non representational theory case study

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Non-representational Theory

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Non-representational Theory and Dance
Non-representational Theory and Music
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Non-representational Theory by Paul Simpson LAST REVIEWED: 19 May 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 31 August 2015 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199874002-0117

Non-representational theory refers to a diverse body of work that emerged during the mid- to late 1990s in the United Kingdom as an alternative approach to the conception, practice, and production of geographic knowledge. Initially proposed by Nigel Thrift in a series of calls during that time, non-representational theory has sought to reorientate geographic analyses beyond a perceived overemphasis on representations (in a variety of forms), and a form of representationalism (whereby meaning is something formed in the mind and that acts as a precondition for action), toward an emphasis on practice, embodiment, materiality, and process. This call has been taken up by a range of geographers and has evolved in multiple, at times potentially conflicting, directions. This highlights a key feature of non-representational theory. It is not, in fact, a singular theory. Rather, non-representational theory marks a disposition based upon a range of styles of thinking that value practice and the processual. It is more easily understood in the plural—in terms of “non-representational theories.” Furthermore, the usefulness of the word non-representational has been questioned, both in critiques of this work and in responses to them. While this “non” suggests dispatching with concerns for representations in general, something many geographers have been troubled by, it is intended more to reflect a different approach to their consideration: a movement away from a focus on the interpretation of their meaning toward a consideration of what they “do” in the unfolding of the social world. The reception of non-representational theory in geography has been mixed. It is evident that a range of work has been inspired on the subject, particularly in terms of certain off-shoots, such as work on affect and materiality. It is clear also that non-representational theory has challenged geographers and encouraged reflection on the epistemological boundaries of the discipline. That said, it is clear also that it has led to the reassertion of certain core concerns for geography and critiques of non-representational theory’s potential devaluation of them. In light of such concerns and debates, non-representational theory has also come to be known by the alternative moniker of “more-than representational theory.” This title has sought to take a “softer” approach to the confrontational edge of the “non” and to suggest that the ideas proposed by non-representational theories can act as an animating supplement to existing approaches to geographic knowledge production.

Many overviews of what non-representational theory is have appeared since the mid-1990s. Thrift 1996 provides one of the earliest overviews and many of the subsequent introductions have been collected in Thrift 2007 . With non-representational theory presenting more a disposition toward the world than an actual theory, a list-based outlining of a range of key concerns for non-representational theory is common to these introductions. These are often replete with references to social theory and continental philosophy, meaning they are not always easily accessible to those not well versed in such ideas. A number of more accessible overviews include Anderson 2009 , Cadman 2009 , Lorimer 2005 , and Lorimer 2008 , which provide less theoretical depth but more general thematic orientation for the reader. The themes of the initial overviews in Thrift 1996 and collected in Thrift 2007 have been taken up and developed in a number of ways in subsequent outlines. Notable here is Dewsbury, et al. 2002 , which clarifies non-representational theory’s approach to representations and representationalism. Further, Lorimer 2005 reviews the early uptake of non-representational theories and suggested the alternative moniker of more-than representational theory so as to suggest more in the way of connections to research undertaken as part of and in light of “new” cultural geography. The most extensive overview of the plural forms non-representational theory has come to embody can be found in Anderson and Harrison 2010 . This poly-vocal collection extends the work of non-representational theory far beyond the initial parameters initially outlined in Thrift 1996 and Thrift 2007 , often in ways that go against aspects of the initial framings discussed above.

Anderson, Ben. “Non-representational Theories.” In Dictionary of Human Geography . Edited by Derek Gregory, Ron Johnston, and Geraldine Pratt, 503–505. London: Arnold, 2009.

Provides a short and accessible overview of the key points of focus of non-representational theory. The entry highlights the plural nature of work undertaken under the banner of non-representational theory and suggests it be better thought of in terms of non-representational theories.

Anderson, Ben, and Paul Harrison, eds. Taking-Place: Non-representational Theories and Geography . Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010.

The most comprehensive introduction to non-representational theory available to date. Includes chapters by sixteen academics exploring various aspects of non-representational theory, including life, representation, ethics, and politics. The introductory chapter also provides a clear genealogy of the emergence of non-representational theory and addresses a number of critiques.

Cadman, Louisa. “Nonrepresentational Theory/Nonrepresentational Geographies.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography . Edited by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, 456–463. London: Elsevier, 2009.

Provides an introduction to non-representational theory’s interests in practice, everyday life, performance/performativity, embodiment, and space-time. Also highlights connections to developments around actor network theory, performance studies, and earlier work on the geographies of bodies. Useful in highlighting the methodological and political implications of non-representational theory.

Dewsbury, John D., Paul Harrison, Mitch Rose, and John Wylie. “Enacting Geographies.” Geoforum 33.4 (2002): 437–440.

DOI: 10.1016/S0016-7185(02)00029-5

One of the first outlines of non-representational theory “after Thrift.” Emphasizes the excessive and processual nature of the world and its perpetual (re)enactment through practice. Responds to critiques of non-representational theory around its argued lack of interest in representations, suggesting they be taken as performative “doings.”

Lorimer, Hayden. “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-Than-Representational.’” Progress in Human Geography 29.1 (2005): 83–94.

