38 This is a case of unconscious collaboration—at any one time, participants in the process are not aware of each other’s contributions, yet the final result is satisfying. For Scruton, such evolutions are humane and ethical; though unplanned in a strict sense, they preserve the ethos of a place or community. Argan, the Italian art historian and critic, contrasts the growth of the Renaissance ideal city from the pattern of Gothic cities in which circles radiate from centres like markets and churches. The ideal city involved subordination of individual houses to overall urban plan; this process culminated in the circulating plan of Baroque Rome and ultimately the modern planned city, and was due to social changes that led to one man,

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notably the Pope, being able to impose his will on the whole population; the paradox was that the application of reason to the organic Gothic city led to absolutism. Others more recently argue that the Gothic city was less organic, more planned, than it seemed; in Siena, for instance, serpentine roads were the quickest way of moving an army from one side to another.

Organic Unity and Genius The metaphor of organic unity has been pervasive in Western art since the Renaissance and has been put to contrasting uses—individualist as well as collaborative. Modernism, for instance, in the case of music, reacting against programme music, conceives structure or form through the post-­ Romantic metaphor of organic unity. This is a biological and not an abstract metaphor; form is regarded as a living thing as opposed to a mechanism; something that at first seemed abstract in fact turns out to be concrete and humanistic. But the organic unity that is the result of collaboration has become an organic unity internal to the product of the artistic genius. It is an internalisation of external form and development. An influential post-Romantic view of artistic creation holds that artworks set up conflicts which are resolved within the frame of the work. But for Adorno, the modernist work sets up conflicts which cannot be resolved, thus rupturing the form of the work, reflecting the impossibility of reconciliation within society. It is a truism at least of post-Romantic thought that the artist must remain ‘true’ to the requirements of the material, but Adorno interprets this to mean that material is not an inert substance to be transformed by the artist, but is ineliminably historical: ‘material is what artists manipulate: everything from words, colours and sounds through to connections of any kind…Forms, then, can also become material’.39 That is, the material that the composer addresses is historically ‘pre-­ formed’. Genres are passed down, forms and gestures show their historical derivation, but within the structure of the autonomous artwork, this material is ‘re-formed’.40 The result is an historical process of unconscious collaboration. These claims are developed by Adorno in a correspondence in 1929–32 with modernist Austrian composer Ernst Krenek (1900–91). Krenek saw the composer as an autonomous creator with absolute freedom to select material, but Adorno responded that their choice was restricted by historical possibilities:

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[w]hen I maintain that atonality is the only possible manner of composing today, it is not because I consider it ahistorically to be ‘better’, a handier referential system than tonality. It is rather because I think that tonality has collapsed, that every tonal chord has a meaning that we can no longer grasp.41

In the early twenty-first century it is impossible to write without irony in the style of Mahler, let alone Mozart; tonality, for instance, no longer has the meaning it had for them. As the leading modernist theorist in aesthetics, Adorno belongs to an individualist ethos of artistic creation, in which individual genius is paramount, but he can also be seen as recognising a more collaborative or at least collective model of artistic creation and development. This duality is present throughout the history of art and forms an inevitable backdrop to any discussion of aesthetics. In this chapter, I hope to have suggested some of its ramifications.

Notes 1. Peter Dunn and Lorraine Leeson, ‘The Aesthetics of Collaboration,’ Art Journal, 56, no. 1 (1997): 26–37. 2. E. Newton and Kenneth Clark, ‘The Artist and the Patron,’ The Listener (22 February 1940): 380–81. 3. Terrie Sultan, Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration (New York and London: Prestel, 2014), 8. 4. Ibid. 5. See http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/5aa/5aa348.htm (last accessed 26 August 2019). 6. Sultan, Chuck Close Prints, 2014, 8. 7. See John H.  Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 137–42. Kant also rejects the Platonic notion of genius as ‘inspiration’. 8. Immaneuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S.  Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), sec. 46, 174–176 at 175. 9. Ibid., 187. 10. Ibid., 174. 11. Ibid., 175. 12. Ibid., 175, emphasis added. 13. Ibid., 175. 14. Ibid., 175–6. 15. Ibid., 187.

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16. Discussed in Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music (London: Continuum, 2007). 17. Susie West, ‘Sacred Architecture, Gothic Architecture,’ in Art and Visual Culture 1100–1600, edited by Kim Woods (London: Tate, 2013), 60. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 61, 75. 21. The issue is discussed in Andy Hamilton, ‘Scruton’s Philosophy of Culture: Elitism, populism, and classic art,’ British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 3 (2009): 389–404. 22. Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re built (London: Phoenix, 1994), 132. 23. Some of these are discussed in ‘Vernacular Architecture and the Economics of Dwelling,’ in Daniel Willis The Emerald City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 117–47. 24. Like all vernacular products it is ‘premodern’, Ibid., 120. 25. Brand, How Buildings Learn, 1994, 132. 26. Andrew Ballantyne, Architecture: A very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31. 27. These claims are developed in Andy Hamilton, ‘Artistic Truth’; see also Charles Harrison, An Introduction to Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Ch. 1.4–5. 28. ‘Alberti’s primary objective [was that] of raising the status of the artist to that of an intellectual, an objective that was further supported by his reference to ancient custom, when painting [he believed] was not considered merely a craft and “was given the highest honour by our ancestors”’ (entry on Alberti in The Grove Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner, Oxford University Press, 2003). 29. ‘The Aesthetics of Design, in Fashion,’ in Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking with Style, edited by Jessica Wolfendale and Jeanette Kennett (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 30. John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 54. 31. As Gordon Graham writes in Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill, eds., Scruton’s Aesthetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 32. Roger Scruton, ‘A Landscape of Litter: This is not civilisation,’ The Times (April 9, 2011). 33. As the New Grove entry on ‘vernacular’ comments. 34. Beth Preston, A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, function, and mind (London: Routledge, 2012). 35. See Stanbury and Raguin, http://college.holycross.edu/projects/kempe/ model/1.html (last accessed 25 August 2019).

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36. HM Govt., ‘Sectional Preface: Ecclesiastical architecture,’ An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the County of Northamptonshire, Volume 6: Architectural monuments in North Northamptonshire (1984), LXXII-CIII, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=126698 (last accessed 25 August 2019). 37. See Roger Scruton, The Classical Vernacular: Architectural principles in an age of Nihilism (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 38. ibid. 39. Theodore Adorno, Vorlesungen zur Asthetik 1967–68 (Zürich: Mayer, 1973), 148. 40. The issued is addressed in Adorno, Vorlesungen zur Asthetik (1973), for instance, 36–7. 41. Letter to Krenek in 1929, quoted in Max Paddison, ‘Authenticity and Failure in Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, edited by Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 83. Emphasis added.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodore. 2004. Authenticity and Failure in Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. In The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn, 198–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ballantyne, Andrew. 2002. Architecture: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brand, Stewart. 1994. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. London: Phoenix. Dunn, Peter, and Lorraine Leeson. 1997. The Aesthetics of Collaboration. Art Journal 56 (1): 26–37. Graham, Gordon. 2012. Scruton on Architecture. In Scruton’s Aesthetics, ed. Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill, 164–176. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hamilton, Andy. 2007. Aesthetics and Music. London: Continuum. ———. 2009. Scruton’s Philosophy of Culture: Elitism, Populism, and Classic Art. British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (3): 389–404. ———. 2013. Artistic Truth. In Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Anthony O’Hear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HM Govt. 1984. Sectional Preface: Ecclesiastical Architecture. In An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the County of Northamptonshire, Volume 6: Architectural Monuments in North Northamptonshire, LXXII– CIII. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=126698. Accessed 25 Aug 2019. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S.  Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett.

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Newton, Erik, and Kenneth Clark. 1940. The Artist and the Patron. The Listener 23 (580): 380–381. Preston, Beth. 2012. A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind. London: Routledge. Scruton, Roger. 1994. The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism. London: St. Martin’s Press. ———. 2011. A Landscape of Litter: This Is Not Civilisation. The Times, April 9. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-landscape-of-litter-this-is-not-civilisation-b2vg9769bbt. Accessed 25 Aug 2019. Stanbury, Sarah, and Virginia Raguin. Parish Church Architecture. http://college.holycross.edu/projects/kempe/model/1.html. Accessed 25 Aug 2019. Sultan, Terry. 2014. Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration. New  York/ London: Prestel. Summerson, John. 1993. Architecture in Britain 1530–1830. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press. Turner, Jane, ed. 2013. The Grove Dictionary of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, Susie. 2013. Sacred Architecture, Gothic Architecture. In Art and Visual Culture 1100–1600, ed. Kim Woods. London: Tate. Willis, Dan. 1999. The Emerald City. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Wolfendale, Jessica, and Jeanette Kennett, eds. 2011. Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking with Style. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Zammito, John. 1992. The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 5

In the Bee Hive: Valuing Craft in the Creative Industries Alice Kettle, Helen Felcey, and Amanda Ravetz

This chapter reports on Pairings, a project initiated at Manchester School of Art in 2009. Pairings began as a way of fostering knowledge-sharing within the Art School but soon grew to include other institutions and makers. We liken the Art School to a bee-hive, where the colony clusters and is productive. We are also thinking of the Manchester bee, a symbol of past industry, and more recently the city’s indomitable spirit. The imperative of Pairings was to recognise and realise the intrinsic and potential value of craft-based practices to each other, and the transferable value to other fields. The project arose from a misconception that craft values are obsolete, labour intensive and insupportably expensive. It sought to counter the pressure from government on universities to move from a model of art and design values steeped in craft to cultural industries models seeing no apparent benefit from the contribution of craft. Pairings opened up a rich debate about collaborative working in art and design. Beginning with the experiential understanding that material-based research constitutes very specific ways of knowing and thinking, the A. Kettle (*) • H. Felcey • A. Ravetz Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_5

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project questioned whether craft—as a process-orientated approach to the field—could have a beneficial effect on Craft—the historical and c­ onceptual approach that separates craft practices into genres such as glass, metalwork, ceramics and textiles. The result was the creation of new synergies between making practices traditionally perceived as distinct from one another, changed scales of production and new thinking across disciplines. By harnessing craft to Craft, we were able to recognise wider potential roles for material practices in the fields of design and industry, replacing the perception of craft as a throwback to another time, with a vision of its responsiveness to the twenty-first century challenge of creating sustainable futures. Originally, Pairings was set up to encourage personal and material-­ based relationships between staff at the Manchester School of Art. The project placed makers and designers together in pairs or in threes. Each participant, who already belonged to a distinct and established area of practice, was invited to exchange ideas, conversation, techniques and materials with colleagues in different areas. But, while beginning in a small-scale and local way, it soon became clear that the project was initiating unexpected enthusiasms, ideas and processes. While craft is no newcomer to collaborative practice, its history of shared labour is a complex one. On the one hand, it is the site of collaboration sine qua non, on the other hand an emblem of solitary practice. In her volume, The Crafts in 20th Century Britain, Tanya Harrod invokes craft as a mode of production in which design and fabrication are enmeshed, carried out by the same person1; and even when applied into the broader fields of design and industry, the authenticity of craft and its ‘genred’ practices2 have been seen to depend upon the specialist knowledge of individual makers. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the teaching of craft was organised around distinctions of skills and materials and it is these delineations that until very recently have continued to operate in the spaces of the glass-blowing studio, the ceramics workshop, and the weaving rooms, each with their different technical and aesthetic sensibilities, ethos and know-how. While the studio-based picture of craft has begun to change over the last 20 years, with makers seeking many different kinds of collaboration, UK art schools have by and large retained a sole practitioner, material and skill-specific model, both in how courses are organised, and in the know-how of lecturers trained in the ‘studio’ craft manner. Pairings was to become influential in a national move emerging in 2009, to redefine course structures and overlapping areas of practice.

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Pairings set out to challenge the picture of craft solitariness and separation. Beginning from the physicality of materials, it used these to initiate dialogues between makers, giving birth to work and ideas that sought to redefine the nature of the object and of craft as a singular occupation. Individual materials, techniques and objects became conversation starters and the monologues of makers translated into something shared and external. The weaver Ismini Samanidou who paired with ceramicist Sharon Blakey described how the woven surface of her ‘home material’ closely resembled her concerns with the final surface quality of fired clay. While the separate nature of Samanidou and Blakey’s work mediated the nature of the dialogue, such that ‘our aim is to create works that sit together harmoniously but which are capable of exiting independently’,3 the emphasis shifted from production to discussions of ideology and ontology. The deep interaction of craft with the world that sometimes remains pre-­ conscious—for example, resistance, socialisation and collective action— were in this way made visible, but Pairings raised further questions too, about authorship/ownership, about skill and the future of craft, and ultimately, about the collaborative power of craft itself.4 In this chapter, three of us who were involved at different times and in different ways,5 reflect on the philosophies, politics and practicalities of collaborative craftwork as explored through Pairings. We elaborate how Pairings tested established working methods, shifted instituted borders and encouraged voices to cohere and sometimes grate together. The material-based dialogues between makers gave birth to work and ideas that redefined the very nature of the object and of craft. Subsequent artefacts or collections of pieces combined a fusion or alternatively, a parallel exploration of materials, of practices and of creative identities. In contemplating the value of such collaborations, we suggest that the perspectives and knowledge gained through Pairings challenge preconceptions about the presumed borders of practices, processes, materials and sociocultural identities in art and design—and that what began as an intuitive celebration of process, ended up by stimulating new applications, which could then be fed back into various strands of craft’s wider role within the creative industries.

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Craft as Worker Bee Given their iconic associations with 1960s protest, creative resistance and autonomy6 art schools have appeared the antithesis of entrenched institutional hierarchy, yet in truth their absorption into wider educational ­structures has exposed them to the same stratification processes sociologists observe in contemporary educational institutions.7 The evolution of artistic tribes of affiliation, ideology and solidarity and the nuanced phrasing of artistic practice, its various ‘material dialects’ have also long encouraged specific modes of allegiance in art and design. In textiles, talk is about flexible surface, tensions, folds; in ceramics and glass it is of form, substance, temperature and fire. Thus, artists and makers experience and reproduce the divisions, stratifications, inequalities and mysterious territories of existing artistic domains through this language. They form clans, familial material groupings, and are capable of enacting thoroughly tribal behaviours, bound as if by kinship relations, reciprocal exchange and strong ties to place.8 The sub-divisions of connection and division in craft take a strongly physical and material form. Textiles, metal, wood, glass and ceramics each share a requirement for workshop space and tools. As with ‘fold versus fire’ of textiles and glass, the distinctiveness of these various workshop spaces is salient. Craft splits its territories through the qualities of material practice. Added to this, institutions reflect wider social, cultural and economic divisions. Beyond, as well as within educational institutions, craft is rarely afforded the same prestige as fine art. While the reasons for this are debated and disputed, craft and makers as a subset of the artistic field find it hard to shake off a sense of inadequacy and inferior status. Pairings grew from just this territorialised and stratified landscape— one that paradoxically supports yet diminishes craft. Together with craft’s ‘internal’ divisions, various ‘external’ pressures pertain such as the elevation of the conceptual in art, which can easily make craft appear naïve, unthinking and base. This pressure can lend craft a certain power of the other, the outsider.9 But, in recent years the requirement by craft for expensive equipment, hands-on instruction, specialist technical skill and workshop space has been at odds with the climate of economic austerity and the impact of the digital revolution with its tendency towards the immaterial. The digital is not necessarily antithetical to craft though, offering up new tools and materials, processes and challenges, and Alice Kettle, the initiator of Pairings, imagined a project in which participants could

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actively embrace technologies, new materials, concepts and evolutionary working methods. Because at the time collaboration was also emerging as a fashionable antidote to economic stresses, Pairings almost inadvertently captured the spirit of current politics and debate, signposting the power of cooperation and shared practice.10 In 2008, the Manchester School of Art had established the Design LAB programme—a multi-disciplinary and project-led MA approach where the cross-overs of material practices were encouraged to enable students to tackle design projects involving complex social issues. The mission of the Design Lab was to prepare students for working in the creative industries through live projects and partnerships with major public organisations and companies, small design studios and agencies. Craft soon became a key voice within the programme, used as a tool to soften, to draw attention to the overlooked, and to question. Students and staff were challenged to recognise the particular role of craft in the process of flexing creative muscle in new and established ways, understanding the movements, the range and limitations of their creative abilities individually and collectively. Flexibility and adaptability on a material and social level enabled students to connect with the scope and profound nature of the issues in hand. Helen Felcey, programme leader of the Design Lab was to become an initiator, with Kettle, of Pairings, while Ravetz joined at a later stage, first as an advisor to the Pairings conference (Pairings: Conversations, Collaborations, Materials 12–13 May 2011) and later as a co-author. Unlike the focus of much contemporary craft at the time on objects and outcomes, Pairings was concerned with slowing down process(es). This was perhaps a counter-intuitive move at a time of threat and high pressure when the impulse might have been to demonstrate smart uses of accelerated technologies. It came from the sense that process—going through something together—would allow staff to ‘hold together’ at a time of risk.11 In this sense, the project embodied an impulse towards the collective. By bringing together pairs, or threes the vision was of whole crafts panoply revealed through correspondence. Nevertheless, since relationships do not exist outside difference, the project involved as well the productive negotiation of friction. If the idea that change and advancement can only be achieved through collaboration appears straightforward, this realisation took time to emerge. It required (and was inspired by) a belief in craft as something social and in movement.12 Perhaps residues of the secrecy of craft knowledge of the early modern age have persisted in contemporary craft, because it seemed

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to those inside the process that Pairings cut across an intangible but ingrained secrecy, nurturing relationships between makers more usually contained by distinctive knowledge practices, tools and materials.

Safeguarding Our Environment The catalyst for Pairings was Place Settings, an exhibition in the Special Collections Gallery at Manchester Metropolitan University  (MMU) shared by Helen Felcey and Alice Kettle that evolved into a collaborative response to each other’s work. This was precipitated by the placing together of existing work that seemed uneasily compromised—the scale and delicacy of Felcey’s porcelain in danger of being overwhelmed by Kettle’s monumental colour work. As a result, new work made by Kettle and Felcey set out to build a delicate ‘field’ of cloth which allowed collections of ceramics to form an installation in relation to it. This accident allowed for spontaneous experimentation and drew in a large audience. In response, Kettle invited another MMU colleague, Alex McErlain, to work with her, exchanging sketchbooks and discovering the possibilities of shared drawing, visits to museums and animated conversations. This precipitated McErlain and Kettle, together with Stephanie Boydell, the curator of Special Collections at MMU, to develop a small formal project by inviting four individual partnerships between makers from the University of Sunderland, The Institute for International Research in Glass, Sunderland, Cardiff College of Art and Design with its Ceramics Research Centre, and Manchester School of Art, MMU. The response was so proactive on the part of the participants that the organisers decided to host a day to launch the project and devise a wider framework that could include around 15 pairs or threes and further institutional links that ultimately included a total of 38 practitioners.13 The attendees of the launch day were self-selecting and it was over-­ subscribed. The day was curated as a speed-dating event with intense snatched moments of conversation and meeting. What emerged was the opportunity to hear about colleagues’ practice and appreciate the subtleties of personality and skill. Each external participant was invited to nominate a partner and after some gentle manoeuvring and ‘relationship counselling’ by McErlain and Kettle, a decision was made as to who matched who. The desire to take part was tangible, as was the curiosity to understand the local ecologies of neighbouring institutions and practices.14

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Alke Groppel-Wegener, Senior Lecturer in Contextual Studies at Staffordshire University was invited to document the project.15 Each partnership had to find ways to negotiate their dialogue. Geographically challenged, they must devise ways of working. Some emailed, others sent parcels to and fro, still others met at designated ­locations. All kept asking ‘how do we do this?’. For many, the connection emerged through returning to fundamentals, defining collaborative structures, methods, coding and plans. Words and instructions offered mechanisms to facilitate beginnings. Louise Adkins (fashion, MMU) and Inge Paneels (glass, the University of Sunderland) used ideas of word association through the internet to explore themes that were both complimentary and in opposition. This provided a structure to interrogate light, and glass slides were used as textual message carriers and coding. Melanie Miller (embroidery, MMU) and Jenny Walker (jewellery MMU) similarly turned to associated word play to explore clothing types and wearable artefacts. For others, the use of props such as photographs, post-it-notes, drawings, lists, blog spots, websites and word clouds aided the conversations. Drawing emerged as an important mode of dialogue and action to facilitate creative thinking and establish common ground. Many described the rediscovery of drawing as an important factor in transforming ideas into design and artistic principles. Often the collaborative nature of the shared drawing allowed for the balancing and merging of difference. Claire Curneen (ceramics, Cardiff College of Art and Design) and Alison Welsh (fashion, MMU) described the indiscriminate trust which permitted the drawing onto each other’s work, obliterating and remodelling the material forms and artistic identity of the other. McErlain remarked how drawing served to explore ideas, which could then be translated into material form. Drawing was informed by the knowledge of its purpose, which became changed through the sight of new application and process. The merging of practices in this way exposed the deepest sense of personal creativity and the processes of learning. It allowed for deep emotional responses, from wonderment to betrayal. Marian Milner in her book On Not Being Able to Paint sees the experience of material transformation and freeing of creativity as an emotional transformation: ‘as the alchemy which transmutes base metal into gold’.16 Her analysis of creative struggle shows how certainty must be let go, surrendered over a precipice, reeling and twisting as a ‘beneficent state before creation’ into emptiness, in order to make ‘what has never been’ come alive.17

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Facilitating departure from the known should not be underestimated in this project. Pairings was carefully scripted to enable the coming together of minds, and to inculcate willingness, even a desire to create new frameworks of thought and action. Bringing two minds together can break habits and support departures from ingrained practice. For the makers involved, the difficulty and liberation of starting was to step beyond protocols, to de-programme and to understand that openness that would allow for what Clinton Cahill (graphics MMU) and Cate Wilkinson (architectural glass the University of Sunderland) called ‘meander’.18 For all participants, the lack of expectation in terms of production and outcome provoked uncertainty and confusion. For Kettle and McErlain, there was a deep questioning in their roles as curators. In holding back from curating, in doing little they could be viewed as ineffectual and lacking. Yet as was subsequently shown, this ‘lack’ was experienced not only as confusing but eventually as empowering. Each partnership had the autonomy to correspond from their own singularity and to leave behind what Cahill and Wilkinson described as the security and constraint of the known, the directed and the briefed.19 In understanding the nature of meandering the pairs and threes appreciated the value of indirection. Meanwhile, over a period of months, McErlain and Kettle soothed, reassured, fielded constant queries, anxieties and questions. McErlain as a father confessor was calm and considerate, able to encourage a deep trust which allowed a surrendering into co-creative partnerships.

The Buzzing Hive Re-meeting After a few months, the organisers hosted a seminar since there was confusion about the unboundaried, ‘purposeless’ nature of the project. The partners stood up and started to talk about exchanges of conversation and struggles to find starting points. After a few moments, the gentle buzz became a frenzied speaking. They began to finish each other’s sentences, to express excitement about entering the privacy of another’s intimate domain. The whispers of voices began to call to others, understanding that, as David Gates (furniture, Kings College) Alice Kettle (embroidery, MMU) and Jane Webb (material culture, MMU) pointed out, they did not need to become the same as each other, but could nevertheless see a reflection of themselves in the procedures of the other.

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In transgressing known and familiar structures, the intention was to facilitate fluid movement and quiet material anarchy. Clinton Cahill and Cate Watkinson referred to this as an interzone and Vanessa Cutler (glass, University of Swansea) and Kate Egan (embroidery, MMU) saw it as opening up temporality into a new Zero Time.20 For Adkins (Fashion, MMU) and Paneels (glass, the University of Sunderland), the movement occurred in a see-saw motion of being absent and present, both seen as having value. It was this exchange and movement backwards and forwards between each other’s voices, which enabled creative, improvised and unpredictable possibilities to open. At the same time, it was often points of connection that had led individuals to gravitate together in the first instance. Some were attracted by the particular skills of another, having a desire to bring these into their own practice. Steve Dixon (ceramics, MMU) wanted to see if bone china flowers could be incorporated within glass, a question directly related to Jessamy Kelly’s (glass, the University of Sunderland) research. Helen Felcey (ceramics, MMU) was interested in Liz Wheelden Wyatt’s (graphics, MMU) ways of thinking—how she operated as a more commercially focused designer. She wanted to explore Wheelden Wyatt’s frameworks of thinking and in doing so, to depart from her own habits for a time—certainly to bridge and challenge her own frameworks with those of another. If one was feeling confined by practice, abandonment could be attractive, but if not, it could be threatening—as for example when Gates described how he was afraid to open the parcel sent by Kettle. He simply stared at it whilst eating his breakfast. Kettle reassured him that he could put it in a drawer out of sight. In the reciprocity, a knowing-ness grew. As Gates wrote: To be able to give and take back, listen and share. Trying to understand someone else, trying to find a way in and to drop in on the beat, in that space of trust and of knowing-ness crossing, something almost intangible might happen. A sometime humbling yet ennobling sensation that someone trusts you with something that is special to them; their voice, their view. Being nudged into unfamiliar territory the specialness is in the process the experience and the journey. In all the exchange, the talk, the doing, new things are forged.21

The specificity of these points of departures was of course unique to each pair or three, but some commonalities can be drawn out. Dawn Mason in

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her essay for Pairings ll writes of Deleuze describing how in creativity the travelling has been as important as arrival, or to put it another way: ‘It’s not the beginnings or endings that count, but middles. Things and thoughts advance and grow out from the middle, and that’s where you have to get to work, that’s where everything unfolds’.22 What emerged was the playful, the carefully planned, the construction of a negotiated alliance that worked through the first flush of desire, the novelty, the troubles and the superficial with the intensity of longing not to be alone or to be abandoned. For Duncan Aynscough (ceramics, Cardiff College of Art and Design), play underpinned his working relationship with Heather Belcher (felt, City Lit, London). For Kettle: ‘my work has been set free, it feels as though it is freewheeling in a way that it was closed before’.23 A lyricism emerged in the weaving of voices. In some partnerships, each person appeared to dissolve into an entity of oneness. Others stood mirroring and watching each other as though the space in between was the place of action. Mostly there were multiple conversations of playful exchanges and experiments. For Sally Morfill (textiles, MMU) and Sylvia Vandenhoucke (glass, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp), there was a mutual risk taking, while Ismini Samanidou (weave, the University College Falmouth) and Sharon Blakey (ceramics, MMU) describe their experience as: ‘like a whirlwind romance: a passionate affair of fleeting encounters and intense assignations’, but one which ‘revealed a deeply rooted, mutual aesthetic in the impermanence and beauty of the everyday and evidence of the transitory’.24 Some found possibilities in new technologies and in alternative processes and tools. They applied these new discoveries to their own material. Claire Curneen’s three-dimensional sculptural forms were transformed into two-dimensional digital stitch patterns on Alison Welsh’s clothing. In some partnerships, there was a softening. Felcey and Wheeldon-Wyatt quite literally layered their languages of materiality and image, which encouraged new readings of their existing practices, a softening of perception and boundary. Personal ‘readings’—often out loud in conversation— were the meeting of minds—the opportunity to reveal or discover new pathways of thought, which in turn could reveal new pathways of materiality.

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Fruition The focus of Pairings became a show, not seen as a conclusion but as a demonstration to a limited public of the activity. The show had an intimacy in being ‘at home’ in the Special Collections gallery at MMU, so that there could be an illusion at least of the brave risks of established makers, the fumbling and the mess being revealed to an audience of mainly internal viewers. Previously at the outset of the project, Kettle had attempted to put together a touring show, but few galleries could be persuaded, since they needed to know the exact content of the show, which at this stage was invisible. It was planned to show an existing work by each maker alongside the collaborations that included scribbled working drawings, email discourse and sampling. It became apparent in planning the show that the normal conception of an exhibition and a gallery was wildly contrary to the workings of the project, threatening to trap it motionless as a set piece without allowing for the momentum of change. A Lab exhibition was proposed instead where participants were permitted to alter work in a constant cycle of renewal. After a month, this became a vast mass of material. Kettle enjoyed the traction of continual reinvention and reconstruction through the partnered works impacting on each other. Stephanie Boydell, Special Collections curator, decided it needed containment, so all work made outside the collaboration was removed, with much residual work too. The intention was to capture the atmosphere and affect of discourse, to show where authorship was merged, where trickery of becoming other offered alternative avenues of thought and insights into future applications and design initiatives. The public responded positively to the rawness of the exposed thinking. The rough-cast gestures of some works evidenced intense conversations, whilst in the refinement of other works there was an acute aesthetic balance of one perceptive eye watching another. In the loss of the individual the work formed its own independent entity freed from ownership of possessive individualism. In the lack of resolution, the work allowed for the disguise of individual maker and specificity of material with the points of connection played out. The heightening of aesthetics was brought together through the negotiation of two or three separate matters and minds. It was only when the exhibition had opened at MMU that a tour was put in place, culminating at Contemporary Applied Arts Gallery, in

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London during 2013. An invitation came from Stroud International Textiles to host a variety of events and exhibition around the notion of collaborative practice and to curate a second funded set of commissioned works.

Contemplating Futures Gröppel-Wegener suggests that makers become ‘ingrained’ as practitioners: ‘Working habits that had become ingrained through practicing for many years were seen through different eyes and subsequently questioned’.25 If this is correct, then how did an unsticking occur? What is the value of this kind of disruption and challenge? To become a skilled and respected craftsperson requires hours and years of practice. The acquisition of skill involves not only the adaptation of the craftsperson’s body to tools, mind to materials, but involves ecology in its fullest sense, the human person part of its wider ecology.26 Craft, art and design exemplify the ecological integration of thought and action, informed by experience, informing experience. In the artistic field, the individual is exposed to a variety of techniques, interpretation styles and kinds of knowledge, leading to what in music Kathleen Coessens has identified as ‘an expert habitus’.27 This habitus becomes interiorised and taken for granted, offering ‘available objective potentialities, containing things to do or not to do, to perform or not to perform, to show and not to show, in the face of probable situations’.28 Trevor Marchand who has studied the interaction of ‘perceptual apparatuses, cognitive architecture, and biological constitution’ in craft as a knowledge making process introduces a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute by pointing out the flux involved in (craft) skills, how: perceptual abilities are sharpened or deteriorate during the course of people’s lives, livelihoods, and pastimes […]; synaptic networks and neural pathways are established and modified through practice, experience, disease, or ageing […]; and anatomical constitution is (re)configured, minimally, in activity (or lack thereof).29

Craft as knowledge-forming thus relies irrefutably on the specificity of ingrained practices. When the maker returns to a form with which they are familiar, fingers apply pressure in ways they are accustomed to and the exchange is two-way. In ceramics, for example, though we practice with

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the clay, the person—the mind and body—are almost indelibly changed through such practice. The material of practice becomes ingrained—with skin, with the touch of hands and the shaping of thought. The external evidence of these ingrained practices are evident through the form of the pot, the sound of music, the visibly worn keys of the piano, the rough tips of the potters’ fingers. The internal evidence though, is usually quite hidden. In certain circumstances, these patterns can become uncomfortably and even dangerously confining. While looking at this in a different way from musical impact, a research project which considers the negative effects of practicing and performing on the health and wellbeing of musicians, Pairings was nevertheless an opportunity to share experiential knowledge and through this to understand the negative constraints of craft ‘practice’ more fully. It allowed participants to explore the value in breaking habitual patterns. Most would agree that departing from ‘ingrained habits’ can be useful at times. Pairings provided this opportunity, initially in the form of a ‘point of departure’. Pairings changed our view of ourselves and of each other. In understanding the potential of creative speculation, play, process and material, craft was re-visioned as a dynamic and active principle. Through Pairings we deconstructed the definitions of craft as we knew them, concerned with confined specific material practices, allowing a mutable version to fuse our material relationships with each other. We reclaimed the actions of craft to view making as an infinite cycle of material and relational engagement, which Morfill (see Chap. 10) and Vandenhouck described as a way to avoid closure. In placing the focus on the open-ended dialogue, the object was not dismissed but understood as something waiting to be discovered. Curneen and Welsh explained that the precious nature of this new object could emerge and evolve from a sustainable and fluid environment which encourages regeneration. How might Pairings be understood politically? It teaches us something about the importance of ground level experiential knowledge and action. Pairings happened with a maximum of affective commitment and emotional labour and a minimum of institutional red tape and funding. At the outset, there was small amount of internal funding which supported external practitioners to travel to MMU.  The majority of the project was through the investment of time and materials by individuals without monetary remuneration which meant participation depended on the willingness and ability to ‘spend time’. The organisers could expect nothing from those taking part beyond a desire to be included. This can of course be

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critiqued as at some level exploitative and at another perhaps as elitist; but by at least temporarily, or in an as if fashion, sidestepping bureaucracy, a particular kind of vitalism was engendered which seemed to underpin the cooperative character of the project, a submersion into the notion of the collective and community. Ernst Bloch describes the utopian alternative imaginary as one of hope, where movements and moments on the brink of change are a kind of ‘forward dreaming’ towards new structures and systems.30 In looking for transformational potential, this collective drawing together was a powerful force beyond the strength of the individuals. Attempting non-­ competitiveness and relinquishing the ‘singular (secretly-skilled) maker’, in favour of a collective ideal, allowed craft to emerge as the active agent, with the material and process as authors as much as the human collaborators. For Victoria Brown (felt, University of Chichester), Jane McFadyen (jewellery, MMU), and Kirsteen Aubrey (glass, MMU), as a three it simply made sense to work in this way. They describe how it returned their focus to the nature of creativity, the questioning of practice and the inherent values in shared thinking as a development into creative industries and in the pedagogical role of academia. Furthermore, Pairings explored the industry of craft as a concept. The definition of industry in Pairings was defined as integrated working methods and their application into other spheres of production. This expansion offered new outward-facing cooperative perspectives, which filtered into the areas, networks and connections with the Creative Industries that we are positioned within. It allowed participants to integrate risk taking, recycling, testing of material and process, encouraging new versions of shared technologies, and variation in scales of production. David Binns’ essay about these processes included in the subsequent collection of essays, Collaboration Through Craft, talks of how his collaborative recycling of ceramic waste project started as an offshoot of a ceramic practice, became a collaboration with scientific and industrial partners and resulted in the establishment of an industrial manufacturing plant.31 Binns establishes the important principle of Pairings whereby dialogue with an industrial partner challenges territories and practice and allows for ideological reinvention, negotiated through the desire to make the impossible possible. As a forward looking, what if space, the impact of the research is to show that channelling synergies collectively can encourage new scales of production and conception across disciplines

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without dissolving our specialist knowledges. In harnessing craft we recognise its wider role across fields of design and industry as an adaptable action that is unfixed by its material protocols. The immediate legacy of Pairings was primarily in pedagogy where teaching and structural changes took place within the participating ­institutions. Unit X was specifically set up as a ten-week cross-faculty initiative at Manchester School of Art with students working collaboratively with businesses and organisations across the city of Manchester. This ‘novel’ and ‘dynamic’ experience of teaching and learning won the Misha Black Award in 2012.32 In looking back at Pairings after time has passed, we recognise the drive was for sustainable and socially engaged purposefulness. It is more and more familiar and unexceptional to be expected to work with one another as co-creators these days; but despite this, the role of self-­determining collectives in relation to problems of economies of production and adaptability into manufacturing models remain. Craft offers an adept, adaptable and vital role in facilitating creative clusters, organisations, cultures and institutions. The values that craft contributes are the essential relationships between making, sustainable production, ethical living, and everyday life. The skills and sensibilities involved in creative making align themselves to human organisation and relationships which determine how policy-driven commercial approaches retain contact with their own heritage. Indeed, the Crafts Council reported that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Economic Estimates of 2016 show that crafts’ contribution to the economy has grown by 14.6% between 2015 and 2016.33

Notes 1. Tanya Harrod, The Crafts in 20th Century Britain (Yale: Yale University Press, 1999), 10. 2. Peter Greenhalgh, ‘The History of Craft,’ in The Culture of Craft, edited by Peter Dormer, Peter (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997), 20. 3. Alke Groppel-Wegener, Pairings: Exploring collaborative creative practice (Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University, 2010), 59. 4. This debate formed the basis of the edited volume: Amanda Ravetz, Alice Kettle and Helen Felcey eds., Collaboration Through Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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5. Kettle who initiated Pairings, Felcey who took part in it, and Ravetz who joined the team at the conference stage to help think about collaborative practice in its wider contexts. 6. Anna Coatman, ‘Excessive Past, Sketchy Future,’ in Times Higher Education, 2246 (2016), https://digital.timeshighereducation.com/THE170316JoJ7ME/html5/index.html?page=1 (last accessed 14 August 2019). 7. Alan C. Kerckhoff, ‘Institutional Arrangements and Stratification Processes in Industrial Societies,’ Annual Review of Sociology, 15 (1995): 323–347. Martin A.  Trow, ‘Reflections on the Transition from Elite to Mass to Universal Access: Forms and phases of Higher Education in modern societies since WWII,’ Institute of Governmental Studies (UC Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 2005). Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/96p3s213 (last accessed 25 August 2019). 8. Paul James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing theory back in (London: Sage Publications, 2006). 9. Although we will not attempt to perform the litany of craft’s historical twists and turns here, craft is of course a contested concept, as described by Tanya Harrod and Glenn Adamson for example. Pairings was in many ways a response to the more recent aspect of this contested history which has left many makers thinking of themselves as singular practitioners—the sole jeweller or ceramicist or glass blower being one legacy, if not the only one, of the twentieth century. 10. The decline in craft courses in higher education over the last five years is 39% according to a Crafts Council report (2014) https://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/research-reports/ (last accessed 14 August 2019). It is an alarming statistic, but also illuminating to ponder the standpoint of such investigations, since where these figures represent craft as a diminishing practice Pairings reveals a deep seam of positive activity and energy. 11. Greenhalgh, ‘The History of Craft,’ 1997. 12. Ravetz et al., Pairings, 2013. 13. Alice Kettle, Stephanie Boydell, Alex McErlain, Helen Felcey, Jane Mckeating, Kate Egan, Jenny Walker, Melanie Miller, Sally Morfill, Kirsteen Aubrey, Sharon Blakey, Louise Adkins, David Grimshaw, Stephen Dixon, Alison Welsh, Jane McFadyen, Jane Webb, Nigel Hurlstone, Liz Wheeldon-­Wyatt, Clinton Carhill, Annie Shaw, CJ O’Neil, David Crow, Rachel Kelly from Manchester School of Art MMU; Andrew Livingstone, Inge Paneels, Cate Wilkinson, Jessamy Kelly from the University of Sunderland, the Institute for International Research in Glass; Claire Curneen, Duncan Aynscough from Cardiff College of Art and Design Ceramics Research Centre; Ismini Samanidou from the University College Falmouth, Autonomatic Research into 3D Digital Design Production; Victoria Brown from the University of Chichester; Vanessa Cutler from

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University of Swansea; Alke Groppel-Wegener from Staffordshire University; David Gates from Kings College, London; Sylvie Vandenhoucke from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium; Dawn Mason, Janet Haigh, Jilly Morris from University of the West of England; Heather Belcher from City Lit, London; and Shelly Goldsmith from UCA Rochester. 14. The majority of the resulting partnerships (24  in total) were based at MMU in various research centres, and further institutional links were made with the University of Sunderland, the Institute for International Research in Glass, Cardiff College of Art and Design with its Ceramics Research Centre, the University College Falmouth, Autonomatic Research into 3D Digital Design Production, the University of Chichester, University of Swansea, Staffordshire University, Kings College, London, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, the University of the West of England and City Lit, London. The project was set up with no preconditions other than a difference of material between partners. Partners simply started to work together, with the offer of an exhibition space curated by Stephanie Boydell in 18 months’ time. 15. Alke Groppel-Wegener produced and edited the accompanying publication Pairings: Exploring collaborative creative practice (Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University, 2010). 16. Michael Brearly, ‘Obituary: Marian Milner,’ The Independent (10 June 1998) http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituarymarion-milner-1163951.html (last accessed 14th June 2014). 17. Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint (London and New  York: Routledge, 1950, rpt 2010), xiv. 18. Groppel-Wegener, Pairings, 2010, 106. 19. Ibid., 106. 20. Ibid., 62. 21. David Gates, in Groppel-Wegener, Pairings, 90. 22. Alice Kettle, Dawn Mason, Pairings II Conversations and Collaborations Stroud International Textiles Pub: Manchester Metropolitan University (2012), 4. 23. Ibid. 24. Groppel-Wegener, Pairings, 2010, 58. 25. Ibid. 26. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: Chicago Press, 1972). 27. Kathleen Coessens, ‘An Artistic Logic of Practice: The case of the performer,’ The International Journal of the Arts in Society, 6/4 (2011): 1–12. 28. Ibid., 6.

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29. Trevor H. J. Marchand, ed., Making Knowledge: Of the indissoluble relation between mind, body and environment (London: Wiley and Blackwell, 2011), 1971. 30. Ernest Bloch, Principle of Hope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 10. 31. David Binns, ‘The Aesthetic of Waste: Exploring the creative potential of recycled ceramic waste,’ in Collaboration Through Craft, edited by Amanda Ravetz, Alice Kettle and Helen Felcey (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 88. 32. http://www.artdes.mmu.ac.uk/unitx/ (last accessed 14 August 2014). 33. https://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/policy-brief-november2017/#growth (last accessed 13 June 2019).

Bibliography Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: Chicago Press. Bennett, Dawn. 2008. Understanding the Classical Music Profession: The Past, the Present and Strategies for the Future. Farnham: Ashgate. Binns, David. 2013. The Aesthetic of Waste—Collaborative Research Exploring the Creative Potential of Re-cycled Ceramic Waste. In Collaboration Through Craft, ed. Amanda Ravetz, Alice Kettle, and Helen Felcey. London: Bloomsbury. Bloch, Ernest. 1986. Principle of Hope. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Brearly, Michael. 1998. Obituary: Marian Milner. The Independent, June 10. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-marion-milner-1163951.html. Accessed 14 Jun 2014. British Beekeepers Association. Bee Facts. http://www.bbka.org.uk/learn/general_information/honey. Accessed 7 Mar 2018. Coatman, Anna. 2016. Excessive Past, Sketchy Future. Times Higher Education, 2246. https://digital.timeshighereducation.com/THE170316-JoJ7ME/ html5/index.html?page=1. Accessed 14 Aug 2019. Coessens, Kathleen. 2011. An Artistic Logic of Practice: The Case of the Performer. The International Journal of the Arts in Society 6 (4): 1–12. Greenhalgh, Peter. 1997. The History of Craft. In The Culture of Craft, ed. Peter Dormer, 20–52. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Groppel-Wegener, Alke. 2010. Pairings: Exploring Collaborative Creative Practice. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University. Harrod, Tanya. 1999. The Crafts in 20th Century Britain. Yale: Yale University Press. James, Paul. 2006. Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In. London: Sage Publications. Kerckhoff, Alan C. 1995. Institutional Arrangements and Stratification Processes in Industrial Societies. Annual Review of Sociology 15: 323–347. Kettle, Alice, and Dawn Mason. 2012. Pairings II Conversations and Collaborations. Stroud International Textiles Pub: Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Kidd, Sue Monk. 2003. The Secret Life of Bees. London: Tinder Press. Marchand, Trevor. 2010. Making Knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society 16: Siii–S202. ———, ed. 2011. Making Knowledge: Of the Indissoluble Relation between Mind, Body and Environment. London: Wiley and Blackwell. Milner, Marion. 1950. On Not Being Able to Paint. London/New York: Routledge. Reprint 2010. Ravetz, Amanda, Alice Kettle, and Helen Felcey. 2013. Collaboration Through Craft. London: Bloomsbury. Trow, Martin A. 2005. Reflections on the Transition from Elite to Mass to Universal Access: Forms and Phases of Higher Education in Modern Societies since WWII. Institute of Governmental Studies. UC Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/ item/96p3s213. Accessed 25 Aug 2019.

