This article is based on the authors' 2015 book, Applied Theatre Research: Radical Departures, published in London by Bloomsbury. Thanks to Bloomsbury for permission. The authors thank Alexandra Bonham for her contribution in this text for publication.

Research as business is something nearly everyone involved with universities understands. It is cutthroat, competitive, and often self-serving. It is an outcome of a neo-liberal business and market model imposed on universities; one which isolates the individual at the expense of the collective, with highly attuned accountability measures based most often on the likelihood of how the research will benefit both the university and the researcher, rather than the community in which the research is undertaken.

University-led research has made highly valuable contributions to improving people's lives. Both of us have used traditional quantitative and/or mixed-method approaches, and we hold the highest regard for our colleagues who have expertise in these research strategies. However, we argue here for a way of thinking about, and enacting, research, valued not on being published in elite journals, but on giving back to the communities from which it springs.

Research has long been complicit with agendas, causing considerable harm to the "recipients" of the research, as perhaps most clearly demonstrated in its complicated history with the processes of colonization. For example, Brown and Strega argue,

Aboriginal peoples have been misrepresented and exploited for countless generations as the subject of academic, "scientific" studies conducted by non-Aboriginals. As a result, Aboriginal communities today are no longer content to be passive objects of "scientific" study, but demand to know who is doing research and for what purposes. (2005)

We argue there is a real urgency to find methods that spring from the need for social justice, requiring different kinds of knowledge and more congruent ways of creating that knowledge from marginalized worlds; for research that engages in processes where the marginalized might be the authors of their own stories, as coresearchers and equal collaborators.

Research, whether it wants to be or not, is always part of the wider political process; researchers must be transparent about their moral bias and intentions. As Conquergood claims, "There is no null hypothesis in the moral universe. Refusal to take a moral stand is itself a powerful statement of one's moral position" (1985). There are multiple risks in taking a stance of non-neutrality in research, not least in the potential response from researchers who still seek objective and measurable truth in the social sciences. We also risk, as Russell Bishop suggests in Decolonising Methodologies, "espousing an emancipatory model of research that has not of itself freed researchers from exercising intellectual arrogance or employing evangelical and paternalistic practices" (quoted in Smith 1999).

We are aware of the dangers of overselling the potential for research, but deny the possibility of overselling the gravity of the effects of neoliberalism and rampant greed that are corrosive to communities. Resisting, and perhaps failing to avoid an evangelical tone, the research we advocate here is, at its best, a form of active individual and collective resistance to the forces of global oppression. For we believe we are moving into a time, described by Ziauddin Sardar as the post-normal, where resistance at every level will be vital (2010).

Sardar argues that the first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed a series of wake-up calls, of system crises—from security, to climate, to food and water, to energy, to financial markets, and more. "'[W]e have never seen any era when we have been hit by all these multiple crisis at the one time,' says UN General Secretary, Ban Ki-moon. 'It is not just that things are going wrong; they are going wrong spectacularly, on a global scale, and in multiple and concurrent ways. We thus find ourselves in a situation that is far from normal; and have entered the domain of the post normal'" (Sardar 2010).

The term post-normal first emerged in 1993 as philosophers of science Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz were searching for a way to understand unpredictability and the plurality of perspectives (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993). While they do not argue that the post-normal paradigm completely replaces the scientific method, they do argue that the normality paradigm is an inadequate starting point for understanding twenty-first-century life. And yet our worlds are almost universally predicated on assumptions arising from normality—cause and effect, economic growth, and industrial prosperity. In his paper "Welcome to Postnormal Times," Sardar nominates three features of post-normality that are demanding change in our approach to the world: complexity, chaos, and contradictions (Sardar 2010).