DOI: 10.1191/0309132505ph531pr

First progress report dedicated to the implications of non-representational theory for research in cultural geography. Accessible for undergraduates and those new to non-representational theory. Contributed to broader uptake of non-representational theory by suggesting the alternative and less confrontational title more-than representational theory

Lorimer, Hayden. “Cultural Geography: Non-representational Conditions and Concerns.” Progress in Human Geography 32.4 (2008): 551–559.

DOI: 10.1177/0309132507086882

Further reviews the development of non-representational theory. Provides an accessible overview of debates related to affect emerging from non-representational theory. Also discusses work on embodiment and the body in terms of engagements with temporality and rhythm.

Thrift, Nigel. Spatial Formations . London: SAGE, 1996.

The introductory chapter to this book provides one of the first outlines of non-representational theory in human geography. While dense with references to social theory and philosophy, this introduction (and the rest of the text) provides an extensive outline of how space is made and remade through practice.

Thrift, Nigel. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect . New York: Routledge, 2007.

This text collects many of Thrifts key pieces on non-representational theory. While most chapters are available elsewhere, the original introduction provides a reintroduction to non-representational theory based on ten years of development and debate and the concluding chapter presents new reflections on the politics of affect.

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Non-representational Performed Research: Beyond the ‘Authenticity’ Debate

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This article investigates the power of performed research outside of traditional ‘ethnographic’ or ‘verbatim’ categories, and amongst diverse audiences. Comparing a performance at a New York dance studio, with performing similar material for an ‘academic’ audience, allows us to interrogate the interplay between performers and audience, as well as scholarly evocation ‘versus’ representation. We draw on the seven tenets of non-representational theory (Thrift, 2008) as a way of considering both performative and onto-epistemological questions for the future of multi-modal performed research, audience response, and performance theory.

Introduction

Performed research has a long and well-documented history in a range of disciplines including drama education, ethnography, communication, and performing arts. Less attention is given to the diverse contexts in which these performances can occur, and the impact these may have on the performers, audience and the work itself. In this article, we examine a performed research event at a non-profit arts organisation in New York City, Mark DeGarmo Dance, in a monthly salon evening with multiple performances. We compare our experience as co-creators and performers in this event, with previous events of the same verbatim material, but in ‘academic’ contexts to consider how performed research (including performance ethnography) live differently in diverse spaces. Our interest goes beyond examination of audience reception or engagement; rather, we extend our investigation to the entire ‘creative ecology’ (A. Harris , 2016; D. X. Harris , 2021) of this performance space and event, to look in particular at the interstitial spaces and threads that bind these elements of the ecology together.

While ‘academic contexts’ and ‘arts contexts’ are certainly not all the same, we consider the ways in which audience and performer expectations and levels of engagement can be affected by culture, aesthetics, discipline (or type of audience), and more. How important is it that New York audiences are well-attuned to attend and respond to works-in-progress, most particularly in community-based and development arts organisations? Is it possible to make assertions about New York culture, American culture, arts culture in different places? Does the overarching arts context of New York City offer audiences a language for understanding, engaging with, and responding to works in progress?

Further, we look through the lens of non-representational theory’s seven tenets (Thrift , 2008) , to argue that performed (ethnographic) research must attend to aesthetics rather than representation, while still proceeding according to the ethical commitments demanded of ethnographic research. In doing so, we hope to extend current debates beyond an emphasis on authenticity.

This work emerges from Daniel’s five-year, multi-sited ethnographic study conducted across three sites in Australia, and in Singapore and Hong Kong (2017-2022). Focusing on how creativity is perceived, educated for, and enacted in creative, cultural and educational industries across this region, the study asserts that creativity is culturally- and geopolitically-situated and enacted. As such, it explores the ways in which regional sites might work more effectively together to celebrate strengths and similarities.

The study’s structure of two phases reflects the diversity it seeks to capture. Phase One uses traditional quantitative (150 surveys) and qualitative (25 interviews) methods at each of the five sites. Phase Two uses verbatim scripts constructed from Phase One interviews, and devising techniques with local actors at each site, to develop a 30-minute performance that brings to life the main themes and specifics of each site. The performance is then shared back with the participants, and the general public, for a further dialogue about creativity in each site, and the ways in which the material frames that for audiences. Dan and Kelly worked together on these Phase Two performances in all five sites.

The rich experience of performing these works in a range of diverse cultural as well as institutional contexts provided experiences of different kinds of engagement with the work. In Hong Kong, we rehearsed and performed in a university classroom; in Singapore, in a performing arts institute dance studio; in Brisbane, in a university campus chapel; in Sydney, in a flagship theatre company near the famous Sydney harbour; and in Melbourne under COVID lockdown, we performed online. The different terms of engagement inform varied responses to each piece of work. The works themselves were different, according to the specifics of each site, but the overall shape of the pieces was similar. The creative ecology (A. Harris , 2016; D. X. Harris , 2021) out of which each emerged reflects the diverse range of elements - the content, the physical context, the performers, the institutional context, the cultural context – which all informed the differing kinds of post-show discussions that followed each performance.

Of course, talk-back with participants was different from that with students, artists, or the general public. One aspect of the talkbacks that stood out was the ability or inability of audience members to be able to discuss the performance as performance, and not ‘just’ as research. At some sites where more academic audience members attended, they were more interested in questions about methodology (what do you call this technique? Is it actually verbatim? How can these be considered research findings?) and representative findings from the overall study, which was not the intention of the Phase Two performance component. Often, artists who attended the performances were able to engage more readily with the work as creative works-in-progress, rather than academic audience members, who focused more on the work as a presentation of ‘data’.