CHAPTER 6

The Right Thing to Play? Issues of Riff, Groove and Theme in Freely Improvised Ensemble Music: A Case Study Adam Fairhall

Freely improvised music offers a distinct and immediate form of creative collaboration. Although many established, even long-running, ensembles exist in the genre, much value is placed on the ‘encounter’; the meeting of improvisers in one-off performances in which the particular line-up of musicians has rarely been heard together, if at all. This practice, in combination with a lack of conscious pre-determination of what is to be played, articulates a move towards spontaneity, a valued notion in freely improvised music even if it can never be absolute. The collaboration occurs in ‘real time’, and the process of co-creation is played out in performance. It is tempting, therefore, to compare this process to verbal conversation (as also proposed in Chap. 7), a common metaphor in discussions of jazz (a preceding and parallel tradition to which freely improvised music bears a complex relation).1 Indeed, in some ways the metaphor is apt; freely improvised music practitioners  often listen closely

A. Fairhall (*) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_6

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and respond to their collaborators, in ways that may demonstrate understanding or misunderstanding of the other’s intentions, agreement or disagreement. Indeed, even if a musician seems to be ignoring the utterances of her fellow players, the metaphor of conversation may still be appropriate. However, there are some types of freely improvised music (and the genre includes various, sometimes antithetical, practices) in which the notion of dialogue is not representative; the music of long-­running English ensemble AMM, for example, involves much independent, simultaneous musical layers, with the musicians allowing space for the others’ activity, but without listening too closely or responding directly. Perhaps a more illuminating concept than the metaphor of conversation is that of the freely improvsed music ensemble as a micro-society. A number of musicians and scholars have suggested this, and Joelle Leandre describes the concept in a particularly nuanced manner: ‘[t]hree musicians meet, for example. It’s a microcosm, a little society with its stakes, its tensions, its courtesies, its harshnesses, its silences, its fears, its powers’.2 Fischlin, Heble and Lipsitz note that Leandre’s description does not idealise the ensemble ‘society’.3 An improvising group does not only harbour harmony and agreement; like any community, there is also the potential for tension and struggle. We may note, for example, the long-standing and much-admired collaboration between pianist Misha Mengelberg and drummer Han Bennink, which often seems to involve strategies of subversion, obfuscation and opposition rather than agreement and a unified sense of purpose. Nonetheless, in the ‘encounter’-based methodology of much freely improvised music, in which improvisers are often playing together for the first time or at least within a new formation, finding areas of common interest and ways of working together in agreement are perhaps the most frequent and desirable approaches. In this context, as noted above, each musical choice becomes an issue of ethics, or perhaps manners. The notion of a freely improvised music ensemble as a micro-society, in which manners and other forms of inter-­subjective negotiation are important, has led in recent years to the development of an interdisciplinary scholarly discourse articulating the wider social implications of improvisation. Indeed, some of the key new works in this area maintain that improvisation practices in the arts provide models of progressive social thinking and behaviour, and attention to them may have beneficial impact on wider social problems.4 The current chapter, however, focuses on a topic that may seem more prosaic than the potential impact of improvisation on society, but which

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nonetheless reveals much about the challenges and issues improvisers face when negotiating the micro-society of an improvising ensemble. This topic concerns the use in freely improvised music of elements, such as riffs, steady grooves and themes, which contain repetitive structural components that may affect the moment-to-moment hyper-flexibility that is a hallmark of much European free improvisation. The ideology of total spontaneity that may partially underpin the privileging of such flexibility in freely improvised music is not the focus here. Rather it is the challenges that elements such as riffs, grooves and themes present for the other musicians when introduced by a member of the ensemble, the ethics (or manners) involved in the use of such elements, and the way in which contemporary musicians have found ways to improvise these elements with a sense of ‘rightness’. This sense of rightness (the sense that a musical contribution by one of the musicians is a positive one, helping to sustain group creativity) is difficult to account for, and depends on many contextual factors. The familiarity of the musicians with each other’s playing, the way some of the group’s personalities may be more dominant than others, the attitudes towards certain musical devices that the musicians bring to the improvisation and the exact moment in the music that the contribution is made are all important factors in the impact of the contribution. Furthermore, a group of experienced improvisers would be able to turn most contributions into positive ones, and are able to discern the creative collective opportunities inherent in any musical gesture, even if, as noted above, these opportunities involve tension, disagreement or irony. Nonetheless, in cordial improvising encounters there is often a desire to work together, to engage in mutually satisfying dialogue, and although tension and difference are important aspects of a rich encounter, a balance may be sought between tension that helps to fuel group creativity and tension that stymies it. The concept of the rightness of a particular musical contribution at a particular moment is related to the term ‘Kairos’ as used by Cesar Villavicencio in his thesis on freely improvised music.5 Villavicencio draws from the theory of rhetoric in his account of the interpersonal dynamics of freely improvised music, and defines ‘Kairos’ thusly: Kairos refers to finding the proper moment to contribute with a musical input considering the contingencies of a given place and time so that it helps the group to achieve clarity and eloquence.6

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Of course, as with other qualitative criteria, clarity and eloquence may not be the primary objectives of an improvising ensemble, and are hard to assess. Nonetheless, this definition aligns with the notion of a ‘positive’ contribution that imparts a sense of ‘rightness’ noted above, and the term is adopted here in the interests of perpetuating useful new critical terms, and because, in Villavicencio’s definition, the concept of Kairos seems to efficiently connote a range of related positive values. This chapter will briefly discuss the issues surrounding the introduction of ‘non-free’ elements such as riffs, grooves or themes into a freely improvised context, before discussing a case study in which these elements seem to have been used with a sense of Kairos. The case study is drawn from my own collaborative, ensemble-based practice as an improvising musician, specifically a 2014 performance (and resulting live album) by an ensemble called The Spirit Farm. The research process and the way in which the ensemble practice lead to the critical reflection in this chapter differs from other practice as research models enough to warrant a short clarifying discussion of methodology.

Research Methodology I was involved in The Spirit Farm as the instigator of the group, initially for a single performance in 2014, and as a performer on piano and other keyboard instruments. I acted as producer of the resulting live recording (the group’s debut album, released on SLAM in 2015), and organised subsequent gigs and a tour. I also spoke about the group, in relation to the topic of ‘non-free’ elements in freely improvised music, in an interview for The Wire magazine.7 Although this implies, particularly in terms of the promotion of the album and the ensemble to press and promoters, that I was the band ‘leader’, perhaps with a leadership role regarding the group’s musical aesthetics, the actual process of music making preserved much of the ‘encounter’-based collaborative potential so valued in freely improvised music. The musicians had not played together as a full group before and certain musicians in the group had not played with some of the other members at all, although others had long-standing playing relationships from previous projects. As is usual in freely improvised music, there was little prior discussion of what was to be played in the concert, beyond a notion that full-group pieces would be interspersed with smaller duos and trios. There was no running order; all decisions regarding the participants of a particular piece would be made in the moment, and musicians not playing

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in a particular piece were free to join at any point if desired. In this way, a sense of spontaneity, discovery and the ‘encounter’ could be retained, while assuming a level of confidence in the compatibility of the group. It should also be noted that, unlike many practice as research projects in which a sense of the research imperative need to be articulated prior to the commencement of the work in order to both secure provisions such as time and funding and to direct the practice in a research-appropriate way, The Spirit Farm was not convened with issues of idiom as a pre-planned research focus. Indeed it was only upon personal reflection after the concert that the potential of the music to yield critical insights regarding the use of ‘non-free’ elements in freely improvised music became apparent. It therefore seems that the most appropriate manner in which to refer to The Spirit Farm in this chapter is as a ‘case study’ in which issues raised in a broader critical argument are illustrated and verified. Nonetheless, it seems in hindsight that the line-up was well chosen to allow idiomatic mixtures to happen, and to illustrate the comfort with which contemporary free improvisers handle elements of riff, groove and theme. The musicians were in their 20s and 30s, and each has demonstrated in previous work willingness and developed ability to introduce elements of riff and groove into freely improvised performances. Thus, the playing environment was such that none of the musicians would feel uncomfortable if such elements were introduced by one of the musicians, and indeed would be alert to those possibilities, able to use and control them collectively.

The Problem with Tempo In an interview for The Wire magazine, Mike Barnes asked Evan Parker the following question: ‘I’ve always wondered why it is that in the free improvising world, repetitive beats seem absolutely to be avoided. Shouldn’t you be free to play rhythms as well?’8 Parker begins his reply with the following: The problem with tempo is, with tempo comes metrication, with metrication comes metric structure, with metric structure comes a kind of fixed form. And with fixed form you really need theme and variations and other material. It’s looser if you don’t have that metrication. It doesn’t mean there can’t be moments of that, or reference to it.9

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Parker’s reply seems quite pragmatic; the prolonged use of tempo or metrication inhibits the ‘looseness’ of the music. This looseness is a distinctive and prized aspect of freely improvised music; in this music the qualities of a musical parameter may shift at any point; the rate of events may speed up or slow down, for example, or the pitch collections may change. As such, the playing of a prolonged steady beat by a participant in a freely improvised music ensemble would be considered restrictive, forcing the other musicians to negotiate an element that, according to Parker, requires such materials as theme and variations to be successful. Such a decision by a musician would risk upsetting the balance and freedom of the group, and may lack Kairos. Parker’s statement regarding the implications of tempo may seem a little too emphatic. It is, after all, possible to maintain a pulse without resorting to bar-lines. However, the veracity of his overall point that tempo requires particular apparatus in order to be used effectively may be keenly felt by any musician who has attempted to play a ‘time-no-changes’10 piece without a theme to reference, or who have embarked on a rock or funk groove without a formal structure. Creating a convincingly shaped performance in such situations can be difficult (although, as we will see, certainly not impossible). And even if Parker’s thoughts on the requirements of tempo are set aside, there remains the possibility that prolonged articulation of a pattern, particularly one that is heavily ‘coded’ inasmuch as it invokes expectations based on familiar use in other genres, may have a ‘coercive’ effect on other musicians, and become an unwelcome dominant voice. Such elements may include beats and rhythms, but may also include tonality (a heavily coded system indeed) or even prolonged single notes; the introduction of a drone into an improvised performance, for instance, will almost certainly constitute an element which the other musicians will feel the need to adapt to, or negotiate, in some way. Indeed, even if the drone finishes mid-way through the piece, the continuing improvisation may be ‘coloured’ by the sense of tonal centre introduced by the drone. Nonetheless, as Parker suggests, it is possible to have ‘moments’ of ‘time’, or ‘reference to it’ in freely improvised music without invoking those difficulties, and indeed, in much recent improvised music such moments are common. For example, American musicians William Parker and Matthew Shipp frequently introduce pulsed motives into freely improvised solos and passages; Shipp is particularly fond of interpolating motives based on a favoured, countable dotted rhythm into solos that otherwise are pointillistic and rhythmically flexible. We may also note that pulse in a complex, nuanced sense may be present in freely improvised music with-

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out constituting the kind of countable time that Evan Parker is probably referring to when he uses the term ‘tempo’; British players such as Keith Tippett and Parker himself often use continuous streams of notes that create a sense of pulse, albeit a flexible one in which speed and accent may shift at any time.11 These elements of pulse, however, are integrated with, embedded within, a free approach that retains moment-to-­moment flexibility; they do not constitute a sudden shift in time-sense within a performance, and in the case of Shipp and William Parker often seem to be examples of ‘moments of’ or ‘references to’ pulse, to use Evan Parker’s terms. As such, they perhaps do not constitute the kind of prolonged, patterned element that Parker views as problematic and which concerns us here. There is, however, another approach to the issue of tempo and meter in freely improvised music besides avoiding it or merely referencing it, and that is to bring ‘theme and variations and other material’ into the improvisation; to improvise them. This may reduce the ‘looseness’ of the music, but the looseness would potentially be replaced by other qualities that may be equally valuable. Indeed, like Barnes, there are many who consider the avoidance of such ‘non-free’12 elements as tempo, groove, chord changes and form in freely improvised music as a restriction, a kind of reversal of Parker’s view. Such a perspective is not new; in describing the outlook of the AACM-associated musicians of the 1970s, Gary Giddins writes: [P]laying free meant just that. It wasn’t a matter of whether or not you used chords or swing rhythms or the tempered scale, or of how you measured improvisation against composition, but of having the options—of choosing to do with or without any of the tools of music in any given performance.13

This inclusive conception of freedom is echoed in the liner notes to a recent album by the Alexander Hawkins Trio, in which Hawkins describes his approach as ‘freedom to’, not ‘freedom from’.14 This inclusive, pluralist approach to materials may be viewed as part of a postmodern tendency as strong in jazz-related musics as in other art forms; many jazz musicians over the past 50 years have subverted ideologically based notions of methodological ‘purity’ by consciously mixing early and modern styles, ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ playing, and vernacular and ‘art’ styles. The extent to which this style-mixing is evident in music which is entirely improvised is

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perhaps harder to trace, but it is certainly there; Dutch musicians, for example, have forged a tradition of improvised music that is particularly referential and ironic,15 and the following description by Gary Giddins of an improvised encounter between pianist Matthew Shipp and drummer Han Bennink illustrates well the way in which improvisers may draw on materials of various provenances to fuel a creative dialogue: Bennink produced every rabbit he had, and Shipp came back with musicbox melodies, the flight of a bumblebee, the plucking of strings, and a long, long recitation of ‘Tenderly,’ pounded out in the bass as though it were Rachmaninoff. There was so much going on—cymbal throwing, woodblock rattling, furniture moving, more and more ‘Tenderly’—that the duet mutated into a sporting event. Bennink, mighty damned tired of ‘Tenderly,’ did his best to kill it, whistling, howling, crashing his chair down on his cymbals.16

In playing Tenderly in a recognisable manner, Shipp is presenting material that contains fixed musical parameters, including melody and rhythm. However, we may note that, in this instance, the extent to which these fixed parameters might cause a problem (in Parker’s sense) is reduced by the nature of the instrumentation, which consists only of piano and drums, and, importantly, the approaches of the musicians involved; there is clearly a sense of irony, even humour, here. This is evident not only in the ‘kitsch’ found elements deployed by Shipp, but in the way the tensions and disagreements highlight or dramatise the nature of the improvisation as a performance. The tension that may result from the ‘coercive’ nature of fixed forms is here recognised and played with in a self-reflexive way. There are, however, ways of introducing ‘non-free’ elements into freely improvised performances without invoking the effect of ‘distancing’ from the musical material that explicit irony and self-reflexivity may produce. Indeed, I would suggest that many improvisers of recent generations are able to capitalise on the energies available in rock, funk and other popular idioms without irony and while retaining the sense of improvisational spontaneity that comes with performing without prior discussion. In Britain, for example, a group of Leeds-based improvisers including keyboardist Matthew Bourne, guitarist Chris Sharkey and bassist Dave Kane, active over the past 15 years, have demonstrated an ability to draw on beats and riffs that relate strongly to such popular genres as funk, rock and punk within improvised performances. Although active within many

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bands, some of which involve degrees of composition and pre-­ determination, Bourne, Sharkey and Kane perform, along with drummer Chris Bussey in a freely improvising group called Collider in which an improvised performance may involve rock riffs, funk beats or even improvised song-forms in which chord progressions are collectively developed in real time.17 The challenges involved in such practices require musicians who are not only familiar with a diverse range of idioms, a common attribute among young improvisers, but are also experienced in introducing elements of these idioms into freely improvised performances. This experience engenders a set of skills that relate closely to the skills developed in previous freely improvised music practices, but which address particular new challenges. It may be that these new skills are becoming more common as a greater number of emerging musicians improvise in this way, and may even represent a further step towards a postmodernism of freely improvised music. British improviser Martin Pyne suggests in his blog that a shift in sensibility among contemporary improvisers may be apparent, and that recognising such a shift may counter the recent notion among certain journalists that freely improvised music as a vital music has run its course. In response to an article on the website of The Wire magazine (2014), in which Richard Thomas suggests that the once vibrant freely improvised music scene in London is now moribund, Pyne begins by questioning Thomas’ continued use of the term ‘non-idiomatic’ in reference to free improvisation: At one stage, in the sixties and seventies perhaps, it was very necessary for some musicians to make an improvised music that did break with established idioms, in particular perhaps the core jazz tradition. By 2000 I would argue that that particular battle had been won, and moreover that European Improv had in many ways become just as much of an ‘idiom’ as anything else.18

He then characterises recent freely improvised music as constituting an inclusive approach to idiomatic sources: I think that now we are in a period where boundaries between idioms are crumbling rapidly. Creative musicians are happy to draw on a wide range of approaches and sound worlds to say what they have to say—the vocabulary of European Free Improv, Jazz, Rock, Classical etc are all available resources—and that one can argue makes the music truly free.19

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Pyne concludes his point by recalling a performance by contemporary improvisers Steve Noble and Alex Maguire in which disparate idiomatic elements were introduced, and how he felt ‘liberated by the idea that grooves and beats could happily emerge in the course of a free improvisation’.20 Pyne’s account of the notion of ‘non-idiomatic’ improvisation, first proposed by Derek Bailey,21 may not align exactly with Bailey’s intention when coining the term; rather than merely signifying a need, in the mid1960s, to break from established idioms, Bailey’s use of the term was in response to the variety of styles and approaches found in freely improvised music, which he believed lacked the ‘social or regional purchase or allegiance’22 to be considered an idiom.23 Nonetheless, Bailey’s notion of idiom was drawn specifically from the field of linguistics, in which the term relates to the development of language structures in specific localities and societies, and perhaps does not help to account for the sense that European free improvisation as a whole does now seem to musicians such as Pyne to constitute a recognisable sound world and a distinct set of musical values and behaviours. Such a view contributes to a desire for ‘freedom to’ rather than ‘freedom from’, to return to Alexander Hawkins’ phrase,24 and as Pyne notes, the free use of elements such as grooves and beats, elements treated cautiously in earlier freely improvised music, is now established among contemporary improvisers. Indeed, Pyne’s use of the term ‘creative musicians’ reflects an increased use of that term in Britain to describe young, jazz-related artists who may draw upon a wide variety of genres in their music, but for many of whom improvisation remains a core method. The concluding section of this chapter consists of a case study, in order to illustrate how a contemporary generation of British free improvisers has developed competencies in using such elements as riffs, grooves and melodic themes in a freely improvised context, while retaining a sense of Kairos.

The Spirit Farm In this case study, I would like to draw attention to four particular musical decisions made by members of the improvising sextet The Spirit Farm during the first track, titled All, of the group’s eponymously titled debut album (2015). It may seem a little fatuous to promote my own musical contributions to the group improvisations as examples of Kairos, and so

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the following examples are drawn from the contributions of other musicians in the group. In discussing the following four examples, I will identify striking positive characteristics of the musical event in question. This may help to account for the manner in which the event ‘worked’, or succeeded in helping to sustain a creative improvisation, rather than having a negative impact on the music and the group. However, both my attempts to describe musical events and my critical-evaluative observations will inevitably be interpretive and incomplete. The discussion, then, is merely a gesture towards perceiving aspects of Kairos in the use of ‘non-free’ materials, to promote the possibility of such. Example No. 1: Fixed Bassline The first example is a largely fixed,25 riff-like bassline that Dave Kane plays on double bass. The piece begins with solo toy piano, before other instruments join in quietly and together create a kind of delicate, rustling texture. At 03.25 all the instruments stop briefly, bringing the first section to a collectively judged end, and only the bass, guitar and hand-tapped drums continue immediately following the pause. This is the point at which the riff-like bassline begins. The bassline is played using the upside-down bow, and a representative sample transcription might be as follows (the riff is separated here into two phrases, both of which are played four consecutive times as part of the riff). However, the bassline does not materialise suddenly in a complete form; it is pre-empted by more expansive lines that utilise the upside-down bow, which eventually contract into phrase a of Musical Example 6.1, and then, after phrase a is played several times, into the full bassline, Musical Example 6.2. Although, as we will see, such techniques of preparation and development are far from the only method by which the introduction of riffs and grooves might succeed, in this case the careful manipulation of the new material allows a secure transition from the first section of the piece to the one dominated by the bassline. Indeed, there is a sense that Kane capitalises on the brief pause in the music to decisively affect the direction of the piece; the bassline becomes a central, underpinning element of a new section, its rhythmic momentum contrasting with the less emphatically rhythmic opening section, provid-

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Musical Example 6.1  Phrase a

Musical Example 6.2  Phrase b

ing development and possibility in terms of the piece’s direction and contributing to a sense of ‘build’. The ‘rightness’, or Kairos, of the choice of moment to introduce the bassline is thus quite clear and straightforward. More difficult to account for, however, is the sense of the bassline itself as good or ‘hip’, or of a quality that would be valued as such by Kane’s peers. The notion of ‘hip’ is a semiotic code that varies from context to context and musician to musician.26 However, it may be that such codes are central to the acceptance, by the other improvising musicians, of elements such as a fixed bassline that relate strongly to genres outside freely improvised music. If, for example, Kane had started playing a basic generic rock bassline—perhaps of the type that a rock critic would describe as ‘pedestrian’—then his contribution may have resulted in disquiet amongst the other musicians and a lack of surety in how to respond. Of course, there is the possibility in freely improvised music of responding with a readable sense of agitation, or of accepting a cliché with a sense of irony, as in the duet between Matthew Shipp and Han Bennink cited previously. The mode of interaction in The Spirit Farm tended, however, to be more towards a collective will to make things work together, and the style of Kane’s bassline is therefore significant. There are striking characteristics of the bassline that distinguish it from simple, generic popular styles, even as it references them, and these characteristics may account for its value as acceptable, ‘hip’ and even inspiring for other musicians. Firstly, the bassline is played using the upside-down bow. This is a common technique in freely improvised music, but its use here to beat out a riff relates to the percussive playing of string instruments in riff-based popular or folk musics, such as diddley bow music, in which a taut wire is beaten with a stick. This connection has been observed by other listeners; Daniel Spicer, in

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his review of the album, noted ‘the upside-down bow bouncing off the bass stings [sic] like a twanging diddley-bow’.27 In using the upside-down bow to beat out a riff, Kane extends the intertextual resonance of his line beyond both the common use of the upside-down bow in freely improvised music, and also beyond many of the most obvious riff-based reference points of rock and funk. In addition, the intertextuality suggested by the pitch content of the line is particularly rich and wide-ranging. The line as a whole fits into a whole-step/half-step diminished scale, a common device of jazz musicians. However, there are details that relate the line to more popular forms; if the ghosted F#, almost inaudible in several instances, is taken as the ‘tonic’ note of the line, the phrase starts on the flattened 7th before descending to the flattened 5th and then to the tonic. The flattened 5th and 7th are, of course, markers of bluesiness, a connection reinforced by the bent and slurred way in which many of the notes are articulated by Kane. However, the starkness of the intervallic leap of a tritone at the end of the phrase, unmodulated by the conventional use, in blues, of the 3rd as a ‘stepping stone’ to the tonic, points beyond blues, perhaps to the use of the tritone in heavy metal or avant rock. Furthermore, the move, in phrase b, to a second tonal ‘plane’ relates to the oscillation between tonal planes found in folk, blues and rock. However, the manner in which phrase b moves from A to Bb and back again introduces an element of chromaticism (if F# is considered the tonal centre) that distinguishes Kane’s line from the straightforward functional or parallel movement often found in those popular forms. In these ways, Kane’s riff is interesting (or intertextually rich) in its mixture of sophisticated harmony and elements of popular forms. The question remains, however, of whether the above account has ‘pinpointed’ the qualities in Kane’s line that would be valued by his colleagues. A critic, relying on adjectival description, might identify a ‘dark’ or ‘sinuous’ quality to the riff that results from the combination of chromatic movement and ‘angular’ intervallic content. The resonances with primitive folk and metal/avant rock noted above would reinforce this reading, and indeed, the use of such adjectives may be the most apt way of interpreting the ‘good’ qualities of Kane’s line. It should also be noted that Kane might not have intended the intertexts described above; intertexts and codes are always contingent and readerbased, and my own reading merely suggests certain resonances among multiple other possible ones. Tracing codes is always an incomplete endeav-

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our, and any attempt to suggest certain intertextual connections over others risks being overly reductive. Nonetheless, if the style of material, and the associations the style invokes, is central to the reception of the material by the other musicians, the question of codes should be noted even if no authoritative account can be reached. Example No. 2: Sudden and Sustained Rhythmic Groove on Bass and Drums The preceding example consisted of a figure that was carefully introduced via a short passage of development. However, at 09.33 in All, drummer Johnny Hunter and bassist Dave Kane enter simultaneously and suddenly with an energetic layer of fast swing, very much in a freely metered jazz idiom. This ‘burst’ of rhythm section activity occurs during a duo passage of saxophone and piano, the result of instruments dropping out after a period of full-group activity. The sudden groove provided by the bass and drums might thus be considered analogous to a ‘drop’ as the term is used in popular music; a ‘drop’ in electronic dance music, for example, is commonly thought to be the point at which the beat ‘kicks in’ after a passage without beats (the ‘breakdown’), often in combination with the (re)entry of a bassline. The effect of the rhythm section entry in All is perhaps similar; the music is galvanised with a sudden injection of rhythmic energy, the suddenness heightened by the fact that the moment is less predictable than in electronic dance music, in which the listeners are led to anticipate the ‘drop’ via genre convention. The placement of such a striking and transformative contribution is particularly important, and here Hunter and Kane decide to ‘drop’ the beat during the relative emptiness of a saxophone-piano duo, maximising its impact. The exact nature of the groove is significant too; Hunter and Kane seem to capitalise upon the rhythmic tension inherent in the shifting accents and rapid pulse of the saxophone and piano playing by choosing a fast jazz feel, an idiom with already-developed rhythmic nuance, flexibility and drive. Again, it becomes apparent that the use of such devices requires genre-ranging versatility on the part of the musicians; rather than simply a gesture towards jazz rhythm, or a basic replication of it, Hunter and Kane produce an accomplished instance of it, making the choice convincing and stimulating for the other musicians. Indeed, the groove is deceptively sophisticated and complex; Hunter has spoken in conversation of his interest in playing jazz-like textures while allowing the pulse to be slightly

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out of sync with the other instrumental parts, creating a kind of middle area between ‘time’-based jazz playing and free playing. To determine the way in which this notion may be present in the groove in All would require transcription and analysis beyond the scope of this chapter, but it may be noted that Hunter brings to the use of jazz rhythm a technique and sensibility other than mere replication of a generic style. Example No. 3: Theme The bass-drums groove noted above prompts the entire group to play, before dissolving into collective free playing, at which point saxophonist Christophe de Bezenac provides the focus for the final section of the piece; a six-note theme, played slowly with free rhythm (see Musical Example 6.3). The rightness of this contribution may be evidenced by the way its simplicity and slow tempo allows the other musicians to either ‘rally round’ the theme, playing it in their various registers, or to continue building up the free playing underneath/behind it. Both possibilities occur in All, with the bass and vibes joining in the theme and the piano, guitar and drums playing freely. The placement of de Bezenac’s theme in the overall trajectory of the piece is also notable; it provides a focus, and an opportunity, for a climactic ending, capitalising on the momentum and sense of crescendo introduced by the previous bass and drums ‘drop’ and the consequent collective free playing. The theme clarifies an overall sense of ‘build’ in the trajectory of the piece that may otherwise have seemed less decisive amid the otherwise episodic form. Indeed, the episodic form found in this particular piece creates both possibilities and challenges regarding the introduction of new idiomatic materials; it perhaps lessens the sense of inconsistency or disruption when such materials are introduced, but also highlights the issue of overall shape.28 In the case of All, the group resolves this issue by generating a sense of ‘build’ that constitutes a macro-structural layer, functioning above the local rises and falls in volume and busyness that occur within and between each section.

Musical Example 6.3  A six-note theme

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Conclusion Although such issues as placement, motivic preparation, stylistic association, idiomatic versatility and awareness of overall form may not be essential factors in the success of a riff, groove or theme in freely improvised music, the above examples suggest that the artful negotiation of such factors contributed to the sense of Kairos achieved by members of The Spirit Farm. If it is indeed the case that more young players are adopting elements of riff, groove and theme in freely improvised settings, then such skill sets may become standard attributes, and further discussions of how non-free elements are introduced into freely improvised music performances may develop.

Notes 1. For a full discussion of the ‘conversation’ metaphor in jazz, see Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz improvisation and interaction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). 2. Joelle Leandre cited in Daneil Fischlin, Ajay Heble and George Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, rights, and the ethics of cocreation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 21. 3. Ibid. 4. See Fischlin, et al., The Fierce Urgency of Now, 2013; Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, eds., People Get Ready: The future of Jazz is now! (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013); Rebecca Caines and Ajay Heble, eds., The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous acts (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). 5. Cesar M. Villavicencio, ‘The Discourse of Free Improvisation: A rhetorical perspective on free improvised music,’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of East Anglia, UK, 2008. 6. Ibid., 131. 7. Adam Fairhall, ‘Free Trade Haul,’ interviewed by Daniel Spicer, The Wire, 387 (May 2016), 36. 8. Evan Parker, ‘Invisible Jukebox,’ interviewed by M. Barnes, The Wire, 195 (May 2003), 45. 9. Ibid. 10. ‘Time-no-changes’ is a method in jazz in which a walking bass and pulsed drumming may accompany a soloist in much the same way as in conventional bop, but without an underlying harmonic cycle or a metric structure. 11. Examples of this maybe found throughout Tippett’s solo album Mujician (1982).

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12. For the purposes of this chapter, the term ‘non-free element’ refers to a musical element that relies on a regular or fixed parameter for its characteristic nature. 13. Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz: The first century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 503. 14. Richard Williams, Alexander Hawkins Trio [Liner notes] [album, CD] (Alexander Hawkins Music, 2015). 15. See Kevin Whitehead, New Dutch Swing: An in-depth examination of Amsterdam’s vital and distinctive Jazz scene (New York: Billboard Books, 1998). 16. Ibid., 526. 17. See, for example, Collider’s session for Jazz on 3, Jazz on 3 [Radio] UK: BBC Radio 3 (3 September 2012, broadcast at 23:00). 18. Martin Pyne, Improvised Music Isn’t Dying—Just Evolving! (10 March 2014), Tallguyrecords.com. http://tallguyrecords.com/page8.htm (date last accessed 17 September 2014). 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its nature and practice in music (Ashbourne, Derby: Moorland, 1980). 22. Derek Bailey, ‘Derek Bailey Interview,’ interviewed by J.  Martin (16 August 1996). European Free Improvisation Pages, http://www.efi.group. shef.ac.uk/fulltext/mbailin2.html (last accessed 17 September 2014). 23. Bailey’s term has been controversial. Andy Hamilton has argued that Bailey’s playing is indeed idiomatic, and without this quality it would risk ‘non-communication’. Evan Parker has commented that Bailey ‘painted himself into a corner’ with the term. Nonetheless, journalists such as Ben Watson continue to use the term to designate the kind of free playing that Bailey helped develop. Bailey’s intentions regarding the term, including his reference to concepts in linguistics, were clarified in a 1996 interview. 24. Cited in Williams, Alexander Hawkins Trio (2015). 25. The general outline of the bassline is fixed for a significant period, although creative variances in accent pattern and phrasing are utilised throughout. 26. A code, according to Michael Klein, is ‘a convention of communication that organizes signs into a system correlating signifiers to signifieds within a particular cultural domain’. Michael Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 51. 27. Daniel Spicer, ‘The Spirit Farm,’ Jazzwise, 197 (June 2015), 44. 28. The initial adoption of this episodic structure may have partly been a result of the group’s approach to stage management; several pieces began with only one or two musicians present on stage, with the other musicians seated in the front row. The seated musicians were then free to walk to their instruments when and if they wished to contribute. This resulted in a more measured approach to the entry of parts than in many freely improvised music performances.

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Bibliography Bailey, Derek. 1980. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. Ashbourne: Moorland. ———. 1996. Derek Bailey Interview. Interviewed by J. Martin. European Free Improvisation Pages, August 16. http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/fulltext/ mbailin2.html. Accessed 17 Sep 2014. Caines, Rebecca, and Ajay Heble, eds. 2015. The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts. London/New York: Routledge. Fairhall, Adam. 2016. Free Trade Haul. Interviewed by Daniel Spicer. The Wire, 387 (May): 36. Fischlin, Daniel, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz. 2013. The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Giddins, Gaty. 1998. Visions of Jazz: The First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heble, Ajay, and Rob Wallace, eds. 2013. People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! Durham/London: Duke University Press. Klein, Michael. 2005. Intertextuality in Western Art Music. Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Monson, Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Parker, Evan. 2003. Invisible Jukebox. Interviewed by M. Barnes. The Wire, 195 (May): 42–45. Pyne, Martin. 2014. Improvised Music Isn’t Dying – Just Evolving!. Tallguyrecords. com, March 10. http://tallguyrecords.com/page8.htm. Accessed 17 Sep 2014. Spicer, Daniel. 2015. The Spirit Farm. Jazzwise 197: 44. Villavicencio, Cesar M. 2008. The Discourse of Free Improvisation: A Rhetorical Perspective on Free Improvised Music, Ph.D. dissertation, University of East Anglia, Norwich. Whitehead, Kevin. 1998. New Dutch Swing: An In-Depth Examination of Amsterdam’s Vital and Distinctive Jazz Scene. New York: Billboard Books. Williams, Richard. 2015. Alexander Hawkins Trio [Liner notes] [CD] Alexander Hawkins Music.

CHAPTER 7

Soundpainting: A Tool for Collaborating During Performance Helen Julia Minors

When working in collaboration, one must usually define the boundaries, scope and aims of such collaboration in order to work towards a shared goal. Within an academic setting, those artistic research goals will likely have been created alongside establishing research question(s) and the form of dissemination.1 Indeed, recent research funding calls require an element of collaboration, such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council Network calls in the UK (as outlined in Chaps. 2 and 3). When working in the moment, however, the creative artists must utilise their intuition  (their instinctive, embodied, tacit knowledge) and in-the-­ moment responses situated usually in a live public setting. One must learn to negotiate with artistic collaborators in real time via one’s own performance art. There is an exciting creative problem to solve when working in this way, which raises questions concerning Artistic Research, which are central to this book: creating in and through dialogue in the moment, across different art forms, with different artists, encourages those involved to work with their intuition and to communicate with others through multiple mechanisms. It requires artistic researchers to conH. J. Minors (*) Kingston University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_7

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sider how we reflect on our intuitive and collaborative practice. Ultimately, this ­collaboration relies on the trust and respect of each other in the group, as the goal and end point are often unknown at the start. This chapter takes a particular case study, that of the live multimodal signed gestural language, Soundpainting, to reassess the central issues of this collective volume. First, what is Soundpainting, and how does a performer-­composer use their intuition in the creation of a new work? By exploring this Soundpainting approach it is necessary to seek new forms of dissemination and performance practice, as this approach is not a mainstream performance method, nor does it sit well within current concert discourse. Notable is that performances using this method always refer to the noun, Soundpainting, yet a concert including a fugue or waltz would not necessarily label it after its formal procedures. Moreover, it is necessary to question the notion of authorship within a work which is created through a collaborative process, in the moment, using intuition and dialogue.2 Central questions which might be considered when reflecting on the practice of Soundpainting include: In what way can collaborative practice, generated live in the moment, enable a sharing of the performers’ intuition? How do creative artists utilise their shared intuition (innate within their embodied knowledge) when utilising the multimodal live creative sign language known as Soundpainting? In what way does this method foster the transfer of understanding and dialogue, notably between international multimodal artists, to make a collaborative work? Utilising a short film as a reference point, What About the Bush?,3 shot during the International Soundpainting Think Tank, hosted by me and led by the creator of Soundpainting Walter Thompson, in July 2013 held at Kingston University, funded by the Practice Research Unit, Kingston University and Grundtvig Erasmus+, I explore the notion of collaboration by considering the intersections between performers, disseminated via this short film. Following a long collaboration between Thompson and me (2008 onwards), involving research questionnaires (2010), interviews (2014–2015), creative placements (2009, 2013) and engagement with workshops (2013, 2015), our pairing as practice researcher and professional artist explores the ways in which partnerships within and outside the academe might foster new knowledge in the field of artistic research (see Table  7.1). Here, I reflect specifically on the 2013 Soundpainting Think Tank to consider the notion of collaboration, intuition and new forms of dissemination. ‘Do media work together as complementary equals?’4 We experience media differently, due to the audiovisual divide; they are not equal in our senses, but in Soundpainting the premise is that all arts are equal, that all

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Table 7.1  Thompson and Minors’ collaborative journey 2008

Artist in residence

Roehampton University

Teaching: students in music, dance, drama concert: students from music, dance and film

2010

Soundpainting questionnaire and filmed discussion

Réunion des musicien jazz, Paris

The questionnaire is available online. The filmed interview was done for personal reflection and to develop a series of interviews for release

2011

Filmed interview

Réunion des musicien jazz, Paris

One-to-one conversation

2010–2014 Regular skype conversations 2013 Soundpainting International Think Tank

2013

Kingston University, London

What About the Bush? A Soundpainting movie 2013–2015 Soundpainting workshop

Kingston University, London

2014–2015 Soundpainting interviews, part 1–4 2015 International Soundpainting Video Postcards Project

Art studio of Jennifer Rahfeldt, Sweden Online, sharing of short video postcards, sent to and from Soundpainters

Réunion des musicien jazz, Paris

Discussing creative approaches to Soundpainting A creative workshop and think tank, where 60 international artists came together to explore new approaches to disseminating Soundpainting A film shot during the Soundpainting International Think Tank 2013 One workshop included students from the Kingston Soundpainting ensemble, in 2015 A series of themed interviews were shot and later edited into four parts All available on online

artists and art forms can share the same signed language. How does this shared communicative method rely on a collaborative process?