 

Complexity, Chaos, and Contradictions

One of the more compelling stories about complexity comes to us through the latest round of geopolitical wars between networked global terror and neoliberalism. In what feels like the last days of the West's hegemonic rule, we are being dragged into wars that seem to many even more pointless than those fought in the past—wars without any seeming end, wars against nouns, where torture and inhumanity become institutionalized and justified on the basis of protecting our "freedom." The so-called war on terror, with its theaters in New York, Europe, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, has taken an enormous toll on human life and on human hope. The world seems to be too complex for even complex solutions. Instead, a sense of ennui, of paralyzing ineptitude and moral indifference, of populations rendered as mere spectators of and on the world, is not some temporary phase; rather it is an entropic version of the post-normal world.

These complexities collide and contribute to chaos. Climate chaos is becoming the new normal and made all the more difficult to tackle as politicians at local and national level across the world hesitate to take responsibility and take action (Yusuf, St. John, and Ash 2014). Meanwhile, civil unrest has become more prevalent with growing inequality. Sardar suggests that traditional research in "a complex, networked world, with countless competing interests and ideologies, designs and desires, behaving chaotically, can do little more than throw up contradictions" (Sardar 2010).

Anyone currently working in education knows the truth of this. The weight of evidence recommends sustained, supported teacher preparation. Yet governments in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia deliver programs where in a matter of weeks you are "ready to teach" and school ready, ultimately delivering a series of frustrated teachers and students (Griffin 2014).

We also know from the research that large and frequent testing does not enhance student learning, as Allan Luke and Annette Woods's study of the No Child Left Behind policies in the United States confirms. They argue:

The combination of increased testing, standardized programs, increased accountability and incentives/sanctions for schools, districts and states who do not reach targets has not been a success. Surely these are telling lessons for policy makers in Australia; telling lessons for teachers as they consider their place in the current Australian debates. (2008)

Yet that is what keeps rolling into schools. Fundamentally contradictory pieces of knowledge become policy and practice. Young people, who know of no other time than the post-normal, are at the greatest risk. Henry Giroux suggests the unrelenting war on youth can be linked to systemic attempts by a

corporate and financial elite, conservative think tanks, and other right-wing forces to dismantle the social state and undermine opportunities for critical education, civic courage, and actions that make a world more just and democratic. These attacks range from the militarization of schools and the reduction in social services to the ongoing criminalization of a wide range of youth and adult behaviors and an increasing disinvestment in policies that would provide jobs, health care, and a future for young people. (2003)

A quarter of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 around the world were unemployed ("Generation Jobless" 2013). More than 50 percent of young people in Spain and Greece; approximately a third of young people in Italy, Portugal, and the Republic of Ireland; and more than 20 percent of young people in the United Kingdom were unemployed in 2012 (Datablog 2012). "The youth jobless rate of 16.1 percent in the United States is over double the 7.6 percent rate experienced by all Americans" (Fairchild 2013).

A growing cynicism and sense of helplessness invade youth who see in post-normal times little sense or reason for hope, little belief in personal agency and understanding, as the ways ahead appear to be predetermined. The remarkable conditions of post-normal times urgently require politically and socially committed research that overtly positions itself as part of active resistance, which advocates for the rights of the marginalized, the silenced, and the forgotten.

 

Participatory Research and Hope

Like Freire, we understand that the world needs critical hope (Freire 2014). It is not enough for research to tell us what the world is; it must provide opportunities for communities to imagine what it might be. John Dewey recognized that at the heart of democracy is talk (Dewey 1916)—the freedom and ability to talk in a way that is not constrained by the powerful and that actively challenges and resists dominant ideologies. The ability to participate in talk and in action, the ability to see oneself as capable of resistance, of participating in civil life, marks out a society with democratic ideals. Research, which, in Linda Tuhiwai Smith's phrase, has been "part of the process of silencing and destroying cultural knowledge" (1999), has been increasingly challenged by more democratic research methodologies attempting to disrupt the traditional rules of the research game towards practices that are more democratic. They include community-based participatory research, participatory action research (PAR), and arts-based research.

 

Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR)

CBPR aims to reposition the "subject" as an "actor," with a voice in the decisions made about the matter and method of the research.

