Review

TOP 5 OF 2023

TOP 5 OF 2023 on Creative Practice Research

Candelario, R, & Henley, M (eds) 2023, Dance Research Methodologies : Ethics, Orientations, and Practices, Taylor & Francis Group, Milton.

“Dance Research Methodologies: Ethics, Orientations, and Practices captures the breadth of methodological approaches to research in dance in the fine arts, the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences by bringing together researchers from around the world writing about a variety of dance forms and practices. This book makes explicit the implicit skills and experiences at work in the research processes by detailing the ethics, orientations, and practices fundamental to being a researcher across the disciplines of dance. Collating together approaches from key subdisciplines, this book brings together perspectives on dance practice, dance studies, dance education, dance science, as well as dance research in cross-, multi-, and interdisciplinary fields. Practice-based chapters cover methodological approaches that provide rich examples of how research design and implementation are navigated by practicing scholars. Dance Research Methodologies also includes a practical workbook that helps readers to decide upon, refine, and enact their research, as well as develop ways in which to communicate their process and outcomes. This vital textbook is a valuable resource for research faculty interested in interdisciplinary conversation and practice, emerging scholars honing their methodological approaches, graduate students engaged in research-based coursework and projects, and advanced undergraduates.” ––From the Publisher

Frizell, C, & Rova, M (eds) 2022, Creative Bodies in Therapy, Performance and Community : Research and Practice That Brings Us Home, Taylor & Francis Group, Milton.

“Creative Bodies in Therapy, Performance and Community champions several diverse and innovative approaches in the professional engagement with the creative body as a catalyst for change in therapy, education, somatics and performance. With contributors from the wide-ranging fields of performance and visual arts, psychotherapy, dance and somatics, this book articulates practice-based experiences in a creative language. The readers are invited to move from the process of reading, into the experience of being in and making sense of the world through a moving body. The book meanders purposefully through practice-led embodied approaches in research that generate new knowledge, methodological frameworks that have emerged in response to the needs of different contexts, as well as offerring a window on first-hand experience as practice. The book will appeal to a wide range of practitioners and trainees in Dance Movement Psychotherapy, arts therapies, counselling and psychotherapy, somatics, community practice and performance.” ––From the Publisher

Modeen, M, & Biggs, I 2023, Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place : Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies, Taylor & Francis Group, Milton.

“This book explores an exciting range of creative engagements with ecologies of place, using geopoetics, deep mapping and slow residency to propose broadly based collaborations in a form of ‘disciplinary agnosticism’. Providing a radical alternative to current notions of interdisciplinarity, this book demonstrates the breadth of new creative approaches and attitudes that now challenge assumptions of the solitary genius and a culture of ‘possessive individualism’. Drawing upon a multiplicity of perspectives, the book builds on a variety of differing creative approaches, contrasting ways in which both visual art and the concept of the artist are shifting through engagement with ecologies of place. Through examples of specific established practices in the UK, Australia and the USA, and other emergent practices from across the world, it provides the reader with a rich illustration of the ways in which ensemble creative undertakings are reactivating art’s relationship with place and transforming the role of the artist. This book will be of interest to artists, art educators, environmental activists, cultural geographers, place-based philosophers and postgraduate students and to all those concerned with the revival of place through creative work in the twenty-first century.” ––From the Publisher

Overend, D 2023, Performance in the Field Interdisciplinary Practice-as-Research, Cham: Springer International Publishing

“This book makes a compelling case for ‘performance fieldwork’ as a vital new approach to interdisciplinary collaboration. Refocussing the histories and practices of field research, it shows how creative methods and artistic processes can contribute to an embodied and situated knowledge of complex landscapes and environments. The book brings together case studies of innovative research in the fields of ecology, clubbing, heritage, mobility and deep time, which took place in the United Kingdom between 2009 and 2021. These accessible and engaging field notes connect to international and intercultural contexts, with attention to alternative experiences and perspectives throughout. Together, they provide a critically informed ‘toolbox’ of playful and exploratory strategies for working with a diverse range of urban and rural sites – including a river, a museum, a nightclub, a motorway and a cave. This is a timely methodology that reaches across disciplines to demonstrate how performance continually plays out ‘in the field’. David Overend is an award-winning theatre director and Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His research focuses on contemporary theatre and performance, often at the intersection with cultural geography. Previous publications include Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010-2020 with Laura Bissell (2021), and an edited collection, Rob Drummond Plays with Participation (2021). David has also written numerous articles for journals including Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly and GeoHumanities. As well as over a decade of site-based performance practice, he has directed for many theatres, including the National Theatre of Great Britain.” ––From the Publisher

Ruopp, A 2022, Encounters with Theory As Conceptual Medium and Creative Practice, Taylor & Francis Group, Milton.

“Encounters with Theory as Conceptual Medium and Creative Practice explores the relationships and intersections between verbal and visual ways of researching, challenging the privilege of the written word in academe. Rooted in a grant-funded artistic research course, the data and experiences shared here illuminate the transformative power of visual thinking and visual literacy as a research data, analysis as well as artifact. The book begins by outlining the author’s background as an artist/researcher/teacher, laying a foundation for the positionality and thinking within the book. The later chapters, offered as vignettes, share the explorations and subsequent discoveries of emerging scholars from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. A/R/Tography takes a front seat serving as a messy and fluid architecture for theory put into practice. Engaging tension as a catalyst for disruption, the book explores how staying present, intra-acting with ideas, concepts, and theory through visual material exploration expands attention and illuminates data in different ways, affording unexpected insight and discovery. In addition, the image-rich pages invite readers into reading the visual in conversation with the verbal, on equal terms. One is not in service of the other, rather a conversation of literacies. With its emphasis on the visual and materiality as a method of thinking, this book will be of interest to anyone interested in or practicing artistic research. One does not need to have an arts background to engage in visual dialog.” ––From the Publisher

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Palimpsest Series

BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration

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Practice.

BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined

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A Gathering.

BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric

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Insanity Helps

BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It

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GUEST EDITOR JANE W. DAVIDSON — Extreme weather events have been experienced in so-called Australia for millennia. This settler painting shows the terror and chaos captured by William Strutt in a depiction of Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 (painted in 1864 and now part of the State Library of Victoria’s Pictures Collection). From records of the time, around five million hectares burnt, which amounts to a staggering quarter of Victoria, and on the same day, with temperatures over 43 degrees Celsius in the shade, large swathes of western Tasmania also burnt.
BY CLAIRE HOOKER and ANNA KENNEDY-BORISSOW — It is well recognised that one of the hallmarks of climate change is an increase in the frequency and severity of disasters (IPCC, 2023). The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR, 2007) defines disasters as a ‘serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society,’ and these disruptions result from interactions between hazards and human systems (Peek et al., 2021; Perry, 2018).
BY SUSANNE THUROW, HELENA GREHAN AND JANE W. DAVIDSON — In this short paper, we aim to explore the potential role creative arts might play in fostering community preparedness in view of the increasing extreme weather scenarios playing out across the globe.
BY PETA TAIT — This article outlines ARC funded research about the representation of ecological damage and climate change in Australian drama, theatre and contemporary performance. The project summary is followed by a brief discussion of artistic depictions of fire and disaster that refers to a community-based play based on the lived experience of its audience, and a performative work in which participants rehearse for a future disaster.
BY SARAH WOODLAND AND LINDA HASSALL — The escalation of ecological crises and climate-related disasters is impacting individual health and community wellbeing globally. The World Health Organization has highlighted that 3.6 billion people now live in regions highly susceptible to climate change, and the health impacts will cost economies US$2-4 billion per year by 2030 (WHO 2023).
BY BELINDA SMAILL — This essay explores how screen aesthetics have been deployed in our new era of fire. In Australia this era is marked by Black Saturday in 2007 and the Black Summer fires of 219/20. As both public knowledge and fire events have evolved the filmmaking community has responded with a largely documentary focused body of work. Examining this new turn in film and television’s narrative and visual interest in fire, I couch this study within Australia’s cinematic history of fire, recognising its intersection with the environmental history of fire and this new phase: the Pyrocene.
BY JANE W. DAVIDSON, SARAH WOODLAND AND GILLIAN HOWELL — This short paper investigates the potential use of opera for enabling sharing and recovery from extreme weather events. Opera, which might be conceived of as storytelling using a combination of words, music, acting, costumes, and set, has a European origin dating back to 1600 (Davidson, Halliwell & Rocke, 2021).
BY DENNIS DEL FAVERO, SUSANNE THUROW, MAURICE PAGNUCCO, URSULA FROHNE — The climate emergency presents an existential global crisis resulting from the combined processes of global warming, atmospheric, hydrospheric, biospheric and pedospheric degradation. The IPCC report of 2023 found that extreme climate events are rapidly increasing around the globe, with projections indicating that they will become more frequent and severe, with impacts intensifying and interacting.
BY Carina Böhm, Didem Caia, Clare Carlin, Emilie Collyer, Ruth Fogarty
BY JOSHUA IP – The interrogation of practice is a common task faced by practice-based researchers. As a PhD candidate the Practice Research Symposium programme in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT, focusing on the discipline of Creative Writing, I have attempted to interrogate my wide-ranging practice as poet, editor and literary organiser for the past six years.
BY ANNE M. CARSON – Disrupting, interrupting and sometimes derailing study in both welcome and unwelcome ways; life gets into PhD projects in a plethora of ways, so much so that there often seems to be no hard boundary between them. This essay uses the example of synchronicity as one way that ‘life gets in’.
BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration from the concept of a palimpsest and the work of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta.
BY JENNY HEDLEY – In this reflective essay, a time-poor single mother and PhD candidate accidentally takes on the role of basketball coach as she seeks to achieve balance between scholastics and life.
BY MICHAEL DONEMAN – Between is a reflection on loss and renewal. It interweaves personal, cultural, and environmental stories near the country where I live, by a waterway at the edge of the Boondall Wetlands called Cabbage Tree Creek.
BY CLAIRE WELLESLEY-SMITH – The use of textile as a creative recording method alongside my PhD (2023, The Open University) extended a practice I began in 2013. Stitch Journal is a long length of linen cloth, pieces added in sections.
BY SUSIE CAMPBELL – Before an unexpected brush with serious illness, the journey of my PhD research project seemed clear. I set out to engage with the avant-garde Modernist poetry of Gertrude Stein in order to draw on her experimental approach to language for my own processual model of poetic practice.
BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined through the process of undertaking PhD creative writing practice research.
BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric essay, is written with the conventions of the lyric essay, utilising white space, non-linearity, image, archive, fragment, association and braiding.
BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It is styled as an interview with the self and is punctuated by interactions between the interviewers which descend into hostile conversations.
BY JENNY HICKINBOTHAM – Life didn’t GET IN to my PhD research, my life IS my PhD research.