When Qualitative Research Meets Theater

Introduction

Thirty Questions for Performed Ethnography and Research-Informed Theater Project Design

Confounding the Role of Participant and Performer: Using the Questions to Negotiate Vulnerability, Ownership, and Artistic Merit in Youth-led Research-informed Theater – Pamela Snell

Delirious ¹ was a research-informed theater project that engaged a group of youth to explore the themes of substance abuse and mental health. Youth participants were chosen for the project based on their interest in the arts, their experiences with the thematic areas, and their desire to become leaders and peer educators. The project unfolded over the course of a school year, with the group meeting two afternoons a week (September 2010 to June 2011). After getting to know one another, the group began doing research about substance abuse and mental health in preparation for creating a play to be toured to high schools across the city. The research phase (September 2010 to December 2010) included exploring personal experiences and stories, attending workshops by service providers, resource centers, and advocacy groups, as well as finding information through pamphlets, the Internet, and community organizations. The youth wanted to understand what substance abuse and mental health looked like in their own lives and reflect that on the stage. Many of the youth had complicated relationships to substance abuse and mental health, and from their own narratives sprang rich theatrical and educational potential; this positioned the youth as both researchers and research participants during the first phases of the project. As the group’s focus shifted from research to play development, so shifted our roles. The youth became performers, and I added director to my list of roles, which also included facilitator, primary investigator and youth counselor. This confounding of roles meant that understanding the purpose of the work, and navigating responsibilities and tensions between the roles became even more pronounced (Question 6).

Through workshops, discussions, character work, improvisation, and story development, the group spent 2 to 3 months devising a short script that reflected their research (January 2011 to March 2011). The format of the play was a structure similar to the film Crash, where multiple story lines involving characters from diverse social backgrounds move in and out of each other’s lives; the play followed a range of characters whose plot lines interwove in surprising and interesting ways. It was at this moment, with a script completed, entering rehearsals and one month until our first performance that tensions began to emerge. Many of the youth suddenly stopped showing up to rehearsals and when I asked them why, I was met with a shrug of the shoulders. It quickly became obvious that without performers, we could not continue with the script that we had spent months developing. We called a group meeting and set about figuring out why people were no longer showing up, why there seemed to be tension between group members, and how we were going to meet our performance deadline. What emerged was the realization that as research participants many of the youth felt the script reflected only the experiences of those who had taken a lead on its development and therefore, they felt unwilling to participate as performers. In essence, many of the youth lacked a sense of ownership over the play, and in turn chose to disengage from the project. Deciding how to move forward meant exploring the goals and responsibilities within the project design (Question 29). The primary goals were that of peer-to-peer education and youth leadership. Therefore, pushing the script forward was not an option as it disempowered many of the participants through their lack of ownership.

In my role as director, I was eager to have the youth share their own personal narratives, but realized that this would put them in a much too vulnerable position within the scope of this project, and in my confounding role of counselor I knew that would be asking too much. With all of these intersecting tensions and roles colliding, a collective decision was reached: Individuals and small groups would create their own short artistic pieces and hopefully in a few short weeks, everything would come together to create something whole, something each person could be proud of and that spoke to the months of research we had done. The youth divided themselves up and worked based on interests: spoken word, scenes, videos, poems, songs, and even a group to create a pamphlet of the research findings and discussion guides. How it was all going to become a single performance was left up to chance and the final aesthetic design, a thematic rough-around-the-edges variety show, did not solidify until our tour was underway. The following journeys of Matthew and Antoine, two youth participants, highlight the importance of stopping midprocess, asking the hard questions, and changing directions to realign with the project goals, which in this case were peer-to-peer education and youth leadership.

Matthew is a shy young man, someone who is nervous when he speaks, but expresses himself beautifully through visual art. When the shift in performance format occurred, and we moved from a scripted play to a collection of short artistic pieces, Matthew suddenly had the freedom to determine his own contribution. He disappeared for a week and then reemerged with a series of comic book images and an accompanying story. He wanted the images he had drawn to be projected above the stage while the story was being read. He was nervous to perform and asked Jalal whether he would read the story on stage. Jalal was happy to take on the additional role and after the first couple of performances Matthew became confident in his work and asked Jalal whether they could perform the story together. Shy quiet Matthew became more animated as the performance tour continued and toward the end was sharing his profound thoughts and insights openly during the question and answer period. He had found his voice and used it magnificently. In this case, the flexibility of the mixed aesthetic allowed for us to meet a responsibility to Matthew, who emerged as a performer and leader (Question 8).

