How does participatory performance operate as an aesthetic form? This project explored 4 distinct components of the aesthetic experience of participation: the intersubjective relationships created, the embodied experience of taking part, the creative contribution from participants to the material of the work, and the demand characteristics of being a participant.
Understanding the experience of participation in performance requires a contextual approach that includes an audience perspective. Agency only becomes meaningful when it is experienced, which means it’s important to be specific about the perspective we use to discuss agency in participation.
My PhD research (2012-2017), carried out at the University of Kent’s research centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance and supported by a 50th Anniversary PhD Scholarship, explored agency and aesthetic experience in participatory and experiential performance forms.
This research explored the rise in interactive, immersive and participatory approaches that focus on creating work that attempts to involve and respond to the audience as individuals. This development has in turn led to an interrogation and redefinition of aesthetics, for instance in Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (2012), which examines spectatorship in participatory art.
The project examined the aesthetics and ethics of participatory performance and argues that agency is fundamental to both. It developed the discourse on participation (building on Gareth White’s Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation, 2013) by proposing a contextual understanding of agency that differentiates between the act and the experience of it.
The main research question was: How does participatory performance operate as an aesthetic form? The research examined how participation implicates ethics and the way that agency becomes both an aesthetic and ethical concern. It also considered ways to analyse and evaluate participatory performance that take into consideration the different contexts of the participant’s (inside) experience and (outside) observation of their decisions and contributions.
This research took a mixed-methods approach to enable a comprehensive response to the research question and employed audience research (implemented on three case studies with internationally renowned practitioners) and practice-based research. Alongside these, the work draws on enactive and embodied cognition (Johnson, 2007; Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008; Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009) to provide a nuanced perspective on agency, intersubjectivity and experience. The aesthetics of participation, and model for the analysis of participatory performance, I propose focus on four key aesthetic elements: the intersubjective relationships between performer and participant (as well as between participants); the participant’s embodied experience of doing within the performance; the creative contribution they make; and the demand characteristics of being a participant.
The empirical audience research method for analysing the aesthetic experience of participatory performance practices is published in Vol.12:1 special issue of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies and can be read here.
The contextual approach to agency, which highlights that agency needs to be experienced to be meaningful, is published in Studies in Theatre and Performance and can be read here.
My thesis, entitled Conducting Creative Agency: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Participatory Performance, can be downloaded here.
