Last Thursday I gave a seminar at the University of Leeds on my PhD research methodology. It was exciting to be speaking to a group of postgraduate researchers, each at different points on the PhD journey, whilst I am at the end of it. I had some great conversations around the shape of how my research developed, so below I am sharing an extract from the introduction to my thesis as submitted in September (it might change) that explores some of this.
My own shifting connections with the field of applied theatre developed during my undergraduate studies; Community Drama BA Hons at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA). This course combined practical training in facilitation, direction, and performance skills, with a theoretical engagement with questions of culture, philosophy, identity and power, and a project based learning with tours to schools, community performances, and placements (LIPA, 2019). Following this, I moved to St Aidan’s College at the University of Durham, where I studied on the MA in Culture and Difference, an interdisciplinary course that examined the formation and shaping of identities on “borderlines of all kinds” (Durham University, 2016). During this time I also began to work as a freelance artist and practitioner, working for arts organisations, in schools, touring small shows, making site specific performances, and developing projects in community settings. I have worked with small community organisations, Chol Theatre for example, I have developed my own work under the banner of Pockets Theatre, and I have collaborated with other artists, with Front Room Productions for example (Chol Theatre, 2019; Front Room Productions, 2017; Pockets Theatre, 2019). I have also recently developed large scale outreach projects for the Leeds Playhouse (Robin, 2019). My own positionality as an applied theatre practitioner is explored at points within this thesis, as I recognise my own sense of self, and my own ongoing practice, is strongly connected to this research. I examine the ways this both acts as a point of risk, potentially bringing the researcher too close to the subject at hand, and of opportunity, bringing a researcher that is not disinterested, but able to identify with those practitioners observed.
The two different chapters of life that I spent at LIPA and at Durham University initially came to represent two opposing and incongruous spheres in my thinking and approach to my practice. I began to haphazardly navigate some of the tensions between the two whilst still studying in Durham. At this point, I felt ill at ease, and out of place, in the black tie and gowns of the collegiate system, just as I did in the lectures and seminars where we delved into complicated thinking from philosophers who were all completely new to me. As someone not hailing from a wealthy family, unaccustomed to the aesthetics and rituals of private school England, I felt uncomfortable at the college formal dinners steeped in their tradition, ceremony, and performances of aristocratic meal times. In the day time, my training in theatre, as a left leaning cultural practitioner, not astute to the inner workings of literary criticism or the French postmodernists for example, meant that there was a huge academic leap I had to attempt to succeed in the Masters course. I found that this gap in background knowledge did not exist for my classmates who had already developed a firm grounding in the important titles, names, and dates of cultural theory whilst they had studied for their undergraduate degrees at the colleges of Oxford, Cambridge, and the like. As David Cameron took a majority Conservative government to Downing Street, I acutely felt the effects, and affects, of austerity in my own life, working four part time jobs and taking on board an inordinate amount of debt, determined to find a way to complete the Master’s degree amidst an economic and social system that seemed to not want me to be there. Time in the library became a deeply sought after luxury, and so I first read Derrida at 5am, in a professor’s office which I should have been cleaning at the time.
It was as I took this academic leap and worked to reconcile these two very different worlds that I had moved through, and in many ways did not feel at home in, that I began to consider how the sort of thinking I was engaging with at Durham University might impact the very different sort of practice I had trained in at LIPA. Some names were familiar, such as Michel Foucault (1954 – 1984), or Antonio Gramsci (1914 – 1937), and their thinking had been a small part of my drama school training. Others felt more distant, such as Judith Butler (1988+), and although not directly taught at drama school, quick literature surveys showed they were indeed invoked and mobilised elsewhere in the applied theatre sphere. During a module that explored notions of representing otherness, I engaged with the work of Gayatri Spivak (1974+) for the first time, in preparation for a seminar. Spivak was presented to us as a highly important thinker, a pioneer of postcolonial philosophy, and a founder of the deconstruction movement. I read her work as concerned with that which is left out in a text, reading for meaning between words, asking who is not speaking, and who ultimately, can never be heard. These concepts resonated with much of what I had come to understand about applied theatre practice. Whilst complicated and confusing, her work also immediately began to bring up tensions when I held it up alongside applied theatre, particularly around the actions of well-intentioned activists and agents of representation. A quick literature survey, and then a longer literature survey, showed that she had been largely neglected by the field, or in the very least not yet fully picked up. The tensions I held between the worlds of Durham University and of LIPA began to centre more keenly on the potentially exciting new ways of thinking that might emerge from a collision of applied theatre and Spivak’s writing. This collision became the first ingredient in my early PhD proposals.