Antoine is a young man who was referred to the group from a local mental health organization, he had ongoing struggles with addiction and depression and he had challenges making connections with his peers. Antoine had a very intense history, with a tendency to over share, making himself vulnerable and other group members uncomfortable. He was searching for somewhere to fit in. When it came to participating in the creative process, he found it very challenging because of difficulty focusing. He was shuffled around a lot as the group tried to frantically develop the new performance and in the end Antoine performed a poem that he found online. He was the only participant to not work as part of a team and to not contribute original artistic work. But he was able to take that poem and make it his own, because it spoke to him and his experience. He did not participate in the same way as his peers, yet, he was able to find one small thing and do it well, which meant that he felt proud, he felt ownership, and he felt part of a bigger whole. By taking on a new performance format and privileging the need to minimize barriers to participation over other research-informed theater commitments, Antoine was able to stand in unity with his fellow participants (Questions 6 and 22).

Delirious ended up becoming a multimedia mash-up, flexible enough to accommodate the needs of each participant. Every performance we gave was slightly different as elements were shuffled around, roles were recast on the fly, and sections were included or excluded depending on who was present. Scripts were in hand for every performance and the youth passed a microphone around on stage. But, in this case the responsibility to the participant’s vulnerabilities and ownership outweighed other commitments and what emerged was an aesthetic design that matched the needs of the participants: an original, raw, and honest aesthetic that provided a rich and engaging conversation with audiences. The tensions between the competing elements (research, pedagogy, and aesthetics) ended up feeding one another, we were first and foremost committed to the pedagogical journey of our participants, and this in turn defined our research design, and our artistic design. All of the elements came together to build something that could not have emerged without stopping to ask what our commitments were and how they were unfolding in a constant state of collective reflexivity.

Writing and Performing theOther – Tara Goldstein

Harriet’s House (Goldstein, 2012b) and Ana’s Shadow (Goldstein, 2012a) are two performed ethnographies about a transnationally adoptive same-sex family that I researched and wrote to engage my teacher education students in sustained conversations about Other people’s families. Like Lisa Delpit (1995), who coined the term Other people’s children, I use the term Other people’s families to refer to families who have been marginalized and/or oppressed by their experiences in school. The ethnographies examine the everyday experiences of transnational/transracial adoptive lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) families. The research that has informed the writing of the two plays comes from (a) my reading of a variety of personal narratives about growing up and living in transnational/transracial adoptive and same-sex families, (b) my viewing of a number of film documentaries about growing up and living in these families, and (c) a set of interviews I undertook with people living in transnational/transracial adoptive same-sex families. Harriet’s House tells the story of Harriet’s adopted daughter Luisa, and her return to Bogotá to find her birth mother and connect with her Colombian linguistic and cultural heritage. Ana’s Shadow picks up the story of Harriet’s family 3 years later and features the story of Luisa’s sister Ana, a singer-songwriter, who has no interest in speaking Spanish with her sister or returning to her birth country (to download copies of the scripts which reference the research materials I used go to www.gaileyroad.com). In choosing to research, write and teach with two performed ethnographies about the lives of people living in transnational adoptive families, I hope to not only inform the work teachers do with these particular kinds of families, but with many other kinds of families as well including immigrant/newcomer families, mixed-race families, families learning English as a second or additional language, blended families, and families led by grandparents or other family members.

As a project that aims to generate discussion about Other people’s family lives, questions of writing and performing the Other (Questions 11 and 12) were central to the development Harriet’s House and Ana’s Shadow. In this short piece, I share the casting decisions the artistic team made for the performance of Harriet’s House that was produced for the 2010 Toronto Pride Festival. I also reflect on what was problematic about our decisions.

