Small Acts at Wimbledon: Performance as co-research
- Written byAdrian Kear
- Published date 22 September 2023
‘Small Acts: Performance as co-research' was a symposium held at Wimbledon College of Arts on 27 June 2023. It aimed to investigate how working on creative collaborations with partners from a variety of sectors can contribute to social purpose and sustainability. The session also highlighted the important element of community in performance research.
The symposium explored research as a collaborative process with communities, institutions, locations and archives, rather than simply producing work about them. Models on collaborative practice in performance research were also discussed. Hosting this seminar also allowed students from various performance courses to come together, sharing their views and experiences.
The audience included a variety of academics, such as postgraduate students, PhD researchers and their tutors and supervisors.
Watch the video below for an overview of the research event.
List of talks held at the symposium:
Each panelist provided an insight into research projects and performances.
Adrian Kear, ‘Ethics of engagement, politics of practice: theatre after Grenfell’
Setting out the agenda for the symposium as investigating performance as a form of co-research, Professor Kear argued for a shift in emphasis from making theatre about communities, institutions, and locations, to making performance with creative participants as an alternate, non-extractive mode of knowledge production. The presentation drew upon the example of the National Theatre’s Grenfell: In the words of survivors (2023) to outline the problems of normative frames of dramatisation and theatricalisation. It made the case for an ethics of engagement to underscore small acts of performance-making that work against the slow violence of representation and the appropriative dynamics of the national-political stage.
Rachael Davies, ‘Locating structures of feeling: Chisenhale Dance Space in the 1980s’
What was, and is, Chisenhale Dance Space? Exploring the composition of a performance archive from memories of place and the material traces of practices of creative collaboration, Davies’ presentation examined how historically specific structures of feeling are produced by and inhabit the fleeting, contingent, and intimate spaces in which small acts of performance happen.
Rudy Loewe, ‘State Secrets: Transforming Archival Research into Creative Practice’
The presentation outlined Loewe’s ongoing visual examination of archival research carried out in The National Archives from the Information Research Department, a secret unit within the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, demonstrating how small acts of performative research can be used as a method to interrogate colonial histories. Specifically, Loewe demonstrated the use of painting and sculpture to expose and challenge Britain’s role in suppressing Black Power movements in the English-speaking Caribbean during the 1960s and 70s. Loewe utilised documents uncovered in the research process as material for the creation of new works which give voice to forgotten figures and pays tribute to their struggle for justice and Caribbean independence. Find out more about Loewe’s work.
Hannah Clarkson, ‘Care and Constraint in Jocelyn Herbert’s design drawings’
The presentation evoked Clarkson’s experiences of looking at Jocelyn Herbert’s design drawings in the archive and recounted her process of going back to the studio to create new works from the memory of these encounters. In characterising both drawing and archival research as friendship and care, Clarkson opened up the space of seeing both care and constraint in Herbert’s designs for Samuel Beckett’s theatre works. In recognising that although the performer’s body is often restricted or contained by Herbert’s costumes and scenographic environments, these moments of restraint also operated as small acts of support, tenderness, intimacy and care for the actors in Beckett’s plays.
Jane Collins, ‘Southall ever after’
Professor Collins reflected on her research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which investigated how performance practices are imagined, embodied and understood across Indian diasporic communities in the UK and within India, as vital components of cultural heritage. Professor Collins emphasised the importance of engaging communities in the co-production of knowledge. She outlined how the research project had shifted focus as a result of the participation of Southall community members, and provided a space to enable their stories, histories and experiences to be centred and celebrated. The emphasis on the self-narration of hybridity and complexity appeared critically important in challenging the rising tide of nationalisms, as well as racial and religious stereotyping sweeping across the globe, which have carried with them an emphasis on identity, culture and heritage as spatially and temporally fixed. In avoiding these notions of fixity, the project developed an understanding of the lived experience of heritage as both coming from the past and associated with place, but not anchored in it, and as still having social and cultural value in the present.
Richard Layzell, ‘Hearing location: listening to community in the moment’
Layzell’s presentation was a performance screening of his short film, Marvell Park, reflecting enigmatically on the relation between visual poetry, personhood and place. Layzell’s embodied performance accompanying the film drew attention to his performative construction of both the landscape as character and his playful inhabitation of the space of the park as a place of performance. In focusing on what happens in the park, the film re-imagines the possibilities of performance as the small act of marking time and place and care for the community of those that have nothing in common but co-presence within it.
Chris Heighes, ‘A partial grammar of site-specific performance’
Looking back over the course of a career making site-specific performance with his collaborator and fellow Wimbledon associate artist, Ewan Forster, Chris Heighes’s presentation focused on the importance of making performance prepositionally – working with people, communities, locations, buildings, institutions – to join together disparate materials, interests, and perspectives. In emphasising the material practice of performance as a making of things and the construction of relations between things as well as meanings, Heighes outlined the how the partial grammar of the conjunctive requires careful maintenance, patience, and resilience to be supported and sustained. Turning to his solo practice, he identified the importance of listening, dwelling and attuning to place and relations before attempting any act of artistic intervention or installation, however small.