Soundpainting: Language and Intuition Soundpainting is a creative method that is designed to engage all performative creative art forms. It began in music: Walter Thompson was performing and composing in Brooklyn, New  York in 1974.5 He had become frustrated when wishing to communicate to other performers in the

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moment, to adapt and modify a work, especially when it was one he had composed and included improvised sections. Although musicians can ‘speak’ through music,6 specific instructions could not be communicated easily while performing as part of a group. Thompson’s response was to use ‘iconic gestures’7 to indicate pitch, style, volume changes and tempo changes. These bodily gestures were not codified specifically to musical parameters. Thompson refers to these gestures as iconic as without explanation performers in the group could understand his requests and responded as desirable, in other words, in an intuitive manner. I became frustrated with how a soloist was improvising [...] I decided (in the moment) to try and sign them instead. I signed several performers (musicians) to play a ‘Long Tone’—I pointed at a few people, made an iconic gesture for a long tone and signalled them to play it, and they did.8

The result was a series of hand signs that could modify the performance in the moment, encouraging soloists, by changing the tempo, or asking for communication between performers, perhaps by seeking an imitative or contrasting relationship. This gestural language, where words are not spoken, is created by the hands and arms, in front of the torso, using legs and feet movement to denote attention (legs bent to denote attention and legs straight to show a non-active default mode). As Thompson repeats in his three workbooks,9 the gestures are multidisciplinary in nature: a single gesture has meaning across the art forms. By asserting that a single sign can be read by all artists, Thompson not only encourages dialogue and a similar approach to the work, but he utilises the metaphoric equivalences between the arts within the collaborative process. Is similarity assumed? Does this rely on a culturally innate reading, such as pitch equated to height? For example, a change of dynamic signed to a musician (to change volume, by using a V sign on the arm with two fingers, moving upwards for increased volume and downwards for decreased volume) is read by a dancer as a change in muscle intensity (muscle dynamics). The signs therefore encourage the collaborative artist in this multimodal setting to cross the audiovisual divide and to consider what equivalences exist. In so doing, the performer must also acknowledge what differences exist between their art forms, in order to work as part of a group in developing a performance. The ‘language’ of Soundpainting therefore challenges the disciplinary separation, but in what way can it be considered a language? A language in dialogue enables a free response by anyone involved in the conversation

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and the owner of the words in a lingual cultural context is the person speaking them. The issue here is twofold: one, it is the ethics of collaboration, where there is improvisation, a director (in the case the Soundpainter), where creativity occurs in the moment, without the need to prior plan the content of the performance; two, the performance process of using culturally innate styles within the language, whereby partnerships are formed within the group to facilitate such creative dialogue. Soundpainting is a specific mode of collaboration in that the Soundpainter stands at the front of the group, signing to the performers, working with them, creating through them. It is possible to have more than one Soundpainter, and it is equally possible for everyone to perform and to sign to modify that performance. The usual performance practice has developed whereby a single Soundpainter stands in the position of the conductor, but in place of a musical score, or pre-prepared choreographic performance, the Soundpainter proffers propositions to the group, and then using their individual offerings, she or he creates the work by proposing modifications to the material, something which Thompson referred to in the interview10 as ‘live-editing’. Thompson is very particular about how he speaks about Soundpainting: ‘I will use the word Soundpainting to signify live composing with the language and Soundpainter instead of live composer.’11 The understanding of Soundpainting as a language rather than a method is significant for considering how it is used in the moment to collaborate, but also, to consider what the Soundpainter (arguably the leader) does to guide and affect this collaborative process. It implies also how the performers may respond. In conversation with creative artists during the 2013 Think Tank,12 some noted this improvised potential and remarked that they felt ‘free’ (Dancer 1) as a performer to ‘offer their own ideas’ (Musicians 1– 3), and to ‘challenge the Soundpainter with unexpected responses’ (Musician/Actor 1). The importance in these discussions, and Think Tank debates on developing the Soundpainting language, is that it is understood as analogous to language, as this enables ‘a performer to have their own accent’ (Musician 4), and ‘my own way of doing things’ (Musician/Dancer 1) and furthermore, the ‘freedom to go beyond score and rigid forms of improvisation’ (Musician/Actor 2). The Think Tank had 60 creative artists performing as musicians, actors, dancers and some taking multiple roles, with 30 members remaining for the entire week of workshops, recordings and performances. This event resulted in the development of new signs and the video What About the Bush? (2014). I took rehearsal notes and kept a diary throughout the event to

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document how the discussion developed, and overwhelmingly the artists present all discussed their own role within the ‘dialogue’ and ‘conversation’ (Musicians 1–6, Dancers 1–3, Actors 1–3). Analogies to language were used in discussion during every rehearsal session without fail. The grammar of Soundpainting, established in terms of a language, denoting the phrase structure of how the Soundpainter communicates, facilitates this analogy. It is problematic though as the signs are not always as precise as a verb or noun, they can be deliberately open, such as some ‘Sculpting Gestures’, to ensure the performer has to contribute something of their own to the performance, with the ‘Sculpting Gesture’ acting as a proposition for response. For example, a request ‘Develop This’ is open to the performer as to how they choose to modify and advance the material. It need not be in consonance with the ‘Whole Group’ either (though we noted during the Think Tank that many musicians will work towards harmonic consonance where actors often seek out dissonance to challenge and to create a level of drama beyond the similarity of offered content). As Thompson observes: Most musicians when signed ‘Relate To’ will do so in a complimentary fashion whereas if one actor is signed to ‘Relate To’ another actor, often the actor will create the relationship in a contradictory fashion—it is more common in theatre to do so. So, the overall possibilities of how a performer may respond to the ‘Relate To’ gesture is governed by the trans-disciplinary applications of the gesture.13

But, what does the Soundpainter do? How does the Soundpainter distribute the labour? In making the initial creative choices, the Soundpainter aims not to remove the equity of the performer, in that they make their own choices regarding how to respond to the Soundpainter. A Soundpainter can choose the style, length and character of the piece. They can also choose whether to use chance material (those using this frequently have anecdotally become known as ‘Chancers’ in the community) whereas others will use precise gesture to denote exact chords (known as ‘Techniks’, as they rely on technical precision to create the precise content, embodying as much of a score, or choreographic notation, in their body as possible). There remains an element of improvisation in how the performer responds. Some have integrated the method into assessment strategies within schools and colleges as well to demonstrate learning of improvised approaches.14

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If the Soundpainter is composing and choreographing the group, then the collaboration would be led by the Soundpainter. But, by considering Soundpainting to be a language, it asserts the fact that each performer and Soundpainter can use that language in a creative and personal way, with their own tone and manner. Thompson makes a point both during the 2010 questionnaire, and later in the 2014 interviews that: ‘specificity and chance is at the root of Soundpainting’.15 This dichotomy between requesting a specific pitch, for example, or for requesting chance material, has led to the language of Soundpainting developing a specific syntax. Thompson stated that: [t]he fluent Soundpainter has a very large vocabulary of gestures that can both guide the development of material and/or ask for very specific material such as a C major 7 chord from a pianist or signing a dancer to jump around the stage on their right foot. The Soundpainter may also use gestures to indicate less specific material and/or chance responses from the performers.16

In order to produce such a specific set of instructions, the Soundpainting syntax was developed in collaboration with Sarah Weaver in 1997, who, working as a performer and Soundpainter, with Thompson, observed the ways in which the order of instructions had to be consistent in order to be understood.17 The syntax is: ‘Who’, ‘What’, ‘How’ (optional) and ‘When’. In other words, a Soundpainter would request ‘Singer 1’, to play a ‘Long Tone’, ‘Dynamic Fader: loudly’, ‘Slowly Enter’. ‘How’ is always optional in order to offer choice and chance material in the performance. ‘How’ includes ‘Dynamic Fader’ and ‘Tempo Fader’. There are two key different gesture types: ‘Function Gestures’ and ‘Sculpting Gestures’. ‘Function Gestures’ identify who is to play/perform. They are a clear indication of who is involved in the performance, with a categorical response (I have referred to these previously as quantitative gestures18). They denote who is to play, such as ‘Brass 1’, but they do not denote what to play. ‘Sculpting Gestures’, refer to a gesture type that relies on the performer to interpret and develop a response which is variable—as Thompson notes ‘they indicate what content is to be performed and how to perform it’.19 These two gesture types have six further categories, as follows in Table 7.2. Despite these strict categories there is an assertion that when responding to the Soundpainting gesture there ‘is no such thing as a mistake’.20 Thompson develops this idea:

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Table 7.2  Soundpainting gesture types and categories Function gestures

Sculpting gestures

Identifiers (e.g. ‘Who’: ‘Brass 1’)

Content (e.g. ‘What’: ‘Minimalism’, ‘Pointillism’ or ‘Long Tone’) Modifiers (e.g. ‘How’: ‘Dynamic Fader) Modes (e.g. ‘What’: ‘Scanning’, ‘Launch Mode’) Palettes (e.g. ‘What’: ‘Palette 1’)

Go (e.g. ‘When’: ‘Play’ or ‘Slowly Enter’)

Gestures referred in the chapter ‘Who’: ‘Brass’, ‘Vocalist’, ‘Actor’, ‘Whole Group’ – these each identify who is being signed to do something. ‘What’: ‘Long Tone’, ‘Heckle’ (to shout, or gesture, in such a way as to show contempt), ‘Match’ (to copy the material of another performer), ‘Pointillism’ (to offer a style of music/movement which is abstract, irregular, and analogous to a Jackson Pollock painting), ‘Synchonise’ (to select an element of another’s performance, such as rhythm, and to match that element), ‘Imitate’, ‘Relate To’ (to formulate a relationship of your choice with the directed individual or group), ‘Improvise’, ‘Laugh’, ‘Speak’, ‘Memory’ ‘How’: ‘Dynamic Fader’, ‘Tempo Fader’ ‘When’: ‘Slowly Enter’

A very important part of Soundpainting language is the basic rule that there is no such thing as a mistake. No matter what happens, the performer must continue performing their material. For example: If the Soundpainter signs the group to perform a ‘Long Tone’ and one musician or dancer accidently performs ‘Pointillism’, then they must continue with the ‘Pointillism’ and not change to the ‘Long Tone’. The ‘no such thing as a mistake’ concept opens up an environment where creativity is never stifled.21

The mistake denotes the value of the performers’ improvised contribution in that whatever is offered becomes part of the piece. The chance element offers a proposition to the Soundpainter—what will you do with this? During the 2013 Think Tank, the mistake concept was discussed: specifically, a musician asked, ‘How do you recover from a mistake in jazz?’ (Musician 7) and the answer was given by Thompson, ‘Repeat it, incorporate it, make it an element of the piece, and it removes the mistake’.22 This is collaborative in that both parties contribute to the piece but it is not collaboration in the sense that the outcome is mutually planned, discussed and anticipated. Rather it relies on the intuition of both parties to respond and react in the moment. The uncertainty of the outcome, but the mutual

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understanding of the method, enables collaborative dialogue to happen in the moment, through the responses to the signs. But, in what other ways can the Soundpainting language be understood as collaboration? What are the reaches of this collaboration? And how does the partnership set up between the ensemble enable intuition to be used in the improvised responses? Whereas an orchestra traditionally uses notation and a jazz band may improvise using free improvisation, Soundpainting is a middle ground, in that it uses guided signs, but usually no traditional notation. The Soundpainter can choose to hand over to the group to freely improvise by signing ‘Whole Group’, ‘Improvise’, ‘Organically Develop’. But this is rare. In a similar way Peter Wiegold, in establishing the Third Orchestra, has worked with this middle space between the orchestra (the first space) and the jazz band (the second space).23 As Wiegold discussed in the pre-­concert series I curated for Women’s Voices at Club Inégales, funded by the Arts Council UK (March–June 2019), in bringing his own signed approaches to an ensemble, Wiegold has developed a group which is truly diverse (spanning cultures, genders etc.) and which deliberately creates a work with performers that ‘cross and move between cultural contexts’.24 As such, both approaches are not restricted by genre but can help to construct chosen aspects of a work if the ensemble chooses to do so. The signs are a liberating device to facilitate dialogue.

Documenting Creative Dialogue To theorise how creative collaboration works is to explore how those participating communicate through their propositions, or their responses, to reflect on where the differences and meeting points are between the different artists and to ultimately chart the process(es) through which this collaboration occurs. As such this chapter is about process, a process which happens in the moment. Surveying the issues concerning the process of communication and performance dialogue need further attention,25 and so I explore and self-­ reflect on the collaborative dialogue between me and Thompson, through interviews and questionnaires, with reference to discussions with other Soundpainters during the 2013 Soundpainting Think Tank. Table  7.1 illustrates the collaborative journey of Thompson and I from 2008 onwards. I do not question the cultural context of the signed gestures here, nor do I question the reach of this method. Rather, I am interested

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in how those involved in a Soundpainting, including me as an insider to the ensemble, collaborate. Robin Nelson stated that the ‘individual or collaborative critical reflection on experience, in the form of a documented conversation, may, through gesturing towards a more abstract conceptualisation, assist in disseminating the (initially embodied) mode of knowing’.26 I have been documenting my conversations with Thompson through formal questionnaires and interviews (2010, 2015) publishing these online, as well as keeping a diary of our regular skype meetings. In order to be able to reflect on my own practice, as a developing Soundpainter, I documented my process in diaries and used the same approach to documenting the various workshops and sessions I have attended with other Soundpainters over the last decade. This amounted to noting the following: (1) the workshop session, date and location; (2) the content of the session, specifically noting any new signs, outlining the gestural movement and shape and their meaning, and also documenting any of my own questions, musings about the role of the Soundpainter versus the performer, and drawing the gestures. As a result of this process, I repeatedly asked myself two questions: (1) ‘How would I use this sign as a Soundpainter?’, considering what effect it might have on the piece, and (2) ‘How would I respond to this sign as a performer?’ Most commonly I would choose to play trumpet within the ensemble, and my intuitive understanding of my second skin (trumpet) lent itself to my using my comfort zone often (mid register, high dynamic levels, percussive rhythmic tonging and so on). But sometimes I would sing, play piano or act. I have become aware, over the decade, that when I perform using something less familiar, I have been more able to experiment. This is not because of a different skill level; I realised during the 2013 Think Tank, as we all sang as a choir,27 that using another medium made me question not only the meaning of the signs, but how I could work within the ensemble in ways which might contradict, counter or challenge, rather than blend, mimic or imitate another. The freedom came by challenging my own intuition. As a trumpeter, I know the instrument, as well as any part of my body—I react quickly, in the moment, often relying on embodied knowledge of how the instrument feels at the time, for example, how the mouth pieces kisses the lips when the mouth piece is cold, especially if it has been placed quickly to mouth in a phrase which required instrumentalists to ‘Laugh’ or ‘Speak’ immediately before playing. But this intuition is not uncommunicable.28 I strove to articulate my own intuition (to myself at first) through writing my notes and observations, in order to help me chart my practice and for

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me to question why and how I did something within the moment. As Robyn Stewart observes in discussing her praxis, there are many binaries we experience: ‘My research practice continues as a process of continuous discovery, filled with correspondences and contradictions, intuition and surprise, serendipity and discipline’.29 It is because of such a personal experience that I now document rehearsals and performances through diaries and drawings. It enables me to reflect on my choices and thereby improves my ability and confidence over time, but it facilitates sharing my understanding of a situation in the moment when working in collaboration. Self-awareness is important when communicating and co-creating in the moment without words. This understanding though does not remove future surprises. It is one thing to have a greater awareness of the self in an ephemeral creative context but the indeterminacy of that moment remains unknown and thrilling: ‘It’s a buzz’ (Musician 2), ‘yeah, not knowing, it’s like, wow’ (Actor 3). What I, and the 2013 Think Tank, are doing, therefore, is learning by doing, and revealing new forms of our own creativity through experimentation, experimenting with our instrument(s) and with how we respond to the Soundpainting signs. As Jerome Bruner stated, ‘knowing is a process not a product’.30 Knowing is not finite, limited or static. The ‘reflective practitioner’ may use their tacit knowledge to respond in the moment, but their capacity and potential develops continually.31 Thinking in Action, as is the title of Donald A. Schön’s book is what I and other Soundpainters must do in the moment. It is only through the action of doing that the practitioner can feel, know and then try to understand their intuitive responses to the Soundpainting gestures. The process of ‘doing-­thinking’32 which encompasses what practitioners do in the moment and during their creative collaborative work is enacted here. As there usually is no formal prior planning for a Soundpainting piece—beyond rehearsing together— the piece structure and content are not predetermined. As such the importance rests in the ‘artistry’ of each member of the group, their artistry enables them to be knowledge makers.33 Their ways of finding new creative solutions to creative problems are done through trial and error. Working as a reflective practitioner in education, Philip Taylor also explores the need for practitioners to reflect while doing, not leaving the reflective act until the end.34 In line with recent debates concerning practice as research, the practice can represent the research finding, but it is necessary to articulate the research aims and methodology, not only to disseminate the work effectively, but to facilitate one’s own practitioner reflection.

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Dialogue and Collaboration Soundpainting is a creative method which relies on collaboration in the sense that a number of people must work together in responding to the signs of the Soundpainter in order to create the new work, the product to be disseminate (usually this has been done through live performance in this method since its creation in 1974).35 The collaboration has varying levels of agency in that there is a leader of the ensemble, but that leader is not able to predict exactly what will happen and is reliant on the performers’ choices. It is important to consider the role of the leader of the group, the Soundpainter. Marc Duby affirms that: ‘Soundpainting is not carried out in isolation, and the Soundpainter is able to draw inspiration from the musicians, who converse about their individual histories and personalities in the group flow of the Soundpainting event’.36 Some have questioned: ‘Collaboration and leadership: […] are they allies or opposites? Does one contradict the other, or does one require the other?’37 The Soundpainter of the group only has the potential to produce a creative work because of the responses of the performers who respond to their gestures. The Soundpainter can be seen as a director but not as a dictator: the performer has a personal choice in what content they choose to offer. The wording is interesting, we co-llaborate, we work through co-­ mmunication and in co-nversation. There is a distribution of labour and a notion that the work is a result of ‘distributed creativity’.38 The combination of many brings the co, to co-operate, to co-mbine. My understanding of Soundpainting as a practitioner is that this language is effectively trying to ‘foster[..] effective group creativity’ forming the basis of the collaborative partnership.39 The coming together of performing artists in a shared creative space, with an aim to create a new work in the moment, sets a premise that the combining of skills, intuitive and learned behaviours, will require effort from all involved.40 Communicating through physical gesture relies on the participants’ ability to read the gestures. The leader of the group is silent, but each group member can be called upon to act as musicians, dancers, actors and so on, crossing the audiovisual divide. Moreover, in working within a l­anguage which may require you to ‘Imitate’ another performer, or to ‘Relate To’, ‘Synchronise’ or ‘Match’ another’s performance, the group members become interdependent: individuals contributing to the piece are reliant coconstructors of the piece who need the contributions of the other members to enable them to make their own relational choices. Thompson outlines those gestures which encourage such relationships between performers:

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There are quite a number of gestures indicating specific types of communication to be performed by the members of a group. Gestures such as ‘Relate To’, ‘Synchronize’, ‘Imitate’, ‘Contact’, ‘Heckle’, are among the many gestures that ask for different types of communication between performers. Each of these gestures comprise specific performance parameters and illicit many different types of responses including making physical contact with another (‘Contact’), performing exactly the same as another (‘Synchronize’), performing something similar though not exactly the same (‘Imitate’), and making fun of the performer (‘Heckle’). There are many other gestures that illicit performer-to-performer communication but these are the most common.41

The value of live interrelational interactions in Soundpainting offers new value to the performers who collaborate in a greater sense than simply performing their given part. They do not only interpret a score or follow a framework. The performer has to decide how to respond to the signed proposition, without any other guidance as to what to offer. Not only do they, therefore, co-create the piece with the group, but they share the experience of the unknown, creating in the moment. In the moment—this phrase is used much in the Soundpainting workbooks, within the Think Tanks and workshops. It denotes liveness but it also denotes the contribution of everyone. It asserts that the collaborators are acting in a reflexive way in that they consider and reflect on their actions in action (during the activity).42 Notions of ‘liveness’43 are imbued in this phraseology, as it determines the approach should be as instantaneous as possible. It actively encourages a performer to use their intuition. The live performance takes place within a cultural context, and that context can determine much about the collaborative process. Within the 2013 Think Tank the context was a UK Higher Education Institution, where the workshop was billed in the email invitation as an ‘experiment’ during which the group would ‘look to see how to develop the language and how to share it more widely’.44 The context was limited in that all participating members were active Soundpainters, 90% regularly led their own groups as a Soundpainter, and all had and were performing actively in Soundpainting groups. The ephemeral nature of Soundpainting brings something to the notion of this creative act as collaborative. There is no time to go back and edit the piece, and no potential to stop and restart—the philosophy of Soundpainting established by Thompson is that ‘the only mistake is to stop’.45 The moment is complex.46 The phrase offered by the Soundpainter

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is delivered freely and can be issued at any speed. In responding to the signed phrase the performer may be invited to utilise a wide range of things which ensure that collaboration is necessary. Beyond the relational signs noted above, the language enables the use of ‘Memory’ whereby a phrase, an individual or groups’ activity can be set as ‘Memory 1, Memory 2’ and so on. This brings back what has happened before, but it also enables mis-rememberings and, therefore, unintentional development and change. But, when a ‘Memory’ is recalled if it is left to play out it will develop. The language is not restricted to repetition. The notion of development is embedded in the language. The Soundpainter can sign to request ‘Develop This’, but overall there are three rates of development: the first is a ‘slow rate of development’ whereby material still has an obvious connection to the original material a few minutes later; while the second rate if faster, whereby ‘a minute later there would only be a vague relationship to the original idea’; and the third rate is left open to the performer when using open improvisation.47 As such, the content offered never remains static and the performer, even if not signed to change their material, will develop and continue to offer creative invention. The relationship between the Soundpainter and the group, and between each other, becomes intimate. Although it seems immediate, responses are considered and—after a group has rehearsed and performed together often—the personalities and preferences of group members can be used by the Soundpainter to predict, determine or offer surprise within the piece. The players must become aware of everything in a peripheral manner. As they look intently at the Soundpainter they need to know who is doing what and from where sounds are coming to be able to discern and respond to particular requests to ‘Relate To’ an individual, or to ‘Match’ and so copy the material offered elsewhere. It feels analogous to a conversation for those taking part.48 As a Soundpainter, performer and a researcher, my rehearsal notes document that I often question myself about what it is I heard and why I responded in the way I did. This same puzzle occupied the 2013 Think Tank discussions: ‘I am not sure why I responded that way, it just felt right’ (Musician 8); ‘I wanted to try to offer a consonant relationship so I tried to mimic your melody in movement, shaping in relation to pitch’ (Dancer 2). I became aware that as a Soundpainter I hear the combination but often I am focussing on specific sections of the group to decide what to do next, and so my experience is not that of an equal digestion of every element, it is selective. As a performer, the signs directed at me modify

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what I listen for, as I react to fulfil the signed request. In other words, if I am signed: ‘Trumpet 1’, ‘Relate To’, ‘Trombone 1’, I will focus more attention on the trombone than to the other parts of the ensemble. Both Soundpainter and the performers need to be discerning and selective. The reasons for the Soundpainters choices may not be transparent to the ensemble but they should be thought-out and meaningful to the Soundpainter. This process is not dissimilar to that of our experience listening to recorded popular music: I listen to recording in the full knowledge that what I hear is something that never existed, that never could exist, as a ‘performance’, something happening in a single time and space; nevertheless, it is now happening, in a single time and space: it is thus a performance and I hear it as one.49

The experience of the moment in Soundpainting is comparable: no one can take in every element, but it is different in that the elements do exist in a real sense in the moment. But, as discussed below, looking for new forms of dissemination, the 2013 Think Tank filmed and recorded sessions, resulting in a performance documentary which brings together movement and music recorded separately, which never existed in the same moment, though produced via the same method.

Soundpainting Think Tank Artist-researchers collaborating in this 2013 Think Tank generated a dialogue across institutional, cultural and disciplinary boundaries which aimed to explore the creative and collaborative potential of working in the moment. Specifically this version of the annual Think Tank looked at presenting the performance of Soundpainting in a new way, other than in a live concert. The aim was to produce a performance documentary: a film of performance, which would show how Soundpainting is used to create a new work. The film would be, and was, released on various online video platforms for open source access.50 As the ‘language’ is inscribed on the body the viewer would be able to see the sign making in action and hear/ see the results from the performers. As it was intended to be a performance with a tone of a documentary—as such it was meant to be informative—we hear Thompson discussing the intensions of the film right at the start (00:21–00:28) and we see the members of the group performing as a whole and in smaller groups but importantly the camera is not one which

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looks at a stage from the back of the auditorium. The camera is used in three main ways: (1) as an observer to the scene looking at the performers from an audience perspective (05:18–05:40); (2) as a fly on the wall, showing angles from within the performance (04:53–05:17), taking a perspective of one of the performers, whereby the cameras see hands, faces, feet (06:00–06:17), shadows (05:42–06:00) and reactions up close and personal (it is notable here too that the camera crew were made up on practising Soundpainters); (3) taking a view of the Soundpainters, notable during the choral sections of the film (01:43–02:18), whereby the Soundpainters chooses and changes the signs as seen clearly and during the opening of the film, where the camera is mobile capturing the initial signed gestures and the responses (00:00–00:26). To formulate a new way to disseminate Soundpainting, we discussed why we needed to develop the current practice. Live performance is both traditional for music but also limits the reach of your audience. We considered how to develop a wider audience. Any new audience would need to be introduced not only to the results but also to the ways of its making. In other words, we hoped that the film would expose the concept of ‘doing-­ thinking’ in the moment, to borrow Nelson’s words. The Think Tank annually explores the possibilities of the language to advance its application and to develop new signs to facilitate creative potential (the 2013 iteration was the first to produce a film). ‘Experiential approaches’ advocated by Kershaw and Nicholson51 are relevant here: a co-creative performance method which exists in the moment must be captured in some form if the aim is to share it more widely, but the form could not be an audio recording alone when the method is innately interdisciplinary. A video recording would be possible, but a conventional documentary would not show the freedom of instantaneous changes of the practice, and a recording of a performance would not show the different ways in which the Soundpainters can work. Our chosen form, a performance d ­ ocumentary, was a way to bring together all possibilities and to experiment with bringing together music and dance composed through Soundpainting. Notable is that the passage whereby music as soundtrack and movement as image are brought together is produced by the same ensemble members, recording first the audio and then the visual (02:18–03:10; 04:15–04:51). As the moment is important in creating the work and also in trying to share that moment experience via the film, so too is the concept of invention vital. As Carter outlines, in discussing the ethics of invention, ‘discur-

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sive momentum provides the interest impelling invention … interest precedes invention rather than being a quality of the invention. It also produces collaboration’.52 This quotation bears affinity to the entire Soundpainting process in that understanding the analogy to language in and through practice, the Soundpainting group feels that ‘discursive momentum’ and responses in the moment. The freedom which comes from the Soundpainting philosophy whereby there is no mistake, ensures that ‘creativity is never stifled!’.53 The Soundpainter ‘imposes…. [to] then compose’,54 ensuring that any invention is used creatively between the members of the group. The shared co-creation of the work is essential to the way in which the language functions. If: ‘Invention begins when what signifies exceeds its signification—when what means one thing, or conventionally functions in one role, discloses other possibilities’.55 To this end, the dissemination of a film, which is not performance, concert, documentary or fly-on-the-wall filming, but a combination of them all, exceeds its elemental features to, become a new form of dissemination.

Authorship ‘It is one person up there making the choices, setting the framework … performers play within that framework’.56 The perspective of the Soundpainter, and in this case the creator of the method, is a strong one. It asserts that the owner of the work is the Soundpainter, as Thompson has repeated in all the interviews, questionnaires and Think Tanks I have attended.57 There are however obvious concerns about authorship and ownership in this context where the work is collaborative and labour distributed across the group. There are differing roles certainly, but authorship needs greater attention. The Soundpainter is nominally in control: the Soundpainter makes the initial choices of signed content, and live edits the groups, deciding who plays and when, but the content is not made by the Soundpainter. Are all responses creative and, therefore, in some way owned by the performer? This is an issue which has been contended within the Soundpainting community. Bruno Faria has questioned how thinking about composition and doing performance relate—the work is co-created. Since the 2008 Think Tank Faria has wondered ‘whether one could argue that there is a single author for a Soundpainting’. He furthers this by noting:

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The string of terms universal, multidisciplinary, live composing, sign language, the use of other concepts such as signed gestures, and the authorship attributed to the Soundpainter may represent Thompson’s understanding of what Soundpainting came to be. To him and many Soundpainting practitioners, what Soundpainting is, who the Soundpainter is and what he or she does might be to some degree be self-evident. But one could ask: what does such definition show or fail to show about the practice.58

As the work relies on the invention of everyone in the group, everyone contributes something. The very nature of this inclusive approach to co-­ creative practice is Musicking in action. ‘To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance’.59 In their chapter exploring ethics in practice as research, Bannermann and McLaughlin question whether we are talking about the ‘author or collaborators’.60 The implication in this context is that all collaborators are contributing to the work as authors, composers and choreographers. They are making the choices of what they will be as they then perform that content. The inbetweenness of the roles, resting not as a composer, nor as a choreographer, nor as a performer, but rather enacting a fluid role which crosses each of these nominal labels, to denote ownership in creative practice. ‘In the flow of devising it is not always easy to know who initiated what’.61 What is under discussion here is their ‘ethical intuition’.62 Ethical intuition is often also referred to as moral intuition. It denotes that one can know a truth without a referential sign to show that truth, it can be sourced from a combination of signs, from context. This means that we should not just take Thompson’s perspective as a given, but we should recognise and witness the full extent of the role played by all participants. Works produced via co-labour and distributed creativities need to be held accountable to distributed accreditation, acknowledging authorship as collaborative. There may be variance in the role, but these can be ascribed in words. I am reticent to suggest contractual percentiles as the level and amount of contribution is impossible to weigh when the relational qualities of the work are innate and bear out the existence of content between performers. It is notable that the credits to What About the Bush? list everyone equally as ensemble members.63 In considering the role of the Soundpainter in our first documented discussion, Thompson noted he was: ‘The creator of the work; The director of the performance; The instigation for communication among an ensemble; A catalyst for creation and mediator for artistic dialogue’.64

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Evidence to the effect that although Soundpainting has a leader,65 the ensemble members have agency and inventive potential. Thompson’s comments regarding the potential for errors in reading the signs reveal this too: It is much more interesting and challenging to Soundpaint with the so-­ called mistake than to acknowledge one has been made. My experience has been that composing with the mistake is quite often a more interesting direction to take the composition than any I could think of. Picasso, Miles Davis, Anthony Braxton, among many other composers, acknowledge the so-called mistake as an opportunity to discover new material and not as a road block. I share this belief and have made it an important part of the basic philosophy of Soundpainting.66

The above acknowledgement is important in considering ethical intuition: if the Soundpainter is using things she/he had not thought of, then the inventive source is the performer. The co-creative approach has the potential to be equitable—in thinking through the social interaction in Soundpainting the notion of the sole genius is removed, as the Soundpainter cannot create a piece without the offerings of the group. The Soundpainter is only as successful and as creative as the whole group. I propose then that each participant in a Soundpainting work be accredited equally in credits. Rather than define the author as the Soundpainter, authorship as constructed through the language using all the participants is incorporated within Thompson’s comment: ‘I am a “composer” who utilizes the Soundpainting language as the tool to realize the work’.67 This is at odds then with a view of the Soundpainter as ‘the sole creator of the Soundpainting composition’.68 As in many collaborative productions, it would be worth further research into how authorship is ascribed. When the following is currently held to be true it shows that those performing and improvising need to be recognised to a greater degree: ‘The Soundpainter owns the intellectual property of the Soundpainting composition’.69

Summary Artistic Research, research done into one’s practice and creative acts, is an exciting world which raises many problems. These problems are all opportunities to experiment, to further my own knowledge of my practice, of the methods I am using, and of those I am collaborating with. As Smith and Dean note, research which involves practice is often a story of

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‘deeply multi-dimensional, reciprocal and iterative journeys of making work!’.70 Above, I have outlined the nature of Soundpainting as a creative method which is collaborative. I detailed what the aims of the 2013 Think Tank were while presenting feedback from my co-creators as to how they think about Soundpainting and how they work within it. I have illustrated some aspects concerning how we have collectively considered new ways to disseminate this artistic method (which requires more varied inventive work in the future).71 This case study does not intend to give a single answer to how collaboration functions: it shows one approach and reveals, I hope, the many problems it entails. The problems I see as comparable to the role of the Soundpainter who issues a signed phrase to instigate a work: the problems offer up questions for us as practitioners, or practice researchers to go and explore. The creative journey is required to test the problem: we must do and think at the same time. Nelson’s ‘doing-thinking’72 approach is absolutely integral to Soundpainting and to furthering knowledge in this field. Acknowledgements  Thanks are due to all who collaborated on the 2013 International Soundpainting Think Tank and the Kingston Soundpainting Ensemble, especially to Claudio Somigli, Jennifer Rahfeldt, Bruno Faria, Jane Masters, Merrellene Middleton, and Lucy Ryding. Special thanks to The Practice Research Unit at Kingston University which ran from 2010 to 2015, for funding this Think Tank, and Roehampton University for funding the 2008 artist in residence scheme from where this collaboration began. I dedicate this chapter to the memory of fellow Soundpainter and Think Tank participant, Diego Ghymers.

Notes 1. Robin Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 2. Helen Julia Minors, ‘Music and Movement in Dialogue: Exploring gesture in Soundpainting,’ Les Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique, 13, no. 1–2 (2012): 87–96. 3. Angelique Cormier and Walter Thompson, What About the Bush?, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huc-f8zigxQ. (last accessed 2 August 2019). 4. Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon, eds., Performance and Technology: Practices of virtual embodiment and interactivity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 195.

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5. Walter Thompson, ‘Questionnaire: Written and conducted by Helen Julia Minors,’ Kingston University, London, 2010. http://www.Soundpainting. com/blog/. (last accessed 2 August 2019). 6. Daniel Albright, Music Speaks: On the language of opera, dance, and song (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009). 7. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 8. Ibid. 9. Walter Thompson, Soundpainting; The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 3: Theater and Dance [with DVD] (New York, Walter Thompson Orchestra, 2014); Walter Thompson, Soundpainting; The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 2 [with DVD] (New York, Walter Thompson Orchestra, 2009a); Walter Thompson, Soundpainting; The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 1 [with DVD] (New York, Walter Thompson Orchestra, 2006). 10. Walter Thompson and Helen Julia Minors, ‘Soundpainting Interview with Walter Thompson Part 1,’ 2015a, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oRLRVumJfhg. (date last accessed 2 August 2019). 11. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 12. I refer to Think Tank members by art form and number in what follows. I am grateful to those you took the time to respond to my questions during the Think Tank and to those you emailed replies after the event. 13. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 14. For an example of this see Helen Julia Minors, Pamela Burnard, Charles Wiffen, Zaina Shihabi and J. Simon Van Der Walt, ‘Mapping Trends and Framing Issues in Higher Music Education: Challenging minds/changes practices,’ London Review of Education, 15, no. 3 (2017): 457–473. 15. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 16. Ibid. 17. For a discussion of this syntax see Minors, ‘Music and Movement in Dialogue,’ 2012, 87–96. 18. Ibid. 19. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. In personal discussion with Thompson, during the 2013 Think Tank. 23. Peter Wiegold, ‘The Third Orchestra,’ Barbican, 2019. https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/the-third-orchestra. (last accessed 9 August 2019). 24. Peter Wiegold and Helen Julia Minors, ‘Women’s Voices at Club Inégales,’ London: Club Inégales, 2019.

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25. Discussion of specific issues or performances in Soundpainting can be read in Minors, ‘Music and Movement in Dialogue,’ 2012 Helen Julia Minors, ‘Soundpainting: Navigating creativity,’ Choreologica: The Journal of European association of dance historians, 6, no. 1 (2013b): 79–90; or Helen Julia Minors, ‘Soundpainting: The use of space in creating dance-music pieces,’ in Sound, Music and the Moving-thinking Body, edited by Marilyn Wyres and Lorenzo Glieca (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013c), 27–34. 26. Nelson, Practice as Research, 2013, 57. 27. What About the Bush? (01:43–02:18). The time codes used from herein refer to minutes and seconds. 28. Nelson, Practice as Research, 2013, 58. 29. Robyn Stewart, ‘Creating New Stories For Praxis: Navigations, narrations, neonarratives,’ in Practice as Research: Approaches to creative arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London and New  York: I.B.  Taurus, 2007, rpt 2010), 124. 30. Jerome Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1966), 72. 31. Donald A.  Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1983), 42. 32. Nelson, Practice as Research, 2013, 22. 33. Ibid. 34. Philip Taylor, ‘Doing Reflective Practitioner Research in Arts Education,’ in Researching Drama and Arts Education: Paradigms and possibilities (London: Flamer Press, 1996), 25–28. 35. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 36. Marc Duby, ‘Soundpainting as a System for the Collaborative Creation of Music in Performance,’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pretoria, South Africa, 2006, 37. 37. Robert Cohen, Working Together in Theatre: Collaboration and leadership (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 9. 38. Elizabeth Haddon and Pamela Burnard, eds., Creative Teaching for Creative Learning in Higher Music Education (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 242. 39. Ibid. 40. Cohen, Working Together in Theatre, 2011, 13. 41. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 42. For further discussion on reflexive action, in other words reflection in and reflection on actions see Schön, The Reflective Practitioner, 1998. 43. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a mediatized culture (London and New York: Routledge), 1999. 44. ‘2013 Soundpainting Think Tank,’ email Invitation, August 2012.

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45. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 46. I outline an idea of the moment experience elsewhere discussing what happens in the moment from the interpretative perspective, see ‘Exploring Interart Dialogue in Erik Satie’s Sports et Divertissements (1914/1922),’ in Erik Satie: Music, art and literature, edited by Caroline Potter (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 115–136. 47. Thompson, Soundpainting; The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 3, 6. 48. Minors, ‘Music and Movement in Dialogue,’ 2012, 88. 49. Simon Frith, Performing Rites (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996), 211. 50. What About the Bush? 51. Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson, eds., Research Methods in Theatre and Performance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 11. 52. Paul Carter, ‘Interest: The ethics of invention,’ in Practice as Research: Approaches to creative arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2007, rpt 2010), 22. 53. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 54. Ibid. 55. Carter, ‘Interest: The Ethics of Invention,’ 14. 56. Walter Thompson and Helen Julia Minors, ‘Interview in Paris’, recording of a structured conversation shot at the Réunion des musiciens de jazz, Paris, 2011: 03:28–03:38. 57. See Minors, ‘Music and Movement in Dialogue,’ 2012; Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010; Minors, ‘Soundpainting: Navigating creativity,’ 2013b; Minors, ‘Soundpainting: The use of space in creating dance-music pieces,’ 2013c; Thompson, ‘Soundpainting Interview with Walter Thompson,’ 2015, Parts 1–4. 58. Bruno Faria, ‘Exercising Musicianship anew Through Soundpainting Speaking Music Through Sound Gestures,’ Ph.D.  dissertation, Malmö Academy of Music, Sweden, 2016, 26. 59. Christopher  Small, Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 9. 60. Christopher Bannermann and Cahal McLaughin, ‘Collaborative Ethics in Practice-as-Research,’ in Practice-as-Research: In performance and screen, edited by Ludiume Allegue, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw and Angela Piccini (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 67. 61. Ibid., 69. 62. Ibid., 68. 63. What About the Bush? (08:50–09:50). 64. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 65. What About the Bush? (00:00–00:26). 66. Thompson, ‘Questionnaire,’ 2010. 67. Ibid.

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68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, eds., Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 197. 71. Further experiments in the dissemination of Soundpainting have continued, notably the International Soundpainting Video Postcard Project, which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCAkP3R8RUMIkIgvMi_uRcHw (last accessed 10 August 2019). 72. Nelson, Practice as Research, 2013, 22.

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Minors, Helen Julia. 2012a. Music and Movement in Dialogue: Exploring Gesture in Soundpainting. Les Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique 13 (1–2): 87–96. ———. 2012b. In collaboration: Toward a Gesture Analysis of Music and Dance. In Bewegungen zwischen Horen und Sehen: Denkbewegungen uber Bewegungskunste, ed. Stephanie Schroedter, 163–180. Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. ———. 2013a. Exploring Interart Dialogue in Erik Satie’s Sports et Divertissements (1914/1922). In Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature, ed. Caroline Potter, 115–136. Farnham: Ashgate. ———. 2013b. Soundpainting: Navigating Creativity. Choreologica: The Journal of European Association of Dance Historians 6 (1): 79–90. ———. 2013c. Soundpainting: The Use of Space in Creating Dance-Music Pieces. In Sound, Music and the Moving-Thinking Body, ed. Marilyn Wyres and Lorenzo Glieca, 27–34. London: Cambridge Scholars Press. ———, ed. 2013d. Music, Text and Translation. London: Bloomsbury. Minors, Helen Julia, Pamela Burnard, Charles Wiffen, Zaina Shihabi, and J. Simon Van Der Walt. 2017. Mapping Trends and Framing Issues in Higher Music Education: Challenging Minds/Changing Practices. London Review of Education 15 (3): 457–473. Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schön, Donald A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Aldershot: Ashgate, rpt 1998. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean, eds. 2003. Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, rpt. 2010. Stewart, Robyn. 2007. Creating New Stories For Praxis: Navigations, Narrations, Neonarratives. In Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts, ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, 123–133. London/New York: I.B. Taurus, rpt 2010. Taylor, Philip. 1996. Doing Reflective Practitioner Research in Arts Education. In Researching Drama and Arts Education: Paradigms and Possibilities. London: Flamer Press. Thompson, Walter. 2006. Soundpainting: The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 1 [with DVD]. New York: Walter Thompson Orchestra. ———. 2008. Soundpainting Residency, Michael Chanan (filmed), Helen Julia Minors (producer), Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research, Roehampton University, London. ———. 2009a. Soundpainting; The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 2 [with DVD]. New York: Walter Thompson Orchestra.

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———. 2009b. Walter Thompson Interview: 9 July 2009, Taran’s Free Jazz Hour. http://taransfreejazzhour.com/podcast/walter-thompsoninter view11-july-09.html. Accessed 10 Mar 2011. ———. 2010. Questionnaire: Written and Conducted by Helen Julia Minors. Kingston University, London. http://www.Soundpainting.com/blog/. Accessed 2 Aug 2019. ———. 2014. Soundpainting; The Art of Live Composition, Workbook 3: Theater and Dance [with DVD]. New York: Walter Thompson Orchestra. Thompson, Walter, and Helen Julia Minors. 2011. Interview in Paris. Recording of a structured conversation shot at the Réunion des musiciens de jazz, Paris. ———. 2015a. Soundpainting Interview with Walter Thompson Part 1. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLRVumJfhg. Accessed 2 Aug 2019. ———. 2015b. Soundpainting Interview with Walter Thompson Part 2. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WpILl0h6fU. Accessed 2 Aug 2019. ———. 2015c. Soundpainting Interview with Walter Thompson Part 3. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzeuBP8BUxk. Accessed 2 Aug 2019. ———. 2015d. Soundpainting Interview with Walter Thompson Part 4. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWASsgNq1Rc. Accessed 2 Aug 2019. Wiegold, Peter. 2019. The Third Orchestra. Barbican. https://www.barbican. org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/the-third-orchestra. Accessed 9 Aug 2019. Wiegold, Peter, and Helen Julia Minors. 2019. Women’s Voices at Club Inégales. London: Club Inégales.

CHAPTER 8

Collaboration and the Practitioner-­ Researcher: A Composer’s Perspective Tom Armstrong

This chapter examines my collaboration with trumpeter, Simon Desbruslais, during the composition of a new work for trumpet and string quartet (played by the Ligeti Quartet) from my perspective as a practitioner-­ researcher working in a university. In adopting this perspective, I make a link between studies of distributed creativity in music1 and research on artists working in university environments.2 I achieve this by studying collaboration in two parts of the project corresponding to the artistic and academic cultures that the practitioner-researcher role straddles: the conception, creation and performance preparation of Albumleaves (for trumpet and string quartet) and the development and trialling of ComNote (a smartphone app). Albumleaves is a composition in mobile form consisting of 12 self-contained pages that can be ordered freely and independently by the trumpet and strings (the members of the quartet having to agree on their order). Com-Note is an Android app that facilitates collaborative composition by allowing audiovisual slide shows to be assembled on the fly and shared via Dropbox. Sharing allows users to comment

T. Armstrong (*) Department of Music and Media, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_8

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on each other’s slide shows, inserting their own slides to produce composite ­narratives—this clearly has great potential for both facilitating and tracking collaboration.3 Simon, myself and two members of the string quartet were each loaned a Samsung phone so that Albumleaves could become a ‘test bed’ for the technology. My study of collaboration in both the Albumleaves and Com-Note strands of the project surfaces two pairs of tensions between determinacy and indeterminacy and between artistic practice and academic research. Below, I show how these tensions affected the collaboration and I assess the degree to which this type of interaction was able to resolve them. In the conclusion, I argue these tensions are necessary to retain the integrity of the practitioner-researcher model and that collaboration may be a particularly useful vehicle for holding them in productive balance. My overarching aim is to present a participant perspective on meeting the challenge of realising a combined artistic and research project, through collaboration, within the unique environment of today’s research-intensive university. The methodology adopted in this investigation is broadly qualitative. I offer an interpretation of my experience of engaging in collaboration that attempts to place this experience in a ‘larger conditional frame or context in which it is embedded’,4 and I describe the ‘process or the ongoing and changing forms of action/interaction/emotions that are taken in responses to events and the problems that arise to inhibit action/interaction/ emotion’.5 I was a participant in the project under investigation (similarly to the authors of Chaps. 5, 6, 7, 10, 11 and 12), and the experiences interpreted were my own, hence a connection to auto-ethnography may be made, ‘an autobiographical genre that connects the personal to the cultural, social, and political’.6 In the following account the personal is my interaction with Simon and the broader embedding context is my role as a practitioner-­ researcher in a university. The timeline in Table 8.1 shows the types of data collected and their distribution over the project: transcribed recordings, Com-Note narratives, journal entries and memory data. One data source not shown is email; this was ubiquitous through the timeline and documented some significant interactions. Some data were collected jointly— Simon and I both contributed Com-Note narratives and memory data; the latter were based on four key interactions (shaded grey in Table 8.1) which we selected together according to significance: initial discussion, first rehearsal, pre-premiere development rehearsal and first attempt at mobile performance. Coding and analysis were carried out by me but Simon was

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Table 8.1  Albumleaves project timeline Date

Occasion

Data

February 2012

Workshop (trumpet and piano) SD, TA

Transcribed audio

September 2012

Meeting at Southbank Centre SD, TA (SBC)

Transcribed audio

December 2012

Com-Note project mooted

January 2013

Com-Note (internal) funding bid submitted

February 2013

Com-Note funding bid successful

March 2013

TA begins work on Albumleaves

Journal entries Com-Note narratives

April 2013

Meeting to introduce Com-Note and distribute phones SD, TA, LQ (Patrick Dawkins and Valerie Wellbanks)

May 2013

Meeting to discuss additional requirements for Com-Note in detail and their implementation TA, DWRC colleagues

June 2013

Rehearsal of 5 pages including 96 Beats SD,

Transcribed audio

LQ (SUR)

Com-Note narrative

August 2013

TA completes final page

October 2013

SD premieres selected pages at Goldsmiths College SD, TA

6 November 2013

Development rehearsal at King’s College

Transcribed audio

London on Intersecting Planes SD, TA (KCL) 25 November 2013

‘Dress rehearsal’ SD, TA, LQ

Transcribed audio

26 November 2013

World premiere at King’s College London

Audio

(continued)

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Table 8.1  (continued) May 2014

Development rehearsal at Shoreditch Church

Transcribed audio

SD, TA, LQ (SHO) July 2014

Com-Note app released on Google Play. First successful narrative share SD, TA

30 July–19 Aug 2014 Intensive rehearsals SD, LQ 20–22 August 2014

Recording sessions SD, LQ

June 2016

CD editing session TA, engineer/producer

shown all the transcripts and codings; initial themes were also discussed, but the specific interpretation in this chapter is mine, based, as it is, on a perspective from within my own practice and profession. My approach to collaboration in Albumleaves may be described as exhibiting a ‘collaborative attitude … a heightened, emphasised, and more socialised version of the general creative act … [a] useful corrective to those still present and influential lone-ranger models of creativity’.7 The project was not collaborative at every stage; the joint working, sharing of responsibility, dual authorship and combined action that mark out collaboration, according to Gritten, came and went as work progressed. The phase between commencing composition proper in March 2013 and sending first drafts of pages to Simon in late May is an example of what Alan Taylor describes as consultative working8; here, I worked on pages alone but informed by the discussion I had with Simon the previous September—this discussion sowed the seeds of Albumleaves’ mobile form (we discussed some measure of independence between trumpet and quartet) and cemented the use of three instruments (trumpet, piccolo trumpet and flugelhorn), both distinctive features of the piece. The project became more collaborative in its later stages as I worked with Simon on certain problematic pages and with all the performers on how to realise Albumleaves in its mobile configuration (both to be discussed below). Hayden and Windsor would nuance much of the collaboration here as interactive, a reflective process involving negotiation with musicians9— perhaps using more open notation—but with the composer maintaining authorial control. Notation in Albumleaves constitutes another important

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site for collaboration; the majority of its pages direct performers’ creativity beyond expressive decisions to choices that affect, for example, textural density or harmony. In Gresser’s words, performers become structuring co-creators, ordering ‘fairly clear single musical ideas and events’.10 Considering the Albumleaves project at a greater distance, it is possible to detect a degree of reciprocity in its outcomes that suggests collaboration was present even if intermittently so11: the triple-trumpet instrumentation enshrined Simon’s request at our first meeting for a piece involving the piccolo trumpet, particularly with the potential to be played as a solo (we discussed the possibility of detaching the trumpet from the quartet) and I have continued to explore mobile form in subsequent pieces; Simon, meanwhile, has developed a research strand in collaboration drawing on his work with a range of British composers on two CD recordings.12 My interest in collaboration relates to my role as a practitioner-­ researcher, a term usually referring to artistic practitioners employed in universities (as discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3). The artist in the university has become more common in the wake of reforms to higher education in the late 1980s and 1990s: the redesignation of polytechnics as universities in the UK,13 the Bologna Declaration in Europe14 and the absorption of conservatoires and other tertiary institutions into universities in Australia.15 Practitioner-researchers typically pursue research of the kinds adumbrated by Rubidge16—practice as, practice-led, or research into practice, through practice—which allows them to offer a perspective from within their artistic work. My research prior to and during Albumleaves followed Rubidge’s practice-led paradigm,17 that is, research ‘initiated by an artistic hunch, intuition, or question, or an artistic or technical concern generated by the researcher’s own practice’.18 The question I explored through my work was how to create a less hierarchical relationship with performers, mainly addressed through developing a more collaborative practice as described above. The practitioner-researcher role is a complex one comprising activities distributed between artistic and academic cultures. Proposed models include a nexus linking artistic practice, research and teaching which allows information to flow between these roles19 and a matrix distributed between artistic practice and (scientific) research poles that plots changes in modes of knowledge and evaluation, areas of action, and working processes according to the practice- or research-related activities being undertaken.20 The experience of working in such interconnected zones is often one of tension as the expectations and norms of different cultures conflict.21

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Biggs and Büchler identify sources of tension resulting from a process of academicisation wherein artistic practice has tended to be subsumed within academia then had the latter’s conventions and values foisted upon it22; this creates incompatibilities when artistic practice comes into contact with the practice of academic research. In Albumleaves two areas of tension may be identified between artistic and academic practice—these relate to research questions and method. The next part of the chapter examines the Albumleaves project in more detail as an artistic and research process; I look at my collaboration with the performers, chiefly trumpeter Simon Desbruslais, in order to reveal the tensions inherent in both these processes and to assess the degree to which collaboration was able to resolve them. Our artistic collaboration surfaces tensions between determinacy and indeterminacy; our research collaboration, via the Com-Note app, shows the values and actions23 of artistic practice and academic research in tension with each other, particularly over research design and conduct.