The first conversation the Harriet’s House artistic team had about issues of race, ethnicity and casting practices emerged during auditions for the roles of Luisa and Ana. After the first set of auditions, the actors that the director Jocelyn Wickett thought were best suited for the roles of Luisa and Ana were not Latin American or of Latin American descent. Canadian actors Supinder Wraich and Rebecca Applebaum identified as South Asian and as white and Chinese. While Supinder was fluent in Spanish, Rebecca was not. The team worked hard to find young actors who were either born in Latin America or came from families of Latin American descent and invited them to the second set of auditions. Unfortunately, none of these actors were as experienced as Supinder and Rebecca or as well suited for the roles of Luisa and Ana.

Before making a final decision about casting Supinder and Rebecca, the artistic team had a sustained conversation about “nontraditional casting” for the roles of Luisa and Ana. To guide us in this conversation, we read an article from American Theatre titled “Opening the Golden Gate” written by actor Lily Tung Crystal. In the article, Tung Crystal (2010) interviews several casting directors about issues of race, ethnicity, and equal representation in theater. I was particularly interested in the way Leslie Martinson, the casting director of TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, California, talked about the difference between color-blind casting and nontraditional casting:

Color-blind casting as a phrase is reductive—it implies that someone’s cultural context can be set aside. Culture is part of the richness of who we are as human beings. It’s usually important to actors in a hundred different ways—why would that not be important on stage? Our commitment is to have the conversation about what role ethnicity plays in a particular production. Sometimes it moves up in import, sometimes down. We’re rigorous in examining our assumptions, and I push directors to examine their own. (p. 67)

In talking about the role ethnicity played in our production of Harriet’s House, the team came to the conclusion that while issues of language, culture and race were at the heart of the play, particularly for Luisa who was attempting to reconnect with her cultural heritage in Colombia, it was more important for the actors playing Luisa and Ana to understand the issues at stake than it was for them to identify as Colombian or Latin American. Supinder and Rebecca were called back to audition together during the second set of auditions. In a discussion of the issues that came up in their audition scene, both actors showed that they had a good understanding of the different views Luisa and Ana held about their linguistic and cultural heritage. Both actors could also relate their characters’ beliefs to their own experiences and perspectives. We felt we had found strong actors to play Luisa and Ana, and felt confident about our decision to cast nontraditionally (to download digital recordings of Harriet’s House and Ana’s Shadow, go to www.gaileyroad.com).

Our decision was not unproblematic, however. By casting Supinder and Rebecca in the roles of Luisa and Ana, we were not providing work opportunities to local Latin American actors who had a deep interest in a transnational story about Colombia and Canada. While we had worked hard to find Latin American actors for the second set of auditions, the number of actors we actually auditioned was small despite the fact that there are two professional Latin American theater companies in Toronto. If Gailey Road Productions had developed a relationship with these companies before the audition process had begun, we might have been able to attract a larger group of Latin American actors to our auditions and we might have found a Latin American Luisa and Ana. Lesson learned.

Representing Range in Research and Performance: Engaging the Questions in Aesthetic Design – Jenny Salisbury

The Roots Among the Rock project was a collectively created play developed through the Ask & Imagine program of the Faculty of Theology at Huron University College, in London Ontario (Glover et al., 2010). It took place in the summer and autumn of 2010, and brought together seven university students as researcher/performers to devise a new play in response to the college’s ongoing work with Canadian youth and faith communities. I am the assistant program director for the Ask & Imagine youth theology program, and was the artistic director of Roots Among the Rocks. ² The play centered on questions of faith in the 21st century, and how a young person navigates experiences of church, community, and identity. It was structured on a respect for diversity, inclusion, and personal experience. The show was developed through interviewing over 70 volunteers representing a breadth of age, religious experience, and Canadian geography. The work was framed by an understanding that each person’s story was unique and specific, but still had something to contribute to a wider understanding of a cultural experience. Roots Among the Rocks premiered at the Anglican Church of Canada’s General Synod on June 8th, 2010, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, then toured from Newfoundland to British Columbia. The goal of the project was to gather a variety of stories, perspectives, and experiences, and share them with the very communities that provided them—an effort to “report back” the findings of the researcher/performers.

