Relational and Aesthetic Accountability: Considerations of a Research-Based Playwright

An Aesthetic of Relationality and Ethics

While this article focuses on my process as an RbT playwright, which could be construed as a singular or even isolated process, an aesthetic of relationality can help to think through the relational aspects of this process, including accountability to multiple people and contexts. An aesthetic of relationality is a frame that articulates RbT as an aesthetic space within which the embodied interpretive work of artist-researchers is extended into spatial, relational contexts, formed through three interrelated modes of practice: playful extending, foolish disrupting, and inventive disrupting (Gray, 2019; Gray & Kontos, 2018). RbT that aligns with an aesthetic of relationality is a performance methodology that is uniquely collaborative and relational; in this way, this work takes its bearings from multiple people, factors, and traditions and is situated in broader social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. This frame helps to consider the interrelationship among these multiplicities, including the ways that the actions of people (what we do and the ways we act) shape and make up the world, with the possibility to disrupt and change those actions. Through the example of my process as an RbT playwright, I aim to highlight some of these interrelationships.

Within an aesthetic of relationality, artist-researchers start explorations in their own bodies. They additionally turn, in that they shift their orientation, which enables them to find their way by situating themselves in relation to social/cultural/historical spaces. From this point, they then attend and engage with imaginative “wide-awakeness” (Greene, 2001, p. 11) to extend beyond their own “bodily horizon” (Ahmed, 2006a, p. 562) toward the stories and experiences of other people (such as research participants and community members), continually and foolishly allowing “[them]selves to fail while remaining always alert, ready and willing to try” (Salverson, 2006, p. 155). They do these things to create theater for their audiences, while still committed to those original stories shared by others, to provoke and support an embodied, imaginative, and foolish engagement on the audience’s part.

For the purposes of this article, I focus on the first two modes of practice: playful extending and foolish disrupting. By playfully extending, an artist-researcher imaginatively and actively starts with but moves past their own “bodily horizon” as a space for action (Ahmed, 2006a, p. 562). From this starting point, they enact gestures of embodied, imagined understanding of the experiences of other people (e.g., people whose experiences informed the play). Gesturing in a particular way, through one’s posture, movement, vocal tone, facial expression, word choice, among others, can be understood as a kind of directing toward a particular line of thought. In this way, the experimental, playful gestures are the artist-researchers but informed by research participants’ stories among other considerations, such as social, cultural, and historical contexts. Given the exploratory and experimental nature of playful extending, an artist-researcher also foolishly disrupts their own bodily horizon, as part of doing or enacting their own bodily horizon differently. These vulnerable and brave disruptions “offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 2–3) with the potential for an artist-researcher to understand other people’s experiences differently.

An aesthetic of relationality can help those of us working in RbT to think about the ways we might be responsible and accountable for our actions in relation to RbT’s “multiple commitments” (Goldstein, 2008); this includes multiple factors and people while simultaneously remaining attentive to shape and form, with sensitivity, openness, and feeling (Gray, 2019; Gray et al., 2020; Gray & Kontos, 2018; Thompson, 2015). To address this, I will consider how the frame of an aesthetic of relationality might be bolstered by both Indigenous research approaches and philosophical writings in ethics of care.

Cree scholar and researcher Shawn Wilson’s articulation of relational accountability within an Indigenous research paradigm serves to think about how different aspects of a story are intertwined and buoy each other. Drawing from the teachings of Cree Elder Jerry Saddleback, Wilson (2008) writes of the ways that who tells a story is interwoven with who receives a story, as the listener, and how a story is shaped and formed, along with the history , culture and context of the story. Within these interrelations of a story are also the ideas, morals or lessons , as well as the sharing of other people’s stories as part of counseling or teaching (p. 98). These relations, Wilson discusses, are sacred, as a deep and sincere service, and hold great responsibility. For a research methodology to be relationally accountable (including storytelling), Wilson articulates how it “needs to be based in a community context (be relational) and has to demonstrate respect, reciprocity and responsibility (be accountable as it is put into action)” (p. 99). Wilson’s suggestions around relationality are not explicitly linked with aesthetics, but his discussions around the attention to the form of a story, intermingled with a range of people, including their presence, emotions, and experiences, signals the centrality of how connected relationality and aesthetics are in practice. Wilson’s discussions of relational accountability, as underpinned by an attention to aesthetics, help to think about how an aesthetic of relationality and RbT might be informed by practices of care and responsibility.