This article focuses on one performance of the ‘Singapore data’ for a non-academic audience, performed by the co-authors Dan, Kelly and Pete, at Mark DeGarmo Dance Company, New York City. In order to reflect the both/and of individual and collective perspectives in this creative-relational (Murray , 2020) performance experience, we alternate within this article between a joint voice, and (in italics) our individual voices. Multi-perspectives are consistent with non-representational theory and models our ethic of respect for individual differences, threaded experience, and ecological creativity (A. Harris , 2016; D. X. Harris , 2021) .

This performance

Mark DeGarmo Dance ( https://www.markdegarmodance.org/ ) is a 34-year-old non-profit dance company that creates original artistic and scholarly work in addition to education and community programs. Since 2010, they have maintained a series of monthly salons which present new works and works-in-progress in a range of dance-inflected modalities. The website explains that,

MDD’s Salon Performance Series, founded in 2010, is a unique opportunity to view and engage with original performing arts and dance works-in-progress of DeGarmo and guest artists. Its facilitated audience response approach is a unique way for the public to actively participate in the creation of new work. The series gives opportunities to transcultural, transdisciplinary artists and art forms underrepresented in traditional or commercial performing or performance art venues.

We were invited to contribute to one of these salons, and so in November 2019, the three authors performed a 15-minute excerpt from the Singaporean site data-informed script.

Dan: Mark DeGarmo Dance is located in an old warehouse-style building in New York’s Lower East Side. Up the stairs, down the creaking hallway, studios abound and reverberate with music, laughter, practice monologues and the thud of socked dancers’ feet. There are three other acts the night we perform, and a full studio audience of about twenty. We are packed in together the way works-in-progress and so many New York venues demand, a proximity that brings us into contact with each other - and the work - in ways that feel purposeful rather than just circumstantial.

Mark introduces the evening and makes it clear that the salon series is meant for development, engagement, and discussion. To that end, his team videotapes all performances and talk backs, and provides them to each creative team - a valuable tool in developing work further. The atmosphere here is so alive, friendly, and safe. We introduce ourselves to other artists, and comment on how this space and event creates the kind of community of practice that is one of the most powerful tools in developing new work. The three of us talk about how different this feels than most of the previous research performances, how taking research out of universities and into arts spaces can breathe so much life into them. We talk about the specifics of this experience: how somehow Mark (who is also an academic) has been able to join the best of this New York arts scene with the best of research practice, and the work seems to expand into that unbounded space; what it is like to be in a city in which audiences are well-schooled in skilful engagement with even nascent works in progress; and that Mark and his team have established and work to maintain a clear, balanced and respectful atmosphere, including his facilitation of the audience discussion after each performance. It is the inchoate ecology of these particular people, on this particular night, that give us the chance for such engaged and detailed discussion about the possibilities and limitations of doing this kind of performance work in research contexts. The combination of factors takes us to new places in this work, making us think differently and more expansively about performed research and how it still may expand in the academy.

Non-representational theory

Non-representational theory (NRT) focuses on practices rather than essentialising statements. When we performed this work for colleagues working in areas of performed research, some struggled to engage with it in the way that it was framed for them, which was as a work in progress, as a snapshot of the data, as something to provoke further conversation. They wanted it to be a representation of findings. That prompted us to consider how we could more effectively encourage people to think about this work differently, and how context plays a role. Non-representational theory’s seven tenets are meant to sensitise social scientists to the fact that “they are there to hear the world and make sure that it can speak back, just as much as they are there to produce wild ideas,” that by rendering “the world problematic by elaborating questions,” and to open research and theorising to “more action, more imagination, more light, more fun, even” (Thrift , 2008 , pp. 18–20) . While Nigel Thrift is considered the foundational scholar of NRT beginning in the 1990s, and is responsible for originally articulating the seven tenets, other scholars have taken up the non-representational approach, primary amongst them Philip Vannini and Hayden Lorimer. The seven tenets provide a useful heuristic for considering the methods we used in our New York performance, for the Phase Two of this study, and for framing generative provocations for future work. These seven tenets are not meant to be prescriptive but rather a map of practice-focused consideration of relational research creation.

Tenet 1: ‘Capturing the onflow’

Non-representational theory’s first programmatic tenet is to “capture the ‘onflow’ . . . of everyday life” (Thrift , 2008 , p. 5) .

Dan: Vannini, who has significantly extended the literature of non-representational theory, reminds us that, “Life is movement—geographic and existential kinesis. Movements of all kinds are profoundly social activities that are both perceptive of the world and generative and transformative of it” (Vannini , 2015 , p. 3) . For us, the salon performance at Mark DeGarmo Dance allowed us to explore the ways in which performed research can capture this idea of research as ‘onflow’, research as ‘everyday life’, rather than something captured, frozen, collected, static, and removed from life as it is lived. A large part of the experiment in the New York performance was the kind of rich symbolic movement that Pete was able to bring from his extensive background as a professional dancer, director, instructor and dance researcher.