The company took great care in creating an aesthetic design that rigorously represented the breadth of the conflicting and complicated research material, as well as artistically addressing tensions between differing theologies, experiences, and pedagogies. The Ask & Imagine program director, Judy Steers, and I worked closely together as we lead the team of researcher/performers through a series of workshops and rehearsals that pushed us to make artistic choices that illuminated the goals of the project. We endeavored to create a performance where the form of the piece, the narrative, performance style, tone, and artistic expression, reflected the research findings. Our ethnographic research revealed a cultural experience that was fluid and shifting, with no unifying experience or concern. To reflect this in performance, the company drew on several influences from both Research-Informed Theatre (See Goldstein, 2012b, p. 1) and traditional performance, to create a nonlinear play that focused around a central idea, abandoning a theatrical continuity of character, setting, plot, or style. The structure was very much like a jazz piece, with themes emerging and fading. Using this serial structure, the company was able to mirror the variety of findings in the research with a variety of performances on stage.

In addressing Questions 22 and 23, the company chose to use a variety of performance styles throughout the piece. Out of respect for the people who volunteered to be interviewed, we approached their specific words with the performative rigor of realism (see Hodgson, 1988, p. 308). Our actors spoke, behaved, and interacted with one another in a manner that strove to resemble the individuals who had been interviewed. We changed the names, and often combined two or three interviews that ran along similar themes. Before bringing it to performance, we shared our script with the volunteers whose words were being used directly (Question 6), as we strove to meet our responsibilities to our research subjects. Alternatively, in scenes where the actors embodied academic, historical or sacred text, we often used a storytelling theater technique, with shared narrative and heightened physical performance. Storytelling theater is often used in Theatre for Young Audiences, or epic theater based on fables, and combines direct narration, symbolic gestures, pantomime, and nonrealistic movement. This helped our audience understand which scenes were derived from what type of research material, and how to interpret the variety of research that was presented. For example, a passage based on the words of an interview subject would be represented as follows:

(MELISSA crosses down stage, and puts on a priest’s stole.)

MELISSA

I decided to become a priest right after I had my breasts removed. My mother had died at 40, from breast cancer. So had her sister and their mother. Those are my women, my blood, my breasts. So, when I was 39, my doctor said: Okay, Jane, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. You’ve had your babies, you don’t want any more; let’s have them off. She was right—but it was a nightmare. I’m a motorcycle momma. Come on now, look beyond the collar, and imagine me an angry teen in the early 80s. Rock and Roll, baby. I’ve got a bit of the devil inside me, and I always thought I’d die young anyway. I love to speed and I enjoy a pint. I didn’t put that in my vocation documents.

Whereas in sections where the performance was based on published text, the performance style took on a very different tone:

(MELISSA and JD cross to a large piece of fabric that they stretch out along the entire width of the stage. The two actors begin an aggressive “tug-of-war.”)

MELISSA (HAUNT) I . . . I . . . I . . . I. Do you think that you can live without us?

(KARYN crosses to centre stage, and steps into the fabric. She moves the fabric about her, creating images of torment and capture. Eventually, she is tied up in the fabric, and abandoned centre stage.)

JD (AUGSTINE) I was blushing for shame, for I could still hear the dim voice of those vanities. ³

MELISSA (HAUNT) I . . .

JD (AUGUSTINE) My vanities

MELISSA (HAUNT) I . . .

JD (AUGUSTINE) and still I hung back in hesitation.

Roots Among the Rocks incorporated dance and silence as artistic choices that reflected great emotion and spaces of tension in the research (Question 26). A number of interview subjects shared personal stories of “coming-out” as a gay person, and that being a time of upheaval in their faith life. Research participants placed these stories within a spectrum of emotion ranging from reconciliation, healing and joy, through to extraordinary hurt and pain. Due to the variety of interviews we gathered, and the private and vulnerable nature of the content, our company chose to explore this category of story through dance. We found that dance could capture the emotional fabric of these experiences in spaces where words either divided or failed. Dance also allowed audiences to approach the work with fewer political lenses. Human sexuality, particularly the question of gay marriage, was, and continues to be, a divisive conversation in the communities we visited (Question 5). We wanted to share the stories we had collected with integrity, and avoid as much as possible the political and theological debate that is better suited to other arenas. The dance offered an experience that could be interpreted and approached from a number of different viewpoints. When the piece was performed for the individuals who had shared their stories with us, it was met with gratitude and approval. It was able to capture the vulnerability, complexity, and emotional core of a story, without sharing specific details or forcing conclusions. The piece was framed with poetry and monologues that drew the audience back into the larger themes of the piece.

