probably still have) not come across the ‘proper academic way’ of citing these phenomenological references in written work. Encountering such perceptions while reading children’s drawings high in the sky or hiking through the countryside of Aberdeenshire or trying to explain to theatre people how I perceive the changing relationships between my body and other bodies when moving through a space has made me come to terms with my limited academic vocabulary.
Because how does one reference an experience of traversing and encountering the interstices between the globes and the spheres, in a correspondence between the sphere-shaped monumental pines above one’s head and the miniature globe-shaped mosses of swampy lowland under one’s feet?
Globes and spheres
“since each view contains the seed of the other(..) both perspectives are caught up in the dialectical interplay between engagement and detachment, between human beings involvement in the world and their separation from it” (Ingold 2000:21)
Ill 3.3.3a: Darcy and Ethan’s positions of themselves in the world
Two drawings of how the children Ethan and Darcy position themselves relationally differently “in the world,” Surrounded by their everyday environment, in-between such ephemeral phenomena as earth, sky, wind and weather. Darcy’s drawing of the sky, the ground (with houses) and the spherical earth.
Ethan’s drawing of the spherical earth, surrounded by the sky (Ingold 2007: 22).
Ill 3.3.3b: Three distinct positionings within the three-dimensional worldmaking atlas of the globe view, sphere view and dome view
For many years I ‘cited’ the different perspectives in my doodles such as the notes related to this illustration (ill 3.3.1b). I was trying to remind myself of the different perspectives that moving and balancing in-between, on top of and inside spheres and globes contribute, and that one should also remember to move between those two. They were also similar to my struggles balancing my position of being a designer ‘knowing from within’ or ‘knowing with my body’ with notions of form and completion, without having the proper academic language to express or attune such discussions. At other times I had a vague understanding or maybe a ‘cognitive reconstruction’ that for instance Turner’s and Schechner’s writings on liminal rites and theatrical patterns of processions could support a performative framework when planning the actual
co-Darcy’s drawing Ethan’s drawing
design encounters in time and space. Just like the program and the experiments drift in a dialectic iterative affiliation, so does balancing the interstices between the globes and the spheres of different world versions and worldviews supporting (co-) designers in a reciprocal movement and reflection in action. But instead of a dialectic drift I suggest a dialogical flow. The way I have approached being and becoming within the multiple worldviews in-between globes and spheres is in a dynamic dialogical position in flux, not an either/or, but rather a both/and, positioning myself in motion from somewhere to somewhere else within the tripartite continuum of globe views, sphere views and dome views:
Within the performance literature I have also found samples similar to Ingold’s different positions and worldviews of how we perceive the environment around us as landscapes and taskscapes of skilled practice. The distanced mode of the etic ‘globe view’ has similarities to Boal’s poetics79 and what Brecht wanted to achieve with the Verfremdung effects: that we see ourselves in a new light, similar to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty as a theatrical practice which “wakes us up.
Nerves and heart” (Artaud 1958: 84). All theatre directors want the audience (for a moment at least) to distance themselves from themselves in order to not become too immersed in the mimetic aspects of the theatre.
Contrary to the ‘globe view’ is the situated and emic mode of the spherical worldview as derived from the traditions of Aristotle’s poetics, where the audience immerses itself in the staging and the characters’ actions. Such examples could be perceived by theatre director Stanislavski’s actors trying to ‘really live’ their characters, or at least trying to ‘remove the
79 I have already touched upon Schechner’s poetics in Chapter 2; but I will briefly give a few examples of other theatrical traditions and poetics: Augusto Boal presented an important contribution with the book chapter: ”Poetics of the Oppressed” in his book:
Theatre of the Oppressed (1979), as a response and a critique of the Aristotelian poetics, which for Boal meant a repression of the people. Many theatre poetics had previously been building on the system that Boal called Aristotle’s coercive system of tragedy where ‘art imitates nature’ (1979: 1). This poetics is still seen in the conventional performative set ups separating audience and performers in theatres, public and social medias such as television shows, soap operas, TV series and in (western) movies. From Boal’s experiences founding the Arena Theatre and the Forum Theatre, he describes his ‘poetics of the oppressed’ as a method and a praxis of turning ‘spectators’ into spect–actors. By not only allowing but inviting non-actors to play, (similar to the PDs traditions of engaging non-designers as everyday people to design), Boal aims to disrupt the traditional dialectical opposites of actors and spectators. The core of his Poetics is that theatre should be performed by the people – by the
‘oppressed’ themselves, not by professional actors claiming to stand on the stage for them. Boal’s poetics further describe his activist theatre, the Arena Theatre that he presents as being performed by the people and for the people as a “rehearsal of revolution” (ibid: 135).