Pete: Inserting abstract movement sections into the performance highlights the physicality discussed in the script. The interplay of movement allowed the performers to reinforce key comments and at times provide a physical and abstract response to the themes presented. The soundtrack starts the performance, directing us to walk in all directions. As the soundscape of the street is introduced, the action of the performers implies they are searching, lost and in an unfamiliar place. The performers physically indicate feelings of being lost and confused amongst Singapore’s busy network of streets. This opening section provides glimpses of what Colls (in Somdahl-Sands , 2013 , p. 2 ) says are “encounters and interactions that are practically invisible.” This opening of the performance seeks to use movement that is recognisable, but not representational, and brings the audience into the streets of Singapore.

Kel: A tension within any performed research (including verbatim theatre) is the line between truth and verisimilitude (Sinclair & Harris , 2016) . Artists/scholars seek to present truth through their work, yet any ‘truth-claim’ is always the appearance of it, or at least a refraction of one or more perspectives. In the context of the Phase Two work of this study, working with verbatim data in Singapore where it was collected, with local actors and the intention of presenting it to local audiences, the stakes are high, and stakeholders are central to creating meaningful work. Our performance there in Singapore and here in New York both offer audiences a snapshot of the place, embedded in culturally specific reference. When performing in situ (in this case, Singapore), it is an offering back to the experts of the site to elicit further discussion. In doing so, we hope that engaging with the data in this manner will stimulate further discussion that may not only allow deeper insight and understanding into the themes of the study, but also trigger rhizomatic opportunities for the research to do its own work within its culture—without being driven by ‘outsider’ researchers. In New York, however, this cultural embeddedness was absent, and it wasn’t our intention for the performance to do any ethnographic ‘work’. As a trio of scholars and artists, our intent was only to devise an adapted version of the Singapore performance, to see if it had ‘legs’ as a stand-alone performance in a creative rather than academic context.

One audience member reflected during the talkback after our performance:

I appreciated the chaos of the sounds at the beginning and then incorporating it back at the end. And for me a sense of the chaotic reality of the outer body experiences that we all get…and book-ended at the end where you did come back to the reality. That spoke volumes to me in a sense of how we live our everyday life out of our bodies.

Seen through the lens of NRT’s first tenet, this quote suggests that while the perspectives shared as interview data were site-specific, the themes are not. The work exists beyond the realm of the site in which it was collected and can prompt consideration in other contexts. This ‘onflow’ continues to move geographically and existentially, serving as a provocation for audiences to respond from their own vantage point about their own context. Taking the art out ‘into the world’, in this sense, serves to remove some limitations imposed by methodological constraints or individualistic cultural approaches imposed by research or other institutional cultures and constraints.

Tenet 2: ‘Anti-biographical and pre individual’

For non-representationalists, autobiography “provide[s] a spurious sense of oneness,” whereas biography offers a “suspect intimacy with the dead” (Thrift , 2008 , p. 7) .

Dan: In addition to Nigel Thrift, Hayden Lorimer’s foundational work shows how, “non-representational theory is an umbrella term for diverse work that seeks to better cope with our self-evidently more than-human, more-than-textual, multi-sensual worlds” (2005 , p. 8) . His use of ‘more than’ rather than anti- or post- indicates the orientation of non-representational theories as consistent with other contemporary frameworks such as more-than-humanism, new materialism, and affect theory. Non-representationalists seek to move beyond the individual, and toward the entangled; beyond the performer/researcher and toward the ecological (A. Harris , 2018) ; beyond the foreclosed and toward the relational, emergent, and sensory.

Kel: Everything we do in the usual devising (Phase Two) part of this study is structured to elicit meaning from, rather than impose it upon, the text. In each research site we use local actors, work in local spaces, draw on the actors’ culturally specific knowledge as additional data to shape the performance. As performer-researchers, we know that this kind of working ensures a richer encounter with the perspectives shared in the interviews than could be gained by simply analysing written transcripts. It is also an ethically and politically vital part of the work. Unlike a good deal of more traditional ethnographic research, we (and non-representational theory in general) have no intention of ‘representing’ a culture and its creativity. Rather, we aim to engage with the interview data, to iterate, to enliven, to facilitate bodily entanglement with what lies within, underneath and around the spoken words. We return to the site and return the words to the site. We co-create, we ask questions, we listen. The text becomes a rich and profound work that is as alive as the people, institutions, art and history that give rise to the words.

Pete: The context in which we were to perform our work-in-progress is well known to me: a small-scale dance theatre in a workshop setting presenting experimental works. The focus is largely about the feedback, providing informed reflection for further development of the work. The script had infinite movement possibilities. The original, full Singapore script featured a movement teacher and her lived relationship with embodied creativity, which I had seen a video of and was keen to re-choreograph. In our New York hotel, as we began the devising the week before our performance, I became more familiar with the script and the processes that Kel and Dan had used, and the new opportunity here for different kinds of movement to punctuate and accentuate the script. Including a significant movement aspect would also help in the translation of this text-based work for the dance audience, as this was not a research-based context but one that was accustomed to experimental dance style works.

As Lorimer contends, more-than representational research pays “attention to these kinds of expression…[and] offers an escape from the established academic habit of striving to uncover meanings and values that apparently await our discovery, interpretation, judgement and ultimate representation” (2005 , p. 84) . We have not sought to ‘represent’ Singapore, Sydney, Hong Kong, Brisbane or Melbourne’s culture in our performances - to claim to do so would be to essentialise complex, diverse, dynamic and multifaceted places and their people. Rather, we perform the verbatim data in sensory, symbolic, and affective ways that provoke pre-conscious, pre-individual, and conscious responses in audiences so that they may share them in post-performance discussions, with us and with each other. Ultimately, the audiences create meaning, and that meaning changes in each performance, in each context.