In reflecting upon Questions 29 and 30, it is clear to me that the Roots Among the Rocks project privileged its responsibility to its pedagogical framework over our aesthetic and research responsibilities. This tension was built right into the project design. Before the research was conducted and a team was assembled, the project was intended to tour to 30 communities across the country, and to act as an invitation to further story-sharing within a variety of faith-based organizations. Knowing that this was the goal shaped our response to other contributing factors of the performance, such as our “coming-out” dance piece. While challenging, we did not find this privileging detrimental to our process, but it was heavily influential. We attempted to be transparent about these choices within the actual performance. Each presentation of Roots Among the Rocks began with a welcoming moment from someone deeply involved in the project, speaking directly to the audience. In this opening speech, the audience was told how the show was made, who it was made for, and what we hoped to achieve in sharing it (Question 18). To this end, we were clear that our goal had been the conversation itself (Question 1). After each performance, the audience was invited to engage in discussions with the creative team. These structures were created in an effort to invite the audience into the process of the project, revealing the work and the choices that contributed to Roots Among the Rocks.

Challenging Discourses of Tragedy About Dementia: Moving Research and Pedagogical Goals forward Through Aesthetic Design – Julia Gray

I will draw on an example from a still-in-progress research-informed theater project, currently titled The Dementia Project (Gray et al., 2013). ⁴ This research-informed theater project was initiated to critique the dominant discourse of tragedy around Alzheimer’s and related dementia and open up space for a new discourse of possibilities that recognizes embodied expression, agency, and relationality of people with dementia (Dupuis et al., 2011; Kontos & Naglie, 2007). Our aim with this project is to reach health care practitioners, policy makers, administrators, as well as people with dementia, their family members and the broader public encouraging a broader culture shift in the way we understand dementia and engage with those who have the disease.

The play has been in progress since the spring of 2011, and has included several months of meetings between the team’s health researchers ⁵ and the playwright/director (me) to discuss the main ideas and themes that we wished to be included in the play (between May 2011 and May 2012); a set of focus groups with people with dementia and their care partners asking them about relationships in their lives and what makes life worth living (December 2011); a one-day interactive arts workshop with people with dementia, their care partners, visual artists, actors and health researchers to explore what people with dementia would want the world to know about them and their experience with illness (November 2012); and several creative development phases with the playwright/director, actors, and health researchers to explore the emerging themes and focus group transcripts (May, June, and September 2012; April and June 2013).

For the purposes of this article, I will unpack how a particular scene was shaped within the play taking into consideration ethnographic research, aesthetic, and pedagogical commitments (Goldstein, 2008a, 2008b). The scene I will examine takes place between Caroline and her brother Clay and is rooted in realism (which values fidelity to real-life conversational dialogue; Brockett, 1991). The broader play, however, is situated within magic realism (which portrays realistic settings infused with magical, imagistic impressions and physical gestures; Maufort, 2006). As such, while this specific scene appears to be “straight-forward” stylistically, artistically it is situated within a play that implicates metaphors, visual imagery, as well as a mix of naturalistic and poetic language. The dynamic style of magic realism offers us the opportunity to challenge audience’s perception of the linearity of time and experiences of those living with dementia, draw on metaphor to explore complex emotions, and develop a complex relationship between stage-action and audience members encouraging critical and emotional engagement. Caroline lives with her mother Elaine, who has dementia, and her life partner Alex. All characters are fictionalized composites, based on participants from the focus groups as well as people in the lives of the artist/researcher team.

The following is an excerpt from the focus groups conducted in December 2011 of a family care provider, proving support to her husband who is living with dementia. She is speaking about a conversation she had with her son about his father (the participant’s husband).

