Location: NUHRI Research Event, Northern Stage, Newcastle

This talk consisted of a presentation of my forthcoming What Would Garrick Do? book, and my participation in a ‘fishbowl’ discussion. For the latter I, and two others had to respond to the question:

What is the value of humanities research to performance practice and what are the specific challenges of applying humanities research to performance?

I did so as follows, spurred on by Emma Whipday’s framing of her answer in terms of ‘specificity’.

Humanities reserach offers generality, or, better, general consciousness: humanities research should be about opening things up, about holding multiple possibilities in mind and not resting on a firm, specific conclusion.  We can offer specific information, of course, but I think that information is at its best when it is in service of a larger idea. Humanities researchers are not vending machines. One of the luxuries of being an academic is that we don’t always have to answer immediate and closed queries, we *don’t* have a performance to put on that night and so can help those that do explore a wider range of possibilities before crunch time comes around.

I  can think of two specific challenges of applying humanities research to performance. The first is, to put it bluntly, misunderstandings on both sides. Academics are often seen as defenders of an established reading and sticklers for detail, and performers are often seen as goal-oriented and uninterested in larger ideas. There are other variations of this problem, and I guess what I’m saying here is that we need to get better at listening to each other as well as talking to each other. The second challenge is more general, and it concerns the kind of metaphors we use: they tend to skew towards transactional qualities, and I worry about how such metaphors shape how we think about our relationships. What does it mean to ‘offer’ humanities research up to performance rather than to ‘apply’ it, for example? And do some metaphors enforce certain categories and thus exclude those who combine humanities research and performance practice?