Tenet 3: ‘Practice action and performance’

Non-representational theory concerns itself with practice, action, and performance. Non-representational theorists (and practitioners) are wary of the structuralist heritage of the social sciences and suspicious of all attempts to uncover symbolic meaning where other, more practical forms of meaning or even no meaning at all exist.

Pete: As a three-person ensemble for this performance, we were comfortable with leaving questions of meaning open to the audience. Like drama teachers do, we sought to bring the audience into an immersive experience created by sound, movement and words. Throughout this performance, movement is a reminder of embodied relationality: Dan and Pete connect physically on the line ‘I went back into my body.’ The audience murmurs its connection to the work as Pete folds and unfolds Dan’s arms in an intimate gesture of simple connection, Dan collapsing into the sensuality of the touch, like that of an old friend. The text moves to and from Kel and Dan, mirroring the sway of the movement and soundtrack, and the audience’s attention moves with us. The movement entangles the action, the script, the audience, offering opportunities to experience the “sensing body in relation” (Boyd & Edwardes , 2019 , p. 3) , and the close proximity with the audience in this small studio room increases the poignancy of the work.

Kel: In my role as a research associate for Dan’s study, I am always at a distance from the performers: directing, shaping, discussing, and it is rare that I’m the one doing the performing. It is my role to help the local actors to ‘get inside’ the script. I am mindful to privilege their positions as experts in the site, drawing on their cultural knowledge to bring the script alive and bring those local nuances that outsiders simply cannot know. As an artist-researcher I help devise a performance that the local audience can recognise so they may deepen our (and their) understandings. It is an exercise of data engagement and entanglement, growing outward from methodological and ethical roots.

New York was different: as a performer, I went back into my body, familiar territory. We felt our way into the work, making decisions about how we would perform based on what felt ‘right’. As Pete moved around and with me, I saw my body anew and felt connected to the words on the page and my co-performers far more than I had in my role as director. NRT’s third tenet invites us to pay attention to these “affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions [as an] escape from the established academic habit of striving to uncover meanings and values that apparently await our discovery, interpretation, judgement and ultimate representation” ( Lorimer , 2005 , p. 85 in Vannini , 2015 , p. 4 ). In stepping into the work as a performer, I was afforded the opportunity to be with it: I regressed, I progressed, I became-with. The on-flow of the work was not just with the audience, but with me, and with me it remains.

Pete: Dance scholars have long collaborated on verbatim theatre works (McCormack , 2008) , some of which explore the potential for the spoken word to be translated through the body into choreography. Verbatim dance-theatre examines the collaboration between verbal language and movement in performance, and how the additional dimension of dance might impact on an audience’s accessibility to the work. The role movement took in our process, however, was to reinforce the text and action of the performer-researchers, rather than translating the text into dance.

Kel: The audience at Mark DeGarmo Dance came from a range of different artforms. Two of the other performances on the same evening were dance-based, while the third was musical. We asked our audience about how they received our work: was our piece verbatim theatre featuring dance, or dance featuring verbatim theatre? The audience was made up of the performers, their guests, and the staff of the studio. When the audience were invited by Mark to respond at the end of our performance, the lack of hesitation was a marked difference from most of our more academic audiences. A dancer from one of the other performances shared that she had worked in Singapore and how the soundscape which opened the performance took her back to her time there. Another audience member commented on how the theme of the body’s role in creativity made him think of his father who was a Physical Education teacher. Another audience member commented on how the dancing gave the dialogue greater meaning and substance. In relation to our carrying and reading off scripts, one woman reflected that it caused her to consider whose words we were speaking, a visual cue that these were the words of others and not our own, a reminder that they should listen to them for meaning rather than follow us as actors playing characters on a particular arc or journey.

Tenet 4: ‘Relational materialism’

Non-representational theory is built on the principle—borrowed primarily from actor-network theory (Fenwick & Edwards , 2010) —of relational materialism. Material objects are not mere props for performance, but core components of hybrid assemblages endowed with diffused personhood and relational agency. “The human body”—Thrift tells us—“is what it is because of its unparalleled ability to co-evolve with things” (Thrift , 2008 , p. 10) .

Pete: Early in the rehearsal process, we agreed to include a soundtrack, a combination of soundscapes (Sounds of Home: Singapore, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEngapM_wg ) with piano music composed by Australian composer Charlie Chan. This work explores the duality of the ‘East meets West’ complexity that is so much a part of Singaporean culture. These tracks added structure to the overall work and offered additional opportunities for solo dance to be integrated at specific moments throughout. Dance was used in three sections as a dream-like sequence to augment the preceding textual elements, providing an abstract view of embodiment. Using my presence to physically manipulate the other performers, highlighted the text while differentiating the performers, and drew attention to the physical aspects of proximate bodies in city street culture, especially in highly populated cities like Singapore. In another dream-like sequence, I drew audience attention to the ground as more than a foundation or surface, my contact with it transforming the ground from an object and into an active participant (Vannini , 2015) . The floor becomes more than a surface and becomes a shared part of the audience-performer dialogue in the piece.