Determinacy Versus Indeterminacy I had been embracing limited notational indeterminacy for several years before working on Albumleaves; it formed my chief means of investigating the composer/performer relationship, provided a route into practice-led research and facilitated my gradual assumption of a practitioner-researcher role. Albumleaves marked a significant personal development and extension of indeterminacy in the variety of notations utilised and in its application to the level of form. My lack of experience with such an all-encompassing use of indeterminacy was one likely cause of the tensions described below. Another possible cause was a fault line within my realisation of mobile form; although I composed Albumleaves as a set of self-contained pages for trumpet and quartet with no master score these pages were composed together, sharing pitch materials and roughly aligned in duration. What I overlooked was the possibility of composing the pages independently, something that a mobile conception of form affords and perhaps demands— this was to create uncertainty on mine and the performers’ parts about the viability of a mobile realisation of Albumleaves. Determinate/indeterminate tensions are now discussed in three collaborations drawn from different parts of the project timeline. 96 Beats (Musical Example 8.1) was one of the earliest pages to be composed and is an example of the score as ‘construction kit’.24 This approach

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Musical Example 8.1  96 Beats (original notation)

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was designed to encourage collaboration via the notation; my role stopped short of determining the rhythmic details of the music, instead providing instructions that (when applied to the given pitch materials) would produce changes in density—the trumpet moving towards sparsity and back again, the quartet tracing the reverse process. My auto-ethnographic account of the first rehearsal of this page highlights a problem that was to prove persistent: I liked the spasmodic, lurching rhythms the quartet produced, they seemed to have a feeling of spontaneity in keeping with their improvised nature, and I was confident the changes in texture would become clearer with familiarity. Simon had a much harder time—forgetting instructions, forgetting to change gamuts, the notation appearing to offer him little insight into the quality of sound (pointillistic, angular) I had imagined. I was frustrated that, for Simon, a notation I had hoped would allow for spontaneity appeared to have had the opposite effect.25

The reason for the disparity noted above was pinpointed by Richard Jones, the Ligeti Quartet’s violist, in a later rehearsal immediately prior to the premiere of Albumleaves at which the problem remained unresolved: ‘That’s funny, yes, because our figures imply pointillist stuff, whereas his could be, you know, a gamut of pitches that could be a melody’.26 The quartet’s materials consist of four clearly differentiated sounds for each instrument that require different playing actions. The trumpet’s sounds, on the other hand, are far more homogenous with register the main variable in each section. In order to draw Simon more towards the pointillist effect I was after, a far greater variety of material should have been considered. The reason for this oversight may plausibly be linked to the careful determination of pitch in 96 Beats and Albumleaves as a whole. A pitch class set of nine notes is used to derive all the material in the piece, usually by providing a source for smaller six-note sets. 96 Beats uses one such set (6–27 in Allen Forte’s nomenclature)27 which occurs at four different transposition levels within the main set. Each of these four transpositions of 6–27 furnishes the pitches of each instrument in the quartet. The D played by the trumpet is the only member of the main nine-note set not included in the 6–27 transposition network. The remaining trumpet notes (F, G# and B) supply the missing ninth notes from three other transpositions of the main set within which the four 6–27 sets of the strings are invariant. My rather slavish adherence to this (albeit elegant) pitch structure resulted in Simon’s rather impoverished part, one that

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militated against my instructions. A willingness to embrace indeterminacy of pitch could have provided one solution to this problem, for example, asking Simon to devise four different articulations attached to registrally distinct sounds of his own choosing. There were two ways in which tension between the determinacy of the pitch materials and the indeterminacy of the instructions affected the collaboration for Simon. First, he found interpreting the notation with the same improvisatory freedom as the quartet difficult and the score became a stumbling block rather than a spur to invention: I was drawn to playing more melodically, as a melodic style is related to the only other forms of improvisation I had previously done. I had never really attempted an improvisation based partly on text before.28

Second, Simon’s radically different material exacerbated his sense of ‘otherness’ created by being a guest soloist with an established quartet: I would very much get on with my own part, while the quartet got on with theirs … I think this relates to the dynamic of the collaboration—to begin with it was, I think fair to say, ‘me’ and ‘them’—although over time I felt this relationship changing and becoming closer.29

After the first performance, I undertook a thoroughgoing revision of Simon’s part (Musical Example 8.2) in which pitch was less determined, improvisation was explicitly called for and the metrical framework was conventionally notated. Simon and I first trialled this version as part of a joint paper30 and further dialogue followed (remotely, via the Com-Note app) immediately prior to the recording. Over these two interactions, Simon’s interpretation came into much closer alignment with the quartet’s and a degree of reciprocity is evident that suggests collaboration, albeit of a temporally distended kind, did occur beyond the premiere. My instructions became more explicit regarding the result I intended and how it was to be achieved in response to Simon’s need for more scaffolding implied by his continued difficulties with the original version. Simon’s improvising, in turn, became more adventurous in response to my less opaque notation. Both of us embraced greater freedom, me in my notation of pitch, Simon in his interpretation of the score. The determinate and indeterminate elements of the notation co-exist more productively in the revised 96 Beats. Like 96 Beats, Intersecting Planes was a page that proved problematic in its original version (Musical Example 8.3):

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Musical Example 8.2  96 Beats (revised notation)

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Musical Example 8.3  Intersecting Planes (original version)

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I think this page needs further one-one collaboration between us before it is really going to work. I have a lot more work to do to find patterns that fall more easily under your fingers. It sounds like an uncomfortable struggle for you at the moment—that was certainly not my intention and isn’t fair on you.31

Whereas 96 Beats involved collaboration occurring remotely (I was not at the first rehearsal) and over an extended time period, Intersecting Planes saw Simon and I collaborating in the same room for a single session of just over an hour. The tension here between determinacy and indeterminacy is evident not so much in the notation itself but in our attitudes towards it during the session. The problem with the page was that the rapid and ever-­ changing valve combinations necessary to play the notated pitches made my initial aural image of a ‘Ligeti-ish (like something from his Chamber Concerto) fast line’ extremely difficult, if not impossible, to realise.32 Our session was remedial in nature, therefore—an attempt to arrive at an idiomatically workable version of Intersecting Planes. The first half of the session concluded with an improvisatory approach to the notation prompted by the following stimulus: TA Yes, it’s a gigantic great line, almost like it’s going around you, almost. It’s like, revolving around you and you just play... It’s revolving round and you play at any point.33 This produced much the most convincing realisation of the notation so far, as shown by my reaction: ‘that’s actually much more getting to something that would work’.34 But as we progressed with our improvisatory exploration the fixity of the notation started to exert an influence on our judgements: TA I think the difficulty with that is it’s harder to differentiate, it’s harder to get the, kind of, way that the pitches kind of move from line to line. SD Yes. Also, the way that there’d need to be some kind of deliberate dynamic, that approach engenders a sforzando for each entry. So I’m putting sforzandi in where they’re not, just because of what I’m doing, because I’m selecting bits.35

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Once again a tension arose here between the notion of fidelity to the highly determined notation (neatly typeset in Sibelius) and the less ­determinate guided improvisation through which we were reworking the page. This led us back, fruitlessly, to our initial approach, which was to try varying the speed of the As fast as possible tempo marking according to playability. When this approach proved unsatisfactory the session threatened to grind to a halt: TA I think my problem is it’s just not... I’ve, kind of, slightly lost sight of what I want with it now, maybe because we’ve tried so many different things.36 The session was revived by Simon’s suggestion that every note be tongued rather than each line played in one breath (an important part of my initial conception of the page). The marked improvement in accuracy and fluency that resulted (without significant loss of velocity) provided the catalyst necessary to attain the final version of Intersecting Planes, a process that saw Simon intervening more robustly—making suggestions for the notation of accents, discussing the relationship between tonguing and mutes and proposing a double-tongued version: ‘you’ve got more notes for your buck’.37 The resulting notation (Musical Example 8.4) illustrates how the collaboration resolved the initial tensions between the determinate original and the less determinate guided improvisation discussed above: the pitches are unchanged (and now clearer due to the change in articulation) but the irregularly grouped grace notes preserve traces of the fragmentary bursts of notes featured in Simon’s earlier improvisation. The new version contains a greater degree of indeterminacy than the original because the performer is not told how to interpret the groupings— whether they should be audibly separated and, if so, whether by the same amount. The new part, of course, also enshrines Simon’s vital contribution in its revised articulation markings—the molto legato of the original being dispensed with and, with it, my initial ‘babbling’ conception of the trumpet line.38 The tension between determinacy and indeterminacy in Albumleaves is revealed most clearly in my equivocation over the feasibility of mobile form. This had a significant effect on the collaboration prior to the premiere in late 2013 and the issue was not settled until the development rehearsal at Shoreditch Church the following May. These concerns were initially voiced privately—a couple of months after starting work, I com-

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Musical Example 8.4  Intersecting Planes (revised version)

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mented that a mobile realisation ‘might well take a lot of work, negotiation, trial and error’ but that I did not want to abandon this idea because it had ‘driven’ the piece so far.39 The prefatory instructions to the score used for the premiere conveyed these doubts to the performers in the form of three suggestions for page ordering: non-aligned and continuous, non-aligned but moving to a new page together, and aligned. This downgrading of mobile form from a guiding principle to an option gave the performers a ‘get out clause’, and at the rehearsal prior to the premiere the opinion of cellist Valerie Welbanks that ‘I think we’ll do that [independent page orders] when we’ve performed it thirty times’40 was accepted by all parties, myself included. My loss of nerve over mobile form affected the collaboration prior to the premiere by downplaying the area in which the musicians were able to exercise most influence in how Albumleaves actually sounded. Experimentation with the formal parameters of the piece in rehearsal was spurned in favour of more typical concerns over coordination within the quartet and between quartet and trumpet. Even the order of aligned pages was decided with reference to their listing in the prefatory instructions, a listing that followed no other criteria than which trumpet each page required. The extent to which a conventional presentation of the pages had become normative was revealed near the start of the Shoreditch Church session, arranged with the explicit aim of trialling a mobile realisation in preparation for the recording some months later: SD So, is the idea that we just… that we just… all of us do it in different orders? TA Well, yes, I’ve got a different order for you, Simon. I mean, I think, you know, there’s all sorts of ways you can do it. You could leave it completely to chance, or you could discuss it. RJ So, he’s not going to be playing at the same time? TA He’s never going to be playing the same thing as you are.41 The circumstances of this rehearsal were propitious for collaboration because uncertainty as to the outcome was shared by composer and performers. As Fabrice Fitch and Neil Heyde42 remind us, collaboration is enhanced when no participant is further ahead than any other. When our uncertainties were settled after three successful, largely unproblematic, mobile renditions, the collaborative dynamic attained probably its stron-

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gest manifestation in the project; participants started to contribute views on interpretative issues such as embracing silence between pages, as well as potentially sensitive areas such as which pages to include on the recording, with quartet members feeling free to state their preferences; Simon and the quartet discussed the best approach to recording, settling on a multitrack format. Had we rehearsed like this earlier, it is quite clear that formal mobility would have become less of a stumbling block, but at that point I was absorbed in the details of individual pages which, in contradiction to Albumleaves’ mobile formal concept, were being composed with trumpet and quartet aligned and often sharing the same materials.

Artistic Practice Versus Academic Research Tensions between artistic practice and academic research are often reported by practitioner-researchers working in universities as they seek a balance between their careers as artists and the demands made by research-­ intensive institutions such as my own—the University of Surrey, UK.43 In the Albumleaves project as a whole I tried to strike such a balance and I will give a brief overview to show how this played out. I will then discuss how Simon and I collaborated via the Com-Note app, drawing out the tensions referred to above as they relate to issues around research questions and methods. The genesis of Albumleaves followed a familiar pattern for artistic work—Simon commissioned the piece and successfully applied for charitable funding (from the Britten-Pears Foundation) to support it—but my response immediately betrayed the influence of an academic context: Do you have any idea about when the record44 is likely to be released? I ask because the deadline for outputs to be elligible [sic] for the REF is the end of December 2013? I would like to take the opportunity afforded by this piece to investigate the collaborative process in composition.45

The twin concerns of the ‘auditability’ of the piece (REF refers to ‘Research Excellence Framework’, the UK government’s research assessment mechanism) and conceiving of it as an investigation were responsible for shaping the evolution of the project. The Albumleaves project evolved in an emergent way akin to an artistic process and was not planned in detail beforehand. The addition of Com-Note was opportunistic—arising from a chance meeting with David Frohlich, Director of the Digital World

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Research Centre (DWRC), at Surrey—and, in part, a response to institutional pressure to strengthen outputs for the REF, the closing date for which was less than a year away. Com-Note was an ‘add-on’ related to my university employment rather than my artistic activity; it was supported with internal research funding and conceived independently of my involvement with Simon. Albumleaves has given rise to a number of outputs that reflect the diverse sources of dissemination typical of practitioner-researcher productivity46: performances in the UK and China, the Com-Note app, conference papers and, including this chapter, three publications.47 Simon and I developed a strong commitment to Com-Note, even though app development played no part in our initial plan for Albumleaves, but data concerning our respective uses of the app point to a patchy collaboration. Our production of narratives (Com-Note parlance for slideshows) was similar (10 by me, 14 by Simon); we showed adaptability in surmounting problems with Com-Note’s sharing functionality by using YouTube as a platform for uploading narratives created using the app; and we demonstrated persistence in seeing Com-Note through to release on Google Play in July 2014, managing our first successful narrative share via our phones in August. We also engaged in successful collaboration over a page for piccolo trumpet running from mid-May to late June 2013; the narrative I made of this period shows a number of exchanges with Simon (who posted a series of his own narratives on YouTube) including play-­ throughs of work in progress and demonstrations of piccolo trumpet valve combinations. This collaboration resulted in my completely rewriting the page and was vital in developing my knowledge of the piccolo trumpet; for Simon it provided an insight into the indeterminate notation I was using. The situation just described, though, was relatively uncommon during our engagement with Com-Note throughout most of which collaboration was only weakly and sporadically present. I shared only three of my ten narratives with Simon via YouTube, the last of these in January 2014 after a gap of some 7 months and well after the completion of Albumleaves. Whilst Simon produced and shared narratives quite regularly, he tended not to post or exchange comments on them; I posted YouTube comments on eight of Simon’s narratives but he replied to only three, each time with a single comment. Furthermore, my comments often suggest a typically hierarchical relationship of the kind I was seeking to avoid: at the moment I can’t hear much difference between the piano tenuto notes and the sffz staccatissimo ones. Can this be much clearer?48

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The content of our narratives also differed markedly; mine were largely reflective, detailing sticking points and breakthroughs in the ­compositional process, whereas Simon’s were much more technically orientated—Simon offered succinct reports on progress ranging in length from 3 to 14 minutes, whereas I contributed lengthy audiovisual diaries between 9 and 32 minutes in length. Our respective Com-Note narratives rarely exhibit the complementarity usually to be found in collaborative interactions49 and instead they appear to be serving different purposes directed towards different goals, one concerned with revealing process, the other with offering practical solutions. The unevenly realised collaborative interactions described above lay bare two interconnected tensions between artistic practice and academic research that practitioner-researchers need to negotiate. The differing content of mine and Simon’s narratives (reflective commentary versus technical demonstration) speaks to the tension between the process-driven methods important in artistic practice and the answer-driven ones preferred in academic research.50 My narratives show a reflective concern with process whereas Simon’s are more pragmatic and may be conceived as presenting ‘answers’ to the ‘questions’ posed by my notations. But my recourse to inverted commas speaks to a further tension concerning whether the explicit question and answer approach conventionally underpinning much academic research is useful in an artistic process that is commonly experienced as less linear and causal, a ‘journey not yet articulated’51 the purpose of which is to ‘illuminate meaning rather than arrive at a definitive truth’.52 My discursive narratives relate rather obliquely to the research aim of the Com-Note project ‘to explore a novel lightweight approach to supporting collaborative music composition’53 as in many of them I am essentially conducting an internal monologue. Simon’s narratives afford much more potential for collaboration—they are clearly addressed outwards, to me—but, as detailed above, we failed to draw this out in a consistent fashion.

Conclusion The foregoing account has highlighted a dual set of tensions running through the Albumleaves project between determinacy and indeterminacy and within the practitioner-researcher role I adopted; these have affected, and been affected by, collaboration. The determinate/indeterminate tension, caused by the distance Albumleaves travelled from my

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earlier work and by the fault line in its realisation of mobile form, was set in motion at different levels: pitch structure, notation and form. In 96 Beats, the highly determined pitch structure proved incapable of yielding the intended results when combined with a less determined score; in Intersecting Planes complete and neatly typeset notation exerted a werktreue-like influence on both Simon and I as we attempted an improvisatory reworking of it; finally, the form of Albumleaves exhibited a contradiction between its self-­contained pages (synchronously composed for trumpet and quartet) and the intended mobile realisation, which played out in an unhelpful equivocation. My practitioner-researcher role subsumed tensions between the process-driven, open-ended work typical of artistic practice and the product-­ driven, question-based approach found more often in academic research; in our use of Com-Note Simon and I appeared largely under the influence of the former and our often mismatched narratives and sporadic collaboration suggest that we lost touch with the research inquiry to a degree. In all these cases collaboration played some part in resolving tension but with differing degrees of effectiveness. Most successful was Intersecting Planes, the final version of which retained the bulk of the original material but adjusted to reflect aspects of Simon’s improvisation and the idiom of the trumpet. The explicit embrace of improvisation within a looser pitch framework in 96 Beats was a more helpful stimulus for Simon but my reaction to a demo he made immediately prior to the recording, ‘I’d be not averse to you writing out a few signposts for yourself if that’s what you wanted. I thought it was okay actually’,54 points to a dissatisfaction that remains unaddressed. The determinate/indeterminate tension on the formal level is perhaps the least satisfactorily resolved. Despite a healthy collaborative dynamic at Shoreditch Church this session occurred at the wrong point in the compositional process—it should have taken place much closer to the inception of Albumleaves in which case the essentially ‘closed’ nature of each page might have been questioned. Whilst there is little doubt in my mind that Albumleaves convinces as a mobile form it is a somewhat crude example, with prefabricated blocks of uniform material overlapping and butting up against each other and no possibility of transitioning from one block to another. Com-Note as a vehicle for collaboration did not, in this project, prove sufficient to resolve tensions between artistic practice and academic research processes, and these surface readily through an examination of our narratives and interactions. In the state of development the app reached over the course of

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the Albumleaves project the remote, non-real-time interactions it afforded allowed me in particular, but Simon also, to get caught up in our respective practices at the expense of collaboration—tension was not so much resolved, then, as nullified through the suppression of the academic research component. The tensions summarised above have been cast as undesirable and collaboration has been viewed as a means of affecting their resolution. But the tensions surfaced in this collaboration may also be viewed in a more positive light. For example, whilst Albumleaves’ rather crude mobile form is a function of only partially resolved tensions between the determinate way trumpet and quartet pages were conceived (synchronous and dependent) and the indeterminate way they are deployed in the piece (asynchronous and independent) this very crudity is also a possible strength; the resulting structure of uniform, overlapping blocks results in quite audible changes when the sequence of pages is altered and the right programming strategy (i.e. repeating the piece) has the potential to audibly reveal the mobility of the form. Tensile forces are also a means of maintaining the integrity of a structure. The terms used in models of the practitioner-researcher—nexus, matrix and multifaceted—attest to the complexity of the role and the need to balance its various components; maintaining the tensions between these constituents (artistic practice, academic research and teaching) in a productive balance, rather than eradicating them, is surely necessary if they are to be realised to their full potential. In any case, models are often too neat representations; Bennett et al. deliberately avoid a ‘neat table’ as it presents an overly ‘linear’ view of their ART nexus.55 Straight lines are, indeed, rare in reality and one of the aims of this chapter has been to offer an insider perspective on the ‘messiness’ of working as a practitioner-­researcher. In order to reflect this, we might nuance Crispin’s matrix56 by adding flexible lines of force connecting each member rather than having them compartmentalised; this would turn the matrix into a lattice structure that could be pulled out of shape as the practitioner-researcher moves around it. To return, finally, to collaboration, it is important to remember that productive tension has a role to play here too. Moran and John-Steiner remind us that consensus is not the goal of collaboration, and tensions57— ranging across identities, actions, roles and personalities—should be ‘taken advantage of as a mechanism for bringing out latent opportunities of the domain’.58 Sawyer explains that conflict in collaboration is necessary to

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keep groupthink at bay (this occurs when too much group cohesion and bonhomie lead to the marginalisation of dissenting voices and a resulting tendency for the group to perform at a level below that of an individual attempting the same task).59 The tension between artistic practice and academic research that resides within the practitioner-researcher and that I have shown manifest within mine and Simon’s collaboration via Com-­ Note should, therefore, be capable of being positively harnessed through collaboration. This is precisely the aim of the research-creation method proposed by Lacasse and Stévance60; the authors define research-creation as an interdiscipline underpinned by collaboration and with a methodological approach that combines practice and theory. The results of research-creation are of a ‘double nature’61 including ‘both scholarly and artifactual productions (be they artistic or otherwise)’.62 Collaboration is a vital component of research-creation because, in critiquing existing models of the practice/research conjunction, Lacasse and Stévance argue that research and creation are epistemologically distinct (tending towards the general and the particular respectively) and so must be combined in a manner that promotes ‘causal interaction (that is, each having a direct influence on the other)’.63 The outcomes of the Albumleaves project as a whole—a new work, a smartphone app, academic research in the form of chapters and conference papers—mirror those of a research-creation project, but as this chapter has shown, collaboration was less sustained and thoroughgoing than Lacasse and Stévance would wish. The intermittent engagement with collaboration was partly a reflection of the piecemeal way in which the project evolved, for example, the way that the development of Com-Note was opportunistically ‘bolted on’ at a later stage. Piecemeal too was my development as a practitioner-researcher before and during the project. I am of a similar generation to the Australian artists described in Wilson64 whose careers span the period before and after the absorption of creative arts education at the tertiary level into universities. I and many others have had to adjust as, in the UK since the late 1990s, the notion of what it means to produce research for all artistic practitioners in universities has shifted from one of equivalence to one conceived ‘in terms of aims, objectives and methods’.65 However imperfectly realised at times the practice and study of collaboration have provided a route into engaging more actively with academic culture as a practitioner-researcher; in doing so, I have reconsidered my relationship with performers and reinvigorated my practice for the benefit, I hope, of all those involved in the chain of composition, performance and reception.

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Notes 1. See, for example, Eric F.  Clarke and Mark Doffman, ‘Introduction and Overview,’ in Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and improvisation in contemporary music, edited by Eric F.  Clarke and Mark Doffman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–18. 2. Dawn Bennett, David Wright and Diana M. Blom, ‘The Artistic Practice-­ Research-­ Teaching (ART) Nexus: Translating the information flow,’ Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 7, no. 2 (2010): 1–19; Diana M.  Blom, Dawn Bennett and David Wright, ‘How Artists Working in Academia View Artistic Practice as Research: Implications for tertiary music education,’ International Journal of Music Education, 29, no. 4 (2011): 359–373; Jenny Wilson, Artists in the University: Positioning artistic research in higher education (Singapore: Springer, 2018). 3. Tom Armstrong, Janko Calic, Simon Desbruslais, David Frohlich, Tara Knights and Haiyue Yuan, ‘Com-Note: Designing a composer’s notebook for collaborative music composition,’ in Final Paper/proceedings of the Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts Conference, edited by Anastasios Maragiannis (London: DRHA, 2015), 41–48. 4. Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss, Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (London: Sage Publications, 2008), 17. 5. Ibid. 6. Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Carolyn Ellis, ‘Introduction,’ in Music Autoethnographies: Making auto-ethnography/making music personal, edited by Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Carolyn Ellis, 1–20 (Australian Academic Press, 2009), 7. 7. Anthony Gritten, 2010. ‘Is this Collaborating? In Search of an Artistic Attitude,’  in Collision edited by Kevin Laycock (Leeds: Gallery Oldham with University of Leeds, 2010), 11. This volume is not paginated (this is a visual artist’s exhibition catalogue). 8. Alan Taylor, ‘Collaboration in Contemporary Music: A theoretical view,’ Contemporary Music Review, 35, no. 6 (2016): 562–578. 9. Sam Hayden and Luke Windsor, ‘Collaboration and the Composer: Case studies from the end of the twentieth century,’ Tempo, 61, no. 240 (2007): 28–39. 10. Clemens Gresser, ‘Prose Collection: The performer and listener as co-­creator,’ in Changing the System: The music of Christian Wolff, edited by Stephen Chase and Philip Thomas, 193–210 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 194. 11. Clarke and Doffman, Distributed Creativity, 2017. 12. Psalm. Signum Records, 2014 SIGCD403; The Art of Dancing. Signum Records, 2017 SIGCD513.

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13. Robin Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 14. Darla Crispin, ‘Artistic Research and Music Scholarship: Musings and models from a continental European perspective,’ in Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, criticism, practice, edited by Mine Dogantan-­ Dack (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 53–72. 15. Wilson, Artists in the University, 2018. 16. Sarah Rubidge, ‘Artists in the Academy: Reflections on artistic practice as research,’ (2005). https://ausdance.org.au/articles/details/artists-inthe-academy-reflections-on-artistic-practice-as-research (last accessed 8 December, 2018). 17. For a discussion of collaboration in my work since 2009 see Tom Armstrong, ‘An Experimental Turn: A composer’s perspective on a changing practice,’ in Music and Sonic Art: Theories and practices, edited by John Dack and Mine Dogantan-Dack (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 138–158. 18. Rubidge, ‘Artists in the Academy,’ 2005, n.p. 19. Bennett et al., ‘The Artistic Practice-Research-Teaching (ART) Nexus,’ 2010, 1–19. 20. Crispin, ‘Artistic Research and Music Scholarship,’ 2015. 21. Practitioner-researchers have also commented on the benefits afforded by being members of the academic research community and working in a university environment. See Wilson, Artists in the University, 2018 chapters four and eight. 22. Michael Biggs and Daniella Büchler, ‘Communities, Values, Conventions and Actions,’ in The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (Abingdon and New  York: Routledge, 2010), 82–98. 23. Ibid. 24. Nicholas Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1987), 363. 25. Armstrong auto-ethnography two. 26. ‘Dress’ rehearsal November 2013. 27. Allan Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music (Yale: Yale University Press, 1977). 28. Desbruslais auto-ethnography two. 29. Ibid. 30. Composer and Performer: An experimental turn and its consequences. Paper delivered at the Institute of Musical Research, June 2014. 31. Armstrong comment on Desbruslais YouTube video October 2013. 32. Com-Note narrative July 2013.

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33. KCL November 2013. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Com-Note narrative July 2013. 39. Com-Note narrative June 2013. 40. ‘Dress’ rehearsal November 2013. 41. SHO May 2014. 42. Fabrice Fitch and Neil Heyde, ‘“Recercar” – The Collaborative Process as Invention,’ Twentieth Century Music, 4, no. 1 (2007): 71–95. 43. Bennett et  al., ‘The Artistic Practice-Research-Teaching (ART) Nexus,’ 2010; Blom et  al., ‘How Artists Working in Academia View Artistic Practice As Research,’ 2011; Wilson, Artists in the University, 2018. 44. Albumleaves was to be recorded for Signum Records. 45. Personal email communication September 2012. 46. Wilson, Artists in the University, 2018. 47. See Armstrong, ‘An Experimental Turn,’ 2018; Armstrong et al., ‘Com-­ Note,’ 2015. 48. Desbruslais YouTube video October 2013. 49. Vera John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 50. Biggs and Büchler, ‘Communities, Values, Conventions and Actions,’ 2010. 51. Blom et al., ‘How Artists Working in Academia View Artistic Practice as Research,’ 2011, 363. 52. Wilson, Artists in the University, 2018, 72. 53. MILES funding application January 2013. ‘Models and Mathematics in Life and Social Sciences,’ EPSRC reference EP/I000992/1. 54. Com-Note narrative August 2014. 55. Bennett et  al., ‘The Artistic Practice-Research-Teaching (ART) Nexus,’ 2010, 15. 56. Crispin, ‘Artistic Research and Music Scholarship,’ 2015. 57. Seana Moran and Vera John-Steiner, ‘How Collaboration in Creative Work Impacts Identity and Motivation,’ in Collaborative Creativity: Contemporary perspectives, edited by Dorothy Miell and Karen Littleton (London: Free Association Books, 2004), 11–25. 58. Ibid., 12. 59. Keith Sawyer, Group Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2007). 60. Serge Lacasse and Sophie Stévance, Research-Creation in Music and the Arts: Towards a collaborative interdiscipline (Abingdon, New  York: Routledge, 2018). 61. Ibid., 151.

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62. Ibid., 152. 63. Ibid., 127. 64. Wilson, Artists in the University, 2018. 65. Nicholas Cook. ‘Performing Research: Some institutional perspectives,’ in Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, criticism, practice, edited by Mine Doǧantan-Dack (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 18.

Bibliography Armstrong, Tom. 2018. An Experimental Turn: A Composer’s Perspective on a Changing Practice. In Music and Sonic Art: Theories and Practices, ed. John Dack and Mine Doğantan-Dack. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Armstrong, Tom, and Simon Desbruslais. 2014. Composer and Performer: An Experimental Turn and Its Consequences. Paper presented as part of the CMPCP seminar series at the Institute of Musical Research, London. Armstrong, Tom, Janko Calic, Simon Desbruslais, David Frohlich, Tara Knights, and Haiyue Yuan. 2014. Com-Note: Designing a Composer’s Notebook for Collaborative Music Composition. In Final Paper/Proceedings of the Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts Conference, ed. Anastasios Maragiannis, 41–48. London: DRHA. Bartleet, Brydie-Leigh, and Carolyn Ellis. 2009. Introduction. In Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal, ed. Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Carolyn Ellis, 1–20. Bowen Hills, Qld: Australian Academic Press. Bennett, Dawn, David Wright, and Diana M. Blom. 2010. The Artistic Practice-­ Research-­Teaching (ART) Nexus: Translating the Information Flow. Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice 7 (2): 1–19. Biggs, Michael, and Daniella Büchler. 2010. Communities, Values, Conventions and Actions. In The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, ed. Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, 82–98. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Blom, Diana, Dawn Bennett, and David Wright. 2011. How Artists Working in Academia View Artistic Practice as Research: Implications for Tertiary Music Education. International Journal of Music Education 29 (4): 359–373. Clarke, Eric, and Mark Doffman. 2017. Introduction and Overview. In Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music, ed. Eric Clarke and Mark Doffman, 1–18. New York: Oxford University Press. Cook, Nicholas. 1987. A Guide to Musical Analysis. London: J.  M. Dent & Sons Ltd. ———. 2015. Performing Research: Some Institutional Perspectives. In Artistic Practice as Research in Music, ed. Mine Doğantan-Dack, 11–32. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Corbin, Juliet, and Anselm Strauss. 2008. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. London: Sage Publications. Crispin, Darla. 2015. Artistic Research and Music Scholarship: Musings and Models from a Continental European Perspective. In Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice, ed. Mine Doğantan-Dack, 53–72. Farnham: Ashgate. Fitch, Fabrice, and Neil Heyde. 2017. ‘Recercar’ – The Collaborative Process as Invention. Twentieth Century Music 4 (1): 71–95. Forte, Allan. 1977. The Structure of Atonal Music. Yale: Yale University Press. Gresser, Clemens. 2010. Prose Collection: The Performer and Listener as Co-creator. In Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff, ed. Stephen Chase and Philip Thomas, 193–210. Farnham: Ashgate. Gritten, Anthony. 2010. Is this Collaborating? In Search of an Artistic Attitude. In Collision, ed. Karen Laycock. Leeds: Gallery Oldham with University of Leeds. Hayden, Sam, and Luke Windsor. 2007. Collaboration and the Composer: Case Studies from the End of the 20th Century. Tempo 61: 28–39. John-Steiner, Vera. 2000. Creative Collaboration. New  York: Oxford University Press. Katz, J.  Sylvan, and Ben R.  Martin. 1997. What is Research Collaboration? Research Policy 26: 1–18. Lacasse, Serge, and Sophie Stévance. 2018. Research-Creation in Music and the Arts: Towards a Collaborative Interdiscipline. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Moran, Seana, and Vera John-Steiner. 2004. How Collaboration in Creative Work Impacts Identity and Motivation. In Collaborative Creativity: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Dorothy Miell and Karen Littleton, 11–25. London: Free Association Books. Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rubidge, Sarah. 2005. Artists in the Academy: Reflections on Artistic Practice as Research. https://ausdance.org.au/articles/details/artists-in-the-academyreflections-on-artistic-practice-as-research. Accessed 8 Dec 2018. Sawyer, Keith. 2008. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York: Basic Books. Taylor, Alan. 2016. ‘Collaboration’ in Contemporary Music: A Theoretical View. Contemporary Music Review 35 (6): 562–578. Wilson, Jenny. 2018. Artists in the University: Positioning Artistic Research in Higher Education. Singapore: Springer.

CHAPTER 9

Creative Industries and Copyright: Research into Collaborative Artistic Practices in Dance Mathilde Pavis and Karen Wood

Introduction The performance arts have a natural and well-known connection to the creative industries. They are viewed as an experimental lab for the creative industries which then carries forward popular practices or successful innovations onto the commercial market via mass dissemination. In parallel, intellectual property such as copyright is also deemed to play a critical role in the creative industries in providing a structure for the allocation of credits and distribution of any revenues stemming from creative ventures.1 This chapter explores the theoretical and practical relationship of the performance arts and intellectual property (copyright) through the lens of collaboration. Although inherent to performative practices, collaboration complicates the distribution of intellectual property in law. This analysis is

M. Pavis University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] K. Wood (*) Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_9

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carried out with reference to a particularly collaborative performing ­practice: dance. In doing so, we illustrate the complexity of working and legal relationships in the context of two case studies involving disabled dance artists (the practice also known as Disability Dance). Dance, in its various practices including Disability Dance, illustrates this web of issues in which the art form (dance), the creative industries (productions) and the law (copyright) are entangled. Dance is sometimes a collaborative art that is improperly protected by intellectual property because it is misunderstood in this particular aspect.2 Yet again, the field of dance is subject to increasing economic interests in the creative industries with new markets opening different avenues for the commercialisation of dance such as television shows (e.g. Strictly Come Dancing) and video games (e.g. Fortnite).3 These features make dance the perfect case study to analyse how collaboration happens between and within the art form and with the creative industries. Dance acts as a lens through which we can explore the role of collaboration in the dialogue between the performing arts and the creative industries, as mediated by the law. It also reveals how collaboration can be as crucial and problematic within the current legal framework when it comes to allocate authorship or ownership to creative works. Collaboration exists within different art forms and across them. For example, dancers collaborate with other dancers but, on a different occasion, may collaborate with a musician or a digital artist. Each can make their own claim on what they create/author; however, the boundaries may become blurred when authorship is questioned. A product/performance may be produced as a final outcome of a collaborative project, but what is questioned is to whom the authorship is awarded. If each individual feel that they have made equal contributions and no one person has necessarily taken a lead, how is authorship apportioned? Is it the person who puts in the funding application? Or should each party be assigned equal rights to the authorship of the piece? If the group disbands after the allotted time of the project, does authorship dissolve? The following sections of this chapter will present two case studies which we will use to expose the law frameworks that support (or not) collaborative practices in dance with differently-abled bodies. We choose this area of dance as it adds complexity to the already-established structures in law where collaboration is both necessary and can be different to what other dance artists experience. The case studies incorporate recent research from the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded ‘Invisible Difference: Dance,

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Disability and Law’  project.4 This project is exploring dance made and performed by professional disabled dance artists, over three years, and the main foci are to explore how the legal frameworks of copyright, intellectual property and Human Rights support (or not) the making of dance. The research has a particular interest in how the artists see themselves as ‘authors’ and ‘owners’ of the work and what their particular challenges are for them working as professional dance artists. These artists generally collaborate with other dancers, producers, designers and musicians.

Collaboration in Dance Theoretical work around collaboration in the arts has resulted in the wide acceptance of a number of propositions. This work has suggested, for example, that most collaborative choreographic work has a well-defined limited objective. Most collaborators share a common interest in a particular discipline, or their relationship has been formed through social networks5 and thereby increasing their social capital.6 Collaborators are usually at the same professional level, not holding a peer-mentor relationship.7 And most of the collaborations, if successful, result in increased social capital.8 Throughout the process, artists will naturally fill a role suitable to their particular skillset, offering creative suggestions and being individually responsible for certain tasks. This is what, as Farrell suggests,9 encourages people towards creating new ideas. From creation of new ideas, labour is often delegated and decision-­ making and authority may rest with one or more persons.10 Relationship dynamics become important to consider and, mostly, relationships are respectful of each other’s ideas, forming trusted ways of working. Trust is a fundamental and vitally important part of the collaborative partnership,11 as Warren Bennis and Patricia Biederman state that great leaders, must first of all command unusual respect. Such a leader has to be someone [whom] a greatly gifted person thinks is worth listening to, since genius almost always has other options. Such a leader must be someone who inspires trust, and deserves it.12

While there may not be a defined leader in a collaborative partnership, rather a sharing of leadership in some partnerships, trust is a significant component. Identifying the leader of the collaboration is particularly relevant to the question of legal authorship and ownership as, very often,

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leadership will equate to authorship over the piece, even if the piece is collectively created. This aspect will be discussed in more detail in the last part of this chapter. Of course, there is often a difference between theory and practice, or rather, it must be acknowledged that most practical examples will be unique and will reflect the theory only to some extent. The following section contains two case studies based on the work of two professional practitioners in the disabled dance setting, namely Caroline Bowditch and Chisato Minimamura. Both artists are disabled choreographers with whom the ‘InVisible Difference’ project worked with. We draw particular attention to these artists as we have been exploring ownership and authorship of their work, and collaboration is necessary in their current practice. The empirical research methods used to collect this information are micro-ethnographic observations of studio rehearsals, informal discussions with the artists and semi-structured, qualitative interviews. This information combined with multi-disciplinary literature reviews seeks to extend thinking and alter practice in the making, status and ownership of contemporary dance performances. Case Study 1: Bowditch’s Falling in Love with Frida The main artist associated with the project is Caroline Bowditch, who is a wheelchair user. She has been in the profession for many years and is regarded as a leader in the Disability Dance sector. The project team have observed rehearsals of her newly formed work Falling in Love with Frida and conducted interviews with Bowditch, which have been complicit in gathering information on how the legal frameworks support her dance making. Her creative process involves collaboration with her dancers. Her ideas stimulate tasks that Bowditch and her dancers carry out together. The direction of the tasks and how they transform into movement phrases becomes her responsibility as choreographer. Bowditch is very aware that the dance is hers, that she ‘owns’ it; however, she is also aware that when the dancers are involved, they might feel ownership with regard to their input. In answer to the question, ‘who owns the dancer’s body?’, she passionately replies: ‘They do!’.13 Therefore, Bowditch does not profess to own the dancer’s body, but their creative and collaborative input into ‘her’ work of art. Moreover, one of Bowditch’s dancers for the piece (Welly O’Brien) has one leg. The dance material that she creates in response to the set tasks is specific to her unique body. If this

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piece was to be restaged without her and another dancer employed, the material would have to be re-created. How does the law support the choreographer in this endeavour? The dancers in this collaborative process are compliant to Bowditch’s requests while feeling able to offer suggestions for improvement and development of material. An informal, friendly but directional environment is created by Bowditch which encourages the dancers to creatively engage with the stimulus. Images, books and excerpts of texts of Frida Kahlo are used to initiate generation of movement material, which later may be manipulated and become part of the structure. They test moves and feed off each other and the dancers are eager to fulfil the choreographer’s artistic vision. Trust is evident in this maker’s process and is certainly granted by the collaborators. Case Study 2: Minimamura’s Ring The Changes+ Minimamura equally promotes trust in her collaborative process. There is less familiarity with her dancers than with Bowditch’s, as this is her first time working with these artists. She was working on a piece that was performed at the Southbank Centre, London, in September 2014 titled Ring the Changes+ in association with Body>Data>Space14 and Nick Rothwell, the piece is an interactive dance performance. Two of the three dancers have not worked with Minimamura before but understood the mode of communication, as Minimamura is a deaf artist. She works with interpreters to communicate her ideas and to understand the dancers’ ideas and suggestions that are made. Trust is gained quickly and is integral to her process and the environment is calm, open and encouraging. Her process of refining created material through improvisation asks the dancers to use dynamic words to create the intensity of the movement, such as using the word ‘whisper’ to imply that the movement will be performed slow and small. Minimamura has a clear vision of what she wants and expects from the dancers and uses her own devised movement scoring or notation system, which involves adding layers to the created movement. Because her system is so implicit to the way she works, the process becomes less collaborative and more directive. However, she encourages the dancers to experiment with the directions. The collaborative aspects of Minimamura’s process can be seen more prominently at a hierarchical level. A higher level of collaboration exists with the producer and digital consultant than with the dancers. This is a

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traditional form of hierarchy that is seen in established companies where an Artistic Director, Choreographer, Producer, Lighting Designer or Scenographer come together to create a work. Yet it is clear that Minimamura owns the process and her part in the outcome of the piece. She found it difficult to answer the question, ‘who owns the dance?’ and commented that the dancers control the dance on their bodies but the choreographic credit will be given to Minimamura.15 Therefore, although her process contains elements of collaboration, the dancers serve a purpose, to ‘dance the dance’. They are essential to the collaborative process, with a defined objective, but not as noticeable in the process as the producer and digital consultant. Comparing the two cases, it seems that both choreographers followed the same pattern of methodology where they brought to the studio an abstract base of the work from which they designed tasks for their dancers to react to. At this point, Bowditch and Minimamura delegated chosen elements of the decision-making to their dancers who were in the position of offering suggestions as to the various steps and movements which will then compose the dance. In both cases, the delegation was focused but also limited; as soon as the tasks were considered as productive enough by the choreographers, the latter closed this collaborative session and returned to their position as leaders in charge of the decision-making when they carefully arrange and edit the dancers’ proposed steps. These case studies confirm the central role of leadership even when the project aims to be collaborative. In both scenarios, the choreographers actively engage their dancers in the choreographing but their inputs remain triggered and controlled by the leader, Bowditch or Minimamura. It is interesting to note that, even if in both cases the collaborative aspect of the relationship is desired and deliberate, Bowditch comments that this process is necessary in her situation. When describing her working methods, Bowditch underlines the fact that she does not share the same physicality as her dancers. As a result, it is technically impossible for Bowditch to ‘show’ the movements she would like her dancers to perform—were she to wish to adopt this more traditional way of choreographing. Bowditch must trust her dancers with their interpretation of her vision to create the piece since she cannot physically direct their input by using mimesis. This point emphasises the depth of the collaboration dancers, but more specifically disabled dancers, must incorporate in their practice to choreograph. It also stresses the trust present between Bowditch and her dancers, another element of the model described above, this case study confirms.

