Bruce Barton

Research-Based Practice: Situating Vertical City between Artistic Development and Applied Cognitive Science

Working with an interdisciplinary group of artists on the 2008 performance project Vertical City, Hansen and Barton, the projects dramaturge and director, drew inspiration from cognitive theories of memory and perception. They imagine how artistic questions from Vertical City can be further explored within an innovative model they call Research-Based Practice.

Immersive Negotiations: Binaural Perspectives on Site-Specific Sound

One of the most compelling aspects of site-specific theatre is the potential for heightened immersion within a specific environment. Increased mobility (on the part of the performance and its audience), combined with the inevitably performative architecture of a hosting site, makes possible a pervasiveness of sensory stimulus unattainable in conventional the atrical contexts. While these condition sappeal to the full range of the senses, some modalities contribute to this experience with significantly more intensity than others.Yet beyond this cross-modal competition, site-specific sound design-particularly that which incorporates the binaural properties of headphone listening — regularly also explores the often contentious interplay between what Paige McGinley, among others, distinguishes as ‘soundscapes’ and ‘soundtracks’.The soundscape- ‘the “acoustic ecology” of a given place or environment’1 — she suggests ‘is concerned with the local spatial environment, the sounded knowledge of a particular place’ (2007, p.58). By contrast, the soundtrack, as a performative intervention, ‘offer[s] emotional and thematic cues,creating — and documenting — a journey’ (McGinley, 2007, p.58). The soundtrack is understood as a ‘mobile soundscape’, one that’accompany[ies]everyday life, but also perform[s] an aesthetic intervention that shapes one’s daily experiences’ (McGinley, 2007, p.58).

Performing the Paradox of Affect and Interpretation

In a 2005 article entitled “Navigating Turbulence: The Dramaturg in Physical Theatre” I utilized Eugenio Barbas “dramaturgy of changing states” as a framework for considering the tensions between the textual and physical aspects of devised performance creation—or, as reframed through Erika Fischer-Lichtes concept of “perceptional multistability,” between the elements of a performance that facilitate efficient semiotic interpretation and those that exceed or resist it. Today an increasingly popular frame for addressing this visceral excess can be found in the burgeoning field of affect theory. This broadly inclusive territory is energetically contested; yet what is shared by most of these initiatives is a conviction that affective experience is a fully embodied process of relating to, understanding, and acting within ones environment, expanding the concept of ‘understanding’ to assert the implicit and pre-semantic nature of perception. This essay focuses on two productions by the Toronto-based interdisciplinary hub Vertical City, of which I am Artistic Director. With All Good Things (2013) and Trace (2014) we attempt to not only foreground but also to perform the above noted tension between interpretation and affect. Our productions regularly employ such postdramatic elements as aerial movement, engineered installation environments, sensory immersion, interactive intermediality, and dense live/recorded soundscapes. However, we also incorporate core components of traditional theatrical performance, such as progressive narrative structures and distinct characterization, which are systematically relocated into overtly performative contexts through pronounced interdisciplinary negotiation and the transformation of audience perception via intermedial modification. Adopting an enactivist approach to these case study performances, I attempt to demonstrate how, in pushing past the “crisis” of perceptional multistability to the utility of perceptual turbulence in a dramaturgy of embrace, performing the paradox of affect and interpretation can become an potent performance strategy.

Stop Looking at Your Feet

Dance Marathon (2009) is a relational endurance test. Nearly five hours in length, it begins with 200 dancing audience members, who are progressively eliminated throughout an evening of dance lessons, foot races, trivia contests and general partying. In the process, it brings together contemporary and traditional dance forms, vaudeville, electronic music, performance art and streamed video with bouts of comic routines, found text, stream-of-consciousness narrative and lyric poetry (an incomplete list of ingredients). Such is the dramaturgical minefield of the New York/Toronto/Montreal-based site-specific performance troupe bluemouth inc. What follows is an attempt to retrace some of my steps through this bracing territory with a company that had never before engaged a dramaturg. Not coincidentally, it is also an attempt to chart the complicated intersection of North American and European influences at work in this visceral and often productively chaotic developmental space. New European dramaturgy is generating powerful rippling effects well beyond continental borders. These are some of the reflections of one Canadian dramaturg trying to ride the waves. T H E D A N C E P A R T N E R : B L U E M O U T H I N C .

Introduction: Ahr-tik-yuh-leay-ting Ahr-tis-tik Ree-surch

When Natalia Esling and I first began to imagine this theme issue of Canadian Theatre Review focused on Articulating Artistic Research, we were, fittingly, faced with the need to clearly articulate the territory we have set out to explore. What, precisely, do we mean by Artistic Research? This is a task that, in fact, began for me several decades ago, one that has evolved consistently over a wide range of different contexts, and one that, perhaps by definition, will continue to do so moving forward. As a performance creator who has also been employed within academic institutions, to some degree and in one or another capacity, for the past thirty years, the dual preoccupations expressed in the paired terms “Artistic Research” have been interwoven in a complex conceptual dance throughout this entire period. It is, without question, a complicated choreography. With this collection of documents, I believe Natalia and I have accumulated a substantial set of gestures in this attempt at articulation. For our purposes, this is how we described Artistic Research in the invitation to contribute that we shared widely:

The Making of Making Treaty 7: A Practical, Philosophical and Ideological Templatefor Intercultural Collaboration

Abstract: The origins of Making Treaty 7 the theatrical production in some ways mirror the treaty signing process itself 140 years ago: Negotiation, protocol, and the quest of two cultures trying to understand each other. Where this process significantly diverges from the murky dealings in 1877 is that the spirit in which this society and this play were created comes out of a need to repair and reconcile the fractured relationship between the First Nations and “newcomers,” a desire to recognize the facts of the past and have it inform us as to how to move forward together on this land. This article is a unique look inside the genesis and creation of Making Treaty 7. Troy Emery Twigg, a Blackfoot artist, dancer, and educator, and Kris Demeanor, a Calgary-based poet and musician, were part of the initial wave of consultation with Treaty 7 elders, research, and discussion with Michael Green, Narcisse Blood, and Blake Brooker that helped define the trajectory of Making Treaty 7. These interviews illuminate how research, largely based on written versions of first hand oral accounts by First Nations leaders, stimulated the artistic process as “theme bundles” were created and as musical and scene creation collaborations were pursued. Ultimately, it is the story of reconciliation through art, and the blending of socially conscious creation with artistic rigour.