The second ingredient emerged from some of the movements of the field at the time. A palpable sense of urgency was arising in communities of artists and theatre makers across the UK and Europe, as they began to intervene, tell stories about, and respond to the unfolding ‘refugee crisis’ (Zaroulia, 2018: 181-2). People felt the need to ‘do something’, to respond, bear witness, to help (Cox & Wake, 2018: 137-14). This, alongside the years of austerity in the UK deepening already entrenched inequalities, and stripping away much needed funding and infrastructure for public services, made it seem as though a wave were cresting. Theatre practitioners, amongst other charitable and cultural workers, made their way to refugee camps across the world, as volunteers, leading play sessions, and building temporary theatres. Organisations and practitioners like the Good Chance Theatre, Borderline Theatre Company, Sabine Choucair, and others, developed a presence that, beyond the labour of theatre making, served to document atrocities, and protest police and state violence (Borderline Theatre, 2019; Good Chance Theatre, 2019; Sabine Choucair, 2019). Touring productions sprung up with stories of the unfolding crisis, warnings against complicity, and demanding action from governments (SBC, 2019). Theatres and theatre companies, like the Leeds Playhouse (formerly, and at the time, the West Yorkshire Playhouse), aimed for sanctuary awards, demonstrating their commitments to those refugees and asylum seekers that made it to the UK (Leeds Playhouse, 2019; SBC, 2019). Projects in communities also emerged, conversation cafes, language learning through arts, work that looked to make sense of the unimaginable that had become real for so many. Street theatre asked host communities to welcome those in need. Meanwhile in the UK, beyond artistic visions for utopia, nationalism that had been brewing for decades found a new life, and calls for our borders to be strengthened, and for the crisis in Europe to be contained in Europe, won out, and the UK voted to leave the European Union (BBC, 2016).
With these basic ingredients, of a Spivak and applied theatre collision, and the above movements of the field, I tentatively started this PhD research project by asking how applied theatre practice was itself being affected by contexts of austerity and migration, at points where these two contexts were developing an acute presence in the daily discourse of the United Kingdom, particularly in England and Wales under the Conservative led governments of 2010 onwards. Specifically, I wanted to ask what effects these contexts had on practices of representation within applied theatre, using Spivak’s thinking on representation as a framework for this. I set out to observe examples of practice that responded directly to the refugee crisis, through an ethnographic process. I kept with the notion of austerity and migration as contexts in mind, continuing to engage with and work through the complex thinking of Spivak.
During this research, and my own personal and professional development as a researcher over the course of the PhD, new routes of inquiry opened up. Firstly, it became clear was that it was not just the effects of these two contexts on applied theatre that could present the most interesting question for the field, but how they were effecting applied theatre. In other words, could the relationship between applied theatre and context itself be brought into question? This felt particularly significant for a field that is often conceptualised as linked to its contexts, seeking to create change in some way in those contexts. I develop this line of argument across the first part of the thesis in more detail. Secondly, as I continued to engage with Spivak’s writing, I moved beyond her thinking around representation and started to ask how her whole body of work could be important to move the above question forward. In addition to this, I began to mobilise other writers, resulting in a diverse constellation of thinkers that includes Spivak and maintains a unique invocation of her work into applied theatre, but does so alongside a multitude of others. Some of these thinkers orbit Spivak’s work, others collide with it, whilst others hurtle away and others yet hold their own trajectories, forming different constellations altogether. There are also a few comets, crashing into this thesis seemingly of their own accord. I explore the details of these diverse constellations of thinkers, the rationale for their use, and how I employ them, in the first two chapters.
In this thesis, I continue to engage with austerity and migration as working examples of context. I begin by exploring the ways that their relationship to applied theatre is already understood within the field. Following this, I move to consider how context might be further mobilised as critical concept, drawing from a diverse range of thinkers to unpick this unassuming concept. I then explore and consider the shifting threads and traces that might emerge from this as points of interaction or connectivity between practice and context, arguing that some of these can be found woven through themes of intention, representation, effect and affect. Working with the case study material, I work to unravel these four themes as threads, drawing from a method of Spivak to explore the double binds within them (Spivak, 2012: 104). The thesis generates new ways of considering context, arguing toward a notion of ‘context within’, alongside strategies of ‘working in the local’ and of ‘a theatre of little contexts’. The thesis develops new ways of thinking about the relationship context holds to practice through this, and it offers four new routes of inquiry, possibility, and strategy for applied theatre through the double binds unravelled from intention, representation, effect and affect.
Cited:
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Durham University, 2016. MA in Culture & Difference : Course Details. [Online]
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Available at: http://www.choltheatre.co.uk/about-us/
[Accessed 16 September 2019].
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[Accessed 16 September 2019].
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[Accessed 16 September 2019].
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Zaroulia, M., 2018. Performing that which exceeds us: aesthetics of sincerity and obscenity
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[Accessed 16 September 2019].
Good Chance Theatre, 2019. Good Chance. [Online]
Available at: https://www.goodchance.org.uk/
[Accessed 16 September 2019].
SBC, 2019. Stand and Be Counted Theatre. [Online]
Available at: http://www.sbctheatre.co.uk/about
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Choucair, S., 2019. About Me. [Online]
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[Accessed 16 September 2019].
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Spivak, G., 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation. 1 ed. London: Harvard
University Press.
This extract has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from this extract may be published without proper acknowledgement.
The right of Samuel Stephen McKay to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by Samuel Stephen McKay in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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