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Both of these case studies display different characteristics of collaboration in practice. They reveal apparent hierarchies and more subtle versions while showing that artistic vision and direction is clear from the beginning, with a leader in place. The leaders are willing to hand over decision-­ making and encourage experimentation, at the same time as fostering a respectful and committed working environment. What does this mean when we consider the authorship of the work to which multiple collaborators have significantly contributed to? Who owns those dancing bodies and the dance movement created in collaboration?

Collaboration and the Law Copyright law is the mechanism which enables individuals to own the intangible artistic products of their creative mind.16 Under the law, the person who creates the work is regarded as the ‘author’ and therefore first ‘owner’ of the copyright in the creation.17 The notions of ‘authorship’ and ‘ownership’ are therefore closely intertwined in the law.18 Copyright confers on the author (and owner) of the work a bundle of rights19 allowing them to protect their work against unauthorised use or to trade such use against royalties.20 In theory, copyright authorship and ownership are patterned after the concept of property ownership in tangible objects. In practice, there is more dissemblance than resemblance between copyright and property ownership for the analogy to be productive. Legal authorship grants artists with economic and moral rights. Not only does authorship ensure authors the financial returns generated by their work (thanks to economic rights21) but it also empowers them with mechanisms to protect the integrity of their piece (thanks to moral rights22). In the UK, moral rights are dedicated to the protection of the work’s integrity and the author’s reputation.23 These moral rights were described as the most relevant and valuable rights the law could grant dancers.24 Legal authorship was introduced to generate incentives for creators to produce artistic works by rewarding them with rights for the time, skills and effort they put into their creations. This rationale shadows the requirements imposed by the law to secure legal authorship. Finally, it must be stressed that authors may transfer their copyright in the work to third parties. Doing so splits the authorship and ownership: authorship and ownership with be split and will rest with different individuals. Whilst the artist

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remains the author of the piece, they are no longer the owner of the copyright. The third parties owning the copyright of the work will become the owners of the work, and be entitled to the various financial incomes it may generate.

Collaboration as the Exception to the Rule Intellectual property laws were drafted to protect authors working individually not collaboratively.25 However, the reality of practice forced policy-­makers to provide dispositions regulating the production of collaborative creative works. ‘Joint works’26 and ‘collaborative works’ thus feature in copyright framework, alongside sole authorship.27 What distinguishes joint from collective works is the degree of the collaboration in the making of the piece. In the situation of joint works, collaborators’ contributions are inseparable and un-severable,28 whereas the collective work is the collection of distinct and independent works their authors assembled to produce a coherent piece.29 For example, this book is a collective work. Each chapter is written independently. Even if they form a coherent whole once put together by their editors, the contributors own their contribution but not that of their colleagues. Interestingly, UK copyright law does not require collaborators to intend to create jointly to award joint-authorship over the work.30 Moreover, the portion of the work the collaborators’ contributions represents in comparison to its whole is irrelevant for the apportionment of joint copyright. The contribution of the artists may be unequal and still be protected by equal joint authors’ rights so long that the contributed efforts participated to the type of creative input the law protects.31 What amounts to the ‘right type’ of creative expression protected by the law is further discussed below.

The Unpractical Management of Collaborative Works Joint authorship also impacts the legal and economic management of the work. Joint authors’ rights have been fashioned after principles applicable to tangible property owned in common.32 Joint authors are the owners in common of the creative work they created. Consequently, the rights must be exercised with the approval of both joint authors. The consent of other joint authors will be necessary if one joint author wishes to make use of rights restricted by copyright (e.g. performing or licensing the work).33

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Because this situation can be unpractical in practice, especially when joint-­ authors do not see eye-to-eye on the commercialisation of their creation, production or commission contracts will often attempt to remediate this issue by including clauses transferring the rights to one person (usually the producer or commissioner). It is perfectly legal for contracts to re-arrange the default rules applicable to joint-ownership to put in place arrangement more flexible than ownership in common.34 To sum up, copyright law was not designed to be exercised by several persons effectively. Even today, the system operates more effectively when rights are owned and managed by one person or entity. Cause or consequence of creation being approached as an individualistic endeavour, the law framing the management of joint works and the apportionment of rights among collaborators remains unpractical. In many regards, the rules applicable to sole authorship have been extended to creations involving multiple authors without revising their relevance in practice. As a result, the outcome of disputes arising between potential joint-authors or co-­ authors have the courts decide who is entitled to what share in the work depending on the facts of each case. The following section synthesises statutory rules and judicial precedents on this question to identify the legal owner and author of the dance according to the collaborative practices of Case Studies 1 and 2.

Owning the Collaboration in Practice Previous comments highlighted that the question of authorship revolves around two different elements of the collaboration: the dance itself and the dancers’ body. The dance is the product of the collaboration whilst the dancers’ body is, to a certain extent, the platform on to which the collaboration between choreographer and dancer takes place. As a result, owning the dancing body becomes as relevant as owning the dance. However, the law of copyright does not deal with the dance and the dancing body in the same way. Whilst it was designed to regulate ownership of creative works like choreography, it is unequipped to envisage ownership of the body.

Owning the Collaborative Dance According to the rules applicable to sole authorship in the UK, copyright rewards the artist who had the relevant creative intellectual input in the work so much so that they produced an original expression of ideas fixed

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in a tangible manner.35 This simple principle recoups the main conditions to obtain authorship which are originality (in the expression of ideas) and fixation.36 What constitutes the relevant intellectual input will vary from one discipline and type of artistic work to another. In the context of choreographic works, sequences of choreographic steps elaborate enough to be distinguished from traditional moves or ball room dancing,37 and is what intellectual property law regards as elements eligible to copyright protection. Consequently, all dance artists involved in the production must contribute to the design of such sequences to be considered legal authors of the resulting piece. Contributing to the creative process by providing ideas or the source of inspiration of the work is not regarded as collaborative enough by the law to be rewarded with authorship or joint-authorship. For instance, the collaborator who would recommend the narrative of Romeo and Juliet for a ballet production will not class as the co-author of the dance unless her suggestion is also accompanied by specific choreographic inputs. This limit derives from the principle according to which copyright cannot cover ideas, abstract concepts and facts.38 The idea of choreographing the fate of two unfortunate lovers caught in a family feud cannot in itself be subject to copyright protection; but, the choreographic work created as a result of this idea can be. The dance will be regarded by the law as the original expression of the idea. In law, this rule is known as the principle of ‘idea/ expression dichotomy’, and aims at protecting the freedom of expression and future artists’ creativity. This idea/expression dichotomy often plays a critical role in apportioning authors’ rights in collaborative ventures. If these principles seem straight forward, the line between contributions adding to the creative expression embodied in the work and those which do not, is difficult to draw and remains subject to casuistry.39 In practice the identity of the author of such ‘expression of ideas’ (sequences of steps) will be evidenced through the control over creative choices. In other words, who controls the creative process and the choices made during that process, is likely to own the copyright in the work. If such control was shared, the legal authorship is likely to be divided between the relevant collaborators. Since the authorship and ownership of the work tends to rest with the artist(s) who controlled the creative decision-making, the type of working relationship existing between choreographers and dancers will influence the distribution of copyright. From a legal perspective, the choreographer/dancer relationship is probably the most complex and least acknowl-

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edged form of creative collaboration. Traditionally, the law understands the relationship between choreographer and performer in a very simple way according to which the choreographer entirely creates the dance which is to be performed by the dancers.40 The relationship between the choreographer and the dancer is treated as no more creative than the connection between a teacher and his/her student. The choreographer teaches the dance phrases to the performers who learn the steps and how to embody the spirit of the piece. In this context, the authorial rights over this collaboration rest with the choreographer who is the only protagonist in control of all creative choices. In collaborative practices, choreographers and dancers are more likely to engage with each other and be involved in the making of the work prior to the rehearsal stage. This was notable for Falling in Love with Frida where Bowditch collaborated with her dancers to design the various movements and steps that then composed her piece. She brought to the studio the inspiration of the work, various ideas and selected the moves her performers offered in response to tasks she had designed and given them. Even though Bowditch collaborated with her dancers and enabled them to contribute to the creation of the piece, she remained in control of its making. It is clear from our conversations with Bowditch that she feels strongly about being considered the author of the piece and she would probably be regarded as such by the law. Indeed, she controlled the input of her dancers in her work, even though they did contribute to the expression of her ideas when they responded to her tasks, which is a copyrightable input. Bowditch carefully selected, edited and arranged what was offered by the dancers in order to produce a coherent whole. When discussing this process, Bowditch referred to her discussions with Adam Benjamin who describes his dancers as ‘the pearls he strings together’ to make ‘the necklace’ that his work represents.41 Likewise, Minimamura involved her dancers in the making of the individual steps and sequences which later composed the piece. Again, she gave her dancers tasks to generate the content of her choreography. Her control of authority over her dancers is evident, it appears to be stronger than Bowditch’s in her studio and seems to be the only subtle difference between the two artists in terms of connection with their performers.42 In this scenario, the two choreographers and their respective dancers have made a creative contribution to the choreographic works and have an eligible claim to legal ownership. In these cases, the determining factor in awarding sole or joint authorship is the amount of ‘editing’ each choreog-

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rapher undertook on the sequences suggested by their performers. The more Bowditch and Minimamura rearranged the fruits of the tasks executed by their performers, the more likely they are to be considered sole author of the piece. Indeed, as they edit the piece, they break down their dancers’ expression into smaller sequences and individual steps. When the dancers’ expression is reduced to such small units, their input in the work loses its eligibility to legal protection, due to the idea/expression dichotomy. Individual steps are not copyrightable43 because they are assimilated to ideas and seen as the ‘building blocks’ of future choreographic works.44 However, if Bowditch or Minimamura were to insert in their piece long segments of their dancers’ suggestions, they would be obliged to share the copyright with the performer, disregarding the fact that such input was originally triggered by their own tasks. In this particular scenario, although the choreographer remained in control of the creative choices during the making of the piece and may, as such, expect to be regarded as its sole author, she will have to share its ownership with her dancers. This situation may be considered as problematic since disputes between collaborators are more likely to rise where their expectations do not meet what the law provides. In order to accommodate this issue, collaborative artists should discuss and agree on the apportionment and management of copyright at the start of their collaboration, and consider revisiting their arrangement towards the end of the project to assess the extent to which their initial agreement reflect their contribution to the final output.

Owning the Dancing Body From our observations of and discussions with choreographers and dancers, the question of who owns the dance appears interwoven with the question of who owns the dancing body. This connection may be attributed to the desire to control the body, its motion and image in future representation of the work.45 This connection may also be attributed to the fact that the dancing body is central to the choreographic work, and so for two reasons. First, it is inherent to the art of dance for c­ horeographers to heavily rely on their dancers’ body to create. Second, in the specific context of Disability Dance, the emphasis on the body and its role is underlined by the uniqueness of the performers’ physicality. In dance, the interaction between the choreographer and the performer goes beyond what the law (copyright and authors’ rights) acknowledges. Choreographers design the work and, in this respect, they do control their

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dancers’ movements, however, the performers continue to be both in charge and in control of their body. To perform, dancers must translate the choreographers’ wishes in the language of their body with the range of moves and actions it possesses. This translation is necessary to the choreographer’s work but yet remains entirely controlled by the dancer who artistically ‘owns’ his/her body. In this respect, the dancer’s input in the dance is out of the choreographer’s reach despite his/her genius, talent or authoritative practice. The dancing body moves away from being the platform of collaboration to be integrated as an element of the artistic piece produced by the collaboration. The dancing body shapes the work and becomes an integrated element to it. If controlling or owning the dancing body is a concern all dancers have, it seems to be more acute in situations involving disabled dancers. In such cases, the dancer’s body can be unexpected, different, and will often impact the audience as the body’s aesthetic departs from the mainstream. Moreover, disabled dancers claim that their work is their body, for their body condition their art, so much so that when they perform their disability becomes integral to the performance, and escape the choreographer’s creative control over the piece. The choreographer’s piece then enters in collision or works in unison with the disabled dancer’s experience. In the situation where differently-abled performers create a biographical piece,46 dancers are likely and entitled to feel all the more involved in the work through their body. In light of these different contexts, should the dancer be entitled to control the work for the amount to which their body contributed to it? It seems to be a legitimate claim in theory but impractical and un-­enforceable in practice. How could choreographers and performers’ input be respectably identified and then be attributed to one or the other? How should the boundaries of each artist’s contribution to the work be drawn in order to assess their eligibility to joint authorship when the performers’ input can be so subtle? Whilst from the dancers’ perspective, their own input seems obvious; it remains nearly invisible and hardly graspable by outsiders since such contribution occurs through their subjective bodily perception and experience.

Conclusion Different collaborative practices are likely to trigger partitions of rights following different geometries. Each dance artist, choreographer and performer works in the environment they judge to be the most appropriate to

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encourage their creativity; each project or practice will thus rely on different creative relationships and processes. As structures vary, the control over creative choices circulates and the distribution of authors’ rights takes a different shape. Indeed, authorship does not follow status but control. No matter whether one can be regarded as the ‘choreographer’ as opposed to the ‘performer’, the law rewards the relevant intellectual input which is, as explained above, evidenced in practice by the ability to control the creative choices during the making-process of the work. The traditional patterns of relationship between dance artists and the choreographer/performer divide are all the more challenged when the production gathers together artists of different abilities and different bodies. The collaboration appears necessary for the creation to occur since the performer faces the necessity to ‘translate’ the choreographers’ creative vision into the language of his/her unique body. This hypothesis evidences the role of the dancing body as a platform of collaboration as much as a component of the product. This situation highlights the fact that the degree of collaboration in performing arts envisaged by IP law is impoverished and does not adequately support dance artists of all abilities in their lived professional practice.

Notes 1. Barbara Townley, Philip Roscoe and Nicola Searle, Creating Economy: Enterprise, intellectual property, and the valuation of goods (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 2. Charlotte Waelde, Sarah Whatley and Mathilde Pavis, ‘Let’s Dance! But Who Owns It?,’ European Intellectual Property Law Review, 36, no. 4 (2014): 217–228. 3. Mathilde Pavis, ‘The Fortnite Lawsuits: Why performers stand a fighting chance to beat the game,’ (The IPKat, 21 January 2019) available at http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-fortnite-lawsuits-why-performers.html (last accessed 3 July 2019); Charlotte Waelde, ‘Can You Sell a Quotation…of Dance? Another Perspective on the “Fortnite” Lawsuits,’ (The IPKat, 23 January 2019) available at http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/ 2019/01/can-you-sell-quotationof-dance-another.html (last accessed 3 July 2019). 4. AHRC grant number AH/J006491/1. See also, http://www.invisibledifference.org.uk 5. Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship dynamics and creative work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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6. Pierre Bourdieu (Thomson, 2008) argues that we acquire capital in the form of social, economic and cultural assets. Robert Moore (2008, p. 103) states that Bourdieu broadly distinguishes between economic and symbolic capital (which includes sub-types of cultural, linguistic, scientific and literary capital). In comparison, symbolic capital has intrinsic value, such as in the field of the arts, where cultural capital ‘is presented as reflecting the intrinsic value of art works themselves’ (Moore 2008, p.  104). Patricia Thomson ‘Field,’ in Pierre Bourdieu: Key concepts edited by Michael Grenfell (Stocksfield: Acumen Publishing, 2008). Robert Moore, ‘Capital,’ in Pierre Bourdieu, 2008. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Farrell, Collaborative Circles, 2001. 10. Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in art from conceptualism to postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 11. Anthony Gritten, ‘Trust in Collaboration, from Policy to Practice,’ Creative Arts and Creative Industries: Collaboration in practice conference, Manchester Metropolitan University (21–22 June 2013). 12. Warren Bennis and Patricia Biederman, Organising Genius: The secrets of creative collaboration (New York: Perseus Publishing, 1997), 18. 13. Taken from an interview with Bowditch conducted in February 2014. 14. Body>Data>Space are an interactive design group, see http://www.bodydataspace.net/ (last accessed 14 August 2019). 15. Taken from a discussion with Minimamura in June 2014. 16. Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently, The Making of Modern Intellectual Property: The British experience 1760–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 17. Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA 1988), Section 11(1). When the work is created by an employee in the course of his employment, the ownership of the piece is attributed to the employer in accordance with Section 11(2). Not all jurisdiction grants employers the copyright for the creation of their employees. In France for instance, employees maintain the authorship and ownership over the creations whether or not they were ­created during the course of their employment or using their employer’s resources. An exception was introduced for software whose ownership follows the rules applicable under UK copyright. See French Intellectual Property Code, Article L. 113–9. 18. CDPA 1988, Section 9. 19. Authors’ rights, authorial rights or copyright are alternate expressions to refer to the same notion of authorship. 20. According to Section 16 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA 1988), the uses of the work covered, thus limited, by copyright are

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copying the work (see Section 17), issuing copies of the work to the public (Section 18), renting or lending the work to the public (Section 18A), performing, showing or playing the work in public (Section 19), communicating the work to the public (Section 20), making an adaptation of the work or do any of the above in relation to an adaptation. 21. CDPA 1988, Ch. II ‘Rights of Copyright Owner’. Authors are entitled to the royalties flowing from their work so long that they have not transferred their copyright to a third party. 22. CDPA 1988, Ch. IV ‘Moral rights’ (Sections 77–85): the author enjoys a right to be identified as author (right of paternity), a right to protect his/ her work against derogatory treatment which could lead to prejudice his/ her reputation, a right against false attribution and a right of privacy in the context of photographic works or films. 23. CDPA 1988, Section 80. 24. Krystina Lopez de Quintana, ‘The Balancing Act: How copyright and customary practices protect large dance companies over pioneering choreographers,’ Villanova Sports and Entertainment Law Journal, 11, no. 139 (2004): 169. 25. Many legal scholars criticised the legal narrative for portraying the author as a solitary creative soul. Daniela Simone, Copyright and Collective Authorship: Location the authors of collaborative work (Cambridge University Press, 2019). This conception of the author as the lonely genius was labelled under the concept of ‘romantic authorship’. See Martha Woodmansee, ‘The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and legal conditions of the emergence of the “Author”,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 17, no. 4. (1984); Peter Jaszi, ‘Toward a Theory of Copyright: The metamorphoses of “authorship”,’ Duke Law Journal, no. 2 (1991); Peter Jaszi, ‘On the Author Effect: Contemporary copyright and collective creativity,’ in The Construction of Authorship: Textual appropriation in law and literature, edited by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994); Peter Jaszi, ‘On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity,’ 10 Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal (1992): 293. 26. CDPA 1988, Section 10 reads: ‘a “work of joint authorship” means a work produced by the collaboration of two or more authors in which the contribution of each author is not distinct from that of the other author or authors’. 27. CDPA 1988, Section 173(2). If this section of the statute explicitly mentions the concept of ‘collective work’, it unfortunately makes a poor use of it by encompassing both joint and collective works. Charlotte Waelde et  al., Contemporary Intellectual Property, 3rd edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 91. 28. CDPA 1988, Section 10.

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29. For instance, a musical song is a collective work if the music and the lyrics were composed and written independently by different artists: Redwood Music Ltd v. Feldman & Co (1979) RPC 385 esp. at 400–403 9 (a decision on the 1911 Act). 30. Hodgens v. Beckingham (2003) EMLR 18. For more recent iteration of the joint-authorship test, see Kogan v. Martin [2019] EWCA Civ 1645. In other jurisdiction, such like the United States, joint authorship can only be granted to artists who collaborated with ‘the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole’, according to the US Copyright Act, paragraph 101. 31. Bamgboye v. Reed (2004) EMLR 5. 32. It was held that copyright could be other owned jointly or in common (see cases here after) but that the common property is the most usual form of ownership in the context of authors’ rights (see David Marchese, ‘Joint Ownership of Intellectual Property,’ European Intellectual Property Review, 21 (1999):  364–365; Waelde et  al., Contemporary Intellectual Property, 2013, 90–1); Lauri v. Renad (1892) 3 Ch. 402; Redwood Music Ltd v. Feldman & Co [1979] RPC 1, Mail Newspaper plc v. Express Newspapers plc [1987] FSR 90. 33. Cescinsky v. George Routledge & Sons, Ltd [1916] 2 K.B. 325; Cala Homes (South) Ltd v. Alfred McAlpine Homes East Ltd [1995] FSR 836. 34. Visit the following website for examples of standard clauses transferring the work’s ownership the work: http://web.law.columbia.edu/keep-yourcopyrights/contracts/clauses/by-type/10/overreaching. 35. These conditions are the result of the dispositions of the CDPA 1988 (Sections 1 to 8) interpreted in light of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice on the matter. See the Infopaq decision: Infopaq International A/S v. Danske Dagblades Forening (Infopaq) (C-5/08) [2009] E.C.R. I-6569. 36. This chapter does not mention the condition of categorisation as a requirement to copyright protection due to the recent change in the European jurisprudence on the matter. See Rosati, E. (2013) Originality in EU Copyright—Full Harmonisation through Case Law. Edward Elgar 2013; Stephen Vousden, ‘Infopaq and the Europeanisation of Copyright Law,’ 1 The WIPO Journal (2010): 197; Jonathan Griffiths, ‘Infopaq, BSA and the “Europeanisation” of United Kingdom Copyright Law,’ 13 Media & Arts Law 1 (2011); and Jonathan Griffiths, ‘Dematerialisation, Pragmatism and the European Copyright Revolution,’ Journal of Oxford Legal Studies, 33 (2013): 767–790. 37. Joi Michelle Lakes, ‘A Pas de Deux for Choreography and Copyright,’ New York University Law Review, 80, no. 1829 (2005): 1843. 38. Millar v. Taylor (1769) 98 ER 201; Donaldson v. Beckett (1774) HL 1 ER 837. Many have contested this conception of ideas and facts as

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available information floating around us waiting to be harvested, see, Michael Steven Green, ‘Copyright Facts,’ Indiana Law Journal, 78, no. 3 (2003), p.  949; https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7f40/60a7ba2fe5 4739b6db8626cb37e6a589543b.pdf (last accessed 20 August 2019); Wendy Gordon, ‘On Owning Information: Intellectual property and the restitutionary impulse,’ (1992), https://heinonline.org/HOL/ LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/valr78&div=18&id=&page= (last accessed 20 August 2019); Ruth Bader Ginsburg, ‘Women’s Work: The place of women in law schools,’ Journal of Legal Education, 32, no. 2 (1982): 657–658. 39. Waelde et al., Contemporary Intellectual Property, 2013, 86–91. 40. This conception of the author/performer relationship can be read in the division of rights between authors and performers for instance. Performers receive fewer rights than authors because they are considered as less creative since they do not take part in the creative process, they only embody the work, see Rebecca Tushnet, ‘Performance Anxiety: Copyright embodied and disembodied,’ Journal Copyright Society of the USA, 60, no. 209 (2013); Pavis, ‘Let’s Dance,’ 2014. 41. Comments gathered during fieldwork conducted in Coventry, September 2013. 42. Her relationship with the dancers might have been affected by the fact that at the time of the observation, it was the first time Minimamura and those dancers worked together, unlike Bowditch and her performer. 43. Lakes, ‘A Pas de Deux for Choreography and Copyright,’ 2005. 44. Lesley Erin Wallis, ‘The Different Art: Choreography and copyright,’ UCLA L. Rev 33 (1986), 1442–1454. 45. Whether such representation is a video record or a re-cast of the work mimicking or not the previous performance. 46. Such as Ménage à Trois by Claire Cunningham and Falling in Love with Frida by Caroline Bowditch.

Bibliography AHRC Grant Number AH/J006491/1. See also, http://www.invisibledifference.org.uk. 4 October 2019. Bennis, Warren, and Patricia Biederman. 1997. Organising Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration. New York: Perseus Publishing. Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 1988 c. 48, as amended (CDPA). Available at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents. Accessed 10 March 2020. Simone, Daniela. 2019. Copyright and Collective Authorship: Location the Authors of Collaborative Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Farrell, Michael P. 2001. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics & Creative Work. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ginsburg, Ruth Bader. 1982. Women’s Work: The Place of Women in Law Schools. Journal of Legal Education 32 (2): 657–658. Gordon, Wendy J. 1992. Reality as Artifact: From Feist to Fair Use. Law and Contemporary Problems 55: 93–107. Green, Charles. 2001. The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Green, Michael Stephen. 2003. Copyright Facts. Indiana Law Journal 78 (3): 919–949. Griffiths, Jonathan. 2011. Infopaq, BSA and the ‘Europeanisation’ of United Kingdom Copyright Law. Media & Arts Law 13: 1. ———. 2013. Dematerialisation, Pragmatisn and the European Copyright Revolution. Journal of Oxford Legal Studies 33: 797. Gritten, Anthony. 2013. Trust in Collaboration, from Policy to Practice. Creative Arts and Creative Industries: Collaboration in Practice Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 21–22 June. Jaszi, Peter. 1991. Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of ‘Authorship’. Duke Law Journal 40 (2): 455–502. ———. 1992. On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity. Cardozo Arts and Entertainment. Law Journal 10 (2): 293–320. ———. 1994. On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity. In The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, 29–56. Durham/ London: Duke University Press. Lakes, Joi M. 2005. A Pas de Deux for Choreography and Copyright. New York University Law Review 80: 1829–1845. Lopez de Quintana, Krystina. 2004. The Balancing Act: How Copyright and Customary Practices Protect Large Dance Companies over Pioneering Choreographers. Villanova Sports & Entertainment Law Journal 11: 139–169. Marchese, David. 1999. Joint Ownership of Intellectual Property. European Intellectual Property Law Review 21: 364–365. Moore, Robert. 2008. Capital. In Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, ed. Michael Grenfell, 98–120. Stocksfield: Acumen Publishing. Pavis, Mathilde. 2019. The Fortnite Lawsuits: Why Performers Stand a Fighting Chance to Beat the Game. In The IPKat (21 January 2019), http://ipkitten. blogspot.com/2019/01/the-fortnite-lawsuits-why-performers.html. Accessed 3 July 2019. Rosati, Eleanora. 2013. Originality in EU Copyright: Full Harmonisation Through Case Law. Cwmbran: Edward Elgar.

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Sherman, Brad, and Lionel Bently. 1999. The Making of Modern Intellectual Property: The British Experience 1760–1911. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomson, Patricia. 2008. Field. In Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, ed. Michael Grenfell, 67–83. Stocksfield: Acumen Publishing. Townley, Barbara, Philip Roscoe, and Nicola Searle. 2019. Creating Economy: Enterprise, Intellectual Property, and the Valuation of Goods. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Tushnet, Rebecca. 2013. Performance Anxiety: Copyright Embodied and Disembodied. Journal Copyright Society of the USA 60: 209–248. Vousden, Stephen. 2010. Infopaq and the Europeanisation of Copyright Law. The WIPO Journal 1 (2): 197–210. Waelde, Charlotte. 2019. Can You Sell a Quotation…of Dance? Another Perspective on the ‘Fortnite’ Lawsuits. The IPKat (23 January 2019) Available at http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/01/can-you-sell-quotationof-danceanother.html. Accessed 3 July 2019. Waelde, Charlotte, et  al. 2013. Contemporary Intellectual Property. 3rd ed. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Waelde, Charlotte, Sarah Whatley, and Mathilde Pavis. 2014. Let’s Dance! But Who Owns It? European Intellectual Property Law Review 36 (4): 217–228. Wallis, Leslie Erin. 1986. The Different Art: Choreography and Copyright. UCLA Law Review 33: 1442–1454. Woodmansee, Martha. 1984. The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (4): 425–448.

CHAPTER 10

Romance and Contagion: Notes on a Conversation Between Drawing and Dance Sally Morfill

Introduction In a note to his text The Pleasure in Drawing, Jean-Luc Nancy refers to the difficulty in determining a single definition for ‘art’ and a simultaneous ‘contagion or general communication’ that occurs in the use of terminology across different fields of artistic practice. He suggests that ‘[t]here is neither metaphor nor comparison between artistic fields or registers— there is a general contagion’.1 Whilst, in this context, he is not discussing models for collaboration per se, his comments do resonate with those who begin to engage in interdisciplinary dialogues, sensing the opening out of discipline-specific languages permeating their own boundaries and finding themselves mirrored in neighbouring practices. Elsewhere, Nancy discusses how meaning emerges through relations ‘between’ things and people. The ‘between’ he refers to ‘is that which is at

S. Morfill (*) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_10

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the heart of a connection, the interlacing [l’entrecroisement] of strands whose extremities remain separate even at the very center of the knot’.2 In the last decade the ‘interlacing’ of dance and art has provided the focus for a series of exhibitions at major institutions in Europe and the United States, collectively mapping the chronology of this connection from the early twentieth century through to the present day.3 As Helen Molesworth, curator of Dance/Draw, notes, ‘Dance and drawing have long shared a privileged relation to the body: both forms emanate directly from the body’s movement’.4 The gestures in drawing produce line through inscription, where gestures in dance are a form of communication that usually leave no trace; the dancer is the line. Across disciplines the further possibility of improvisation as a strategy connects thinking to movement at the moment of execution. For Karen Wood (see Chap. 9)—a dance practitioner with a particular interest in improvisation—and me—a visual artist interested in the connections between gesture, language and line manifesting in a practice broadly understood as drawing—this shared vocabulary suggested the alignment of our artistic fields and the potential for productive collaboration. Collaboration between drawing and dance is less common than practitioners from one field referring to, or appropriating, aspects of the other. Or in the case of the emerging field of ‘Performance Drawing’ the two might mix together, as the performed movements of the body also become gestures of inscription.5 Our aim was to allow a doubling rather than merging of voices, equal, as in conversation. We were willing to relinquish individual authorial standpoints and examine our respective practices in relation to the other, and this led to an unsettling of old habits as I (the one who draws) entered the performance space and Wood (the one who dances) began to make drawings. Funding structures dictate that academic institutions insist upon an examination of the relationship between research and practice for those practitioners in the arts who are also educators (as outlined in Chaps. 2 and 3). ECHO—the collaboration referred to in this chapter—although initiated by an artists’ collective outside the academic institution, could be seen as adopting a research attitude through its what if? strategy. Fragments, the project of which ECHO forms a part, specifically creates space for speculative collaborative inquiry by inviting the alignment of two or more established practices, in this case drawing and dance. In ECHO a loose hypothesis leads to a process of working through propositions in the actions of making and performance. A second outcome of the collaboration, 100 metre line drawing, builds on the experience of the first to pro-

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duce a more concisely articulated response to the questions being asked. Each is a tangible visual presentation of thought.6 What we bring from our individual practices becomes the means to think beyond usual disciplinary constraints, albeit both practices benefit from being located within disciplines that are already broad. The work reaches beyond self-reflexivity (a concept also discussed in Chaps. 6, 7 and 11) in its attempt to define language as a seam that relates the gestures of drawing and the gestures of dance; it also likens its processual methods of production to those of literary translation that is dependent on interpretation, and in which meaning is produced as ‘an effect of relations and differences among signifiers along a potentially endless chain’.7 The performance may only partially communicate the stages of thinking that inform its making, and this is where there is potential for thought to be further communicated in a written form. Similarly, writing about the work offers only a partial, deferred experience. However, such a multimodal approach, with the event of making at its centre, is characteristic of work that bridges practice and research, and has the capacity to extend the chain of relations effecting meaning. Conversation functions as a metaphor for our exchange-based methodology, but also as subject matter in the initial stages of the collaboration. In its later stages, however, its role as subject matter was abandoned in favour of the more direct and fluid conversation that was the outcome of ‘contagion or general communication’ between drawing and dance. In this account I am writing alone, as one half of a collaborative pairing. I am also one of many voices who together constitute the artists’ collective, Five Years.8 Five Years initiated Fragments, the project that prompted Wood and I to work together. Therefore, it is from a dual perspective that I will talk about the structure and aims of the project as well as details of our specific collaboration, and try to negotiate the boundary between my position as insider involved in the making process and outsider involved in objective reflection on the work. I also make reference to Our Research: A Fragment on Fragments (2014) a text by Francis Summers and Edward Dorrian, in which they develop a set of ideas central to Romanticism by applying them to the organisational structure of Five Years. Like Nancy’s ‘contagion’, the romantic fragment described here can supply another way of understanding collaborative practice. Fragments offered a framework within which a series of collaborative projects could develop; it exists within the larger framework that is the collective enterprise known as Five Years. I will first provide some background context on these before discussing the collaboration itself.

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Five Years Five Years was established in 1998. Since its inception, it has continually adapted in response to external drivers and the evolving concerns of its members. Having started life in Underwood St, N1, alongside other artist-­ run spaces (‘Mellow Birds’, ‘30 Underwood Street’ and subsequently BANK’s ‘Gallerie Poo Poo’), from 2002 Five Years operated without a permanent space before moving to Regent Studios, Hackney, in 2007 (this is the point at which my membership began). In 2016, it relocated to a new space in Archway, adjacent to The Bomb Factory Art Foundation and Central St Martins Archway building. In effect, there has been a gradual spiralling outwards from the city’s geographical centre, but each change in location has sited Five Years in a new centre, relative to other creative activities or enterprises, that contribute to the ongoing shaping of its identity. Over its lifetime Five Years has used its spaces to stage over 260 exhibitions or events involving over 1000 artists and participants. Projects have also taken place in other artist-run spaces, public buildings and national institutions in the United Kingdom, and members have represented Five Years at conferences and through residencies and exhibitions abroad. It is distinct from other artist-run projects in its refusal to adopt any curatorial identity. Instead, members organise events in response to concerns that emerge from their respective practices. Individual identities might be asserted through the diversity of its exhibition and events programme, but Five Years refuses the kind of homogeneous identity that might be associated with (and necessary for) a commercial space. The programme is a reflection of the membership and members’ concerns. The fact that these shift and change is seen as a positive attribute; Five Years is always in a state of evolution, disturbance or reinvention.

Five Years as ‘A Chain or Garland of Fragments’9 The Arts Council–funded project Fragments involved five participants from Five Years each forming new collaborative partnerships or groups. On completion of the project, the last outcome was a printed publication, Five Years: Fragments.10 In their introductory essay, Francis Summers and Edward Dorrian set up the proposition that Five Years can be seen as a ‘romantic project’. In drawing out this analogy with the Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they make specific ­reference

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to Friedrich Schlegel’s use of the term ‘fragment’, as well as its subsequent analysis, almost two centuries on, by writers such as Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot.11 The idea of the fragment informed the philosophy and aesthetics, the form or content of the work of artists, musicians, writers and thinkers associated with the Romantic Movement, but beyond this, its political and social implications can be seen as having wider relevance within community structures operating today. Schlegel’s ‘chain or garland of fragments’ is taken as emblematic of the loosely connected individuals (and individual practices) that collectively contribute to Five Years: The collective whole or work of Five Years, then, is the work of the empty place around which a garland of fragments operate[s]. As fragments (each practice a fragment) each practice is that of the ‘complete’ individual […] but these complete parts converge as on a garland. The string upon which these fragments are strung, Five Years, encircles an ‘empty place’ as the site of incompletion, of the refusal of completion through synthesis. Here the possible activity of dissensus rather than consensus can take place, if one is brave enough.12

The fragment insists on plural voices and ‘discontinuous form’ thus aiding a refusal of identity, and creating the space for difference. This suggested ‘fragmentary nature’ of Five Years as an organisation, with ‘individual artists exercising creative autonomy in relation to a communally adopted overall structure’,13 is reflected in the project Fragments, where dialogue between ‘complete individuals’ working across different fields of artistic practice (temporarily strung together) plays out towards a collaborative outcome. What the idea of the fragment can bring to the collaborative process from the outset is the possibility of a common form constituted from ‘discontinuity and difference’.14

Five Years: Fragments Fragments invited members of Five Years to choose a collaborative partner working in a field of the arts outside the broad parameters of contemporary fine art practice. Five members participated in this opportunity, securing collaborators involved in music, creative writing, filmmaking, critical and historical practices and dance.15 Work was developed and showcased

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outside of Five Years, thereby providing an opportunity to build connections with other spaces and audiences; however, in addition, elements of the project in progress were brought together in an exhibition at Five Years in May 2013. A process of dialogue or one-to-one conversation was central to the project, as a means of both gaining insight into each other’s practices and developing ideas through exchange. Transcribed conversations between collaborators were included in the publication Five Years: Fragments16 launched at The Showroom17 in June 2014, and this occasion included reflective presentations on the experience and outcomes of each collaboration and a panel discussion chaired by artist and writer, Dean Kenning.

Background to Collaboration I first met Wood in 2012. We were both involved in preparations for different aspects of Walking the Warp Manchester a performance by American artist Anne Wilson organised by The Whitworth as part of their exhibition, Cotton: Global Threads. As an artist engaged in drawing, I was curious about methods of instructional notation, including choreographic scores, and, where the boundary lies between everyday gesture and dance. Understanding Wood’s particular interest in improvisatory dance, I proposed a potential collaboration. It now seems obvious to state that the process of collaboration is not as alien to a dancer as it might be for some practitioners, and I found myself the beneficiary of Wood’s default position of openness at the prospect of working together. I was also not a stranger to collaboration; my most recent experience prior to Fragments being through Manchester Metropolitan University’s Pairings project (see Chap. 5), initiated in 2009 by Alice Kettle and Alex McErlain.18 For Pairings, my collaboration with Belgian artist Sylvie Vandenhoucke enabled me to articulate a key interest in the provisionality of the material line—its potential for being dislocated from any contextualising reference to suggest new possibilities through its alignment or juxtaposition with other lines. In effect we produced a ‘kit’ of material lines that could be assembled in multiple ways, influenced by the simplicity of the eighteenth-­century ‘myriorama’, a set of cards showing images of landscape that can be ordered in any combination, each time achieving a newly configured image.19 The role of line, within an expanded notion of drawing, as provisional and improvisatory had therefore already been established.

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Wood’s collaborative work includes the ongoing Stream project that brings together dance and neuroscience, and is concerned with how a dancer can respond to her own physiological data in live multimedia performances. Another venture, SoundMoves, involves three musicians and three dancers in improvised performances, jamming together on stage in an equal exchange between different forms of expression. A competitive ‘call and response’ between tap dancer and musician in these performances highlights rhythm as the heart of each practice, drawing attention to what can be shared in the improvisational moment. Improvisation in dance is informed by prior knowledge and understanding of gesture, and an existing repertoire of movement. Similarly, in drawing, awareness of the range of marks it is possible to produce through gesture, using particular tools, materials or surfaces can inform an otherwise spontaneous drawing. There is a connection between tacit knowledge and improvisation that occurs in the conscious moment of making. Therefore, when we speak of improvisation, we are referring to an activity that is already full of experience, and characterised by decision-making in the ‘presentness’ of its performance. My own image-making uses line, specifically as a means of registering improvisatory hand movements. I use motion capture equipment to record the gesticulations of subjects in conversation, and my drawings reconstruct these gestures from the captured data, focusing attention on fleeting experience through a kind of portraiture in pieces. I work in an analytic way, redrawing fragments of what the motion sensors have ‘seen’. Each line, representing the movement of the same temporal duration, is cut from adhesive vinyl before being pieced together as a temporary wall drawing that exists as something between a construction and a visualisation. In my collaboration with Wood, I anticipated building on this established method during a two-day performance that was scheduled to follow Process and Product, an international festival of dance improvisation, at Axis Arts Centre, MMU Cheshire in March 2013.

Conversation and Translation Blanchot makes a useful observation in how conversations work in practice and this aligns with how my collaboration with Wood began. He states that:

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when two people speak together, they speak not together, but each in turn: one says something, then stops, the other something else (or the same thing), then stops. […] The fact that speech needs to pass from one interlocutor to another in order to be confirmed, contradicted, or developed shows the necessity of interval.20

Our first conversations were used to establish a system for working in which dance and drawing might be brought together in the same space. In fact the structure we developed mirrored the idea of speaking ‘each in turn’, as a way to maintain the singularities of our respective practices. Wood began with a movement sequence (then stopped), I responded, saying the same thing but through drawn lines. Our conversational structure therefore also incorporated a process of ‘translation’ between modalities. The adhesive vinyl drawing developed directly from the movement data would be assembled (then disassembled) in the performance space over 2 days, allowing for new dance responses to occur in response to its changing state. This moving from dance through drawing, then back to dance over the timescale of the project might be described as a ‘process of translation and “back-translation” (moving from a target language back into the same language)’.21 ‘Translation’ as a process capable of producing difference and variation corresponds to ‘improvisation’ as a method for dance performance, in that there is the same potential for meaning to shift on the basis of a decision made in response to the moment. In line with the activity of dance, I aimed, through my drawing, to place emphasis on process over product. I would leave no permanent trace of the action I had registered, as my use of adhesive vinyl as a drawing material allows me to stick lines directly to a surface then later peel them away. Where work shown in a gallery context might remain intact for the full duration of an exhibition, on this occasion I was keen to draw the audience’s attention to the action that takes place either side of this usually static display; the movement of making that has more in common with the present tense of dance. In becoming the focus of the visual work, the movements made in installing and deinstalling could be read as a slowing down or drawing out over time of the movement represented by the lines. By locating this drawing process within a performance context we hoped to highlight a temporal duality between the original performed and recorded movement and the speed of its reconstruction; and the specific ambition to communicate at least some aspects of the work’s making. The actions involved—physical, slow and often repetitive—could also provide

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stimuli for the dancers as they began to improvise responses from the visual cues provided by the developing lines. Drawing (as both noun and verb) and dance could literally rub up against each other in the same space as an active demonstration of the ‘contagion’ Nancy speaks of.