It is a collaborative approach to research, [and] equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings. CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community with the aim of combining knowledge and action for social change to improve communit[ies]. (Minkler and Wallerstein 2003)

This has real implications for the way researchers approach and navigate the research relationship, bringing stakeholders into the conversation as soon as the design of the research begins. According to Israel, Schulz, Parker, Becker, Allen, and Guzman, there are several principles this kind of working must fulfill, including:

1. genuine partnership means colearning (academic and community partners learning from each other);
2. research efforts include capacity-building (in addition to conducting the research, commitment to training community members in research);
3. findings and knowledge should benefit all partners; and
4. CBPR involves long-term commitments to effectively reduce disparities. (Israel et al. 2003)

In a time of growing class disparities, building capacity within impoverished communities is increasingly vital. CBPR is a socially committed and politically motivated form of research, with the potential to make a positive difference in the communities that researchers engage with. More politically charged in its approach to research is CBPR's cousin, PAR.

 

Participatory Action Research

PAR promotes research as a transformative tool, assisting people to imagine and articulate how they wish to see their world put together and run (Israel et al. 2003). Building on the Freirean concept of naming the world so as to transform their own lives, PAR is a means for enabling people to see themselves as actors, not spectators, with agency and control. Core to the philosophy that underpins PAR is the recognition that it provides opportunities for individuals and communities to challenge hegemonic knowledge that does not reflect their own struggles. This is achieved largely through reframing the roles of the "researcher" and "the researched." Research partnerships strive for an investigative process in which both researcher and participants are actively engaged in designing, interpreting, analyzing, and representing the data. In much the same way that Applied Theatre actively resists the actor-spectator divide, PAR seeks to equalize the power relationship and transform both parties of the research into actors.

 

Arts-Based Research

The search to find more democratic, participatory, and critically informed research methodologies has been invigorated by arts-based research, which has emerged and pushed the boundaries of traditional research over the past 30 years. Dixon and Senior, when advocating for arts-based research, suggest, "the arts in general teach us to see, to feel, and indeed to know" (2009). As Rolling has observed, arts-based research has challenged traditional researchers to consider the ways evidence can be generated, represented, and presented. It can also often be labyrinthine, leading to divergent outcomes resisting those that neatly match taxonomical expectations (Rolling 2013). The borderland space in both teaching and research eschews safe, limited, and limiting outcomes for the possibilities inherent in making ourselves vulnerable to different ideas, thoughts, and ways of being. Arts-based research rejects the notion of singular truths or clear answers, instead searching for contrasting nuances, revealing ambiguities and complex multiple truths. Self-reflexivity is important in adding perspective and gaining distance and viewpoints to avoid self-fulfilling and circular practice (Haseman and Mafe 2009). In a post-normal world, the arts are uniquely positioned to capture the flux and fluidity of a globe teetering on the edge of multiple extinctions.

 

Theatre, Performance, and Research

James Thompson usefully defines performance as "an inclusive term for all those artistic practices that include the participation of groups and individuals as they present themselves to others" (Thompson, 2009a). A number of methodologies represent the outcomes of research through performance, but what most share is the use of real peoples' narratives (Belliveau and Lea 2011). Performance provides the opportunity to work with narratives in the realm of metaphors and "embodied analogies" (Ackroyd and O'Toole 2010).

Denzin understands the political implications of such research, and the necessity that researchers work with, not for, the community to not just document their lives, but also empower them to imagine a better future and give them the tools to make change happen (2003).

We argue that performances of people's lives must be more than a celebration of their struggles, which can be ultimately disempowering if there is no practical way to imagine moving from the state of oppression. They must also move beyond the present and provide space for hope for the future. Performance ethnography thus meets the challenge that Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues for creative research, that it enables people to rise above their circumstances, to dream new visions and to hold on to old ones. "It fosters inventions and discoveries, facilitates simple improvements to people's lives and uplifts our spirits . . . Creating is about channeling collective creativity in order to produce solutions" (Smith 1999).

