PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Bacon: Jane | UK

Plenary session abstract:

Dr. Jane Bacon, Reader in Performance Studies, University College Northampton

Caught with my pants down, I avert my eyes and ask ‘do you read me?’:

Revealing an embodied ethnographic methodology for interdisciplinary performance making

Jane works in an interdisciplinary field that includes dance, video, text and extended vocal technique. She uses an ethnographic and heuristic first person methodology with a post-Jungian slant that includes creative tools emanating from active imagination, the felt sense and a variety of improvisational strategies. She has a commitment to developing methodological approaches to the documentation and assessment of PaR in order to assist in peer-review processes and assessment.

Trying to find a language with which to articulate the creative process I have been drawn to Jung’s notion of Active Imagination (see Chodorow, 1997)to explore a particular embodied methodology which draws on the notion of a ‘knowing body’ which draws inspiration from Gendlin’s notion of the ‘felt sense’ (1981,1986,1996,2003) for the creation of interdisciplinary performance practice. I will perform my current piece, Myths and Stories by Her (25 minutes), and then present a more traditional paper (15 minutes) in order to explain the particular embodied and reflexive performance methodology that is employed in the making and documentation of my work. This will allow the audience to understand how the work exists as both performance and documentation. Theoretical utterances will sit alongside the video, sound and movement in order to reveal how and why this ‘knowing body’ comes to create a particular kind of ‘what, where and when’.  My process works with the body as a source for creative inspiration rather than the stories of my life appearing as a demonstrable explication of what it means to be ‘me’. This is not autobiographical work.

In my creative process I have historically intertwined making and documenting (the process and product) in a way that makes it difficult to disentangle them. I draw inspiration in this part of the process from those working in ethnography (see Emerson, Fretz and Shaw; Amit) who question the boundaries of researcher and researched, of field site and home. The result is a purposefeul blurring of my own boundaries, in that documentation can be presented as a particular and individual aspect of the performance (such as the video or the text) or it can be experienced through the performance itself (as the text, for example, which reveals the processes of making and the theoretical imaginings which exist within the performance).

The dual aspects described above provides me with a frame for  the creation of performance material and other forms of articulation such writing or other forms of documentation. This performance and paper will aim to reveal my discipline influences,  training regimes and theoretical mind-sets that lead me to call my work  ‘performative self-ethnography’, ‘auto-ethnography’ or ‘personal ethnography’.

Indicative Bibliography

Amit, Vered (2000) Constructing the Field, Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, London:Routledge

Chodorow, Joan (1997) Jung on Active Imagination, New York: Routledge

Emerson, Robert; Rachel Fretz and Linda Shaw (1995) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, USA: University of Chicago Press

Gendlin, Eugene (1981) Focusing, New York: Bantam

_____________(1986) Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams, Chicago: University of Chicago

_____________(1996) Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy, A Manuel of the Experiential Method, London: Guildford Press

_____________ (2003) ‘Beyond Postmodernism: from concepts through experiencing’ in Frie, R. (ed), Understanding Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism, London: Routledge, pp 100-115

Contact: jane.bacon@northampton.ac.uk

Panel abstract:

Evidence models for process, product and impact of PaR

This panel will share readily accessible approaches to articulating research imperatives and adducing evidence for PaR projects.  Robin Nelson and Jane Bacon will outline frameworks in which different kinds of data, simply gathered in the making process, might serve to ground PaR projects.  Claims about insights produced amongst the makers in collaborative processes and claims about the impact or effectivity of projects are difficult to ‘prove’ without an additional research dimension beyond the scope of the PaR project in hand. By means of short presentations by NW-Midlands practitioner-researchers, the aim of the panel is to share possible ways of making the findings of typical PaR research processes count as evidence without too onerous a burden of additional research.  The panel will include: insider-outsider ‘readings’; ‘experiencer’ response; documentation of ‘insider’ knowledge-production.

Contibutors are:

Jane Bacon & Robin Nelson

Jane Turner & Neil Mackenzie

Anna Fenemore

Teresa Brayshaw & Shane Kinghorn

Robert Jude Daniels.