Within Indigenous epistemologies, the self of the storyteller is importantly interwoven within the storytelling process, which is useful in thinking about the playwright in RbT. As Sium and Ritskes (2013) note a storyteller is positioned “outside the realm of ‘objective’ commentary” (p. iv), which then includes, even centers, the subjectivity of the storyteller within the shape and action of the story itself. Secwepemc scholar Georgina Martin (2018) discusses the ways a researcher (and/or storyteller) must validate stories reciprocally and relationally with people who first shared their stories. This validation is part of an ethical obligation to cultural belonging and identification of everyone involved in both research and storytelling processes. These insights about the multiple relations as part of storytelling, including among the storyteller/researcher herself and those who first told stories, helps to think through the ways RbT might invite belonging through reciprocity and validation.

While a departure from Indigenous research, feminist ethics of care also centers on relating. Ethics of care tends to address the question of how shall I act? in the context of situations, settings, and relationships. This work is aligned with questions of whether acting in the world is always taken up by an autonomous subject engaging in solely rational processes, as opposed to considering the ways actions might be relational and interdependent, morally and epistemologically (Held, 1993, p. 13, cited in Stuart Fisher, 2020). Care is enacted between people as a responsibility including personal encounters, as well as wider sociopolitical considerations (Stuart Fisher, 2020). Feminist philosopher Maurice Hamington (2004) discusses the centrality of embodiment to care, and the ways care “is committed to the flourishing and growth of individuals yet acknowledges our interconnectedness and interdependence” with others and the world (p. 3). In addition, Hamington asserts that care ethics must consider “context, relationships, and affective knowledge” as part of care’s embodied dimension (p. 3).

Bringing these ideas from Indigenous research and from an ethics of care in conversation with an aesthetic of relationality is meant to open up thinking about how both research and theater-making might be grounded in notions of care. Hamington asserts that the imagination is central to change and what he terms “caring habits” or actions (Hamington, 2004, p. 74), as it allows us to make empathetic linkages with others, rooted in embodied experiences and “what the body knows” (Hamington, 2004, p. 4). Aligned with this, applied theater scholar and practitioner Julie Salverson cites the importance of humility, imagination, and emotion-centered practice as she advocates working as a “foolish witness” when attending to a multiplicity of people with a range of emotional and sensory needs without self-erasure (Salverson, 2006). These connections open up questions about how playful extending, as experimental gesturing toward experiences of other people, might be enacted with care, as committed to everyone’s flourishing and growth. Or, given the potentially disorienting aspects of foolish disrupting, as interrupting and changing one’s own body with bravery and vulnerability to experience and enact differently, how might these aspects of working be supported with responsibility, as reciprocal and in community context? How might theater-making and research be artful/aesthetic, responsive, and reciprocal, contributing to caring, and even loving, societies?

Example: Working as an RbT Playwright

To put these ideas in context, I draw on an example from an RbT project called Cracked: new light on dementia. Specifically, I use an example from my own process as the project’s playwright—creating a scene called Tom is Lost. It might be easiest to comprehend the work of actors as being situated within an aesthetic of relationality, as their work is most obviously embodied (in that their bodies are quite literally their artistic and exploratory instruments). However, by drawing on my work as playwright, my aim is to highlight the ways that a range of people engaged in RbT processes also foolishly and imaginatively engage their embodiment, as part of caring research and theater practices that are aesthetically and relationally accountable.

Cracked was created to disrupt normative assumptions which posit that persons living with dementia are irrevocably tragic, which can lead to social stigma and isolation as well as have implications for policy and professional care practices; our team has discussed this as “the tragedy discourse of dementia” (Mitchell et al., 2013, 2020). The play is based on the programs of research of Drs. Sherry Dupuis, Pia Kontos, Christine Jonas-Simpson, and Gail Mitchell whose work focuses on dementia care, relational caring, aging, and all of whom have experience in arts-based research; I was the lead artist-researcher as the project’s playwright and director. Also included on our team were actors Susan Applewhaite, Lori Nancy Kalamanski, Tim Machin, Mary Ellen MacLean, Claire Frances Muir, Mark Prince, and Jerrald Karch. ²

Our process took place over several years; we first met as a team in 2011, first public performances were held in 2013, and a film version was produced of several live performances in the summer of 2017, which launched in January 2018 at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto, Canada (Dupuis et al., 2016; Gray et al., 2020). Drawing on stories told to us by people with dementia and their families, our own experiences, critiques of the tragedy discourse, and theory and research developed by the team, we engaged in a “theatrical devising” process, which involved a collaborative, improvised creative process among those working in-studio (Barton & Wells, 2008; Filewod, 1987); further details about our process and the play can be found in several publications and in the published script (Collective Disruption, 2017; Gray et al., 2017, 2020).