Boal positions his poetics in relation to Aristotle and Brecht:
“…the poetics of Aristotle is the poetics of oppression: the world is known, perfect or about to be perfected, (…) Dramatic action substitutes for real action.
Brecht’s poetics is that of the enlightened vanguard: the world is revealed as subject to change, and the change starts in the theatre itself, (…) Dramatic action throws light upon real action. The spectacle is a preparation for action.
The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action!
Perhaps the theatre is not revolutionary in itself; but have no doubts, it is a rehearsal of revolution!” (Boal 1979:135)
obstacles’ and create a distance between actor and character, like theatre director Grotowski’s concept of via negativa supporting the actors ‘inner flame’ with the score of ‘the character’ in order to be as close to one another as possible in a constant process of poiesis.
The liminal in-between positions of globe views and sphere views could relate to Barba’s
‘bartering’ as a practice of cultural exchange between the theatre troupe and local communities without previous experience of theatre, or Fischer-Lichte’s transformative aesthetics as a re-enchantment of the world, where opposites collapse and become a both/and, on similar lines as Schechner’s transformative poetics and environmental theatre and Lehmann’s postmodern theatre, where the distinction between the actors and the audience – the ordinary world and the performance world – becomes insignificant and blurred.
These different modes of multiple worldviews within a shifting fractiverse, pluriverse multiverse and momentarily a one-world80 resembles how I have positioned myself within my research being immersed within a spherical worldview and distanced by a globe worldview, and sometimes also balancing the interstices between globe view and sphere view trying to engage the impossible position within and on top of the dome while trying to capture one’s shadow.
Sometimes ‘speculist assumptions’ have taken me ‘outside the world’, to a ‘cognitive reconstruction’, where I (in correspondence with others) have learned how to sketch and to represent such reconstructions in the form of ‘maps’. Maps condensing all the sensory attunement of lived life into ‘facts’ are probably quite irreal in themselves, like stating that “84 % of all waste burned today could have been recycled – How can you and I help with that?” (DAIM 2009)” or “We do not call it exercise, but we are tired afterwards” (SI 2013) and “Many seniors feel lonely – long-lasting involuntary loneliness has the same negative impact on health as smoking” (G&T 2017).
Remember how maps don't make worlds. But they might help us answer the question how we come to know ‘the world’. But by raising such mappings of positions on top of a ‘globe perspective’ I came to hear and know about responses and stories centred within particular situated practices. From within this local perspective the world is a spherical experiential centre, centred in a particular place, and ‘beings-in-the-world’ from the attention of those who live there
80 Pluriverse, multiverse & fractiverse; Ingold explains that William James in 1908 proposed a multiverse as ‘a pluralistic universe’ insisting that the multiverse is simultaneously singular and plural for the reason that its one-ness is never absolutely complete. It is ‘strung-along’, ‘not rounded in and closed’ (James 2012:170). Arturo Escobar’s critique of the one-world world is the globe of corporate capitalism. Against this global world, Escobar reintroduces (from James) what he terms the pluriverse,
“It might be described as a process of planetarization articulated around a vision of the Earth as a living whole that is always emerging out of the manifold biophysical, human, and spiritual elements and relations that make it up” (Escobar 2012:139).
Fractiverse is Law’s critique of how everything there is can be made to fit into a single container universe which he terms a
‘one-world world’ (Law 2011: 10). Instead Law suggests that we live in the era of the fractiverse, “a set of contingent, enacted and more or less intersecting worlds in the plural” (Law 2011:2). From ‘One World Anthropology’ (Ingold 2018:18-20).
as the ‘inhabitants of the weather-world’ (Ingold 2007: 35) are drawn ever deeper into the world in the quest for knowledge and understanding. It is through such attentive engagement that the very process of dwelling is entailed.
The calls from globe views as ‘exhabitant of the earth’ (ibid: 35) worked as programmatic and provisional knowledge regimes setting a direction for the experiments. One example is the large systems working around the waste incineration plant Vestforbrænding (owned by 19 municipalities), with a capacity of turning 550,000 tons of waste into energy annually81, that was calculating its output and stated that ‘84 per cent of burned waste could have been recycled…’ into experiments. Other examples are the responses from ‘inhabitants’, such as the local residents Ulla &
Lillian together with shop owner Allan, caretaker Michael and civil servant of waste planning Dorthe, who turn the correspondence between ‘inhabitants of the weather-world’ and ‘exhabitant of the earth’ into habiting a ‘one-world’ of a pluriverse (Ingold 2018) by Rehearsing the Future of better local waste-sorting practices. There are also the calls from the globe view systems of the
municipality of CPH department ‘SUF’ (which has 10,000 employees and accounts for ten per cent of all elderly care in Denmark82) enquiring how to avoid long-lasting involuntary loneliness among senior citizens, into a response from the sphere view that “We do not call it exercise, but we are tired afterwards.”