 

Applied Theater As Resistance and Art

Theater as a recognizable art form and an academic discipline has long served political purposes. It has provided a space for questioning, challenging, and celebrating our lives as individuals and as communities. Aristotle saw theater as a means to maintain state control; others, including Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, have recognized its potential as a revolutionary tool. Over the past 40 years, a new form of theater, although richly derived from progressive theater movements predating it, is described with the portmanteau term applied theater. The term embraces a diversity of theatrical forms, including community theater, theater in education, museum theater, prison theater, theater in health, theater for development, reminiscence theater, participatory performance practices, and process drama, and uses a range of theatrical practices. Motivated by the desire to empower communities by addressing key social issues, in all of these forms, the boundaries between actor and spectator are deliberately blurred.

Applied theater is first and foremost a form of theater, an art form in its own right, with distinct features and characteristics. Regardless of the underlying political agenda of its progressive radical heritage, it must always possess aesthetic qualities that move and inspire the audience and performer. The participatory nature of applied theater has led to an aesthetic that can be met by participants who often have no formal theater training, but whether it is in drama classrooms, prisons, retirement villages, or among the rubble of earthquake zones, we work to make theater that resonates in and through the body with its power and its beauty. Applied theater is no less theater than the commercial form presented inside large glittering buildings.

James Thompson argues that the real question to consider is not whether applied theater has effected change, but whether it causes an affective response in the community it exists in. The creation of beauty and joy, he argues, should be considered ends in themselves (Thompson, 2009b). Thompson recognizes, too, that such theater, "far from a diversion, acts to make visible a better world" (Thompson, 2009a). The philosopher Schiller understood that it was through beauty that people could best understand what a good society could be (Winston 2010).

Michael Balfour argues that instead of conceiving of applied theater in romantic and grandiose terms, we should promote a "theater of little changes" (2009). Its potential, as Maxine Greene recognized, is to "arouse persons to wide awakeness, to courageous life" (Stinson 1998).

 

Democracy

We take our lead on the possibilities of democracy by understanding, as John Dewey did, that democracy is more than the government structures derived from popular suffrage, but rather the realization of human potential through participation in acts of citizenship (Dewey 1916). Dewey believed that democracy requires the participation "of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men together, which is necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals" (Dewey 1937). For Freire, in Lankshear and Lawler's reading, critical pedagogy makes central "people's control over their lives and their capacity for dealing rationally with decisions by enabling them to identify, understand and act to transform" (Lankshear and Lawler 1987).

Central to the process of applied theater is how dialogue is established through the aesthetic process. Unspoken truths and situations too complicated, emotive, or difficult to articulate are displayed with clarity through the body, recognized and felt in the body, and publicly acknowledged in glances, nods, laughter, silence, words, and action.

Dialogical performance is a way of having intimate conversations with other people and cultures. Instead of speaking about them, one speaks to and with them. The sensuous immediacy and empathetic leap demanded by performance is an occasion for orchestrating two voices, for bringing together two sensibilities. (Conquergood 1985, 10)

The participatory, democratic processes inherent to applied theater form the bridge that allows for intimate conversations about things that matter to all the participants. The chances of such theater creating more than little change are slim. However, it does achieve, in its resistance, a humanizing and liberating of potential that should never be underestimated politically, socially, or culturally.

 

Applied Theater as Research

ATAR creates, through a fictional frame, a set of propositions that are co-constructed, analyzed, and then re-presented to communities in order to create new knowledge and forge social change. Like arts-based research, ATAR unifies the processes of data generation, analysis, and dissemination/communication of findings using the rigor and discipline of multiple art forms. ATAR has two primary and complementary motivations, the creation of theater and the performance of political and cultural resistance through research.

Researchers using ATAR desire to see power and power relationships made visible and to "give voice to those who have been marginalized as a result of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, disability, or other factors (as well as the interconnections between these categories)" (Conquergood 1985). When we engage in ATAR, or any other research, we enter a moral and political sphere where our intentions should be transparent.