Despite that we engaged in a theatrical devising process, as playwright I occasionally wrote independently and brought that written work to the group. I draw on one of these instances to highlight the ways I tried to engage in a caring writing practice, as relationally and aesthetically accountable, as well as how I felt cared for by others on our team. In sharing my own experiences of writing, I also draw on data collected as part of my doctoral studies, ³ including my own director/playwright creative notebooks and interviews with actors involved in the process for Cracked (Gray, 2016). ⁴

The scene Tom is Lost takes place between Vera, a woman in her 70s who is in the early stages of dementia, and Tom, her husband of over 40 years. Before writing this scene, I discussed with health researchers, Dupuis, Kontos, Jonas-Simpson, and Mitchell, about how people with dementia and their partners spoke about the ways dementia had changed rather than eradicated their relationship, specifically related to intimacy and sex. Sometimes this was positive (such as “I forget we just had sex, so we’re doing it all the time!”) to the more difficult (e.g., “it can be disorienting, and my wife doesn’t really have the interest and wants more hugs than anything else”). As a team, we felt this change in intimacy was important to explore in the play; specifically, we wanted to work through the difficulty of the shift in physical and sexual intimacy that many partners expressed.

As I sat down to write this scene, truthfully, I was at a loss about how to begin. I do not have dementia. I am also middle-aged. In listening to the stories of others, I wondered if it was presumptuous of me to write about such an intimate loss that I had not experienced. I felt a deep sense of responsibility but was concerned I would not act with sufficient care, nor support the “flourishing and growth” of others in re-telling their stories (Hamington, 2004, p. 3). Following Wilson, I understood that I was working in service of others through my storytelling, and I felt uncertain and humbled. I let this uncertainty sit in my gut for many weeks before attempting to put anything on paper.

As I sat with this, I imagined what I might feel like if my own partner did not recognize me. At this thought, I felt very lost; in many ways, I would feel disoriented without his recognition. In addition, I imagined if I had dementia with moments of not recognizing the people around me, how disorienting this might be too. By imagining with “wide-awakeness” (Greene, 2001, p. 11), I was disorienting my immediate experience of not having dementia. Through interviews as part of my doctoral work, a fellow artist-researcher described this imaginative work as: “I don’t think I can understand. . . but I can imagine.” I imaginatively approached the experiences of people with dementia and their family members not as a way to finitely know how a person with dementia feels not recognizing her partner, but to open up possibilities for me that might otherwise remain closed. As Hamington discusses: “My imagination call[ed] on the bodily resources I do have to give me a glimmer of understanding” (Hamington, 2004, p. 74).

I have chosen my husband as a life partner because of how he relates to me, how he sees me, and how he touches me—in part, as an aesthetic engagement. His aesthetic engagement with me is also, in part, how I come to understand myself. We emotionally, sensorily, and physically extend toward each other through the space of our friendship, and as such our bodily horizons impress upon and shape each other. Through our friendship, our co-habitation, and our sexual intimacy, we have directed our actions toward each other, we have committed, taken a promise toward the future, extending from our bodies as starting points, from our past histories. We are two others reaching out to each other, and through our reaching we in part become ourselves. My partner’s otherness, or, as Ahmed discusses, his ““not me” is incorporated into [my] body, extending [my] reach” (Ahmed, 2006b, p. 115). The way we extend toward each other, the intention and nature of our actions, both create the space of our friendship through which we continue to extend and shape each of us as individuals. In addition, as a straight, White, middle-class couple, our actions of extending into the space between us are oriented along particular points of alignment that allow for a normative extension into the social world. Our relationship, as well as both of us as individuals, is shaped by this orientation and commitment to each other as individuals and our alignment within social/cultural/historical spaces.