Conversation as Subject Through conversation we had established a system within which the tension between structure and improvisation could be played out. There would be ‘rules’ to follow—my own making sequences or Wood’s choreographic scores—and responsive spontaneous action. We understood a form that the work could have, but so far had not determined its content. I hoped to bring my interest in speech-related gesture to the project, and given that gestures of both dance and drawing would be developed and performed in what we understood as a ‘conversation’ between our disciplines, this subject seemed to align with our process. The usually non-­ verbal nature of dance prompted us to consider using gestures specifically associated with word finding or retrieving memory, hesitation disfluency and fillers; or gestures from the in-between moments of movement in a related narrative where no utterance occurs. In Blanchot’s definition of conversation, whilst not referring to gesture, he proposes the ‘interval’ or ‘pause’ as an ‘interruption’ that is in fact the ‘respiration of discourse’.22 These moments of interruption are essential to speaking. ECHO then, evolved from observations of the unconsciously performed gestures associated with speech in these moments of hesitation or pause.

Improvisation in Process Observing unconscious gestures in a range of situations, Wood copied, amplified and repeated them, ultimately turning them into a consciously choreographed dance sequence. These silent phrases of movement within conversation would provide the starting point for my input as I took my turn in the conversation. Following an initial coming together involving dialogue and decision-making, the trajectory was fixed; however, each collaborator would in turn determine their path individually, until meeting together at last in the performance space. In one of our recorded conversations Wood explained that we had ‘diverged to converge’; equally we might return to the idea of ourselves as ‘complete individuals’ (or ‘fragments’), linked together within the space of conversation.

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It is perhaps worth mentioning, without placing too much emphasis on, the practical difficulties often encountered in a project such as ours, and the necessity to ‘improvise’ in another way when things do not proceed according to plan. Whilst we had tried to accommodate the workload in relation to our other commitments, the project became vulnerable as the timing of the motion capture session, required to record Wood’s movement and outside our control, was delayed. We were fortunate to have cross-faculty support from staff at MMU who provided the space, equipment and technical expertise to carry out this necessary stage in the process, and it finally took place 3 weeks before the performance date. The most time-intensive stage of the project involving the translation of movement data into vinyl lines therefore took place within a much shorter timescale than planned. This constraint forced the decision to work only with data generated by Wood’s left and dominant hand. In fact, this reduction in the proposed drawing did not impact on the piece where, after all, the aim was to expose the process of making a drawing within a performance context, rather than a drawing as an artefact. What at first appeared to be an obstacle served as a reminder of our aims and enabled me to better understand how drawing was being used within the collaboration.

A Method for Drawing Dancing I have already mentioned improvisation as a term that might be associated with both dance and drawing, but the method I have developed for drawing the ephemeral and improvisatory gestures that accompany speech could be identified as choreographed rather than improvised. I establish systems for translating motion capture data into a material form, and within such systems there is a clear sequence of tasks to follow in order to achieve the physical outcome. Improvisation may occur through responsive decision-making as the stages of processual translation (from recorded data, through digital drawing, to material outcomes) are followed, but throughout I am aware of the intended form or arrangement of lines as they will exist in the final drawing. As such the making process is a kind of reconstruction of a series of swift and spontaneous gestures drawn out over time. Wood’s movement sequence lasted between 4 and 5 minutes and incorporated gestures such as wiping the face, wringing hands together, pulling at sleeves and swinging arms that she had noted from her observations as apparently unconscious and symbolic of thinking and recalling. Her

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­ ovement was encoded as columns of numeric data representing the x, y m and z rotation of each of the sensors attached to the motion capture suit she wore. Then, through digital alchemy, these numeric values were ‘back-­ translated’ to an animated skeletal figure that moved through virtual space reproducing Wood’s movement. In the 3D program Maya, I began to break down the animated sequence by creating a series of motion trails—these are red lines that show the movement of a point, across a defined number of frames. Each motion trail, equating to 100 frames (approximately 4 seconds) of the movement of Wood’s left hand was screen-grabbed, placed into Adobe Illustrator and redrawn as a vector line. These were then scaled to actual size at a thickness of 1 mm and prepared for vinyl cutting. In considering the nature of the space in which the work would be seen—a performance space as opposed to a gallery—I wanted to avoid a situation where the drawing would exist as a backdrop to the dance rather than an integrated element within the performance. The advantage of taking the movement data into a 3D program was that motion trails could be viewed from different angles, and in a departure from previous wall-based work, I made the decision to produce lines for the wall, as seen in what Maya terms the ‘Front’ view, as well as lines for the floor as seen in the ‘Top’ view. The aim was to use these two sets of lines, developed from the same data, to articulate the space in which the dance performances would occur. To this effect, lengths of adhesive vinyl with near-invisible cuts were weeded in order to remove the waste vinyl and reveal the 1 mm thick lines that would be assembled over the duration of the performance. They were then applied with transfer paper, numbered and cut into individual sheets, ready to install. Although this detailed preparation is evidence of a structured process, I would argue that it is not without its moments of improvisation. The stage that required most spontaneous decision-making, was in fact the redrawing of the motion trails using precisely plotted bézier curves in Illustrator. A low-grade screen-grab depicting the knotted red line of a motion trail was often difficult to decipher and it is inevitable that approximation and error occurred in the translation of these lines. But again these adjustments away from the original, which caused concern during the focused, drawing process, were ultimately slight and affected neither the overall dynamic nor the scale of the lines. Once again I was perhaps forgetting that the action of installing (and deinstalling) the drawing was where the focus of my contribution lay.

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ECHO The performance of ECHO took place at Open Space in March 2013. As vinyl lines were assembled end to end across the wall and floor, a group of dancers entered the space on six separate occasions to improvise a response to the developing line, to the installers and to each other. Thus, whilst the drawing in itself had the potential to function as a choreographic score (turning drawing of movement back to movement), other moving bodies in the space, and the new gestures—sorting, peeling and sticking—used to reconstruct the fragmentary trace of Wood’s original movement sequence, might also trigger improvised responses. Although we had developed a structure to implement both prior to and during the performance, the experience of bringing the component parts of the work together could not be planned. The conversation between drawing and dance, two singularities occupying the same space began with a sense of reserve. Open Space is L-shaped and as the drawings were installed in one arm of the L, the dancers kept a respectful distance from this activity, apart from the occasional curious participant daring to venture into the space of the drawing. At first, two distinct disciplinary monologues took the place of our hoped-for dialogue. The 2  days in Open Space could be seen as a condensed version of the collaborative process that had taken place over the previous months: a period of polite reserve and getting to know each other before being prepared to take risks together. As time passed and the trails of lines grew, relationships also changed. The dancers moved within the space occupied by the drawing, mimicking its forms and influenced by its dynamics, reading the line as a direction to work at speed and slowing down only to echo my own concentrated movements as I peeled the backing, aligned the vinyl, rubbed the surface and revealed the next fragment of line. If contagion can be understood as ‘the spreading of an emotional or mental state amongst a number of people’,23 the improvisational score for the performance, including rules on copying and contact work, encouraged the transmission of dance gestures across the group as well as repetition of my own gestures of making by the dancers. Nancy’s ‘general contagion’ began to be played out in the performance space in parallel to the theoretical framework it provided. ECHO at Open Space functioned as a durational piece: the constant slow beat, the rhythmic activity of firstly applying, then later removing the vinyl lines was countered by the series of fast-paced 20-minute improvisational dance responses. It is impossible to know whether the audience

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perceived the installation of the drawing as an element of performance; it took place in public and was necessary to the dance, but during periods where the dancers were absent, it may have appeared as a preparatory activity, the making of a drawing that would be given a different kind of attention once it was complete. The context provided by the space, in this case a public performance venue as opposed to a gallery, helps inform the audience’s reading of the activity that takes place therein. However, Open Space is always open and what happens in it is always visible to an audience; therefore, these boundaries between rehearsal or preparation and performance can easily dissolve.

Conversation on the Page The rules of engagement for Fragments required each collaborating group to record and transcribe conversation to be included in the publication that would bring the five project strands together. For us, dialogue (or movement associated with dialogue) provided the content for the work as well as being central to our methodology. We chose to record conversations at key points during the process, punctuating the stages of observation, translation and reflection with attempts to articulate our respective approaches to process and understanding of each other’s practices. Selected excerpts from this narrative contribute to the publication as unedited transcriptions of our spontaneous conversations.24 They demonstrate our own disfluency: filled pauses are denoted by ‘ums’ and ‘ers’, and ellipses note our hesitations. By exposing such hesitations to public scrutiny we are drawing attention to the open-ended nature of both conversation and this collaboration specifically. The numbered fragments of conversation—with no authorial designation—that form the transcription, provide a further open-ended narrative; but in the same way that the gestures we performed and depicted lacked utterance, so these words on the page lack the gestures that helped complete the conversation for its participants. In this way, the fragmentary text is a counterpart to the gestures—the two forms divided by their different temporalities: inscribed (permanent) text versus ephemeral movement.

100 Metre Line Drawing Beyond the performance at Open Space, an exhibition was planned at Five Years for May 2013 aimed at bringing the five collaborative projects from Fragments together. In the process of preparing material for ECHO, I had

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made a small group of drawings on paper using the weeded-out, adhesive vinyl remnants. These were by-products of the work and we chose to show one of them alongside a printed vector line drawing of the movement of Wood’s left hand, as it appears viewed from above—the same line that I had reconstructed on the floor of Open Space. These works on paper spoke of Wood’s movement as alternative translations of the same information, or documents of past activity. However, we also wanted to bring an element of liveness to this exhibition. I had previously made a work called 100 metre line drawing. Reliant on audience participation, this work had not yet been shown, and it seemed appropriate to ask Wood to take the place of the audience and find a way to perform it. I had prepared a 40 × 25 cm rectangle of black adhesive vinyl with horizontal cuts spaced 1 mm apart. The idea was that the vinyl could be peeled from the wall, in theory as a continuous line, and should it remain intact it would stretch to 100 metres in length. This piece did not involve the elaborate preparation required to stage ECHO, and therefore it could be easily tested. I invited Wood to tease out the narrow vinyl and what followed was a mesmeric pas de deux between dancer and line as she learned the behaviour of the material and coaxed it to respond to her movement. The line broke frequently and each remnant adhered to the wall or to Wood’s body; as she worked to unravel the 100 metres of line, she produced her own improvised wall drawing as evidence of her activity. 100 metre line drawing shifted the focus of our collaborative work. As a single simple solution that lacked the complexity of ECHO, it felt lighter and less studious and found a genuine intersection between drawing and dance through movement. The conversation moved from its position as a structure around the work to within the piece itself. I would suggest that its success comes from understanding how much we could let go of the earlier work whilst staying true to our intentions. Conversation was key to our methodology; its characteristics as open-ended, spontaneous and free flowing had informed our approach to ECHO, but it had acquired additional layers of complexity (subtexts and meta-conversations) that required further reflection. In 100 metre line drawing we see the literal opening out of an idea through the metamorphosis of a solid black rectangle into an expansive, spontaneous collection of lines animating the surface of the wall, a concise visual manifestation of the relationship between structure and improvisation. This work was performed at Five Years, where two vinyl rectangles

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were placed side by side on the wall. One remained intact, with its even horizontal cuts perceptible on close inspection, and the other deconstructed (or in ruins, to return to the analogy of the romantic fragment) with twisting and curling lines, breaking out from a state of two-­ dimensional flatness into random compositions that traced where the dancer had been. Here we shed the bodily gestures that accompany dialogue, as a subject for the work, in favour of the direct dialogue between dancer and line (and thereby between our different forms of practice) that was, after all, the purpose of the collaboration.25

Further Developments for Five Years: Fragments The publication gave scope for developing further new work for the page. Our contributions combined documentary imagery with new drawings. Returning to video footage of Wood’s movement sequence, we began to identify specific gestures that had informed her choreography. Five of these ‘movement phrases’ were rendered in Maya as three-dimensional lines. Where the fragmentation of lines for ECHO was based on dividing a timeline into equal segments, here each motion trail represented a whole gesture. Understanding these static, isolated forms as representations of movement, it is possible to detect physical qualities through the tense, relaxed, stuttering or flamboyant lines. This new beginning returns to the origins of the project—I am drawing what Wood observed when she looked for gestures of hesitation and disfluency; this time, however, I am drawing in a more traditional way, using graphite on paper to interpret what I see on screen. This drawing, combining my renderings of gesture alongside Wood’s written descriptions of the movements they allude to is the final fragment in this project, placing us together, as equal voices speaking on the space of the page.

Conclusion Recent decades have seen a burgeoning in named collaborative practices. They exist now within the mainstream, and as Maria Lind suggests, manifest as ‘alternatives to the predominant focus on the individual so often found in the field of art, as an instrument for challenging both identity and authorship’.26 She identifies collaboration as an ‘open-ended concept’ encompassing a broad range of activities undertaken collectively, that

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reach far beyond the confines of art practices. The fact that the term ‘collaboration’ is so wide-ranging, means that it continues to be problematised. Even within our own experience, with relatively simple aims, questions of definition similarly arise. Was ECHO a collaboration between two, or a ‘collective action’ involving many more? The performance would not have been realised without the participation of colleagues, technical staff and students who supported us at different stages in the process. Where exactly does the status of collaborator begin and end, and are we in danger of applying a hierarchical structure within a modality that seeks the exact opposite? As the two key protagonists at least, Wood and I acknowledge that we think, view, understand and respond differently to any stimulus that we place in the space between us. But, it is through this process of meeting between disciplines that we create something outside of our usual experience that belongs to us both but that is sometimes harder to name. This kind of collaboration construed as a form of conversation is, similar to Hallam and Ingold’s definitions of improvisation, generative, prompting answers in response to opening statements, offering endless digressions. ‘Far from attempting to bring closure to the world, or to tie up loose ends, improvisation makes the most of the multiple possibilities they afford’.27 Fragments did not involve a top-down forcing together of specified disciplines; its constituent collaborations have been self-determined by the participants involved without any prescribed outcome, and therefore, the project has allowed for such improvisations. At the same time the structure of collaboration was not itself under scrutiny within this project; instead, the fact of collaboration provided an opportunity for interdisciplinary conversations to take place and unexpected outcomes to emerge. At the heart of our particular methodology is translation: from movement to movement, from movement to material, and from material back to movement. Writing about literary languages, Nancy says: [I]t is well known that there is never any homothety between languages, and precisely this lack gives to the task of translation its pleasurable and disturbing character.28

In our own process of translating information from one form to another, within or across disciplinary divides, we experience failures in communication and misinterpretations, or indeed only fragmentary interpretations,

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determined by the choices we make. As a precise choreographic score, the lines drawn for ECHO, for example, are a dance only for the left hand; however, they were not named as such, and therefore suggested far greater improvisatory possibilities in the dancers’ imaginations. Although I followed an order in assembling the lines to reconstruct Wood’s original movement, like the myriorama or endless landscape, their arrangement could also be improvised producing alternative iterations and readings, all stemming from the same origin point. Thus the work generates an open-­ ended spiral of responses beyond closure. Reflecting on the methods we have used it is helpful to consider Ingold’s observations on the distinction between the ‘transported passenger’ and the ‘wayfaring traveller’.29 For the wayfarer, ways of knowing come from the experience of inhabiting the world; the itinerary for her journey is not prescribed as are the ‘point-to-point connectors’ of transport routes. We could align these terms with the notions of ‘structure’ and ‘improvisation’ as applied in discussion of our collaboration. We can further compare our process to the traveller’s journey; it is the experience of being in the moment that echoes the wayfarer who ‘is his movement’ and ‘has no final destination’.30 Where the dance improvisations could be seen as acts of wayfaring, the process of assembling a pre-planned drawing might, in contrast, be seen as travelling towards a ‘terminus’ that is the exhibition of the artwork. However, by choosing to install lines in public view as part of a performance, the aim has been to overturn this assumption and expose the experience and duration of the journey, thus shifting the focus away from any fixed idea of destination. Returning to Nancy’s note on ‘contagion’, this is recognised as a response to ‘the multiple allures of a differential sensibility between aesthetic fields’.31 In sharing authorship, we do not necessarily seek to eradicate distinct identities; rather as Nancy suggests, the differential sensibility between aesthetic fields that ‘proceeds from an intensified distinction … becomes the distinction that is an artist’s own—a style, a gesture, an allure’.32 Thus we can return to the idea of complete individuals, the (Romantic) fragments, distinct but speaking together in the work. ECHO and 100 metre line drawing are ephemeral outcomes that we could see as short breaths in the ‘respiration of discourse’, and through this practice of collaboration we have con-spired: we have agreed, plotted and literally breathed together.33

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Notes 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, translated by Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 110. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 5. 3. See for example, Move: Choreographing you, Hayward Gallery, London, 2010–11; Dance/Draw, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, Mass. 2011; Danser Sa Vie, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2011. 4. Helen Molesworth, Dance/Draw (Verlag, Ostfildern; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2011): Hatje Cantz, 11. 5. ‘Performance Drawing’ is a legacy of art works from the 1960s onwards when boundaries and definitions were expanded and drawing moved beyond the page. 6. For more on this see Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge eds., Thinking Through Art: Reflections on art as research (Oxford and New  York: Routledge, 2006). 7. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A history of translation (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 13. 8. For information on Five Years, its history and current membership see http://www.fiveyears.org.uk/archive2/info.html (last accessed 14 August 2019). 9. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, translated by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 1971), http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/ modules/panromanticisms/schlegel-lucinde_and_fragments.pdf. (last accessed 20 August 2014). 10. The publication Five Years: Fragments was launched at The Showroom, London in June 2014. A pdf of the publication can be downloaded from http://www.fiveyears.org.uk/archive2/pages/194/Showroom_ Fragments/194.html?id=1819 (last accessed 14 August 2019). 11. Summers and Dorrian cited from, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (New York: State University of New  York Press, 1978); Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 12. Edward Dorrian and Francis Summers, ‘Our Research: A fragment on fragments,’ in Five Years: Fragments, edited by Edward Dorrian and Mark Hulson (London: Five Years, 2014), 11–14. 13. Five Years, 2014, 9. 14. Blanchot, Infinite, 1993. 15. In addition to my collaboration with dancer Karen Wood, Marc Hulson worked with writer Paul Curran; Rochelle Fry worked with musicians,

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Squares and Triangles; Esther Planas worked with Tuesday-029 and Edward Dorrian worked with Amy Todman. 16. Five Years, 2014, 9. 17. The Showroom was established in 1983 and is currently based in North West London. ‘We commission and produce art and discourse; providing an engaging, collaborative programme that challenges what art can be and do for a wide range of audiences, including art professionals and our local community.’ See http://www.theshowroom.org/ (last accessed 14 August 2019). 18. Alke Groppel-Wegener, Pairings: Exploring collaborative creative practice (Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University, 2010). 19. See http://www.fiveyears.org.uk/archive2/pages/061/MORFILL_ VANDENHOUCKE/061.html for documentation of this project. 20. Maurice Blanchot, Infinite, 1993, 75. 21. Nancy Ann Roth, ‘Preface,’ to Vilém Flusser, Gestures, translated by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), vii. 22. Blanchot, Infinite, 1993, 76. 23. Nancy, Pleasure, 2013, 110. 24. Sally Morfill and Karen Wood in Five Years, 2014, 18–20. 25. A second performance of 100 metre line drawing took place at Backlit, Nottingham, in November 2014 as part of InDialogue ‘a biannual International Symposium that interrogates how artists and researchers use dialogue in practice.’ https://indialogue2014.wordpress.com/ (last accessed 14 August 2019). 26. Maria Lind, ‘The Collaborative Turn,’ in Taking the Matter into Common Hands (London: Black Dog, 2007). 27. Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), 15. 28. Nancy, ‘Preface,’ 2014, xii. 29. Tim Ingold, Lines: A brief history (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 75–77. 30. Ibid. 31. Nancy, Pleasure, 2013, 110. 32. Ibid. 33. I owe this thought to Dean Kenning. In comments made during the panel discussion launching Five Years: Fragments, he connected the idea of ‘conspiracy’ to collaboration, and pointed out its etymology: con—together, spirare—to breathe.

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Bibliography Blanchot, Maurice. 1993. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dorrian, Edward, and Francis Summers. 2014. Our Research: A Fragment on Fragments. In Five Years: Fragments, ed. Edward Dorrian and Mark Hulson, 11–14. London: Five Years. Firchow, Peter. 1971. Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Groppel-Wegener, Alke. 2010. Pairings: Exploring Collaborative Creative Practice. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University. Hallam, Elizabeth, and Tim Ingold, eds. 2007. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Oxford/New York: Berg. Ingold, Tim. 2008. Lines: A Brief History. London/New York: Routledge. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1978. The Literary Absolute. Trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. New  York: State University of New York Press. Lind, Maria. 2007. The Collaborative Turn. In Taking Matters into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, ed. Johanna Billing, Maria Lind, and Nilsson Lars, 15–31. London: Black Dog. Macleod, Katy, and Lin Holdridge, eds. 2006. Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research. Oxford/New York: Routledge. Molesworth, Helen. 2011. Dance/Draw. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag and Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2013. The Pleasure in Drawing. Trans. Philip Armstrong. New  York: Fordham University Press. Roth, Nancy Ann. 2014. Preface. In Gestures, written by Vilém Flusser. Trans. Nancy Ann Roth, vii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Oxford: Routledge.

CHAPTER 11

The Good, The God and The Guillotine: Insider/Outsider Perspectives Martin Blain and Jane Turner

The focus of the writing in this chapter engages with the principal research aim of the project that became known as The Good, The God and The Guillotine (TG3),1 which was to develop strategies towards a ‘successful’ collaboration between a range of professional artists. The project brought together theatre makers, musicians, a digital artist and lighting designer with an aim to develop strategies of engagement with a creative process that both challenged the artists to extend their own ways of working, as well as their expectations of their disciplinary field within a multi/interdisciplinary context. At the outset, the collaborating artists explored what the tenets of a successful collaboration might entail. Two key strategies that the artists considered should be the basis for the collaboration included (a) the development of a shared consciousness by initiating inclusive ways of developing, sharing and reflecting on creative ideas and materials and (b) interrogating disciplinary specific terminology in order to construct a shared creative and performance language. It is evident that even this iniM. Blain (*) • J. Turner Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_11

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tial strategy of amalgamating ideas, as a way of working, reflects an intention to inclusively acknowledge all the collaborators equally. At the heart of the project was the impact and creative use of technology in performance, and the wider world, and all the collaborators were interested in exploring the possibilities of technology in a multi/interdisciplinary context, bringing their expertise into a shared space that required them all to reflect and revise their normative ways of creating material and performing. This chapter provides a critical appraisal of these collaborative strategies and intentions that led the artists to collectively build a shared theatrical performance language that translated the central text, The Stranger (L’Étranger), Camus’s existentialist commentary on religion, and reinflected it as an examination of the contemporary existentialist anxiety concerning the pervasiveness of technology. The chapter will draw on particular examples derived from the creative process that illustrate moments where collaborators were challenged and required to resolve creative problems. The authors offer complementary perspectives on creative collaboration from their insider/outsider positions. Jane Turner’s ethnographic role gave her a privileged outsider perspective on the collaboration process and insights into the insider perspectives from the interviews she undertook with the collaborators. Here she focuses on the ways in which aesthetic judgements were made and how a process of creative cohesion evolved. Her observations are aligned with Noël Carroll’s taxonomy2 for qualifying aesthetic experience. Although Carroll focuses on the experience of the recipient of an artwork, in this context, the taxonomy provides a useful insight into the creative development and decision-making processes engaged with over the course of the TG3 project. Martin Blain is a composer and laptop performer directly involved in the project and was particularly interested in exploring how his creative practice was influenced, freed up and compromised by interactively working on such a multi/interdisciplinary project. From his insider perspective, he documents some of the creative insights exposed through the processes of collaboration. Developing on Andy Lavender’s notion of ‘circles of collaboration’,3 Blain positions and theorises his own experience as a performer-musician4 within his formulation of the concentric circles of collaboration, which are conceived as three contrasting types of collaborative relationship:

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• Inner circle of collaboration: for this project the creative challenge for Blain, and each of the collaborating artists, was to develop effective practical applications of innovative compositional techniques, processes and practicalities that could be communicated to and aesthetically realised by the wider group; • Middle circle of collaboration: this is where the practical experiments initiated in the inner circle between individuals were re-worked within the studio space and connects with the ideas and relationships discussed in the outer circle. This is a playful space where discoveries, inherent, in the material can be revealed, developed and refined for performance; • Outer circle of collaboration: this is where ideas were discussed and collaborative relationships were developed across different arts disciplines with the ambition to develop a shared consciousness. Activities in this circle of collaboration were, in this instance, facilitated by the use of regular reflective feedback discussion, both in the shared studio space (at the end of each day’s work) and virtually (via a blog). In a similar way that the artistic work explored new strategies for collaboration, and creative play that led to a novel aesthetic framework, Turner explored how critical frameworks opened up and informed her observations as ethnographer/dramaturg. In addition to Carroll’s taxonomy, the twin ideas derived from Kant’s aesthetics, interested and disinterested pleasure, also provided useful commentary on the creative processes of collaboration, particularly in relation to decision-­making and creative judgement calls in TG3.5 The two terms ‘interested’ and ‘disinterested’ are used by Kant to identify two positions whereby pleasure is experienced that leads to a form of aesthetic judgement/aesthetic evaluation of art and offer a further critical connection with the concentric circles of collaboration. Kant makes a link between imagination and understanding (sensuous and rational) in relation to our experiential response to an artefact that he argues both transports us from everyday life and heightens our experience of life. ‘Interested’ might here be understood as an insider perspective, the direct experience generated in the Research & Development (R&D)6 space. ‘Disinterested’ might be considered an outsider perspective, a contemplative feeling, where an aesthetic judgement is possible because of a gap created between the art object and the spectatorial position, here illustrated by the viewing of the work on the blog that allowed for a critical distance.

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The blog became a memorial space, and ‘jars a bodily memory’,7 and it also allows the collaborators to re-evaluate an experience with the benefit of time and space. As such, disinterested activity can be aligned with the work taking place in the outer circle (e.g., in the blog), whereas the concept of interested activity can evidently be associated with the operations in the inner circle. The inner circle represents a space where material is initiated and developed through a process of negotiation between the creative initiator and the technical ability of the performer; thus, it is a space of experimentation. Both inner and middle circles equate to interested, sensuous, imaginative engagements with creative materials. However, the middle circle also represents a collaborative space of negotiation that draws on both interested and disinterested activities. The middle circle serves as an aesthetic space for the collaborators’ creative experiments to be played out in conjunction with other collaborators and thus requires a process of discussion, compromise and adjustment in line with the broader vision of the project. The outer circle offers the collaborators a disinterested perspective, one where they critically and aesthetically reflect and make judgements in order that the materials can be refined to create an experience that operates as both sensuous and rational for the spectator at the point of performance.

Context TG3 set out to be a collaborative project exploring Camus’s novel The Outsider (L’Étranger) to be performed as an intermedial concert event in 11 Chapters.8 The collaborators were: two members of Proto-type Theater (Gillian Lees and Andrew Westerside) and Leentje Van De Cruys (associate member of Proto-type Theater) as performer-singers; MMUle (Manchester Metropolitan University laptop ensemble) comprised three musicians (Martin Blain, Nick Donovan [latterly replaced by Jonas Hummel] and Paul J.  Rogers) who were performer-musicians; lighting designer Rebecca M.K. Makus (from the USA), digital designer/animator, Adam York Gregory (freelancer) and writer and, initially, director Peter S. Petralia (founder of Proto-type Theater). The collaborators were involved in five short blocks of R&D time: February, March and May 2012, followed by a week at the Tramway in Glasgow in January 2013, a three-week block in July/August 2013; the show premiered at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre in October 2013 and continued to tour in the UK through 2014.9

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The TG3 project required the collaborators to creatively respond to a contemporary adaptation of Camus’s novel prepared by Petralia. The performer-musicians were each charged to initially compose scores for four Chapters of the adaptation and then to perform with pre-recorded samples, as well as with live sounds and samples recorded during each performance. The performer-singers sang the textual scores and created an enigmatic theatrical world, with further creative input from Makus, who provided a lighting score and a range of light objects, and Gregory who created and operated a complex animation projected onto different surfaces throughout the performance.

Processes and Terminology Over the course of the R&D process, collaborative strategies were tried out that aspired to create a shared consciousness between the collaborators, a shared consciousness that identified and then resolved the tensions and conflicts that inevitably arose from a group of individuals coming together to develop a performance project. Some strategies were successful in achieving their artistic aims; some were not. For example, during the first R&D block the performer-singers played with a tarpaulin and sand, while the performer-musicians improvised with found sounds as well as live sounds produced in the space; however, while the task generated some interesting moments, it was impossible for the improvisatory play to be reproduced by the performer-musicians and the performer-singers. Furthermore, while the task created an enjoyable mess it proved to be very difficult to clear up. Due to the amount of electronics being used in the performance space, the presence of sand raised particular issues concerning the functionality of the technology. However, some of the sound structures generated did make their way into the final sound-score. There was an ongoing tension that emerged at this early stage between what was achievable and reproducible by the collaborators. For example, an early comment on the challenges of the project was made by Gregory, the digital designer, who described the project as a performance engaged in ‘tangled webs of technology’.10 His comment usefully identifies the way in which technology both literally operated and how it served metaphors and motifs around the visible and the invisible textual layers developed through the creative processes. The project was described as using media-­ driven elements as a ‘structuring logic’ and conceived of technology as an ‘existential agent of the 21st century’.11

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At an early meeting of the collaborators there was a discussion about terminology, especially terms such as rehearsal, improvising and devising. Rehearsal was a term that the collaborators agreed was loaded with an expectation that there was pre-existing material that could be rehearsed; however, as Harvie suggests, ‘rehearsal … is never just the repetition of learned delivery but the creation of performance’,12 thus illustrating discrepancies in understanding of terms in common usage in any creative process. However, within TG3, the group settled on calling the periods of time that they came together to work as R&D blocks rather than rehearsals. Time together, in an equipped studio space, was scarce and costly. Over the two and a half years, from first meeting to first performance, the collaborators worked in a shared space for no more than 58  days. Further challenges and a consequence of the fractured duration of the project include the early departure of Petralia, the initial director and author of the adaptation. Petralia left the project 18 months in; this event was followed by one of the performer-­musicians, Donovan, leaving the project two years in.13 Both female performer-singers, Lees and Van De Cruys, were ill during scheduled meeting times, and the lighting designer, Makus, because she lived in the USA, was unable to attend all the scheduled meetings. Thus the 58 days were compromised and disrupted for a range of very legitimate reasons. It is testimony to the determination and commitment of all the collaborators that the project came to fruition. Improvisation was a further term that highlighted differences in understanding. It emerged that the term had a currency that was inflected differently across the different disciplines, and across cultures. It became apparent that the term improvising was understood differently in the USA than in the UK; Petralia reported that in the USA the term devising was rarely used as improvising was the more usual term to describe creative activity where new material was generated and refined for performance.14 However, in TG3 the term improvisation was more usually used to describe the experimental, spontaneous activities generated during R&D and, as we shall see, can be aligned to the middle circle of collaboration. The term devised or scored was used to describe the pre-planned materials that were brought into the physical R&D space by Gregory, Makus and the performer-musicians, whereas devising became more prominent in the latter stages of the collaboration to describe the process of refining the materials for performance. Heiner Goebbels, a renowned international music-theatre maker, composer and collaborator, comments that his works ‘are never improvised …

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but as a method of research on material, an experimental improvisation is the best possible tool’.15 The technical complexities of his work and TG3, at the point of performance, required a very precise score to be fixed and thus to use the term improvisation to determine the structure would be misleading. In both instances the term devising is preferred. Jörg Laue, in Composed Theatre, described his preference for the term devising as a ‘process-related’16 activity that required constant re-negotiation. For TG3, as a process involving both devising and improvisation, the evolving performance language similarly needed to be reconsidered in each R&D block. While the collaborators often created scored (yet another contentious term in the field of contemporary performance)17 material on their own, occupying the area we have identified as the inner circle of collaboration, the material was then shared with others in the middle circle, where the collaborators worked ‘in the moment’,18 often using improvisation strategies as a tool; the outer circle then provided a disinterested opportunity for reflection on the successes and failures of the materials. While challenges concerning terminology and the disparate and diverse making processes being brought into the R&D could have led to irrevocable breakdowns in the creative development, in actuality, these discrepancies and incoherencies became a positive strategy for creating innovative practice. John Cage, when discussing his own insights on developing collaborative work, reminds us that: We must construct, that is, gather together what exists in a dispersed state. As soon as we give it a try, we realize that everything already goes together. Things are gathered together before us; all we have done is to separate them. Our task henceforth, is to reunite them.19

Echoing Cage’s comments, in one of the reflective discussions held each day during R&D blocks, performer-singer (and latterly director), Westerside, commented that the performers needed to move away from each other and the compositional scores in order to come back together.20 In this way, he believed that a theatrical language would organically develop alongside the sonic score. This point is further supported by what Laue describes as ‘flexible time-brackets’,21 another concept derived from Cage, that operate in conjunction with a multilayered strategy and creates what Laue calls ‘performative polyphony’: this describes the way in which apparently discreet materials are simultaneously combined and create a particular sense of coherence.22 Laue’s notion of the performative

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polyphony, here, reflects the way in which the diverse individual scores, developed by the collaborators, were put into play and successfully combined in the concatenation of the final performance.

The Concentric ‘Circles of Collaboration’ Through experiment and play, the rules of engagement and negotiations concerning language and practices required a particular approach to reflexive and reflective collaboration; this was liberating in terms of creativity, seeing what was possible, especially in the early stages of the project. For Blain, the ‘inner’ circle of collaboration was a place where he was able to focus his attention on the practical music-making elements of the work. Blain’s focus of attention was on exploring the musical potential and possibilities in bringing together performer-singers with a laptop ensemble. Two of the performer-­singers were untrained, one had some previous vocal training; all performer-singers were confident in using their voice and were open to the challenge of trying out new (for them) approaches to developing vocal structures. To become better acquainted with the vocal qualities of the performer-singers, Blain worked with them individually, in pairs and as a trio. Through a series of vocal exercises, tasks and interventions, he became aware that they were able to develop stronger and more convincing sound structures (a) when they were not singing in unison, (b) when they were working with short melodic fragments and developing materials within a heterophonic texture23 and (c) when the male and female voices were being used to explore pitch contrast, for example, the male voice explored the low vocal register at a time when the two female voices explored the high register.24 Consequently, Blain elected to experiment with composing using heterophonic textures to both challenge the technical ability of the performer-singers, while also remaining true to his compositional aims. An example of the development of a heterophonic vocal texture can be heard in Blain’s composition The Best Way to Taste the Salty Sea (TG3, Chapter 4). The final section of this Chapter lasts c.3 minutes and is built around a static pointillistic texture that was provided by the three performer-musicians. One of the performer-singers began singing and the other two performer-singers began singing shortly after, with Blain’s instruction that they should sing the same melodic line but not in rhythmic unison: there were no precise rhythms to follow, but the response from each performer-singer needed to be delivered with confidence and appear

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improvisatory. With this amount of indeterminacy within the development of this sonic structure, there was flexibility for the performer-singers to not be too concerned with the rhythmic complexity that would have resulted had this heterophonic texture been fixed in music notation with an expectation that the individual parts would be repeated exactly the same each time it was performed. This enabled the performer-singers to move freely within their individual parts, thus providing musically complex and interesting vocal textures. Thus, the heterophonic technique, within this sonic structure, developed out of necessity. Blain negotiated a fine balance with the performer-­singers in achieving his compositional aim of developing a rhythmically complex vocal texture, within the technical and musical capabilities of the performer-singers. This was a negotiated compromise that met the artistic aims of Blain and the performer-singers. For Blain, the ‘middle’ circle of collaboration, illustrated by MMUle’s working relationship with Proto-type Theater, a lighting designer and a digital artist, revealed processes, ways of working together and developing ways of interacting with each other that were more important than the results of their labour. Spontaneous play, what was referred to as ‘noodling’ in the R&D blocks, generated what was later described as the most experimental and exciting experience for both performer-­musicians and performer-singers. However, the process was not sustainable and the material generated would have been difficult to repeat because the dynamic energy of responding spontaneously to a moment, a gesture or a sound could only be enjoyed by those recognised as insiders to the creative process. In an interview with Rogers, he explained that, for the musicians, improvisation operated within a field of technical expertise: you need to be proficient on your instrument before you can begin to conceive of working with improvisation aesthetically and at the early stages of this project the laptop musicians were still developing their knowledge and expertise of the instrument.25

Given the limited amount of time available for real-time interaction between the collaborators, as well as the limited ability for some of the collaborators to improvise and respond to requests to change and adapt materials in real-time, the blog, as a manifestation of the outer concentric circle, became a useful documenting platform, a virtual R&D space. Gregory used the platform to present work-in-progress animations as well as the results of subtle changes to existing material that would have taken

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too long to explore within the scheduled R&D time. This virtual platform was also useful for MMUle as a way of offering sonic structures in development and in response to vocal work explored in R&D. For example, in The Smell of Darkness (TG3, Chapter 9), to help the performer-singers learn their vocal parts, Blain recorded an audio version of each vocal part and uploaded this to the blog. This enabled the performer-singers to learn their part before the next R&D block. This demonstrates how the circles of collaboration and insider/outsider perspectives became productively tangled throughout the course of the project.

Performing with Technology TG3 was a technologically driven project and, as has been discussed, this produced a range of particular challenges. Nicholas Till encountered similar technical and performative challenges in his work on digital opera where he was exploring the notion of the ‘technologically uncanny’. He defines the term as, an effect that arises through the blurring of nature/culture distinctions, both at a phenomenal level (the electronic that sounds human, or vice versa; the anthropomorphism of machines) and the conceptual level (do we hear technologically produced sounds/images as phenomena of nature or culture; as ‘mediated’ or ‘immediate’?)26

Till’s discussion of the relationship between vocally produced and digitally produced sound and the difficulties experienced by the spectator regarding what was occurring live in the space and what was pre-recorded was shared by TG3 collaborators. A characteristic of many laptop performances is that it is unclear who is in control; speaking about his project, Till asks whether it is ‘the performer; the person sitting [standing] at the laptop or sound console; the machine itself?’ that is in control.27 Following a work in progress showing at Battersea Arts Centre, Till records that perhaps the most important observation was that ‘the audience was unable to discern either the liveness or the interactivity of the live interactive elements, meaning that our assumption about the ‘uncanny’ effect of these interactions was not working’.28 In light of Till’s account, the aim in TG3 to create an experiential ambiguity for the spectator needed to be reconsidered. Till notes that eventually a ‘cheat’ was employed to signpost the relationship/connections for

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the spectator. In TG3, Petralia was clear that the signposting and ‘rules’ of the performance were made explicit to the spectator early in the performance so that the web of connections and later disconnections were made meaningful to each spectator and that they were able to commit to the experience. This was an aspect of TG3 that was noted as particularly successful by both Andy Lavender and Nicholas Till in a round table discussion after a performance at Axis Arts Centre in 2013.29 Following Till, further commentators30 have also reported that it is not always clear how laptop musicians’ performance gestures relate to the sounds they produce and that this has the potential for a loss of connection between performance, gesture and spectacle. Similarly, for some more sceptical spectators, there may be a suggestion that some of the musicians may not be performing at all and may, in fact, be more likely to be responding to and initiating email correspondence while spectators watch, so establishing a connection between performer-musicians at their laptops and the performer-musicians became a significant issue in TG3. The logistical restrictions of working with laptops and software programming in a rehearsal space only began to emerge in the second R&D block. This realisation is shared by Till who notes that using Max/MSP slowed down the process of ‘immediate response and improvisation essential in a rehearsal situation’.31 For the performer-musicians in TG3, adapting their bespoke Max/MSP program patches, and Gregory working with animation software, was not possible in the moment of R&D; by the time proposed adjustments had been made, the material and flow of the improvising and devising processes had moved on. In TG3, the generation of materials was dependent on contributors all taking responsibility for preparing material outside of the R&D space for the group to work on. Gregory commented on the blog that generating digital material spontaneously was not possible for him as a working method: That was something I became aware of as we worked. As it stands, I can’t match the reaction times of the performers. Or the musicians. At least not whilst I’m part of the process … let the machine take over, however, and everything will be fine.32

An ironic comment in relation to the critique offered by TG3 is that the live is compromised by the digital. Gregory’s comment here is a further example that collaborative strategies need to be flexible to accommodate the differing work patterns of the collaborators.

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Petralia, as writer and initial director, was interested in working with strategies of displacement and defamiliarisation both in the making phase of the performance and in the way materials were juxtaposed in the final performance score. The strategies were developed to distinguish live from pre-recorded materials, to foreground connections but also disrupt connections between human and machine and to provide and destroy the notion of visual and audio clues concerning ‘cause and effect’ relationships in the playing out of the material, thus requiring the spectator to be carried down different aesthetic and sensory pathways. The challenge of signposting the live efficacy of the performer-musicians at their consoles was tackled in the second R&D block. The configuration of the space positioned the laptop performer-musicians at the front of the playing area; however, the three performer-singers (positioned at the back of the space) noted that their ability to work playfully behind the computers ‘felt’ as though it was thwarted by the rules imposed by the technology. A shift of dynamics was suggested that paired a performermusician with a performer-singer, and this decision opened up possibilities for connections to be made in the space; however, one performer noted a further frustration pertaining to the compromised sense of live connections between performer-musician and performer-singer: that the relationship produced was static and unidirectional. This feedback led to the performer-musicians having their chairs removed, requiring them to be more evident bodies, standing (awkwardly) behind their laptops in the space rather than appearing as an extension of the machine. A further defamiliarisation strategy was introduced whereby all the performers removed their shoes. This somewhat radical suggestion produced very positive results in terms of the performers developing an awareness of themselves in the space, connecting with each other and beginning to explore what performing as ‘self’ might mean in the context of the project; thus, all six performers became integral to the developing landscape. The method of creating an initial space for play allowed for some basic strategies for learning to work with each other to emerge, as described above; however, it became apparent in the second R&D block that the group required more intervention and clearer instruction from Petralia as the ‘outside eye’. In feedback, there was a call for connectivity, a narrative, a sense of who these people were and why they were there. This led to further, more specific, interventions being introduced in the form of rules and structuring principles; thus, a process of filtering, eliminating and distilling of the creative materials began.