Kel: The script in hand has always been required due to logistics: throughout the study, we have only ever had a matter of days to devise the performance works before it was time to perform them. But script-in-hand performances are not unusual in sharing theatrical works-in-development. The New York performance was the first time (out of 6 performances) that our team encountered a specific comment about the role of the script in performance and reminded us of the ways in which performed research (or any creative research outcomes) can quickly become bounded by academic, disciplinary or epistemological rules. Here Tenet 4 is evident in our relational materialising with each other, the audience, the scripts, the floor, and the city itself.

Tenet Five: ‘Non-representational theory is meant to be experimental’

Non-representational theorists feel a deep antipathy for the hyper-empirical conservative tendencies of the traditional social sciences, for the conventions of realism, and—obviously—for any manifestation of positivism. By invoking the expressive power of the performance arts, Thrift calls on social scientists-cum-artists to “crawl out to the edge of the cliff of the conceptual” (2008 , p. 12) and to engage in a battle against methodological fetishism and in a “poetics of the release of energy that might be thought to resemble play” (p.12) [also see Ingold , 2011 ].

Pete: My movements are performed behind Kel and Dan as they continue to read the lines of the piece. My movements both underline the script’s key messages, but importantly also bring a sense of play that Thrift reminds us is central to non-representational theory. As Dan narrates the roles of the educators, movement indicates a sociocultural ‘shift’, a core theme in the script (and the interviews from which it draws). Physical shifts in movement direction also remind the audience of the role of bodies in making and remaking cultural flows. The movement is experimental, conceptual, symbolic. The second soundscape is heard under the line “I return to my body,” and our performance continues to nudge the audience away from traditional empirical notions of ‘data’ or ‘research’, and toward creative evocation. As the text begins to address the relationship between creativity, somatic experience and spatial awareness, the movement becomes more naturalistic as Kel performs a monologue, and Dan and I respond in character, as audience members.

Kel: I feel very safe in the devising work I do as part of Dan’s study. I go into it armed with a deep theoretical understanding of the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of research-based theatre and performance ethnography. Each directorial decision I make in that context is informed by my reading and I can justify each choice well, almost to the extent of citing authors as I go. My mentors would be proud! This fierce methodological commitment is required when working in intercultural spaces with research participants whose lived experiences inform the work, but how does this kind of commitment shift when working in a manner and context that is more experimental? I stand in the New York hotel room which serves as our rehearsal studio wondering this very thing, feeling a little at sea in a space in which I’m essentially playing with a script. There are ethical dimensions to what we are doing, sure; but the freedom with which we’re allowing ourselves to respond to the aesthetic opportunities of our lines of dialogue unsettles me. At the performance I’m more nervous than I expected I’d be. The protective armour of my theoretical understanding has no place in this dance studio. We perform.

Pete: The audience follows with ease, and comments on its effectiveness in the post-show discussion.

Kel: The audience responds enthusiastically. Afterward I feel energised, like new possibilities have been awakened.

We wonder together with the audience afterward whether this ability - this performance language - is a kind of vernacular available to theatre/dance audiences, but not always to academic audiences? How might we as artist-researchers push creative research further in developing these kinds of languages in the academy, not just ‘theoretical’ scholarly discourses?

Tenet Six: Non-representational theory stresses the importance of bodies

Thrift (2008) views bodies not as subjects for micro-sociological empirical attention but as the engines of political regeneration, driving the new politics and ethics of hope that he proposes. Bodies are especially important because of their affective capacities.

Dan: Performed research of all kinds is intentionally chosen for its affective capacities. By working through the body, research engagement (whether alone or collaborative) offers countless opportunities for different political and cultural regeneration too. The performative body is never fixed in location but always becoming with and within its own unique creative ecology. Similarly, the ‘audience body’ is mutable, be it an academic, student, educational or public theatrical audience.

Pete: I place my hands on the shoulders of Kel and Dan, standing behind them. It is a surprisingly emotional connection. As the next track begins under their joint line, “I return to my body,” I am moving once again, acknowledging their presence as I continue the motif of breaking through horizons. As the movement becomes more thickly textured, Kel and Dan join in the action from their static positions on the side. The streetscape soundtrack is reintroduced to remind the audience and performers of the unfamiliar location where this occurs, of the specifics of all places. As the music dwindles to single notes I continue the movement to the floor, sweeping my hands on the ground as I finally reach upward and then collapse completely into the ground.

Kel: It’s been fascinating to see the wide range of responses to all six performances of these works. For example, in the classroom of one Hong Kong university, some audience members were moved to tears at seeing what they considered disappearing aspects of their culture. Although this was not part of the intention of the work, the audience response reflected the high emotions in Hong Kong at that time, during an increase in mainland Chinese ‘reunification’ with Hong Kong. In our Sydney (Australia) theatre rehearsal room venue, the audience discussion was largely focussed on the themes in the piece as relevant to their city and personal experiences. In unpacking particular moments of the performance, they were able to comment on resonances, draw comparisons between their experiences as Sydney locals with their understanding of other cities that were sites in the study, as well as discuss aspects of the creative ecology of their city that weren’t represented. In both the Brisbane and Singapore universities that were our sites for performance, some academic colleagues in the audience with experience in performed research were preoccupied with seeing the work as a presentation of summative findings from Dan’s study. Despite the work being framed at each site as a work-in-progress affective evocation meant to stimulate further intercultural dialogue and understanding, some academic audience members were unable to move beyond their need for conclusions, interpretation, and representation. The biggest difference between the responses was the extent to which the audience was able to engage with the work as a work of art, rather than ‘just’ research, and with the affective power of the chosen form.