As I imagined what it might be like if my partner did not recognize me, my sense of self, shaped in part by this chosen orientation and commitment toward my partner, was shaken. Ahmed discusses how orientation is about “making the strange familiar through the extension of bodies” and how “disorientation occurs when that extension fails” (Ahmed, 2006b, p. 11). As I imagined failure of recognition, as a disruption in my partner’s regular extensions toward me, the tragic discourse of dementia, as seeing the person with dementia as only filled with loss, became tangible.

In pondering how to approach writing the scene, my imagined reflections combined with my feelings of disorientation gave me a starting point. I imagined that, not only was the character Vera lost in her orientation to her husband because of her dementia, but Tom was lost too—he became disoriented by their changing relationship.

The first incarnation of the scene was very short and involved Tom and Vera coming into an embrace, only to have Vera become confused and disoriented, pushing Tom away with the fear of not recognizing him. This brings Tom to tears and, when Vera comes back into the present moment and recognizes Tom again, he confesses to her that it is he who is lost.

We played this in-progress scene to an audience of members of the dementia community at a preview presentation in November 2013. As seen in my hand-written notes, many, especially partners and family members, felt it was too intimate a moment, too raw, and very dark. Audience members said it was too difficult to watch the loss for Tom as he struggled with the change in their relationship.

As a creative-research team, we agreed that our intention with the overall play was not to dwell in the tragedy but to move through it to find hope and new ways of engaging with people with dementia. As a playwright, I understood that in writing this scene, in playfully extending toward the experiences of persons with dementia and their partners through the scene’s structure and word choices, I had failed. I had worked with some care, in that I had intentionally set out to be attentive and sensitive to these stories. Aligned with Sium and Ritskes (2013), I importantly drew on my own subjectivity to relate to the stories of others, including my embodiment and imagination, but my crafting had overtaken the experiences of others. In addition to witnessing the scene, audience members’ responses affirmed what was created, in that audience members identified with this loss and struggle. However, as a team we understood that audience members did not validate what was created or our aims to offer new possibilities of flourishing for persons with dementia and their partners; what was created did not invite cultural belonging, but rather continued to exclude (Martin, 2018).

It was with the involvement of other people, including the actors performing the in-progress scene, and audience members receiving the story, that I came to understand that my crafting was not contributing to the flourishing of people with dementia and their partners. Indeed, my imagined understanding of becoming disoriented in living with dementia, as both the person with dementia and partner, had not disrupted the tragedy discourse but reproduced it. My responsibility, then, was to use these audience members’ responses to reattend with humility and to shape the scene differently.

In returning to rewrite the scene, my colleagues and cocreators never admonished me, but rather invited me to flourish and grow by working with softness as I moved forward. Buoyed by their emotional attention and joint vulnerability, again I turned inward and was at a loss about where the hope was in this scene. I deeply explored my own perceptions of dementia and how I was taking on the discourse of tragedy that we were aiming to challenge. How were my own deeply engrained assumptions about dementia shaping the play? In what ways were my imaginings of living with dementia, as disorienting, contributing to the tragedy discourse and causing further harm?

I began to imagine where the hope was in this scene and to work toward seeing possibilities of an imagined future relationship with my partner. I asked myself: What would I need from my partner if I become disoriented? Or what kind of support or physical touch would I want to provide to my partner if he did not recognize me? How might the imagined lack of recognition not be a failed extension toward the space of our friendship, but rather what Ahmed calls “a wonky moment” (Ahmed, 2006a, p. 562), a crack, that can offer insight? As queer and cultural theorist Jack Halberstam offers: How might the failure of this moment of lack of recognition, the “losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming [and] not knowing,” in fact, hold the potential to “offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 2–3). As I reflected, I contemplated how I might use this process of overturning and imagining possibilities of hope to help me playfully extend differently, or full of reciprocal care to allow for everyone to flourish, through a new scene structure and word choices.

