In part two of a two-part series, Ellen Richardson and Michael J. Flexer describe an evaluation approach to performance that combines words, sounds, and movement in a cohesive soundscape and video of audience responses.
In part one, we considered the excellent example set by Squeeze Box, a disability-activist collaborative process, for ethical, feminist, and accessible theatre and community engagement. Now we consider how we can rethink the evaluation process to provide a ‘toolkit’ of creative methods that goes beyond the quantitative demands of arts funders.
Response-able evaluation
Firstly, we turn to the notion of response-ability. Many thinkers have used and advanced this concept, but here we draw specifically on Bozalek et al (2018) and Donna Haraway (2016), to re-evaluate the notion of responsibility as an ethical artistic practice. In particular, we ask how thinking with response-ability allows us to understand the possibilities we create (or fail to create) for individuals to be able to respond to the art. This is critical when thinking, with disability scholars and through performance, about the contested notion of ability (Goodley 2018). But we also argue this should be applied broadly as a feminist practice that ensures, no matter the context, that we’re attending to the potential spaces we open for debate, response, critique, and play.
Response-ability allows us to question how we create a space in which people with various abilities and skill sets can respond in the ways that suit them, their wants and needs, and how this might speak to the demands of evaluation, e.g. how we create a space in which different forms of communication can be applied to evaluation and data production to support future funding grants that actually demand a particular, formal way of writing. As critical researchers and artists, working in the entangled meeting space between feminist care ethics and new materialisms, we have a responsibility to ensure that our audiences are able to respond to the work in a way that suits their ethico-onto-epistemologies (Barad 2007). This term encapsulates the significant inextricable relationships between ethics, ontologies, and epistemologies. It is a useful term for understanding evaluation, as individuals’ responses to a performance cannot be accurately shared if we fail to provide a responsive outlet that fits ontologically and epistemologically with the ways that those individuals know and understand the world around them.
Different methods
Secondly, building upon critical Science and Technology Studies, we approach the notion of diffraction as applied by Haraway (1992) and Barad (2007, 2014) to explore how difference is not a binary and hierarchical opposition but rather a productive, intra-active complexity that holds diverse possibilities and potentials. As with the particle physics double slit experiment, the method chosen for evaluation can be understood as an apparatus that produces particular outcomes that might be otherwise different through a different apparatus. Instead of assuming, in line with positivism, that there’s one method that enables the representation of an audience’s response to a performance, understanding how the apparatus elicits one of many diffractive possibilities can allow for a reimagining of what evaluation can and ought to do. We should ask, therefore, how we can create space for diffractive evaluation, wherein individuals can perform diffractive responses through various material-discursive becomings, within a small-scale project, with a fleeting audience, limited time, and a very limited funding application format. Can we apply a creative means of evaluation, then apply a diffractive analysis that challenges the format of funding applications but equally efficiently evidences the value of the work?
Exploring the entanglements of the Squeeze Box performance, the team, feminist new materialist theoretical underpinnings, and Ellen’s background in arts-based health research methods, we developed a multi-sensory feedback system. We will explore this below.
Creating a multi-sensory feedback landscape
Squeeze Box utilises creative technologies that span eras and uses – an overhead projector from the 1990s, a very prominently featured cassette recorder from the 1980s, and other retro and analogue bits of kit. These sit alongside conspicuously futuristic technology like a Sound Beam, which senses movement and translates it, through sliding scales, into sound, light, or projected images. We wanted to embrace this diffractive entangling of time, space, technology, and movement and to carefully reappropriate this into an accessible format for diffractive approaches to evaluation. Through this evaluation approach, words, sounds, and movement might all come together in a cohesive soundscape and video of audience responses to particular sections from the performance.
Sounds interesting, sure, but how would that work in practice?
As the performance space is free to move about in and the audience is not separate from the equipment and staging, we suggested having two spaces in the room for feedback. First – a table with multiple tape recorders, or notices advising that individuals use their phones to record their voices if they choose. Second – a space around the sound beams themselves. While the team projects images from the performance onto the wall, audience members are encouraged to respond through sound and movement and words, either into the tape recorders or through play with the sound beams. The sounds could be recorded. So, too, the space could be videoed for context and to explore the movement of audience members around the room and their interactions with each other, the space, and the artists. Afterwards, the sounds could be collated into a soundscape that directly ‘speaks to’ or, better yet, communicates with the images/scenes of the performance.