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Having confidence in each other’s abilities to make judgements, to willingly be taken on a journey out of normative aesthetic and artistic ‘comfort zones’ was vital to the efficacy and success of the collaboration and, thus, further strategies were explored. Pairing each performer-musician with a performer-singer, so that physical movements and gestures were synchronised with the resulting audio sounds, made an important connection between performer-singer, performer-­musician and laptop computer. This approach to developing a causal relationship between movements and sounds was further explored by Rogers (MMUle) and Lees (ProtoType Theater). Through improvisation, Rogers captured the vocal sounds Lees was producing as she copied the physical movements he was making as he interacted with the computer to control and manipulate the captured audio. Michael Kirby has suggested that whilst ‘the differences between acting and non-acting may be small […] it is precisely these borderline cases that can provide insights into acting theory and the nature of art’.33 At moments during this particular improvisatory session it became evident that both Rogers and Lees were working in, or trying to find sub-consciously, that space Kirby identifies as ‘borderline’. For moments in this improvisation Rogers and Lees reported that it was not apparent who was initiating material and who was re-acting to the process. Whilst the material developed from this improvisation session did not appear in the final performance of the work, the performance strategy to align ‘cause and effect’ relationships between actions and sounds did. Simon Emmerson, when discussing compositional approaches within electroacoustic music, has suggested that ‘cause and effect’ relationships might exist at both the micro and macro levels within the audio stream. He suggests that: ‘From grand gesture to a noh-like shift in the smallest aspect of a performer’s demeanour, we attempt to find relationships between action and result’.34 Emmerson’s point here is that for him, it is the ‘hearing’ of a cause that can result in the ‘hearing’ of an effect.35 Emmerson has defined this as the audio’s ‘sounding flow’.36 Developing ‘cause and effect’ relationships within the audio stream can be helpful for spectators when attempting to engage with sonic structures that have little or no apparent connection between the visual and the sonic. However, in the world of electroacoustic music, the sounding flow is normally prioritised over the visual stimuli that may result, as a consequence, in human and machine interaction. Retreating a little from this position, MMUle, working within a multi/interdisciplinary context, was required to locate its musical practice

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within the wider context of contemporary arts where the audio and the visual complement one another (in terms of coherence but not necessarily unity). Here, the audio ‘cause and effect’ relationships were competing with ‘cause and effect’ relationships in other mediums, as noted in relation to Kirby above. In an attempt to encourage the spectator to ‘find relationships’, ‘cause and effect’ connections were planted at the beginning of the musical score so that the resulting audio streams developed with an identifiable ‘cause and effect’ relationship; the clues, as mentioned earlier, had the potential to allow the spectator to discover their own pathway through the material being presented. The initial work in the R&D sessions, developing spatial relationships between MMUle and Proto-type Theater, along with the reflexive approach to building a physical and sonic relationship, as evidenced through the example of Rogers and Lees above, and MMUle’s approach to planting audio clues into the sonic structures of the developing work, led to what became the opening section of the work. In Prologue, two performers (one performer-musician and one performer-singer) entered the space. The performer-musician stood behind a laptop computer stage right; the performer-singer stood down stage behind a microphone; both were lit by spot-lights; the performer-musician encouraged the performersinger to ‘test’ the microphone; the performer-singer spoke into the microphone and made a physical gesture in recognition that their relationship had been established. The performer-singer’s voice was ‘captured’ by the performer-musician. This process was repeated until all six performers had entered the performance space and established, for the spectator that there was a special, sonic and visual relationship that would be played out throughout the performance. The intricate web of creative compromises and problem-solving documented above evidences the complexities inherent in any collaborative process. The work undertaken in the concentric circles of collaboration was all underpinned by the necessity to make decisions and articulate value judgements and, thus, the following proposes a critical frame that provides an insight into these processes.

Aesthetics as a Critical Framework TG3’s collaborative journey was saturated with aesthetic experiences, judgements and decisions. Noël Carroll, in an article on aesthetic experience, examines a taxonomy of three sorts of aesthetic experience:

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‘affect-orientated’, ‘axiologically-­orientated’ and ‘content-orientated’.37 While Carroll primarily discusses artistic value from the position of an outsider, he notes the possibilities and limitations of each sort of experience and seeks to identify key characteristics of aesthetic experience, as opposed to aesthetic evaluation that denotes a distance or separation from the aesthetic object. In terms of TG3, value (for the collaborators) was generated both in the immediacy of the work space and from a distance via a project blog, a space where the insider/outsider positions merged. Simply, affect-orientated aesthetic experience is generated in the moment of an encounter; axiologically-orientated aesthetic experience is where experience is interpreted via pre-determined value judgements; content-orientated aesthetic experiences are driven by the construction of the materials rather than experience, thus the aesthetic experience is a response to the expressive qualities of the art work. In the outer circle of collaboration, the blog provided a virtual space that replicated the daily review of the day’s experiments and similarly encouraged an open debate that crystallised thoughts on the aesthetic ‘content-orientated’ materials being developed that, in turn, resulted in axiologically-orientated decisions or a sense of the growing, collectively agreed, intrinsic value of the performance. While there were many notable moments during R&D that generated affect-orientated aesthetic experience for the collaborators, these moments were often unrepeatable, as have been noted previously. What was required was the generation of affect-orientated experiences for the spectator. Thus, being able to shift perspective away from the sensorial affect that something ‘feels good’, but we do not know why (aligned with the play of activities in the middle circle) and away from the axiological aesthetic, reminiscent of the collaborators working in the inner circle, informed by their own previous experiences of what was ‘good’, enabled the collaborators eventually, and effectively, to focus on the content-orientated aesthetic and the intrinsic value to the performance product. Carroll usefully queries the notion that an aesthetic experience must be pleasurable. In TG3, being able to distinguish between an aesthetic experience that aroused pleasure and/or excitation rather than tedium and displeasure was important to both the collaborators and the desired experience designed for the spectator. Those aspects of the process that resulted in ‘defective’ aesthetic experiences were discounted or re-worked in order that the aesthetic experience galvanised for the spectator was not merely

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pleasurable but also had the potential to evoke a heightened sensorial experience that might overwhelm, disturb and potentially mobilise a sense of disorientation. In relation to the experiential effects that were designed to garner a sense of disorientation for both performer and spectator, Makus created several kinds of light objects and lighting designs that were dismissed (see Fig.  11.1) and re-­ worked before being completely reconceived (see Fig. 11.2). The final built light objects were used interactively by the performer-singers and performer-musicians and created a seemingly discordant dramaturgical strand. The objects appeared late in the R&D process and disrupted what, in many ways, had become a comfortable pleasure in the sound and visual composition. Makus was not interested in merely providing light to see the stage action but to provoke both performers and spectators at a heightened sensorial level. She commented that she liked to

Fig. 11.1  R&D block 2: Gillian Lees, Leentje Van de Cruys, Nick Donovan and Andrew ‘Wes’ Westerside; light objects by Rebecca M.K. Makus. (Image courtesy of Proto-type Theater)

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Fig. 11.2  R&D block 5: Leentje Van de Cruys, Andrew ‘Wes’ Westerside and Gillian Lees. Developing interactive light objects worn by performer-singers by Rebecca M.K. Makus. (Image courtesy of Paul J. Rogers)

tilt lights so that they grazed the eyes of performers, agitating them but not infuriating them, producing an affect-orientated aesthetic that was not pleasurable but was effective in disturbing and exciting the sensibilities of both performers and spectators.38 For the collaborators involved in TG3, it became evident that they needed to recalibrate their sense of value and align it with the project as opposed to their knowledge and expertise of a particular disciplinary domain. For example, Donovan reported that, at times, Petralia, as an outside eye, would make positive comments about a section that he experienced as unsatisfactory, as lacking in innovation—as tedious. However, he grew to recognise that his experience was different from what became a common or collective discourse. With a group of collaborators, with radically different skill sets and reference points, each searching for something innovative, what they produced/suggested was frequently consid-

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ered too outlandish or extreme for another collaborator. Thus, an important aspect of the collaboration was recognising the terms with which they perceived each other. They needed to construct a common language and common value to know what was a ‘common good’ for the project. Donovan comments that ‘it was not about compromise (although it felt like it at times) but a need to re-define and negotiate what was collectively good for the project’.39 Understanding the aesthetic judgement that something ‘looks right’/‘feels right’ required a collective agreement of values. Some of the performers commented that their value judgements were based on intuition but, of course, intuition is informed by experience (cultural, social, political) and particular predilections for particular approaches to developing artistic content; intuition is axiological. In order that the performance evoked a heightened sensorial affect for the spectator required that the decisions of the collaborators needed to be based, not just on what was in some way familiar but, perhaps more importantly, where the art work imaginatively departed from existing techniques and compositional practices (in both form and content). If the collaborators became energised by an aesthetic experience, then so might the spectator. However, something that energised the performer-musicians often appeared passé to the other collaborators; something that appeared novel musically to these collaborators equally appeared mundane and clichéd to the performer-musicians. Thus, questions of innovation and originality in relation to cultural/personal context, the breaking of rules, rupturing conventions and so on became important markers in the making of decisions and aesthetic judgements. To return to Carroll’s taxonomy, the affect-orientated approach may best serve to recognise that the collaborators were drawing on different— and discrepant—aesthetic experiences. From this perspective the individual’s experience is prioritised, whereas a more effective strategy might have been for the collaborators to acknowledge that a different type of approach was required to make collective decisions regarding aesthetic experience, hence the axiological approach, which provided a way of describing the aesthetic agreement that was constructed through the project through repetition and negotiation. Making space for group feedback and discussion after each day’s work, using the blog, as well as having intense periods of R&D where, in some instances, the collaborators shared living space as well as work space, fostered a level of collective experience, facilitating a

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collective valuing. Carroll describes this approach as valuing the art experience ‘for its own sake’.40 Building strategies that enabled the disparate collaborators to transform into a collective ensured that their experiences and creative proposals were listened to/supported/rejected equally. Such processes were vital in terms of keeping everyone on board and trusting that this was, as has been documented, a genuinely collaborative process. As noted above, the strategy of pairing a performer-musician with a performer-singer had the effect of breaking down any perceived normative privileging of the performer-singers in relation to the performer-musicians. In relation to Carroll’s axiological aesthetic experience, the effect of the pairings was to affect the working relationships across the whole process, promoting the importance of shared experiences and thus building opportunities for developing collaborative strategies as the collaborators developed a sense of shared responsibility. As Carroll states, it is, to the advantage of the individual to develop and refine a talent for being attuned to the feelings of conspecifics. Aesthetic experience makes the transmission of a common culture of feelings accessible—with evident benefits for both the group and the individual.41

In the case of a project such as TG3, an agreement that the project had intrinsic value was a motivating force. However, running parallel to this sensibility was also a sense that the collaborators valued aspects of the process and the final performance as ‘instrumentally valuable’.42 Van De Cruys reported that, as a solo performer, she had a freedom within her work that was not possible in TG3. At times, she said, she felt like a ‘small robot’; she needed to find moments of freedom but also recognised that she had a responsibility and part to play in the ‘machine’.43 Van De Cruys’s experience of digital oppression produced a tension in her performance quality: she, along with the other two performer-singers, fought to re-assert their place on stage against the ‘tangled webs of technology’. Their performances embody a physical resistance in the playing out of their material scores as they are caught between the live and the digitally processed, further emphasising the fundamental relationship explored in TG3 between the human and the machine. While the project illustrates that effective collaborative strategies between humans are possible, we might query, as does Camus, the relationship we have with the machine.

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Conclusion TG3 sought to maintain a level of inclusive collaboration throughout the R&D blocks. Consequently, each collaborator was encouraged to develop their own response to the source materials and, thus, there were as many dramaturgical threads as there were collaborators. The content drove the aesthetic experiences, and while the project itself needed to have intrinsic value for the collaborators, the individual dramaturgical strands were content driven. This is the third formulation of aesthetic experience identified by Carroll’s taxonomy. He says, Sometimes form gives rise to aesthetic properties, such as unity, while the succession, evolution, or juxtaposition of expressive properties can constitute the form of the art work … if attention is directed with understanding to the form of the artwork … then the experience is aesthetic.44

Carroll defines form as ‘the ensemble of choices intended to realize the point or the purpose of the artwork’.45 In this instance the form was a composite of individual dramaturgical strands that frequently collided but whose overall aim was to sensorially overwhelm the spectator, a metaphor representing and providing a sensorial insight into Camus’s existential condition. Lavender commented that in performance TG3 engaged with a different aesthetic palette, whereby collaborators came together as a team and where, as a spectator, ‘we could not see the joins’.46 Echoing the comment made earlier by Cage, Lavender stated that the project aesthetically engaged with different individual entities that came together to find a common voice; although the entities were separate they could not be looked at separately: it was a composite. He went on to describe the performance as, a piece of music-theatre based on inter-relations; it asks not what it is but what it does. It performs the fact of needing to be produced, manifesting the production as a part of the piece; it becomes about surfaces, coming together in integral ways as well as juxtaposed ways. It had a uniformity of voice derived from a composite of elements—like a mosaic.47

As Lavender stated TG3 might better be located in terms of what it does rather than what it is. What it does is offer a platform to a diverse range of artists to collaborate and demonstrate that collaboration can be affected by allowing individual voices to be retained and promoted. The

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three concentric circles, discussed earlier, depict the ways in which ­collaborators were able to retain a sense of agency while also producing a discordant but coherent shared aesthetic. The success of the collaboration was that the artists all recognised a need to compromise as well as accommodate and embrace different creative strategies. Their aesthetic dispositions at the start of the project were challenged and restored as a powerful and effective collective aesthetic sensibility that effectively drove the performance.

Notes 1. Henceforth referred to as TG3. 2. Noël Carroll, ‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited,’ British Journal of Aesthetics, 42, no. 2 (2002): 145–168. 3. Andy Lavender, ‘The Builder Association—Super Vision (2005)—Digital Dataflow and the Synthesis of Everything,’ in Making Contemporary Theatre: International rehearsal processes, edited by Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 21. 4. For the purposes of clarity and consistency throughout this chapter, we have elected to refer to the three laptop performers (MMUle) as performer-musicians and the three theatre performers as performer-singers. 5. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, translated by J.C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 6. R&D (Research and Development) was the preferred term to describe the time the collaborators physically met and worked together. 7. Peter S. Petralia, interview with Turner 2012. 8. The concept of Chapters was conceived as a series of musical interpretations aligned with Camus’s narrative; there was, in addition, a Prologue and Epilogue that framed the event in terms of the way that technology has replaced God as a twenty-first-­century existential anxiety. 9. The Good, The God and The Guillotine was commissioned by Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (Lincoln), Manchester Metropolitan University (Crewe) and Tramway (Glasgow). Supported by Live at LICA and the National Lottery through Arts Council England. The Good, The God and The Guillotine premiered at Lincoln Performing Arts Centre on 25 October 2013 followed by a 2014 UK tour including performances at Live at LICA, Contact, Manchester (Presented by Contact and Word of Warning), Axis Arts Centre and Nottingham Playhouse. see http://prototype.org/projects/past/the-good-the-god-and-the-guillotine/ (last accessed 30 August 2019). 10. Adam York Gregory, interview with Turner 2012.

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11. Proto-type Theater, 2015. http://proto-type.org/ (last accessed 30 August 2019). 12. Jen Harvie, ‘Introduction: Contemporary theatre in the making,’ in Making Contemporary Theatre: International rehearsal processes, edited by Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 1. 13. Both Petralia and Donovan left the project as a result of taking up jobs overseas. 14. Peter S. Petralia, comment made during R&D 2012. 15. Heiner Goebbels, ‘“It’s All Part of One Concern”: A “Keynote” to composition as staging,’ in Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, practices, processes, edited by Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner, 111–120 (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 113. 16. Jörg Laue, ‘… To Gather Together What Exists in a Dispersed State …,’ in Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, practices, processes, edited by Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner, 133–154 (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 136. 17. For a discussion regarding the use of the term score in theatre, see Eugenio Barba, The Paper Canoe (London: Routledge, 1995). 18. The idea of working in the moment is also discussed in Chaps. 6 and 7. 19. John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds (Boston and London: Marion Boyars 1981), 215. 20. Andrew Westerside, comment made during R&D 2013. 21. Laue, ‘… To Gather Together What Exists in a Dispersed State …,’ 2012, 137. 22. Ibid. 23. This is a non-western technique where the same melody is sung simultaneous but with some variation to the rhythms used, thus avoiding unison singing. 24. For a more detailed discussion of how these and other techniques were incorporated within TG3, see Andrew Westerside, Martin Blain and Jane Turner, ‘Through Collaboration to Sharawadji: Immediacy, mediation and the voice,’ Theatre and Performance Design, 2, no. 3–4 (2016): 293–311. 25. Paul J. Rogers, interview with Turner 2013. 26. Nicholas Till, ‘Hearing Voices – Transcriptions for the Phonogram of a Schizophrenic: Music-theatre for performer and audio-visual media,’ in Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, practices, processes, edited by Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner, 183–199 (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 187. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 196. 29. Both Professor Andy Lavender and Professor Nicholas Till attended and participated in a Roundtable, post-show discussion following the

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performance of The Good, the God and the Guillotine at Axis Arts Centre, Cheshire in 2013. 30. See, Kim Cascone, ‘Grain, Sequence, System: Three levels of reception in the performance of laptop music,’ Contemporary Music Review, 22, no. 4 (2003): 101–104; Caleb Stuart, ‘The Object of Performance: Aural performativity in contemporary laptop music,’ Contemporary Music Review, 22, no. 4 (2003): 59–65; Tad Turner, ‘The Resonance of the Cubicle: Laptop performance in post-digital musics,’ Contemporary Music Review, 22, no. 4 (2003): 81–92; Martin Blain, ‘Issues in Instrumental Design: The ontological problem (opportunity?) of “liveness” for a laptop ensemble,’ Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 6, no. 2 (2013): 191–206. 31. Till, ‘Hearing Voices – Transcriptions for the Phonogram of a Schizophrenic,’ 2012, 197. 32. Adam York Gregory, Private project blog 2013. 33. Michael Kirby, ‘On Acting and Not-Acting,’ in Acting (Re) Considered, edited by Phillip B.  Zarrilli, 43–58 (London and New  York: Routledge, 1995), 43. 34. Simon Emmerson, Living Electronic Music (Padstow: Ashgate, 2007), xiii. 35. Simon Emmerson, ‘Music Imagination Technology,’ Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (2011): 365–372, 269. 36. Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, 2007, 30. 37. Carroll, ‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited,’ 2002, 145–168. 38. Rebecca M.K. Makus, interview with Turner 2013. 39. Nick Donovan, interview with Turner 2013. 40. Carroll, ‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited,’ 2002, 159. 41. Ibid., 157. 42. Ibid., 160. 43. Leentje Van De Cruys, Roundtable post-show discussion, Axis Arts Centre, 2013. 44. Carroll, ‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited,’ 2002, 164. 45. Ibid., 165. 46. Andy Lavender, Roundtable post-show discussion, Axis Arts Centre, 2013. 47. Ibid.

Bibliography Barba, Eugenio. 1995. The Paper Canoe. London: Routledge. Blain, Martin. 2013. Issues in Instrumental Design: The Ontological Problem (Opportunity?) of ‘Liveness’ for a Laptop Ensemble. Journal of Music, Technology and Education 6 (2): 191–206. Cage, John, and Daniel Charles. 1981. For the Birds. Boston/London: Marion Boyars.

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Carroll, Noël. 2002. Aesthetic Experience Revisited. British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2): 145–168. Cascone, Kim. 2003. Grain, Sequence, System: Three Levels of Reception in the Performance of Laptop Music. Contemporary Music Review 22 (4): 101–104. Emmerson, Simon. 2007. Living Electronic Music. Padstow: Ashgate. ———. 2011. Music Imagination Technology. Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, July–August 2011, San Francisco: ICMA, 365–372. Goebbels, Heiner. 2012. ‘It’s All Part of One Concern’: A ‘Keynote’ to Composition as Staging. In Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes, ed. Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner, 111–120. Bristol: Intellect. Harvie, Jen. 2010. Introduction: Contemporary Theatre in the Making. In Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes, ed. Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender, 1–16. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1973. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. J.C. Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kirby, Michael. 1995. On Acting and Not-Acting. In Acting (Re)Considered, ed. Phillip B. Zarrilli, 43–58. London/New York: Routledge. Laue, Jörg. 2012. …To Gather Together What Exists in a Dispersed State .… In Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes, ed. Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner, 133–154. Bristol: Intellect. Lavender, Andy. 2010. The Builder Association – Super Vision (2005) – Digital Dataflow and the Synthesis of Everything. In Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes, ed. Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender, 17–38. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stuart, Caleb. 2003. The Object of Performance: Aural Performativity in Contemporary Laptop Music. Contemporary Music Review 22 (4): 59–65. Till, Nicholas. 2012. Hearing Voices – Transcriptions for the Phonogram of a Schizophrenic: Music-Theatre for Performer and Audio-­ Visual Media. In Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes, ed. Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner, 183–199. Bristol: Intellect. Turner, Tad. 2003. The Resonance of the Cubicle: Laptop Performance in PostDigital Musics. Contemporary Music Review 22 (4): 81–92. Westerside, Andrew, Martin Blain, and Jane Turner. 2016. Through Collaboration to Sharawadji: Immediacy, Mediation and the Voice. Theatre and Performance Design 2 (3–4): 293–311.

CHAPTER 12

Connecting Silos: Examples of Arts Organisation and HEI Collaborations at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology Roger McKinley and Mark Wright

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.1

Creating connections and getting Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) together with Independent Arts Organisations (IAOs) into a formal arrangement can be a scary business. We offer here ways in which we

R. McKinley (*) FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool, UK M. Wright FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool, UK Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6_12

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reflect on and explore projects developed and run collaboratively between HEIs and IAOs. Our IAO agenda engages with HEI research, but it is fundamentally an agenda which has impact in public settings, and such projects look at what benefit there might be for people engaging with the project from outside the institutional context, namely the spectators and participants from the wider community and within the cultural context. Each project therefore has its own historical context,  which informs its own agenda, that impacts on the way their business models are created. We acknowledge too that HEIs and IAOs often speak different sectorial languages—even within the same discipline—and for a lot of experienced professionals making new and innovative work, formal agreements, particularly long-term ones, is a big step into the unknown. As such what we offer below is framed according to the types of reports and languages which are used in IAOs. This broadens out the discussion in this book, from the case study examples and refined analyses, and offers first this evidence from IAOs, prior to Nelson’s epilogue, which again opens out the context to question the current state of artistic research. Arts professionals, beyond HEIs, can operate as academic sociopaths, unwittingly stumbling into conflicting situations where intellectual property (IP) and careers are at stake through an over-friendly enthusiasm to share with others. The academic community can easily fall prey to frustration born out of the rapid pace of ideation and iteration in arts organisations that leaves no room for systematic, empirical research to be carried out. This chapter knowingly presents our discussion in a sectoral language, and as such it is hoped this different voice contributes to the field of artistic research in presenting another perspective on the collaborative research practices discussed previously. Universities are innately collaborative in that they deliver undergraduate and postgraduate courses in a wide range of academic disciplines spanning the arts and humanities, business, education, social sciences and sciences. Many offer combined degrees crossing these disciplines, such as degrees in business and the creative economy. University courses are informed by research-active staff that publish in esteemed journals, through monographs and edited collections, as well as through participating in the hosting of international conferences and events. Interdisciplinary research across the disciplines is an essential element of all HEIs’ approach to scholarship and departmental structures (as detailed in Chap. 2, REF, TEF and KEF impose certain criteria through which metrics are assessed).

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The diversity of disciplines or range of partnership potential is not seen as an impediment to collaboration. Robust structured research, which is qualified and cross-referenced through the academics’ own validation mechanisms, creates research which should be empirically quantifiable, which should also be rigorous and disseminated widely beyond the academy. The outlook of HEIs is long term: research leaders are strategic in planning activities that construct the maximum impact and esteem to the organisation, therefore attracting the best researchers; both students and staff. It is a historically self-contained system that generates and holds the production of cultural knowledge and then exploits it for its long-term value. Traditionally, most arts organisations deliver public-facing programmes and projects, with tangible outcomes, to as wide an audience as possible through physical and digital spaces (HEIs are now also engaging in these activities). IAOs are often responsive to the needs of their audience, able and willing to be reactive to emerging societal issues. They are also civic in their construction in that they engage with a range of people in the education sector, collaborating with a range of stakeholders. IAOs are constructed as social spaces and, although they are not always diverse or accessible, they are inclusive in their outlook and sentiment. They are ‘open’ and porous in their activities, and the cultural knowledge they generate is temporarily held, but dynamically presented and shared. Such neoliberal approaches to research and arts production are guided in our case by the agenda of Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) and by the aims of each individually funded project. We acknowledge that neoliberal research and neoliberalism often align arts practice, research and production to economic means and to the economic impact, but here we chose not to analyse this, instead we look rather to the civic impact in the context of each project. Collaboration with external partners—artists, collectors, publishers, business through sponsorship and other arts organisations—is an essential part of an IAO’s modus operandi for a swathe of reasons including efficiency, cost-effective planning and the need to turn around effective, wellvisited programmes that bloom and stay fresh for relatively brief periods. Though IAOs may have long-term strategic programming and ambitions as hosts to cultural events in all its forms, arts organisations generally work on short-term affect (with long-term impact in mind nonetheless), with a core constituency of content providers (such as the artists) that are heuris-

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tic in their approach to production, highly risk-taking and inherently iterative in their approach (similar to that proposed by Smith and Dean).2 This is closer perhaps to the magazine or publishing models familiar in the world of print and journalism than anything else. IAOs seek to be effective in communicating ideas and practices quickly and clearly and in consumable and accessible ways. IAOs briefly hold and communicate specific cultural knowledge and are validated through the public’s eye as well as the lens of their peers and collaborators. IAOs and HEIs are two of the main players (along with schools and Further Education establishments) in the landscape of knowledge exchange and talent development in the spaces in which they operate. FACT and its Liverpool-based HEI partners (including Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool John Moores University, University of Liverpool, and further nationally MMU, University of Nottingham and University of Salford)3 have a common interest in developing a mutually beneficial relationship based on six key areas, shown in Table 12.1.

Table 12.1  FACT and HEI, six key issues 1 Common bidding: To develop strategic partnerships and consortia for existing and upstream funding bids in line with mutually agreed research aims and objectives; 2 Shared networking: To share existing networks and utilising of those networks for the creation of the above-cited consortia and for the purposes of disseminating research outcomes, including, but not limited to, symposia, exhibitions and publications; 3 Sharing resources around intellectual capital: To agree to pool knowledge and share intellectual resources across all disciplines and areas of research for the mutual benefit of both parties; 4 Dissemination of applied research in public-facing events and spaces: To agree to provide, source and create opportunities for delivering research ideas to the public and academia in both formal (symposia, workshops, talks and publications) and informal learning environments and events (exhibitions and performances); 5 Common agency: To agree to support, whenever possible and with prior agreement, the continual professional development of staff across both organisations, the artistic professional development of artist practitioners within predetermined projects and to share opportunities and promote the activities, where appropriate, for early career professionals and researchers, practice-based researchers and students; 6 Non-competitive intellectual property: In other words any findings and products are shared with stakeholders.

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As a hub, FACT is a regionally known central space for discovering new, challenging and creative ideas. We describe ourselves as a place where art, people and technology meet—inside, outside and online, in other words, where people meet across media boundaries, across institutional barriers, in person and through virtual technologies. Significantly our description acknowledges the artists practice as both an insider and an outsider  in FACT’s varied collaborative ventures (as discussed elsewhere in this book). The process of developing a strong research culture to support this aforementioned vision necessitates deeper relationships with external partners in the university sector. To facilitate and manage this developing collaborative culture, FACT created two specific posts that grew out of a department set up in 2011— the Research and Innovation Department. These posts consisted of a Head of Innovation and a Research Director. Of significance, the Research Director’s role was appointed as a full-time member of staff at Liverpool John Moores University, on the agreement that they would spend 50% of their time at FACT developing the research strategy. This original appointment consolidates a permanent collaboration between FACT and Liverpool John Moores University. To frame the collaboration, and give it form and shape, the first task was to develop a tangible place—to inhabit the building. FACTLab (the name given to the physical space) was tested in public through the gallery exhibition programme as a ‘test-bed’ or prototyping space for speculative new work. Reconfiguring the building, by physically removing walls and developing an ‘open plan’ layout, while designing a new and responsive signage system through digital screens, was the first step in creating the space. FACTLab now also sits across the digital spaces of FACT through website, apps and AR spaces, and out into the public squares around the building and the city of Liverpool. This visibility is a key driver in encouraging artists and collaborators to take risks, to be research driven, as artists, technologists and creative industries practitioners, bringing their activities into the FACT collaboration in a public-facing way. As a pop-up, interactive and generative place, the combination of digital space and physical space also extends FACT’s other strengths—research as practice through to publishing and audience engagement.

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Examples of FACT Projects In order to demonstrate leadership in this area to others and be demonstrable and proactive in defining how collaboration can be meaningful and valuable for talent development across stakeholders, we need to consider how we might achieve this. Communicating and establishing the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of digital entrepreneurship are vital to generate the income and the ‘heat’ necessary to sustain momentum. Digital practices and communication strategies include such activities as the commercialisation and the requisite cost modelling for content creation; iteration; advanced interaction (including Human Computer Interfaces); research and debate; vlogging and blogging; and, talent development and agency for both advice and brokering. What follows are some illustrative examples of projects undertaken through the Research and Innovation Department that highlights the different strands of activities that are described as collaborative with HEIs.

Rhythmanalysis Part of the Creative Exchange programme, supported by the AHRC, Rhythmanalysis came out of an open submission Sandpit event run by the Royal College of Art (RCA) at FACT and was a collaboration with the University of Liverpool (UoL): the collaborating departments and partners were: Department of Architecture, Centre for Architecture and the Visual Arts (CAVA), Design Studio Amaze and the RCA. A PhD researcher from the RCA, Veronica Ranner, and a visual artist/designer from the commercial PR company Amaze, Alastair Eilbeck, developed the visualisation of the research for the gallery setting for an exhibition put together with the RCA at FACT called ‘Time and Motion, Redefining Working Life’. The FACT Research and Innovation Manager (McKinley) and Professor Richard Koeck designed and developed the proposal and oversaw the research aspect of the project, steering the activities. We set out to look at two different working groups in Liverpool: the modern office worker as games tester (Sony Computer Entertainment); and a craft-based profession, Minsky’s the hairdressers (a profession consistently highly placed in the City and Guilds reports and league tables documenting the happiness of workers in the country). We compared their live physiological data over a 24-hour life/work cycle, consisting of heart rate, movement and personal diary information.

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This pilot project included ten people from two different institutions, over a 24-hour period: five hairdressers from Minsky’s hairdressers (Liverpool City Centre) and five game testers from Sony Computer Entertainment (Wavertree, Liverpool). The project had the ambitious aim of discovering whether or not the participants had a discernible rhythm. If there is a discernible rhythm, is there affinity to the concept that psychologists call ‘flow’4—a place of well-being, immersion and creativity that is an optimal condition for making work of best quality. Our methodology began from ideas described by Daniel Kahneman in his international bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow5 as a way of determining the level of ‘experienced well-being’ through the method of ‘experience sampling’. The experience sampling method was originally a research methodology developed by psychologists Larson and Csikszentmihaly6: they asked participants to stop activities at certain times and make notes of their experience in real time. Given the nature of the work we were looking at (hairdressing and games testing), this was not practical, so we looked at Kahneman’s work with fellow Israel psychologist Amos Tversky (who together pioneered most of the work on heuristics in human decision-­ making) who took this research and created a second sampling method called the Day Reconstruction Method7 (DRM) that would create a space where the participants could revisit their previous day’s activities, breaking down their experiences into episodes, like scenes in a film, then using the experience sampling method to reconstruct their subjective experiences. To oversee the experiments, we employed Kiel Gilleade8 as a consultant from the Department of Psychophysiology at Liverpool John Moores University, overseen by long-term collaborator Professor Stephen Fairclough. At the conclusion of the research we created a temporary exhibition, which was designed and installed by Veronica Ranner. This exhibition used the findings from the captured data as a means to stimulate light and movement in a large bowl of optical gel spheres. We created also a print publication in which we attempted to gather together some of our experiences, views, iterations and analysis. Within the team was a designer, an artist, a number of key academics from architecture and psychology and an expert in physiological data analysis. We reiterate this to give an indication of the transdisciplinary nature of our approach as a co-designed process, each member contributing and

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learning from each other at each stage of the process. We did not want to simply create a set of data from which to draw conclusions—we wanted to make the data, and the process of capturing and presenting it, as innovative and creative as possible.

YourTour Another project which grew out of a Sandpit funding event was YourTour and was developed at an event entitled ‘Design with Heritage’, which was supported by the University of Central London (UCL), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and funded by the AHRC. The proposal, designed collaboratively by FACT, UCL and The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art (SCVA) in Norwich was built around the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection of Art held in a Norman Foster building in Norwich9—finished in 1978, the building is considered Foster’s first mature work. It displays ‘archeological objects’ alongside ‘art’ and in so doing asks the viewer to question their definition of ‘art’. The collection mirrors how the objects were placed together in the family home and is intended to be presented without any other information about the object. This enables the artefacts to speak for themselves. Using a cost-effective and innovative indoor locative tool (akin to GPS), YourTour was designed to push content—via a handheld device—to the viewer at the right time and in the right place. The YourTour team comprised three industry partners. The first was the SCVA, represented by Nell Croose Myhill. The SCVA was initially interested in the ‘Design with Heritage’ project as a means of forming collaborations, which would allow them to develop research ideas with other professions and resources not easily available to a provincial gallery operating on a limited budget. Another member of the team was FACT through the Research and Innovation Department. Emerging out of the EU funded project ARtSense, FACT had a specific interest in continuing to explore the integration of emerging technology in a visitor-focused heritage context, particularly in relation to locative media. The final member of the team was Dr David Scott from the University of Westminster, who, as a psychologist and architect, had a long-running interest in the possibilities of feedback from human experience in spatial design. The basis of the project responded to a real-life problem faced by the curators at the SCVA.  David Di Duca from UCL describes this in his introduction to the project when it was presented at the V&A:

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Specification of the exhibition is that only minimal written information can be displayed to accompany the artifacts on display. This reflects the ethos of the design and curation of the display. At the core of this is that the visitor experience is non-linear and non-prescribed. Rather the visitors are free to make their own connection and discoveries in the gallery by moving between the objects at their own free will and with little to influence their thoughts and opinions of them.10

This provides a dilemma for the curators and collections manager of the Gallery. With so little contextual information delivered to the visitor in situ, one must question: how does the gallery maintain the attention of the visitor while following one of the basic needs of any collection’s curator (in other words, how best to provide engaging additional information from the rich sources available in the archives)? The YourTour project developed a prototype based on a mobile device scenario that used real-time non-invasive monitoring of  each visitor’s behaviour to autonomously provide a live stream of location-specific content to a tablet device that the visitor carried. This ‘personalised’ journey was then augmented with additional suggestions and link scenarios to other parts of the exhibition, creating a tacit tour tailored to the ­(presumed) interests of the visitor, designed to not only retain the visitor longer in the space, but to illustrate the relational complexity hidden within the collection while providing a rich source of information on the objects within it. The project was managed at regular co-design sessions with the stakeholders and project team, a series of iterative design solutions and tests and a two-week audience engagement testing with actual visitors to the centre. Once more this cross-sector funding model enabled collaboration between organisations that previously would have had no particular reason to work together, towards a solution that would have an application and scalability across multiple sectors including cultural and music festivals, the conference sector, and trade shows of all descriptions.

Shona Illingworth: Lesions in the Landscape Artist Shona Illingworth’s Lesions in the Landscape11 relates physical brain trauma to cultural trauma through exploring scientifically ‘loss’ as a phenomenon. A partnership between the artist, FACT, the College of Fine Arts (COFA) Sydney, Central St Martins, National Trust for Scotland,

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Kent University and the University of Westminster, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, the project culminated at FACT across all of the exhibition spaces inside the building during autumn 2015. This included research gathered as part of an ongoing process that Shona has called the Amnesia Forums. Working with ‘Clair’ (not her real name), who suffers from catastrophic amnesia resulting from encephalitis in her mid-40s, her memory loss is related to her immediate present as well as her long-term past. At the start of the project two  years previously (supported at that time by a small grant from the Wellcome Trust), Clair could not remember anything after c. 20 minutes had elapsed, but by developing new mapping techniques with the artist and the deployment of a novel automatic wearable camera system (Sensecam), Clair began to recreate those missing pathways. Shona compared this to the ways in which the highland clearances of her native Scottish Isles can be excavated and rerouted to uncover a surprising comparison with Clair. The approach that Shona took is an example of what can be described as research-based practice—embedded in the creation of the work is the explicit process and presentation of research itself, as oppose to research which, in a tacit way, sympathetically informs the creation of an artwork. To make explicit (as opposed to merely making visible) connections between the research and the creation of an artwork, Shona went on to install a 3-screen video and ambisonic sound installation in Gallery 1 at FACT, poetically exploring the subject area through a rich visual and audio experience, entitled Lesions in the Landscape, and in the smaller Gallery 2 she made a complementary presentation of intelligence and shared knowledge with materials gathered from the six ‘Amnesia Forums’ and other sources, entitled ‘The Amnesia Museum’.12 We invited experts from different fields (that included medical, cultural, sociological, anthropological and security professions amongst them) to these Amnesia Forums to discuss, in closed sessions, themes connected to the areas being researched. The Gallery 2 element of the project was an opportunity to present a rich array of related content, from across academic and practice-­ based disciplines, using the exhibition design as an innovative way to ‘publish’ our findings (Figs. 12.1 and 12.2). The captured content from these forums would also inform the sensorial final multiscreen film installation in the main gallery (Gallery 1), using the total exhibition concept as an inter-contextual forum to stimulate new ways of thinking about the subject matter in a way that it is transdisci-

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Fig. 12.1  Installation view Lesions in the Landscape. (Copyright FACT, 2015)

Fig. 12.2  Amnesia forum #4 image. (Copyright FACT, 2014)

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plinary by design. This co-design process, working with the collaborators to transpose expert knowledge into an accessible exhibition in a public space, both challenges and offers a solution to a problem inherent in working across the HEIs and arts organisations—the problems of finding a shared language to communicate deep research to a wider sector of the public.

Art@CERN and FACTLab Since 2015, FACT has been a partner of Art@CERN13 to aid with its Collide International Artist Residency Programme.14 During this time, each year, an international call is made and a winning artist is chosen of any age and origin whose works demonstrate a relationship between art and science. The winning artist spends two months at CERN talking with scientists and technicians, and seeing the Large Hadron Collider experiments and accessing the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire—European Centre for Nuclear Research) Library and Archive. They then spend a month in FACT in a preproduction phase as part of FACTLab, where they can reflect on their residency, unpack the issues they have uncovered and plan for their future. One form of interaction was for the Research Director to conduct informal interviews with the artists on the subject of their experience at CERN, charting how it influenced them. Themes include scientific concepts from physics such as space and time or cultural issues such as the production of knowledge and the use and evolution of language. The Research Director was also tasked with the creation of an online archive. The approach was taken of a living expanding archive, which attempts to capture the creative processes inherent in art, science and curation. A 3D scanning approach was used to capture the layout of the gallery and its evolution in time during installation. The residencies culminated in a large-scale touring exhibition called ‘Broken Symmetries’ and was exhibited across the FACT galleries in 2018.

Cloudmaker and FACTLab Cloudmaker is an online and physical collaborative design tool for children that is designed to combine the online gaming environment Minecraft and the latest generation of rapid prototype printing tools with a physical making and learning environment.15 The Cloudmaker

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project was funded by the RCUK Digital Economy initiative under the ITAAU strand—Internet Technology as a Utility. The context of its use is a rich and challenging educational environment, which aimed to encourage young people to collaborate through both digital and physical interaction and to learn about community issues through a design and build process. The Cloudmaker Utility consists of the following components: • At the Cloud level: Printcraft, created by our industrial partner GlowInTheDark, is an extension to the game Minecraft, which allows the building of digital models which can be exported as 3D files. These files can be downloaded to rapid prototyping devices and deployed in a physical construction environment. Printcraft, now in beta, has been made available to the project as one component in a larger, mutually beneficial, knowledge exchange process between the partners. • At the Physical Making level: Modern Design and Creative Practice involves a combination of digital and physical activities. These include ideation, sketching, model-making, as well as, digital design. Cloudmaker supported and combined these creative processes with 3D Prototyping (Fig. 12.3). Furthermore, Cloudmaker explored next-generation mixed reality spaces and tangible interfaces. • At the User level: A collaborative environment is created so groups can work on specific issues. Our method centred around co-­designing of activities involving teachers and young people at two highly innovative new schools in Liverpool and Norwich. The focus is on collaborative design. An example of such collaboration has been to discuss their local environment such as an existing playground or derelict urban space to exchange ideas and models for its regeneration. An online resource encouraged the long-term use of Cloudmaker by other groups, by providing teaching activities and social space for ideas and model exchange, as well as a code base. The aims of the pilot project were the following: to determine the needs of the educators and young people with respect to online and physical collaborative design activities, using digital design tools and 3D prototyping;

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Fig. 12.3  Cloudmaker tangible interfaces. (Copyright FACT, 2016)

to explore, through a process of co-design, the best form for an IT Utility to support online and physical collaborative design activities for children and young people; to create a prototype of such an IT Utility by the integration of a digital design tool for 3D rapid prototyping, an online social exchange forum and an online resource to support other educators to create their own events and learning activities using the IT Utility; to explore advanced tangible interaction between virtual and real design spaces; to disseminate the findings of the project and raise awareness of the Cloudmaker IT Utility; to ensure continued momentum and activities of the IT Utility beyond the pilot project (Fig. 12.4).

Other Examples of Research and Innovation Research and innovation in a highly interdisciplinary and complex social context are challenging. Appropriate techniques have been developed which are user centred, iterative and design-led. Interaction Design allows users and researchers to explore issues, to co-create solutions and to evaluate them in an iterative manner. Specific approaches include: workshops, personas, scenarios, prototyping and evaluation through user trials.

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Fig. 12.4  Cloudmaker online screenshots. (Copyright FACT, 2016)

Through FACTLab and the Schools & Learning programme, North Liverpool Academy’s ‘Studio’ and the Isaac Newton Free School (Norwich) children and young people were involved from the outset through focus groups, project design and user testing. There were other associated events. The Cloudmaker Utility was launched at a high-profile week-long pop up event at FACT, called ‘Making Minecraft Real’. A range of physical making processes were developed. Children designed models on a local Printcraft server and printed them using Rapid Prototyping machines. Physical Media Artist Ross Dalziel led activity in physical learning by copying digital designs using small- and large-scale physical facsimiles of Minecraft blocks. Robotic Construction Partner Def-Proc Engineering provided a robot which built children’s digital designs out of physical blocks. Tangible interfaces were developed that demonstrated through a Minecraft immersive Mixed Reality Smart Space in which models created in Minecraft were 3D printed and used as tangible interfaces on a Microsoft Surface touch table. At the same time, two large projection screens gave a real-time view of the Minecraft world being controlled. The event was attended by 6000 people in one week. Of special interest, it attracted a lot of attention from teachers and carers of autistic children. The Minecraft world is especially appealing to children on this spectrum and can hold their attention for long periods (Fig. 12.5).