Lastly, the seventh tenet of NRT stresses an ethic of novelty suggesting ‘a particular form of boosting aliveness’ and a promise to ‘jump to another world’ (Thrift , 2008 , pp. 14–15) .

Kel: We included dance in the first (Singapore-based) Singapore performance but haven’t had dance in the other pieces. In our New York performance, the dance was integrated across all three of us as performers, not just the ‘dancer’. We make this artistic choice in order to continue introducing novel approaches to the performance element of the study. Performance-based research is now well-established, and drama educators too are familiar with the strategies for using performance to embody uncomfortable topics or perspectives.

Dan: Like the call for aesthetic and political experimentation, traditional ethical systems will not suffice for non-representational thinkers. Such experimentation has the potential to take us beyond the human, particularly beyond the traditional academic configurations of ‘legitimate’ knowledge production as logical, western, and rational. A new ethics built on the performativity and creative-relationality of everyday life, and existing at the ‘interstices of interaction’ (Thrift , 2008 , p. 15) , is liable to ‘build new forms of life’ in which ‘strangeness itself [is] the locus of new forms of neighborliness and community’ (Thrift , 2008 , p. 14) . Such neighbourliness and collaboration are goals of my study of creativity in our shared East Asian and Australian region.

In this paper we have shown the ways in which an experimental, iterative and non-representational approach to creating performed research can have multiple and complementary outputs in diverse settings, which take the work beyond common ‘authenticity’ debates that still dominate some verbatim theatre scholarship. Using symbolic movement to accentuate the core images and concepts in the text provides another layer of meaning and interaction between the performers, highlighting the need to value both aesthetic and methodological concerns equally. Symbolic movement assists a move away from the ‘literal’ confines of traditional verbatim theatre, and these less representational modalities help expand the work’s reach. What we developed in this iteration was something new: not strictly verbatim theatre, but founded on those principles, an ethics of commitment to the original interviewees in these cross cultural dialogues, as well as a commitment to the work as art. Importantly, in this case it was made and performed for a dance-based audience, which elicited different responses than from other audiences. This audience didn’t care where it had come from, how ‘accurate’ it was to the original research interviews, but instead sought an artistic coherence, an affective evocation of – in this case – Singaporean perspectives at one particular place and time. We suggest this case study offers a new contribution to ethnographic performance theory and methods, one which moves away from ‘representation’ of cultures or groups, and toward a more experiential, somatic encounter as called for in Thrift’s seven tenets of non-representational theory.

Our provocation here extends Thrift’s experimental and Harris’ ecological approaches to enable something beyond truth-claims about whole groups; rather, applying NRT to performance ethnography allows a return to a body-driven, encounter-focused research focus aimed at social change through the particular affordances of theatre. By doing so, we combine embodied, methodological innovation, with intercultural dialogue (both in the making and in the performing), to make explicit the political and relation-based aspects of our work in drama education and research. Our teaching and research are always entangled with/in the creative ecological contexts in which we conduct them, and by approaching this work with humility and openness, we believe that the seven tenets can help scaffold the steps toward doing collaborative performance work that is committed to aesthetics, methodological innovation, and social change.

We extend the well-established work of intercultural drama research (Freebody & Finneran , 2015; Gallagher , 2014) which has effectively explored the ways in which drama, theatre and performance approaches can bridge cultural differences. Here, we are concerned with both aesthetic and methodological considerations equally, when using performance techniques (as in Sinclair & Harris , 2016 ): what does an ecological approach bring? What impact can different contexts have on audience expectations? How might abandoning social science expectations of traditional anthropology and ethnography open up experimental spaces of collaborating through and beyond ‘representation’ and truth-claims that continue to typify areas like applied theatre and ethnographic performance?

While not explicitly an article focused on audience reception, we acknowledge that these differences in audience reception are important. We recognise that these differences are a result of many elements: the quality of the performance, the venue itself, the type of audience, the differing ‘audience cultures’ at each place, the cultural moment in each site. For example, Hong Kong audience members openly wept during the performance when one of the characters referred to Cantonese opera dying out. They went on to explain in the post-performance discussion that aspects of their culture being stamped out through the impending Chinese take-back of the region was a daily source of sadness. After the performance and audience discussion, one of the actors went on to write a social media post about the impact of performing the work and engaging with the audience:

Unexpectedly, some friends were touched during the discussion session. We all saw that Hong Kong’s unique culture might be gradually lost. Then one of the attendees cried tears when speaking, ‘I’m sorry, but I really love Hong Kong.’ I breathed a sigh of relief. Great, it turns out that I am not the only one who thinks like this…

The goal for these performances has never been to generate neat or easily determinable ‘findings’ in relation to the study’s central questions. In this article we have tried to demonstrate some of the ways in which diverse audiences, and performance contexts, contribute to these nuanced understandings. Each performance has in different ways hit home with both audiences and the actors, providing an encounter for exploring memory, grief or laughter. As such, we respond to Thrift’s seven tenets as touchstones for ways of doing drama differently, with attention to context, audience and collaboration. Just as new materialism and posthumanism demand attention to more than human exceptionalism, here we invite readers to consider performance ecologies when working with research participants, classroom students, or creative collaborators, to move beyond the pervasive individualism of so much academic research, and to experiment with research activities as encounters for social and creative change.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This publication draws on research funded by the Australian Government through an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (project #170100022), Professor Daniel X. Harris as recipient.