Together the visual and auditory feedback could be presented as a video, highlighting the value of non-verbal means of communication (as noises and movement are translated through the soundscape into other ways of communicating experience) and knowledge sharing. The ways of knowing and experiencing shared through the soundscape will be affective (Ahmed 2006, 2010), with individuals responding directly through their bodies and not necessarily through words. Arguably, an artistic performance of feedback which is also affective in nature, stirring and moving evaluators’ and funders’ orientations in how one perceives the audience’s response (and drawing on the diffractive creativity and non-representationalist possibilities of the data), is the most suitable way to present an ‘evaluation’ of an affective theatre installation.
The feedback zine
Ellen produced a zine that could be filled in and kept by the audience and shared digitally with the Squeeze Box team. The zine guides the reader through the feedback process and visually orders the sections of the performance to which they’d respond, while leaving space for comments and feedback within the zine itself should individuals choose, either during the performance or as post-show feedback. Individual zines could be kept private or shared through photographs following the event. The zine is an evaluation tool, explaining this innovative method and supporting the development of feedback, an opportunity for audience members to think through the performance privately or together with others, and a souvenir of the performance that can be kept and referred back to. The zine is also a touchstone for conversation in which evaluation can morph between public, private, oral, auditory, and written, yet all the while hold a cohesive shape through the explanatory and ordered nature of the zine.
On this occasion, we were only able to share the zines with the audience as our collaborative ideas were still evolving into practical forms as we approached the final performance. However, thinking through evaluation and the forms of creative feedback that might be made meaningful has been extremely productive. Squeeze Box’s process, new materialist theories, and a feminist ethics of care have come together to create a strong argument for a “potential future worlding” (Springgay 2022, 4) in which we might have a different, diffractive, form of evaluation.
For the future, it will be critical to enact these processes in practice and work through the translating of this data to comply with (or contest) formal funder requirements. This is just the beginning. For now, however, working with community, activist theatre projects like Squeeze Box has revealed valuable opportunities for the medical humanities to keep rethinking how we might work collaboratively to put critical concepts about care, ethics, and epistemology into practice.
You can find out more about Squeeze Box, explore some clips from recent installations, read Hugh’s blog, and keep up to date with future performance dates at hughmalyon.live. There you can also find all credits and thanks to Squeeze Box’s partners and funders.
NIHR Disclaimer:
Ellen Richardson’s role in this project is funded by the NIHR Pre-doctoral Fellowship (Ref: NIHR304791). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Social Care.
About the authors
Ellen Richardson is a post-graduate research associate at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health where she explores the use of creative and arts-based methodologies for health research. She is a medical humanities scholar with particular interest in the use of zines and craft-based methods for grounding new materialist theories through praxis.
Michael J Flexer is the co-director for public engagement at the Centre of Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. He is a mad studies and disability studies scholar, and semiotician (no, really).
Hugh Malyon is a disabled artist based in the South West who is directly challenging categorisation through re-writing notions of what is disabling about being disabled. His work sits between theatre, performance, dialogue, live art and digital media.
Jennifer Noice is a creative enabler, writer and facilitator who has worked alongside Hugh for 8 years. She has combined academic and creative works to delve into understanding the human condition and how small gestures can be used to build a more caring society.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. ‘Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.’ GLQ 12(4): 543-574.
Ahmed, Sara. 2010. ‘Happy Objects’. In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29-51. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2014. ‘Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.’ Parallax 20(3): 168-187.
Bozalek, Vivienne, Abdullah Bayat, Daniela Gachago, Siddique Motala, and Veronica Mitchell. 2018. ‘A Pedagogy of Responsibility. In Socially Just Pedagogies: Posthumanist, Feminist and Materialist Perspectives in Higher Education, edited by Vivienne Bozalek, Rosi Braidotti, Tamara Shefer, and Michalinos Zembylas. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Goodley, Dan. 2018. ‘The Dis/ability Complex.’ DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 5(1): 5-22.
Haraway, Donna. 1992. ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.’ In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 295-337. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press
Springgay, Stephanie. 2022. Feltness: Research-Creation, Socially Engaged Art, and Affective Pedagogies. Durham: Duke University Press.