Typically, research begins with a problem defined by the researcher. As Sean McNiff argues, this leads to a tendency "to fit the question into a fixed research method" (McNiff 1998). We see our role is not to tell communities what their problem is, but rather to support the construction and design of research methods that respond and adapt effectively to challenges, as they are understood by the community from which they emerge. There is thus a shared ownership and responsibility for the integrity and relevance of the research that harnesses the expertise of the researchers to the needs of the partnering community. McNiff argues:

Since artistic expression is essentially heuristic, introspective and deeply personal, there needs to be a complementary focus in art-based research on how the work can be of use to others and how it connects to practices in the discipline. (McNiff 1998)

Planning an ATAR project is an active crafting of aesthetic tools in order to meet the needs of the research participants vis-à-vis the research question. One research project does not look like another. The process begins with discussions with the group, which reveals what approaches they find appealing and engaging and which they resist. By taking this time we also "break the ice" and build up trust, showing that we are committed to the co-construction of research with them. This careful preparation and sensitive engagement helps us abide by the ethical standard that we do no harm, consider the impact of the research on the research participants, and ensure a symbiotic experience that benefits all involved.

This symbiosis occurs in two main ways. The first strategy is to integrate capacity-building into the research methods, for example, arts workshops that hone participants' skills in music, comedy, drama, design, etc. The second is to support symbiotic practice through the dissemination and communication of the research back to the community. We agree with Patricia Leavy that the strength of arts-based representational strategies (such as performance ethnography, verbatim theater), free from discipline-specific jargon and other prohibitive (even elitist) barriers, is that they can be shared with diverse audiences, expanding the effect of scholarly research that traditionally circulates within the academy and arguably does little to serve the public good (Leavy 2009).

ATAR projects are commonly carried out with multidisciplinary teams that include researchers, artists, teachers, and cultural experts who may offer insights that assist in the generation, analysis, and representation of data, thus designing a project that attends to the needs of all. Most useful are advisors with long-standing good relationships with the community and its leaders. Artists often provide specialist knowledge that is useful, but unless they have had experience with such projects and/or working in the community involved, they will require detailed briefings related to the research process. Roles in the research must be clearly defined and understood from the beginning.

Fictional frames are at the heart of effective ATAR projects, perhaps its most defining feature. By fictional frame we mean the dramatic conceit through which participants play a role in order to provide sufficient distance from their own lives to be free to work within that fiction, but close enough to the real world that their engagement with the fiction resonates. It provides participants in research the safety to engage emotionally, aesthetically, and through the body in order to talk honestly about matters of significance. A successful frame has a number of attributes:

1. The frame must suit the participants and the researchers, in that it must engage all and be within their capabilities. A successful frame will privilege the participants as experts in the situation created.
2. The frame must also provide the potential for metaxis. Augusto Boal uses this term to describe how a person in role is able to both perform and view that performance (Boal 1979). The aim is to allow consideration of multiple points of view and enable participants to reflect on their own actions (Bolton 1979).
3. The frame must be safe. Metaxis matters in ATAR because the content of research often touches on areas of high sensitivity, such as family violence, sexual behavior, criminality, and bullying. The distancing effect of the fiction does not mean that participants do not reflect on their own experience, but rather allows them to do so from the safety of the role that is "other" then their actual identity. The fictional frame must provide sufficient distance from reality.
4. The fictional frame must provide the potential for imagining a different future. In some ways the ATAR process is similar to open dramatic forms, such as improvisation. Making a different world visible and creating our roles in that world differently is a form of active resistance, a matter of reclaiming stolen voices.
5. The frame must generate meaningful data. When planning the fictional frame, researchers should carefully consider generating diverse data on several different aspects of the research question, so if one stream of data is not productive, there are several other streams to rely on for the inquiry. A research design could include poster making, freeze-frames, forum theater, songwriting, documentary, dance, researcher-in-role, and so on. ATAR can encompass any arts-based products and processes. Deploying the arts in research provides access to communication and understanding that is embodied, affective and imaginative.
6. The frame should provoke communication. As Leavy explains:
   Arts-based practices can also promote dialogue, which is critical to cultivating understanding. The particular way in which art forms facilitate conversations are important as well. The arts evoke emotional responses, and so the dialogue sparked by arts-based practices has the potential to be highly engaged. By connecting people on emotional and visceral levels, artistic forms of representation facilitate empathy, a necessary precondition for challenging harmful stereotypes and building coalitions/community across differences. (2009)
7. The frame has scope for flexibility. It is highly effective, during the research project, to keep checking in with coresearchers in order to assess the engagement of the participants, the depth and scope of the data generated, whether it is relevant or not, and identify gaps. Where necessary, new approaches within the frame may be introduced in order to tackle the research questions in a more engaging way.