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Fig. 12.5  Image: Screenshot of MakeFest 2016 Railway Project. (Copyright FACT)

FACT helped the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester to win the prestigious regional public engagement Lever Prize from the North West Business Team Leaders, an association of leading large North West companies. We transferred our experience of Cloudmaker to make a model of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world’s first passenger train service between the two cities. We commissioned a special working model of Stevenson’s Rocket which could be driven by children at the museum. The work was seen by 8000 people and we interacted directly with 600 people. The Living Room of the Future Following the project listed above, there have been seismic changes in the UK. The primary event of the decade is the fact that the public voted to leave the EU, a major research funder for both universities and arts organisations alike. Consequently, the landscape has changed significantly. Research activities can no longer be Eurocentric, but must cast a wider net. The UK Government’s sector deals, as part of its much-­ heralded  Industrial Strategy, promise to unlock research and development in the universities to raise the quality and standard of support for the creative industries and others. Since the vote to leave the EU was

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taken, FACT has delivered several key projects, including its three-yearlong artist residency collaborations with CERN in Switzerland, the yearlong scoping exercise for a creative cluster of activities in dementia research with the University of the West of England (Dementia Connects), a two-­year European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) funded creative industries support and development programme with Liverpool John Moores University called LCR Activate, a brain-controlled cinema piece (The Moment by Richard Ramchurn) with a PhD studentship at Nottingham University and a major exhibition across the FACT galleries looking at data as both art form and artistic methodology co-curated by a PhD student from MMU in collaboration with the Open Data Institute. To focus on any one of these projects would speak to the scope of this book in a number of different ways, as this new landscape has enabled any number of consortia to form and reform according to calls and funding opportunities as they emerge from the Industrial Strategy and the Research Councils UK. Limited space requires concision, however, and necessitates concentrating on one example below. A group of research-driven organisations consisting of the BBC Research and Development unit (Ian Forrester and Lianne Kerlin), University of Nottingham (Andy Crabtree, James Coley and Neelima Sailaja), Lancaster University (Paul Coulton and Adrian Gradinar), University of York (Davey Smith) and FACT, were able to secure funding from the British Council, the AHRC and the EPSRC (Research and Partnership Development Call) to engage in an experiment on the Internet of Things (IoT), specifically looking at paradigm shifts and emerging practice in the changing field of broadcasting. This project was called the Living Room of the Future. We began by asking the question: What is the living room of now and what will it look like in the future? It is often a dislocated space, where multiple, conflicting interests are serviced by multiple devices simultaneously. Families and friends may congregate in the same physical space, but do not share that space as a media experience. The research, however, was not intended to recreate a specific, short-lived and somewhat overblown moment in broadcast history when families came together to enjoy a few specific programmes at certain times of the day via television, rather, it looked at the communal needs for storytelling as a shared and adaptive experience that takes into account the identity of the audience and the immediate environment as tools that a good storyteller can adapt to enrich

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the experience of those stories. The research taps into the much longer and universal history of the oral tradition, the ability of good storytellers to embed dynamically environmental and audience factors in the story itself to enrich the experience. It is a return to the campfire as theatre, and to the theatre as an active and reactive experience. Getting the IoT devices to interact with broadcast media, and enabling audiences to have some agency in how the content media is adapted and personalised, is intended to augment or increase the immersive experience of watching and to deepen the level of engagement with the content by altering elements of the media experience itself. Considering the home as a responsive theatre space, it is an evolution of familiar tools such as surround sound, including low-frequency emissions, which have for a number of years been standard in broadcast services. However, connected technologies now enable us to go beyond simple mechanisms such as rumble, 5.1 and bigger screens which take into account lighting, temperature, air circulation and the personal ­preferences, or profiles, of the audience. So, for example, a viewer may wish to see the story unfold from a different camera angle, from a gendered ‘point of view’ perhaps, or wish to have additional information about parts of the story simulcast to other personal devices in the home such as laptops, mobile devices or IoT devices (for example) to help children understand the programme experience that is being shared. Enriching and personalising the media content gives audience flexibility to share augmented content dynamically and adaptively in new and different ways with friends and family members. Ultimately, the aim is to create a richer and more meaningful content-based media experience in a single space, the living room. The surprise factor of the programme or narrative itself remains intact. With the support of the British Council the team undertook a two-day workshop in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina interrogating what kind of narrative could be developed in the space. This was done with participants from the Western Balkans’ emerging creative and digital sectors, with the aim of commissioning a new piece of immersive content, between the UK and the Western Balkans. The workshops paired people from a creative background (producers, filmmakers, artists) with people from a technical or coding background) to co-design scenarios and stories that could be realised in the Living Room of the Future. The final realised piece took place in FACT as a live experience over a two-week period in a self-­ contained fully functioning and IoT-enabled living room with the original content provided by a combination of 2x research filmmakers (Pavel

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Prokopic, Salford University and Ilija Tiricovski, Macedonia) and a web and mobile app coder (Mladen Rakonjac, Albania) with researchers from the BBC’s Research and Development unit, capturing interviews, in the form of objective and subjective responses from participants as they emerged from their experience. A scaled version of The Living Room of the Future went on to appear in the V&A as part of London Design Week (September 2018)16 and as a full scale rebuild at the British Council’s showcase of creative and digital talent in the Western Balkans PlayUK in Macedonia (November 2018).17 The research behind the Living Room of the Future interrogates the shared experience of culture in the home. Rather than the current isolated experience of media—either through closed and personal media devices or more broadly through disembodied and distributed groups found in gaming or social media—it aims to encourage the shared physical moment of broadcast media more deeply, personally and creatively than in the past. It aims also to demonstrate the art of what might be possible for media in the twenty-first century. Key to disseminating the work was an in vivo approach to public engagement. Every appearance the Living Room of the Future makes brings new and different audiences to the broad-reaching aims of the research project—to encourage us to think more deeply about storytelling and how technology affects and augments our experience.

Conclusion These exciting and innovative examples of collaborations between artists, HEIs, researchers and IAOs are part of a groundswell of activity across the sector. Each example demonstrates a cross-discipline and cross-sector coming together, supported and funded by forward-­ thinking funding mechanisms. Such a mechanism not only looks to the neoliberal benefit of the work, in economic terms, but also and importantly seek to chart the benefit of each project in terms of its stakeholders, the people who engage with the events. IAOs can become the digital testbed spaces that act as translators for deep research in the public realm, simultaneously international and local. Making public-facing work—being brave and putting it out there before you know it is finished, and using both physical spaces such as buildings and digital spaces, is risk-embracing. It is essential to make exhibitions and artworks accessible, through sharing research-led

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materials that are enriched with multiplatform experimentation and simultaneously co-created through audience-driven dialogue. IAOs can be the perfect paradigm changer for making public and accessible research work through the lens of the artist. Their relationship to new thinking about connectivism as a social learning event is critical to making a space that is fit for purpose and somewhere that changes the way we see the world and the ways in which we inhabit the future. With cross-sector recognition of this symbiotic relationship as a force magnifier emerging, the silos are slowly breaking down and we are becoming genuinely more cross-disciplinary and cross-sectorial. The heat generated by combining the twin forces of cultural and academic institutions can, and should, be enough to forge brand new alloys that help support the knowledge economy and the cultural ecology into the future in innovative, exciting and transformative ways.

Notes 1. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2014). 2. Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, eds., Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 3. FACTLab, ‘Supporters,’ https://www.fact.co.uk/about/supporters (last accessed 20 August 2019). 4. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing flow in work and play (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2000). 5. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast, Slow (London: Penguin, 2000). 6. Larson Reed, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘The Experience Sampling Method,’ in Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The collected works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Netherlands: Springer, 2014), 21–34. 7. http://www.midss.org/content/day-reconstruction-method-drc (last accessed 15 August 2019). 8. Gilleade is a computer scientist who researches how to use brain and body signals to control computers. 9. Sainsbury’s Centre for Visual Arts, https://www.fosterandpartners.com/ projects/sainsbury-centre-for-visual-arts/ (last accessed 15 August 2019). 10. Unpublished, exhibition poster text, V&A 2014, Copyright David Di Duca, 2014. 11. Lesions in the Landscape, http://shonaillingworth.net/lesions-in-thelandscape (last accessed on 15 August 2019).

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12. ‘The Amnesia Museum,’ https://www.fact.co.uk/artwork/the-amnesiamuseum (last accessed 15 August 2019). 13. ‘Art•at•Cern,’ https://arts.cern/ (last accessed 15 August 2019). 14. ‘Collide,’ https://arts.cern/programme/collide (last accessed 14 August 2019). 15. ‘Cloudmaker,’ http://education.fact.co.uk/documentation-test (last accessed 15 August 2019). 16. ‘Living Room of the Future,’ https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yneprnGCRm0 (last accessed 14 August 2019). 17. ‘PlayUK Arcadia,’ https://www.britishcouncil.mk/en/programmes/ arts/our-work-film/playuk-arcadia (last accessed 14 August 2019).

Bibliography Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 2000. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. London: Wiley. FACTLab. Supporters. https://www.fact.co.uk/about/supporters. Accessed 20 Aug 2019. ———. Lesions in the Landscape. http://shonaillingworth.net/lesions-in-thelandscape. Accessed 15 Aug 2019. ———. The Amnesia Museum. https://www.fact.co.uk/artwork/the-amnesiamuseum. Accessed 15 Aug 2019. ———. Art•at•Cern. https://arts.cern/. Accessed 15 Aug 2019. ———. Collide. https://arts.cern/programme/collide. Accessed 14 Aug 2019. ———. Cloudmaker. http://education.fact.co.uk/documentation-test. Accessed 15 Aug 2019. ———. Living Room of the Future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= yneprnGCRm0. Accessed 14 Aug 2019. ———. PlayUK Arcadia. https://www.britishcouncil.mk/en/programmes/arts/ our-work-film/playuk-arcadia. Accessed 14 Aug 2019. Kahneman, Daniel. 2000. Thinking, Fast, Slow. London: Penguin. Reed, Larson, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 2014. The experience sampling method. In Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Dordrecht: Springer. Sainsbury’s Centre for Visual Arts. Projects. https://www.fosterandpartners. com/projects/sainsbury-centre-for-visual-arts/. Accessed 15 Aug 2019. Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean, eds. 2003. Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Reprint 2010. Wilde, Oscar. 2014. The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Montana: Kessinger Publishing.

Epilogue Robin Nelson

As requested by the editors, this epilogue is more a reflection, and significantly a provocation, on the state of play in Practice as Research (PaR) than a response to the specific content of the book. But, first a couple of observations on collaboration. The first occasion when I was confronted with the issue of collaboration and co-authorship in a formal arts PaR context was the now (in)famous case of Miller and Whalley. Lee and Bob were PaR PhD students under my supervision working together on a collaborative performance practice initially on the understanding that the written exegesis for each of their final submissions would be different. But, it became evident that their entire working process—reading, writing, performance, and artwork—was collaborative and dialogic. They politely asked why they might not submit a joint exegesis for what became a single, collaborative joint-­PhD submission (the first in the UK in this domain). They pointed out that Deleuze and Guattari, for example, write and publish collaboratively. As noted elsewhere,1 the process of taking the idea of a joint submission for a collaborative PhD involved a journey through various university committees, but resistance was less than anticipated partly because of established teamwork in the hard sciences but also because, in the Social Sciences, traditional Robin Nelson, Professorial Fellow, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, London, UK; Emeritus Professor, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Blain, H. J. Minors (eds.), Artistic Research in Performance through Collaboration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38599-6

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articles are typically published under several names to the extent that single authorship is viewed sceptically, as if insufficiently rigorous. After two decades of their own sustained collaboration, Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley and Lee Miller published a co-authored book titled Between Us to which ‘intersubjectivity is central’. They again cite Deleuze and Guattari: We’ve already made clear that there are only two authors, but as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote: ‘since each of us is several, there is already quite a crowd’.2

This observation takes in another direction the question of individual authorship of original research. It is ironic that so much work in contemporary performance explores fluid and multiple identities and yet the research audit tradition remains tacitly based on the notion of a self-­ identical, coherent individual subject as a point of origin to whose (notionally) sole-authored outputs a grade might be assigned. Originality (together with ‘Rigour’ and ‘Significance’) remains a key criterion for research outcomes in research audits and, in a strongly individualist culture, this tends to be located within the individual researcher, even though in actuality, across the range of disciplines, collaborations are commonplace. In the Humanities, however, sole authorship remains the norm and in the Sciences, where teams of people typically work on a project in laboratories, the funding application—and, in some instances, the findings of the research—may be attributed to a senior professor. As is evident from the above and the chapters contributing to this book, however, much arts PaR is conducted collaboratively in situations ranging from devised performances by groups of people who work together as a matter of course to new partnerships between disparate disciplines to address specific issues—for example, where electronics engineers team up with dancers for experiments in robotics. Though it may be possible to identify the different aspects of research each person or team contributes, since they bring varying skillsets and mind-sets to the workspace, it is broadly accepted today that, in collaborative or interdisciplinary projects, the investigation is ultimately a group effort and the insights of the project should be credited equally to all of the substantial contributors, in recognition that collaborative processes are simply that—collaborative. In its 2014 Guidance Notes, the formal UK research audit (REF) protocols for Music, Dance, Drama and Performing Arts (UoA 35) stated that: The sub-panels do not require the submission of textual information about the individual co-author’s contribution to a co-authored output.

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Once the sub-panel accepts that the author has made a substantial contribution to the output, the sub-panel will assess the quality of the output taking no further regard of the member of staff’s individual contribution. The quality of each output will be judged on its merits independent of authorship.3

Moreover, in the pending 2021 REF exercise, new submission arrangements tend to place more emphasis on the quality of the output than on individual researcher profiles. So far, it is positive. It is evident from the above however, that poststructuralist insights notwithstanding, a basic assumption that individuals are normally responsible for original research lurks beneath the openness. Besides the authority of the author, the complexity of language structures and iterative discursive instances is at issue. The conscious referencing, sampling and allusiveness of post-postmodern contemporary artworks would seem to cast significant doubt on the notion of originality in ­authorship. As Barthes long ago put it in his seminal desacralising of the Author-God: We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning, (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.4

And, in this context, we might extend the line of words to compositions of images, sounds and movements. We may have ‘known’ since the 1960s that it is the semiotic system which expresses and not the author, but we often still behave as if originality and authorship were unquestionable terms—particularly, perhaps, in research audits. However, if we accept that significance is a matter of engagement between subject and object—or, indeed, that signifiers float freely dislocated from any fixed referent—we should even better understand the need to articulate the inquiry and insights of our research projects in recognition that other people will engage differently with them and may not see/hear what to us may be selfevident. This point is typically overlooked by those artists who object to any additional framing of their creative practice beyond the artwork itself. Practitioner-researchers are not being asked to translate their dance, theatre or music into words but to draw attention in complementary writings to the research dimension of their project. And this is often not because a research dimension is doubted but because the complexity or multi-dimensionality of the outcome and the fluidity in the semiotic encounter (as indi-

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cated above) creates an openness of affective engagements which is fine—even desirable—in the arts world but less productive in the domain of new knowings (the academy) where evidence of an inquiry is required. There are other undercurrents—besides questions of originality of authorship—which threaten to de-stabilise the established research audit model. An additional mode of collaboration to those mentioned above, namely that between arts researchers and creative industry partners, is encouraged, if not driven, by government policy. The ‘impact agenda’ as it is known, requires researchers to demonstrate not just the new insights generated but how their research is of benefit to society beyond the academy. In part, governments want to be able to justify to a supposedly sceptical public the investment made in Higher Education and particularly in research. Indeed, in the forthcoming 2021 REF exercise, the weighting of Impact has been increased from 20 to 25% at the expense of Outcomes (reduced from 65% to 60%). Though an emphasis on Impact is not unreasonable from one point of view, the danger is that ‘blue skies’ research is effectively discouraged as funding applications from research councils require a prior demonstration of the impact even though it is well known that many significant advances have been tangential to an initial path of inquiry or simply serendipitous. The entire Higher Education sector in the UK (and elsewhere) has been thoroughly corporatised over the past two decades such that the aim of universities is now to make a profit rather than (in the traditional mould) open-endedly to pursue truth and knowledge. As in other domains, arts PaR projects which achieve funding, either public or private, are those which meet the funding criteria—increasingly those with demonstrable Impact. Positive outcomes have undoubtedly ensued from this arrangement and some insights have been gleaned which otherwise may well not have come to light. The downside, however, is that the agenda is always shot through with the values of the paymaster and that other potential projects—perhaps those without a clear research design and trajectory towards specific outcomes are frustrated. Research audit is itself a factor in this equation. In the essay cited above, Barthes observed that ‘positivism, the epitome of capitalist ideology […] has attached the greatest importance to the “person” of the author’5; we might now add that late capitalism attaches the greatest importance to the consumer, particularly of experiences. It is important not to confuse the social benefits of research outcomes with the value of the research per se. The ‘impact agenda’ may have muddied the waters in this regard. The social value of a project—say a com-

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munity arts project—may be great, but the research informing it may be of less value. REF in the UK sustains a distinction between Research Outcomes and Research Impact. But where funding criteria seem to place as much, if not more, emphasis upon impact by way of social benefit, confusion in the slippage is perhaps understandable. These reflections bring me indirectly back to the current state of play in PaR. Though research undertaken through an arts practice, including collaborations, is well established in the UK and in many other countries worldwide, traditions differ discernibly along the porous fault-line between the arts industries and the academy. ‘Artistic Research’, the preferred term in Nordic counties, is used to cover a broad range of activities: Artistic Research is meant as an elastic umbrella concept that includes a range of approaches that use art, creative practice or performance as a primary means and method of inquiry. These include the distinct approaches ‘performance as research’ (PAR), ‘practice as research’ (PaR), ‘practice-­ based research’ (PBR), ‘practice-led research’, ‘creative arts research’, ‘research-creation’, ‘arts-based research’, and numerous other associated practices.6

In its inclusiveness, this approach tends to blur fault-lines between artists’ practices, the ‘arts industries’ and the academy by embracing them all. Indeed, there is a tendency—attractive also in some sectors of the UK, including parts of the Music community—towards the view that artists’ processes simply are research. As we know, many PhDs in Music composition in the UK have been awarded historically with little, or no, exegesis. Now, whilst I strongly support the notion that research can be undertaken through arts processes and practices—that it is ‘in the notes’ as one musician has remarked—it seems to me evident that not all compositional practices constitute research as understood in the academy as ‘a process of investigation leading to new insights effectively shared’.7 Les Misérables, in its theatre and cinema versions, is internationally acclaimed, has high production values and has been amongst the top box office achievers. It has had significant impact. But this does not make it insightfully knowledge-­ producing. To suggest it constitutes research would, in my view, require a case to be made according to a different set of values and criteria. Once it is accepted that some creative outcomes constitute research whilst others do not, we reach what has been a forking path. The tradition of art schools and conservatoires focuses on high-quality practice within a

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professional context. Their key reference points are the creative industries, professional bodies, showcases and agents, with many links to partners beyond the academy. Some processes pursued will be investigative to the point of producing new insights but much of their work and disposition is not focused upon research as understood in the academy. In the latter, in contrast, the key reference points for HEIs are scholarship published worldwide through recognised channels and (more recently) institutional audit (e.g. in Australia, ‘Excellence in Research for Australia’, ERA; in the UK, the Research Assessment Exercise and then more recently the REF). It is in the context of the latter’s ‘impact agenda’ that HEIs have followed conservatories in much extending their links beyond the academy. But research (as defined above) remains the basis of the impact here not ­professional excellence (though the outcome may well involve high quality, it is not a pre-requisite). Several conservatories in the UK now engage in research thus understood and submit to research audits. But such hybrid institutions remain in development and slippage between the various accents of ‘research’ still occur. In the UK, a working institutional understanding (not welcomed by all) has recognised the small but significant difference between creative practice, per se, and Practice as Research (PaR). I frequently cite Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit to illustrate that an artwork might be actively viewed from different perspectives (Fig. 1):

Fig. 1  The ‘duck-rabbit’, attributed to Wittgenstein. (Used first by psychologist Joseph Jastrow, the image was made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M Anscombe [Oxford. Blackwell, 1994, 1953], 194.)

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From one angle it might be constructed as an artwork in the professional domain; from another as an insightful research inquiry in the academy. And just to be clear about the allegation that it is the post-presentation rationale not the artwork itself which research audit assesses, it is clear in my experience that a process can only be constructed as research after the event if there has been a genuine inquiry. Where there has not, no amount of rationalisation after the fact helps—indeed, it tends to point up the absence. In any case, if it is a PaR submission the praxis is primary. But in the UK there has been a drift in the past decade away from PaR to the term ‘practice research’, partly on the grounds that everybody ‘gets it’ now and the latter term is neater.8 This may be so but, rather than simplifying taxonomy as has been claimed, it adds yet another possible term to an already crowded field, and it is interesting that it echoes ‘artistic research’ the preferred term in Nordic counties, as noted. This would be fine, in my view, if everybody does ‘get’ the idea that not all arts practices constitute research and that some means is needed to distinguish those which do from those which do not. But the RAE 2007 and REF 2014 arts subject reports suggest otherwise.9 They speak rather of misunderstandings and missed opportunities. And I cannot help thinking that we do ourselves a disservice as an arts community repeatedly to ignore what has been achieved in PaR to muddy the waters again with unnecessary confusion. For example, the advocacy of an arts professional doctorate in one UK university states: We believe that there is a lack of opportunity within the doctoral environment for artist-makers of performance to feel that they can focus primarily on practical output as the core of their doctoral level journey.

Why this ‘belief’ when a large number of PaR doctorates across the arts and media-based ‘primarily on practical output’ have been awarded over the past two decades? I sense a shift towards the looser ‘artistic research’. Partly because of their institutional histories, Nordic countries have, in my view, tended to confuse the professional and academic agendas noted above. The criteria for a PaR PhD submission in some Nordic universities requires that, over and above established generic research criteria (the production of new insights through a sustained and systematic inquiry effectively shared), the arts practice must be demonstrably of acknowledged excellence in the arts community nationally or internationally. That is to say, the aesthetic quality of the artwork as judged by its status in the cre-

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ative industries sits awkwardly alongside established research criteria. I continue to prefer PaR over ‘practice research’ simply because it avoids this unhelpful slippage, potentially undermining the small but significant distinction between arts practice and arts PaR which has allowed the submission of arts research based ‘primarily on practical output’ to be accepted within the academy. Having cited Wittgenstein, I might, of course, argue this the other way. Following later Wittgenstein’s conception of language-usage, artistic research might simply be what we term ‘artistic research’ in everyday language usage (the Nordic approach as I understand it). I have some sympathy with artists who feel it is an imposition to ask for documentation such as a 300-word statement and an account of process to assist in articulating and evidencing the research inquiry (my approach). Following this line of thought, we might argue that each arts project is a new exploratory creation and thus original, even if it is a re-working of codes and conventions in an established tradition (the postmodern approach). But what is new to some is passé to others. The internationally recognised academic standard is for knowing which has not hitherto been made manifest elsewhere. It may well be that, within the arts community, peers feel that they recognise the insights of the praxis. But what if they do not? Have you ever encountered significantly different estimations of the worth of professional practice amongst artist and arts commentators? What, then, is at stake? There is a particular importance in sustaining academic respect for PaR now because the arts are broadly under threat. It is evident that an emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, English and Maths) subjects in schools has marginalised the arts. University applicants for arts programmes are accordingly diminishing fast; art departments in HEIs are being rationalised or, at worst, closed. Furthermore, despite the success over the past decades of establishing PaR, scepticism remains in some parts of the academy about this mode of knowing. In the competition for resources, there are vested interests willing to imply that arts research is not equally worthy to research in other domains. If, for no other reason, we need to sustain the hard-won credibility of arts research achieved in the UK and elsewhere, avoiding a slippage between professional practice and research which might encourage others to suggest that arts research should not be funded. In sum, whilst there are many perspectives on PaR and debates properly continue, it has been established—and institutionally accepted—in the UK and other parts of the world, that valuable research may be under-

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taken in which an arts process/practice is the primary means and method of inquiry. Further, it has been recognized that there are modes of knowing attainable only by means of a PaR methodology, and other, more established, disciplines have benefited from adopting PaR approaches. Equally, however, misunderstandings remain about what is required to present PaR in a formal academic context (research audit/ PhD submission), and in some parts of the world PaR is not yet accepted (particularly where HEI staff submit PaR in applications for promotion). Thus, advocacy of the often small but important distinction between investigative creative practice per se and research in an academic context needs to be sustained. More work in addition needs to be undertaken into how aesthetic modes are knowledge-producing and it may be, as this line of inquiry develops, that it becomes more generally evident that exploratory arts do constitute research. But it cannot be ignored that ‘research’ in the academy has an internationally recognised accent: beyond inquiry into a domain, there is a requirement to produce substantial insights (new knowledge or knowing). This can only be done by being consciously aware of what has already been established and setting the new insights of a praxis in that broader context. At an historical moment when arts education is under threat and its values not fully appreciated by governments, it will serve us well as a community to be prepared to assist others to understand how the arts are modes of knowing by articulating and evidencing our research inquiries. Moreover, I strongly hold that reflection upon our processes and practices ultimately makes for better artwork—individually or collaboratively made.

Notes 1. See Robin Nelson, Practice as Research: Principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 73–80. 2. Cited in Joanne Whalley and Lee ‘Bob’ Miller, Between Us: Audiences, affect and the in-between (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 3. REF2021, Dance, Drama and Performing Arts (UoA 35), https://www. google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahU KEwjqmPLjoZTkAhXzsnEKHX7SCkAQFjAAegQIAhAC&url=https%3A %2F%2Fwww.ref.ac.uk%2F2014%2Fmedia%2Fref%2Fcontent%2Fpub%2Fp anelcriteriaandworkingmethods%2F01_12_2D.doc&usg=AOvVaw34yBJ32zi1mBwhh4stj-w paragraph 58–59; 85–86 (last accessed 20 August 2019). 4. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 146.

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5. Ibid., 143. 6. Conference call for ‘Artistic Research Working Group’, Performance Studies International, http://www.psi-web.org/2019/01/16/cfp-artistic-­researchworking-group-at-psi25-calgary/ (last accessed 14 August 2019). 7. HEFCE, ‘REF 2014: Assessment Framework and Guidance on Submissions,’ (Bristol, UK, 2011). 8. See, for example, https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/practiceresearch/dr-­ rachel-­hann-second-wave-practice-research-questions-and-ways-forward/ (last accessed August 2019). 9. Available online at the HEFCE, REF website, https://www.ref.ac.uk/ 2014/panels/paneloverviewreports/ (last accessed 20 August 2019).

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. HEFCE. 2011. REF 2014: Assessment Framework and Guidance on Submissions. Bristol: HEFCE. Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Whalley, Joanne, and Lee ‘Bob’ Miller. 2013. Between Us: Audiences, Affect and the In-Between. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1994. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe. Oxford. Blackwell.

Author Index1

B Bailey, Derek, 67, 104, 111n23 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12, 18 Barnes, Mike, 99, 101 Bennink, Han, 96, 102, 106 Bezenac, Christophe de, 109 Blain, Martin, 6, 9, 206–208, 212–214 Blanchot, Maurice, 189, 191, 193 Borgdorff, Henk, 52 Bourne, Matthew, 102, 103 Braxton, Anthony, 131 Bussey, Chris, 103 C Cage, John, 211, 224 Camus, Albert, 206, 208, 209, 223, 224, 225n8 Carroll, Noël, 9, 206, 207, 218, 219, 222–224

1

Carter, Paul, 19, 21, 128 Collider (ensemble), 103 Cook, Nicholas, 47, 48 D Davis, Miles, 65, 131 Derrida, Jacques, 42 Donovan, Nick, 208, 210, 220–222 Dorrian, Edward, 187, 188 E Emmerson, Simon, 217 F Fischlin, Daniel, 96 Foucault, Michel, 42

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AUTHOR INDEX

G Giddins, Gary, 101, 102 Ginsborg, Jane, 20 Goebbels, Heiner, 210 Gregory, Adam York, 208–210, 213, 215 Gritten, Anthony, 12, 142 H Hallam, Elizabeth, 200 Hamilton, Andy, 7, 8, 65, 68, 111n23 Haseman, Brad, 15 Hawkins, Alexander, 101, 104 Heble, Ajay, 96 Hummel, Jonas, 208 Hunter, Johnny, 108, 109 I Illingworth, Shona, 237–240 Ingold, Tim, 200, 201 K Kane, Dave, 102, 103, 105–108 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 12, 61–63, 207 Kenning, Dean, 190 Kershaw, Baz, 24, 128 Klein, Michael, 111n26 L Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 189, 202n11 Laue, Jörg, 211, 226n16 Lavender, Andy, 9, 206, 215, 224, 226n12, 226n29 Leandre, Joelle, 96, 110n2 Lees, Gillian, 208, 210, 217, 218, 220, 221 Lind, Michael, 199, 203n26

Lipsitz, George, 96, 110n2, 110n4 Lyotard, Jean -François, 42 M Maguire, Alex, 104 Makus, Rebecca M.K., 208–210, 220, 221 Mengelberg, Misha, 96 Minors, Helen Julia, 6, 8, 115, 134n25 Monson, Ingrid, 110n1 N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 185, 187, 189, 193, 196, 200, 201, 202n1, 202n2, 202n11, 203n28 Nelson, Robin, 9, 10n1, 21, 25, 27, 33n44, 122, 128, 132, 230 Noble, Steve, 104 P Parker, Evan, 99–102, 110n8, 111n23 Parker, William, 100, 101 Perkins, Rosie, 20, 33n32 Petralia, Peter S., 208–210, 215, 216, 221 Pyne, Martin, 103, 104 R Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 102 Rink, John, 55n22 Rogers, Paul J., 208, 213, 217, 218, 221 S Sawyer, Keith, 12, 22, 31n5, 158 Schlegel, Friedrich, 189

  AUTHOR INDEX 

Sharkey, Chris, 102, 103 Shipp, Matthew, 100–102, 106 Spicer, Daniel, 106 Summers, Francis, 187, 188, 202n11, 202n12 T Thomas, Richard, 103 Thompson, Walter, 114–122, 124, 125, 127, 129–131 Till, Nicholas, 6, 214, 215, 226n26, 226n29 Tippett, Keith, 101 Turner, Jane, 9, 72n28, 206, 207, 226n24

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V Van De Cruys, Leentje, 208, 210, 220, 221, 223 Villavicencio, Cesar, 97, 98 Vygotsky, Lev, 42 W Waddell, George, 20, 33n32 Wallace, Rob, 110n4 Watson, Ben, 111n23 Westerside, Andrew, 208, 211, 220, 221, 226n24 Williamon, Aaron, 20, 33n32 Williams, Richard, 111n14 Wood, Karen, 8, 186, 187, 190–193, 198–200, 202n15

Subject Index1

A Aesthetic experience, xi, 9, 206, 218, 219, 222–224 Aesthetic, the, v, x, xi, 7, 9, 12, 22, 23, 28, 41, 47, 49, 52, 59–71, 76, 84, 85, 98, 177, 189, 201, 206–208, 216–225, 257, 259 Aesthetic judgements affect-orientated, 219, 221, 222 axiologically-orientated, 219 content-orientated, 219 Agency, 20, 79, 124, 131, 225, 234, 246 Amnesia Museum, The, 238 Art@CERN, 240 Artistic practice, vi, 8, 11, 13, 26, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 78, 140, 143, 144, 154–159, 165–178, 185, 189 Artistic Practice as Research (APaR), v, x, 12

1

Artistic researcher, 5, 27, 41, 44, 48–53, 113 Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), vii, 5, 17, 18, 25, 39, 40, 50, 166, 234, 236, 245 Arts Council UK, 121 Author, 7, 11, 13, 14, 23, 48, 88, 129–131, 140, 159, 166, 167, 171–176, 178, 179n19, 180n21, 180n22, 180n25, 180n26, 181n32, 182n40, 206, 210, 252–255 Authorship, x, 5, 6, 8, 9, 18–20, 28, 43, 77, 85, 114, 129–131, 142, 166–168, 171–175, 177, 178, 179n17, 179n19, 181n30, 199, 201, 252–254 group, 43 Auto-ethnography, 140, 161n25, 161n28 Autonomy, v, 20, 42, 70, 78, 82, 189 autonomous individual, 42, 189

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B BBC, vi C Cause and effect, 216–218 CERN, see Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, European Centre for Nuclear Research Choreographer, 7, 14, 130, 168–170, 173–178 Cloudmaker, 240–242, 244 Co-creation co-creativity, 5, 8, 14, 95, 129 co-labour, 130 Collaboration collaborative practice, 6, 20, 76, 86, 90n5, 114, 143, 166, 173, 175, 177, 187, 199, 201 collaborative process/processes of collaboration, 3–9, 15, 19, 24, 26, 29, 30, 59, 114, 116, 117, 125, 154, 169, 170, 189, 196, 206, 207, 218, 223, 253 Collaborative research practice, 4, 7, 20, 230 Commercialisation, 166, 173, 234 Commodification of knowledge, 40 Communication in conversation, 7, 9, 24, 76, 77, 80–82, 84, 85, 95, 96, 108, 110n1, 116, 117, 122, 126, 135n56, 175, 185–201 in dialogue, 4, 8, 27, 30, 43, 45, 77, 81, 87, 88, 96, 97, 102, 113, 114, 116–118, 121–127, 130, 147, 166, 185, 189, 190, 193, 196, 197, 199, 203n25, 248 in moment, 113, 114, 121, 123 Composer, vi, vii, ix, x, 7, 8, 14, 22, 70, 117, 130, 131, 139–159, 206, 210

Concentric circles of collaboration inner circle of collaboration, 207, 211, 212 middle circle of collaboration, 207, 210, 213 outer circle of collaboration, 207, 219 Connectivism, 248 Consciousness, shared, 205, 207, 209 Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), 240, 245 Conservation, 68–70 Content development, 30 Continuum of collaboration, 26 Contractual agreements, 28 Copyright, 21, 165–178, 239, 242–244 Craft, 4, 8, 14, 23, 63, 66, 67, 72n28, 75–89 Creative artists, 9, 11, 27, 113, 114, 117 Creative arts industries, 3 Creative journey, 15, 132 Culture of collaboration, 41, 49 D Dance, 4, 8, 9, 14, 108, 128, 165–178, 185–201, 254 Decision-making, 9, 23, 27, 29, 167, 170, 171, 174, 191, 193–195, 206, 207, 235 Defamiliarisation, 216 Devising, 130, 210, 211, 215 Dialogue, 4, 8, 27, 30, 43, 45, 77, 81, 87, 88, 96, 97, 102, 113, 114, 116–118, 121–127, 130, 147, 166, 185, 189, 190, 193, 196, 197, 199, 248 Disability, 177

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Disability Dance, 166, 168, 176 Disabled dancers, 170, 177 Displacement, 216 Dissemination documentary, 22, 127, 129 forms of, 22, 27, 113, 114, 127, 129 mechanisms of documentation, 21, 22, 24–26, 129 modes of dissemination, 5, 25, 26, 30, 34n58, 122 sharing process, 24 transmitting knowledge, 25 Distributed creativity, 11, 20, 27, 124, 130, 139 Doctoral research, 13 Doing-thinking, 21, 24, 123, 128, 132 Drawing, x, 4, 9, 60, 80, 81, 85, 88, 122, 123, 143, 154, 185–201, 222 E Educational research, 20 British Educational Research Association (BERA), 20 Ensemble as micro-society, 96 Ensemble music, 95–110 Equality, 18 Ethics ethical responsibility, 19, 22 ethical strategy, 26 ethics of collaboration, 5, 6, 8, 21, 22, 41, 117 research ethics, 19–21, 29 F FACTLab, 9, 233, 240–243 Five Years, 90n10, 187–190, 197–199, 202n8

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Flow, 17, 124, 130, 143, 180n21, 198, 215, 217, 235 Fragments, 186–191, 193, 196, 197, 199–201, 212 Free improvisation (music), 8, 95, 96, 98 Funders/research, 4, 11–30, 39–53, 75, 98, 113, 139, 165–178, 186, 205, 230, 244 G General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 21, 29 Genius, 8, 11, 23, 39, 59–64, 66, 67, 70–71, 167, 177, 180n25 Gesture, 48, 70, 85, 97, 105, 108, 116, 118–125, 128, 130, 186, 187, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 199, 201, 213, 215, 217, 218 The Good, The God and the Guillotine The Best Way to Taste the Salty Sea, 212 Prologue, 218 The Smell of Darkness, 214 H Heterophonic, 212, 213 High art, 59, 63–67 Higher Education Institution (HEI), v, 5, 14, 16, 50, 125, 229–248, 259 university (research-intensive), 140, 154 I Idiom in music, 103, 104, 157 Impact, 6, 8, 12, 16–20, 41, 50, 78, 85, 87, 88, 96, 97, 105, 108, 172, 177, 194, 206, 230, 231, 254–256

268 

SUBJECT INDEX

Implicit/Tacit knowledge, 3, 15, 123, 169, 191 Improvisation/improvising, 8, 65, 68, 96–106, 116–118, 121, 126, 131, 147, 151, 157, 169, 186, 191–195, 198, 200, 201, 210, 211, 213, 215, 217 Independent Arts Organisations (IAOs), 9, 229–231 Independent Research Organisations (IROs), 5, 9 Indeterminacy, 123, 140, 144–154, 156, 213 Individualism, 60, 63, 85 Insider, insider/outsider, 9, 13, 24, 30, 122, 158, 187, 205–225, 233 Intellectual property (IP), 9, 20, 131, 165–167, 172, 174, 178, 230 Interdisciplinary, 9, 22, 40, 43, 46, 96, 128, 185, 200, 205, 206, 217, 230, 242, 253 Internet Technology as a Utility (ITAAU), 241 Intuition ethical intuition, 130, 131 performers’ intuition, 114 shared intuition, 114 ITAAU, see Internet Technology as a Utility K Kairos, 97, 98, 100, 104–106, 110 Kant disinterested, 9, 207 interested, 9, 207 Knowledge economy, 16, 40, 248 Knowledge Excellence Framework (KEF), 5, 15–17, 25, 230 knowledge exchange projects, 16, 17, 25 Knowledge transfer, 41

L Language analogy, 7, 118, 129 gestural language, 8, 114, 116 iconic gestures, 116 syntax, expressive, 119 Law, 165, 166, 169, 171–176, 178 Line, 17, 18, 105, 107, 123, 144, 150, 151, 157, 158, 174, 186, 190–199, 201, 208, 212, 253, 254, 258, 259 Liveness, 125, 214 The Living Room of the Future, 244–247 M Manchester Metropolitan University laptop ensemble (MMUle), 208, 213, 214, 217, 218, 225n4 Material practice, 76, 78, 79, 87 Material-thinking, vi, 21 Metaphor, ix, 12, 69, 70, 95, 96, 185, 187, 209, 224 Minecraft, 240, 241, 243 Mission statement, 28, 29 Mobile form, 139, 142–144, 151, 153, 157, 158 Models of collaboration collaborative, 27 cooperative, 27 directive, 27, 169 hierarchical, 27, 169, 200 interactive, 27, 142 Modern system of the arts, 63, 66 Moment, 3, 8, 15, 23, 24, 39, 52, 53, 64, 80, 82, 88, 97–101, 106, 108, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120–125, 127–129, 135n46, 150, 155, 186, 191–193, 195, 201, 206, 209, 211, 213, 215, 217, 219, 223, 245, 247, 259 Motion capture, 191, 194, 195

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Mujician, 110n11 Multidisciplinary, multi/ interdisciplinary, 8, 9, 116, 130, 205, 206, 217 Museum of Science and Industry, 244 MusicHE, 17 Musicking, 23, 130 N National Portfolio Organisations (NPO), 5, 9 Notation, 22, 24, 118, 121, 142, 144–148, 150, 151, 155–157, 169, 190, 213 O Open access, 127 Organic unity, 68–71 Originality, vi, x, 6, 14–17, 23, 26, 34n52, 61, 62, 174, 222, 252–254 Outsider, insider/outsider, 9, 13, 24, 30, 78, 122, 177, 187, 205–225, 233 Ownership, 6, 8, 9, 18–20, 28, 47, 77, 85, 129, 130, 166–168, 171, 173–176, 179n17, 181n32 P Pairings, 8, 75–80, 82, 84, 85, 87–89, 190 Participant audience, 20, 21, 23 focus group, 243 interviewee, 247 spectator, 20, 230 Partnership, 4, 6, 16–19, 26, 29, 79–82, 84, 91n14, 114, 117, 121, 124, 167, 188, 231, 237, 253

269

Performance, vi, viii, 3, 4, 6–8, 12–14, 19, 20, 22–26, 30, 39–53, 95, 98–104, 110, 111n28, 113–132, 139, 147, 155, 159, 165, 166, 168, 169, 177, 182n45, 186, 187, 190–197, 200, 201, 205–212, 214–219, 222–225, 252, 253, 255, 257 Performance Arts Research, 3, 4, 9, 12 Performer, 7, 8, 14, 22, 24, 41, 44–53, 98, 114–120, 122, 124–131, 142–144, 151, 153, 159, 175–178, 182n40, 182n42, 206, 208, 211, 214–218, 220–223, 225n4, 226n26 Power, 20, 40, 47, 50, 62, 77–79, 96 Practice as research (PaR), v, vi, xi, 9, 11, 12, 24, 25, 27, 34n58, 98, 99, 130, 160n2, 162n43, 251–253, 255–259 Practice-led research, 11, 144, 255 Practice Research Action Group (PRAG), 12 Practitioner-researcher, 3, 4, 6–8, 13, 16, 20, 23–25, 139–159, 254 Praxis, 27, 123, 257–259 Process, v, vii, xi, 3–9, 11–15, 18–30, 40, 42–47, 49, 59–61, 63, 66, 69, 70, 76–81, 83, 84, 86–88, 95, 98, 114–117, 121–123, 125, 127, 129, 140, 142–144, 146, 151, 154, 156, 157, 167–170, 174, 175, 178, 182n40, 186, 187, 189–197, 200, 201, 205–213, 215–220, 223, 233, 235, 236, 238, 240–243, 252, 253, 256–259 Product, 4–7, 11, 21–23, 25, 27, 30, 59, 61, 62, 64, 70, 123, 124, 166, 171, 173, 191, 192, 219 Project development, 28 Proto-type Theater, 208, 213, 217, 218, 220

270 

SUBJECT INDEX

R Rapid prototyping, 241–243 Reflection, reflective practice, 4, 7, 13, 30, 39–53, 82, 98, 99, 122, 123, 125, 134n42, 159, 187, 188, 197, 198, 211, 251, 255, 259 Reflexive practice, 30 Regulatory requirements, 29 Rehearsal, 12, 17, 22, 24, 117, 118, 123, 126, 140, 146, 150, 151, 153, 168, 175, 197, 210, 215 Relationships, vii, 8, 18, 19, 22, 27, 28, 42, 43, 45, 49, 76, 79, 80, 84, 87, 89, 98, 116, 118, 124, 126, 143, 144, 147, 151, 155, 159, 165–167, 170, 174, 175, 178, 182n40, 182n42, 186, 196, 198, 206, 207, 213, 214, 216–218, 223, 232, 233, 240, 248 composer/performer, 116, 124, 143, 144, 159, 175, 178 Research-creation, 159, 255 Research enquiry, 12, 14–16, 19, 23, 25, 30 Research Excellence Framework (REF) audit guidance, 16 impact, 16 REF criteria, 14, 23, 34n52, 230 REF2021, 34n52, 253, 254 Stern Review, 15 Research portfolio, 14, 23 Rhythmanalysis, 234–236 Risk assessments, 21, 24, 30 Romanticism, 187 S Sensuous knowing, 49 Smartphone app/app, 139, 144, 147, 154, 155, 157, 159, 247

Sounding flow, 217 Soundpainting Function Gestures, 119 International Soundpainting Think Tank, 114 live-editing, 117 mistake, 119, 120, 125, 129, 131 Sculpting Gestures, 118, 119 Soundpainter, 8, 117–132 Think Tank, 114, 117, 118, 120–123, 125, 127–129, 132 The Spirit Farm (ensemble), 98, 99, 104–110 The Stranger (L’Étranger), 206 Strategies, 4–6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25–30, 45, 47, 51–53, 96, 118, 158, 186, 205–207, 209, 211, 215–217, 222, 223, 225, 233, 234 T Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), 5, 15–17, 25, 230 Technologically uncanny, 214 Translation, 9, 177, 187, 191–195, 197, 198, 200 V Value, vii, 6, 12, 17, 18, 20, 23, 28, 30, 40, 42, 44, 46–53, 75, 77, 82, 83, 86–89, 95, 98, 104, 106, 120, 125, 144, 179n6, 195, 218, 219, 221–224, 231, 255, 256, 259 Vision statement, 28 Y YourTour, 236–237