Submitted : June 02, 2023 AEST

Accepted : January 30, 2024 AEST

Educational Research: Material Culture and Its Representation pp 115–132 Cite as

The Ethics of Materiality: Some Insights from Non-representational Theory

Lynn Fendler 5
First Online: 12 November 2013

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Part of the book series: Educational Research ((EDRE,volume 8))

Why should we care about materiality? Assuming we are not interested in pursuing ontological debates about the number of angels capable of dancing on the head of a pin, why study materiality? In what ways might materiality be an issue with ethical implications for educational research in history or philosophy? To address aspects of this question, this essay draws on insights from ‘non-representational theory’, an approach to theorizing that has been developed recently by geographers in the United Kingdom. The basis of non-representational theory is geography’s longstanding scientific focus on material things of the world as they exist in space and time. In their attention to space and time, non-representational theories pertain to discussions of materiality. Non-representational theory describes itself as a critical alternative to the two mainstream epistemological positions in educational research, namely social constructivism and logical empiricism. Using insights from non-representational theory, I examine some implications for our current Research Community focus on ‘Material Culture and the Representation of Educational Research’. My essay is organized around three issues: the role of the Cartesian subject/object dichotomy in constructing research objects, the privileging of timelessness and concomitant devaluing of the historical in evaluations of scientific knowledge, and the ethical implications of uniqueness in research approaches.

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Geographers include Tim Cresswell (Royal Holoway, University of London), J.D. Dewsbury (Bristol), Hayden Lorimer (Glasgow), Derek McCormack (Oxford), Mark Paterson (Exeter), Richard G. Smith (Swansea), Nigel Thrift (Warwick), and Sarah Whatmore (Oxford).

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Fendler, L. (2014). The Ethics of Materiality: Some Insights from Non-representational Theory. In: Smeyers, P., Depaepe, M. (eds) Educational Research: Material Culture and Its Representation. Educational Research, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03083-8_8

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Queer sensation and non-representational queer reading: a case study of Wu Hao's All in My Family

2023, Studies in Documentary Film

This article develops a non-representational queer approach to the analysis of first-person queer documentary. I suggest that a change of the view from investigating queer representations to exploring queer sensation may release the desire and repression that are both hidden and maintained with images of queerness. Queer sensation in this article refers to the existence of a complex relationship between queer and familial kinship, which affectively infiltrates the queer documentary. To chart queer sensation, I propose the notion of non-representational queer reading that foregrounds the approach of charting queer sensation rather than defining it. Non-representational queer reading comprises affect-based non-representational theory and the idea of queer reading. Non-representational queer reading queers the way of analysing queer documentary that follows the idea of mobility and flexibility as the essence of queerness. Utilising Wu Hao's All in My Family (2019) as an example, I argue that Wu's documentary sheds light on a complex queer sensation which not only overflows from the film but also pervades within the heterosexual-dominated Chinese society outside the screen.

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This article explores the relationship between queer thought and kinship through a study of video autoethnographies by Jean Carlomusto and Richard Fung. I propose the concept of ambivalence as a useful point of departure for grappling with the conflicted political, affective, and conceptual terrain of LGBT kinship. Through close textual analysis of four video autoethnographies, I extend existing sociological, anthropological, and philosophical scholarship on LGBT family and kinship to consider audiovisual production as a specific and productive kinship practice. Queer film and video autoethnography offers unexpected and insightful accounts of queer relationality. In contrast with dominant North American family narratives and imagery concerned with continuity, heredity, and the closed white, heteronormative North American intimate sphere, Carlomusto's and Fung's works probe the moments where kinship breaks down: illness and death, migrant experience, and family secrets. Through a doubled formal and thematic emphasis on fragmentation, discontinuity, and affective ambivalence, these extraordinary works help us understand kinship otherwise, or queerly.

Daren Fowler

Megan Rogers

The negotiation of (in)visibility remains a crucial point for oppressed and minoritized communities. The desire to remain invisible seems to be counterintuitive when visibility seems to promise emancipation. At the same time, aspirations toward invisibility seem delusionary in an age of technological control and surveillance. The representation of collective identities and struggles persists to be a focal, yet controversial topic in relations to political mobilization, discourse and agendas. Activists, scholars and artists alike have criticized how the gains of social justice movements are absorbed into a neoliberal market of social change. Here, the particular interests of minority groups are made visible in mainstream culture just enough to generate profit while doing little to affect the majority and society structurally at large. This gives the illusion that a few members of minoritized groups can transcend into the so-called mainstream, it strengthens the misleading narrative that the power of a few can change the whole (Neon Chen 2). This is a false promise of emancipation that also upholds colonial economic structures. At the same time, reductionist representation politics that attempt to make complex social issues comprehensible not only affect how minority groups are perceived, but also limit the ways in which they can express themselves beyond the didactic.

In Focus: Queer Approaches to Film, Television, and Digital Media

Patty Ahn , Julia Himberg , Damon R Young

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Cultural Review

Wenqing Kang

Verge: Studies in Global Asias

Hentyle Yapp

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