The next incarnation of the scene started the same way: with Vera and Tom coming into an embrace, to have Vera push Tom away. Tom again confesses to Vera that he is lost when she comes back into the present moment. But next Vera pushes Tom to explain himself. He repeats a line from earlier in the play, a line that was originally said by a character with dementia: “I am losing track of what I should do, or should not do. It makes it difficult to be steady.” Tom confesses to Vera that he misses how they used to engage with each other, sexually and otherwise. She assures him that he does not need to be steady, that he does not need to dwell on the past, or tomorrow, but to be with her as she is now in the present moment. And, inspired by Leonard Cohen’s poem Anthem, she tells him that “cracks are how the light gets in” (Cohen, 1993, p. 373).

It was important to our entire creative-research team that support for Tom come from Vera as the person with dementia. In this way, dramatic structure guided our interpretive approach and helped us shape the scene; we felt it was stronger dramatically and spoke to our goals of critiquing the tragedy discourse that the person with dementia, as the one who is disruptive, be the person to support Tom’s growth by “offer[ing] more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 2–3). It is Vera who suggests that cracks, as a metaphor for disruption, are what allow us to be in light, as a metaphor for creativity and surprise. It is Vera who suggests that Tom not be steady; that he could fail, un-become, and lose his way. That their extensions toward each other through the space of their friendship could still be filled with surprises and the unexpected; but they must be receptive to that surprise, and support those moments of not knowing and disruption.

The response to this version of the scene through additional previews and final performances was much more hopeful. In post-performance discussions, audience members from the dementia community have told us that, while the scene is still difficult, they appreciated the guidance and care in the scene offered by Vera, the person with dementia. Audience members spoke about the importance of being in the present moment with the person with dementia and following their lead. They shared how they appreciated the reminder about each of our cracks and imperfections as integral to who we are as human beings. They validated that the scene (and the play more broadly) left them feeling hopeful and with a sense of belonging.

Conclusion

In reflecting on my process as an RbT playwright, and the ways I playfully extended and was foolishly disrupted, it is important to recognize that being wrong, being vulnerable, or risking being ridiculous and “failing” (or being foolish), were integral to writing the scene with care. While I did not gesture in the ways that actors might—through their physical bodies—I playfully extended through the structure of the scene and word choices. I drew on my own “bodily horizon” as a resource (Ahmed, 2006a), imagined beyond my immediate experience of not having dementia, and gestured through my writing toward a particular line of thought. It was in writing the scene wrong at first, by reproducing the tragedy discourse in the first incarnation and having the scene not validated by members of the dementia community, that I was able to understand the ways I was implicated in the tragedy discourse and the ways these assumptions were shaping the scene and play. But this wrongness or failure did not happen in isolation. It was in additionally sharing the scene-in-progress with the support of a team of caring, emotionally attentive, and equally vulnerable fellow artist/social/health researchers that I could fail and be wrong as part of working with and toward care.

As part of complicating dichotomies often associated with RbT’s ethical tensions, specifically that aesthetic/artistic interests conflict with responsibilities to research, I have suggested a refocus of RbT toward caring practices that invite flourishing and growth. I have demonstrated how those of us engaging in RbT practices might be accountable for a range of relations and aesthetic considerations, such as attention to multiple people, broader contexts, as well as emotions, senses, and form. As part of this are the embodied, imaginative and foolish foundations of the RbT work. Both theater and research are collective endeavors and ways of engaging community members (as research participants and/or audiences) despite that both traditions customarily prize the singular, independent genius. Here I join colleagues in theater and research across disciplines who work with care, and additionally aim to be relationally and aesthetically accountable (for some examples, please see Baer et al., 2019; Bhattacharya, 2016; Gallagher & Kushnir, 2020; Goldstein, 2012; Kontos et al., 2021).

These understandings have implications for institutional Research Ethics Boards that aim to support RbT, including considerations for consent processes. Here I invite Research Ethics Boards to consider how researchers and partners might be caring as well as relationally and aesthetically accountable, throughout a particular RbT process. Considering the centrality of collective work and embodiment (including emotions and senses) to RbT, along with recognizing that vulnerabilities and failures are important and unavoidable, will be important as part of developing Research Ethics Board guidelines. Rather than exclusively considering how to avoid harmful practices throughout RbT, can the support of caring ones also be considered? I would suggest these considerations should reach beyond (while including) the ways community members and research participants are engaged in RbT, to also include each other as artist/social/health researchers. Through the frame of an aesthetic of relationality, relational and aesthetic accountabilities can offer an important foundation for considering how RbT might be rooted in caring practices, and might also influence theater-making and the traditions of research more broadly.