Analyzing in ATAR requires the researcher to understand the qualities of the data generated (dance, drama, documentary, etc.) and apply appropriate analytical methods that capture meaning from that data. The work created, discussion generated, and ethnographic observations of the participants, including silences and emotional responses and recordings of the process, frequently undertaken by the participants themselves, all contribute to data streams. We have used simple thematic analysis facilitated by software packages like NVIVO to code and analyze these data streams in a systematic and cohesive manner in order to generate findings that respond directly to research questions.

Researchers also use ethnomethodology, quantitative analysis, discourse analysis, linguistic analysis, image analysis, and semiotic analysis, among other methods. One of the most prominent research contributors whose work intersects the arts, qualitative research, and analysis strategies is Johnny Saldaña. His work demonstrates the potential for reconciling traditional research paradigms with innovative and performative approaches to data generation, analysis, and representation (Saldaña 2011).

Performance ethnography reminds researchers of their responsibility to connect the research undertaken with the research participants. In ATAR projects, the form of the data generation will often lay the groundwork for its communication and dissemination. For instance, if the process involves participants creating documentaries, these could naturally be presented back to the participants. Again, the approach taken for the communication of findings should be responsive to the needs of the community that generated the data.

 

Multiple Ways Ahead

We would be the first to acknowledge that this methodology is in its infancy. The explosion of opportunity that has arisen with the arts-based research movement has connected the power of the arts with the requirements of research. In many ways, we are just beginning to understand the potential of this marriage. The methodology will continue to evolve as ATAR researchers continue to innovate within the form and innovate as they work with children in care in England, with communities in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, at the site of ethnic massacres and reconciliation in Australia, and at alternative education sites in New Zealand, to name just a few projects in place around the world. We are suggesting here not a rigid set of protocols, but rather a set of principles to guide the ongoing development of this exciting methodology. For example:

1. The personal and the political are inextricably linked. Now is the time to understand the manner in which research is manipulated and distorted for financial and/or political gain by the powerful. The greed of global capitalism is a direct threat to the possibilities of democracy. ATAR positions itself alongside other forms of resistance determined to hear the voices of the deliberately silenced. The metaxical relationship found in applied theater within fictional framing provides safety for communities to speak, honestly and truthfully, to themselves.
2. ATAR demands of its researchers a personal commitment to the creation of critical hope. People do not need research that simply describes or analyzes the disasters we live in. What is required in post-normal times is a research agenda that believes in the possibility of change, and that not only provides visions of different futures, but also positive, meaningful, and constructive steps toward them. The theater provides a means to unmake the everyday, the ability to both think about and represent the world in startlingly different ways.

We are theater makers as well as researchers. We recognize and understand the power of beauty in a world made ugly through greed. ATAR is not about using elements of applied theater in research, it is about the centrality of the participatory theater form within all phases of the research process. It is about making applied theater in all forms as research. It is research as theater. The opportunity is to change the way we "do" research. It is the opportunity to make communities central, not subject(-ed) to the research, and together to respond to questions that matter to them, not merely the questions that matter to us. In essence it is the opportunity, through critically departing from traditional research, to remake research that urgently addresses the post-normal world.

 

Work Cited