Why performance as research?

a US perspective

Shannon Rose Riley

pp. 175-187

in: Robin Nelson (ed), Practice as research in the arts, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Practice as Research (PaR) doctoral programmes are not well established in the US, and are established least of all in theatre and performance. The conventional "terminal degree" in arts practice in the US continues to be the Master of Fine Arts (MFA).¹ Moreover, the bulk of conversation (or fierce debate) about PhDs for artists (PaR or otherwise) has been in the area of the visual arts, to which performance art lays substantial historical claim.² Several fairly new practice-based doctoral programmes in visual arts currently exist in the US — and, as Nelson notes in Chapter 1, James Elkins forecasts their increase as inevitable.³ Yet there are only one or two established PhD programmes in theatre or performance framed up as practice-based programmes or as having a substantial and required practice component: the Practice as Research strand in the PhD in Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis and to a lesser degree, the PhD in Theatre Performance in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo.⁴ I suggest this disparity is partly because the visual arts in higher education in the US have been thoroughly saturated with theory for the last few decades, primarily in the independent art schools such as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, Maine College of Art, and so on.

Cited authors

Elkins James