Well, I went over to visit him [my son] once because I said—when I knew he was home . . . And I said to my daughter-in-law, “Is XXX [my son] home?” And she said, “Yes.” So I said, “Well, I’d like to go up and talk to him.” And so I went up and talked to him. I said, “What is this? I need help you know, I need your support.” “Mom,” he said, “I can’t.” This is the man [his father/my husband], they used to go canoeing, you know. He [my son] can’t accept it. He’s 58 years old and he can’t accept it. (Participant, Family Care Provider)

This focus group excerpt acted as the foundation for the scene that follows, between Caroline and Clay.

Scene

CLAY is standing down stage centre facing the audience, with a bottle of (micro-brew) beer in his hand. CAROLINE enters.

The decision to change the relationship in this scene from mother/son to sister/brother came from two sources: (a) Additional data beyond this specific excerpt indicated to us that often there is tension between siblings caring for a parent that we wanted to reflect, and (b) through our creative development process, certain characters were emerging that we wanted to pursue and capitalize on. This scene was presented as part of a works-in-progress presentation in June 2013 after the completion of a creative development phase, with an invited audience of family members of people with dementia, health professionals working with people with dementia, health researchers and artists. This presentation allowed us as artist/researchers to see whether the work was resonating with audience members.

Response to this scene was very strong. Audience members felt that the tensions between Caroline and Clay reflected emotions and concepts that people had experienced or witnessed in their own lives, especially relating to gendered responsibilities. It was clear that each of these grown children were struggling with their mother’s disease differently. There was a desire to see more of the character of Clay through the rest of the play (at the time, this scene was his only scene). If Clay’s role were to increase, audience members seemed divided about how much growth Clay might experience through the play. Some wanted to see change in Clay, perhaps coming to a “new regular,” as a way to offer audience members some kind of solution about how to move forward with a family member living with the disease. Conversely, some felt Clay’s struggle to be in the present with his mother was “truthful” and important to reflect. Certain audience members discussed how “solutions” do not always happen in “real life” and so to present something discreet and bite-sized through the play would be forced and insincere. An interesting debate ensued about whether the play should put forward solutions, suggest pathways or options about how to engage with people with dementia, or, in fact, encourage nonsolutions such as being in the present with the person with dementia rather than trying to “fix the problem.”

With this feedback, discussions among the team (actors and health researchers) returned to what our pedagogical goals for the research project are, and how these might be best achieved through the aesthetic, interpretive process of developing the play. We agreed it was better to show the story and the struggle of Clay and the other characters, rather than tell about solutions to the “problem.” This struggle provides audience members the opportunity to experience the story alongside it (Thompson, 2009), with the intention of the audience’s own assumptions about people living with dementia being revealed with the revelation of the characters’ own transformation (Mamet, 2010). We agreed our goal is to draw audience members into the action of the play so they can be engaged emotionally and critically. We felt that, because we paid attention to the interrelationship among research, pedagogical, and aesthetic goals of the project, a rich discussion occurred post-presentation for audience members. The combination of the rich research findings, a dynamic, complex aesthetic design, and an in-depth postpresentation discussion provided space for audience members to engage with key ideas and emotions in empowering, nondidactic ways.

Closing Remarks

In this article, we have discussed what it might mean to design performed ethnography and research-informed theater projects that recognize multiple commitments to research, aesthetics and pedagogy. In developing her youth project Delirious, Pamela Snell found that it was challenging playing a variety of roles—researcher, youth counselor, and director—within the project and discussed the importance of privileging the development needs of the youth she was working with over the aesthetic and research needs of her project. Like Snell, Jenny Salisbury found herself privileging pedagogical responsibilities over aesthetic and research responsibilities in her project Roots Among the Rocks. In casting Harriet’s House, Tara Goldstein found herself asking a number of questions around the politics and ethics of representing Other people’s families in performed research. And Julia Gray, in The Dementia Project had to work through a variety of issues to powerfully represent her research team’s findings about living with dementia aesthetically.

While each project described here brought its own unique challenges, issues, and questions, we argue that asking questions about research, aesthetic and pedagogical design, and responsibilities can help prepare researcher-artists for the complexities that will inenvitably accompany their projects. Many researcher-artists have primary identifications and commitments to their work as either researchers or artists. Here, we have argued it is important to consider the ways research design and aesthetic design interact with and feed into each other and the ways that research and aesthetic decisions impact the pedagogical work our projects do.