To iterate by re-calling and re-responding to Ingold’s in-between globes and spheres, to know the world from a dome perspective is then, not only a matter of sensory attunement and not only a matter of cognitive reconstruction. Such knowledge is not-not acquired by engaging directly, in a practical way, with the objects in one’s surroundings, and not-not by learning how to represent them, in the mind, in the form of a map. Rather it is the correspondence and dialogues between these positions.
I further wish to qualify the dialogical relationship between the performative approaches as the drifts the experiments have taken within the programs as the dialogues of braiding disparate ways of knowing through different orientations.
81https://ipaper.ipapercms.dk/Vestforbraending/aarspublikationer/aarsrapport-2017/?page=22 (retrieved 1/7 2018) 82 https://www.kk.dk/artikel/sundheds-og-omsorgsforvaltningen-som-arbejdsplads (retrieved 1/7 2018)
Ill 3.2a Braiding disparate ways of knowing
A performative and embodied research practice braiding together disparate and stratified ways of knowing Multiple ways of knowing Examples of how I have been situating my embodied design and walls with printouts of text in progress, as well as
position such as ‘globe-views’
Tokens produced in the Lab and treasures from the Field; re-membering moments of lived life of correspondence, of attending and caring. Here they appear as notes from the diary displayed in the gallery: as welcome calls from the past;
“Thank you. It has been a really pleasant day – and a cool ending with a bonfire with
‘æbleskiver’, Love Anni”,
“Christmas spirit the 25/11 – Nice, Love Ulla” and “Thank you for cosy days with fun and games, hope it continues next
Props, traces and performance remains
Ill 3.2b Constructive design research by re-constructing ‘the field’ in an experimental ‘gallery setting’
As a design-researcher, trained in moving in and out of workshops, studios and gallery settings, with one performative and embodied way of working, I have regarded moving between perspectives and different ways of knowing as similar to different approaches from the Lab, Field, Gallery and beyond as well as different perspectives on worldmaking and positioning oneself as in-between the globe-, sphere- and dome perspectives. Performance to me is both an activity and an analysis. Turner’s social dramas and Schechner’s performance poetics have been suitable as lenses and works of imagination and as support of a drift towards a position similar to Ingold’s exhabitant of the earth with a globe view from above. Performance has also been driven by a pragmatics of inquiry, however, as the Fischer-Lichtian notion of ‘transformative aesthetics’ as presence and perceptual multistability for navigating and operating within design research events;
traversing as Ingold’s inhabitant of the weather-world immersed with a view from within the sphere. Performance has further been a tactical view designing interventions and reenactments between the two for dispersing moments of completion as alternative civic spaces of struggle (Conquergood 2002: 152).
When travelling through dialectic drifts between different worlds of programs and experiments and encountering multiple worldviews social designers could engage a liminal trickster character as described by Conquergood. In chapter seven I will discuss three design positions, following Conquergood who suggests travelling through different worlds and sites as a trickster to decompose and compose; making a world-version by braiding together disparate stratified ways of knowing. But let us take a moment to summarise our journey so far, before
As part of analysing ‘the data’ of engagements (beside
transcribing video logs ect.), I have been annotating printed blog posts – making some of the large amounts of immaterial digital data tangible. The digital blogs have long been removed and deleted. But printouts of a few blog posts are still archived here as maps and globe-view traces of once immersed and spherical field experiences now captured in a ‘gallery archive’.
Gallery
Kinesis
poiesis
heading into gathering worlds for making and the performative mode of Rehearsing.
I have now presented the foundation for this thesis. In the first chapter I described a general transition of post-industrial design moving towards ‘social design’. I also described my empirical foundation being engaged in several public-private partnerships with multiple partners, ranging from sustainability to sharing platforms of wellbeing and relational care. I further presented a theoretical foundation ranging from Homo Performance to performance, related to human mankind as performing, social beings and Performance Studies in more general terms, but specifically PS related to social change, transitions and transformation anchored within social dramas and extra-daily theatres.
Finally, in this chapter I introduced a research approach and methodology building on a performative Constructive Design Research tradition. I first recapped Conquergood’s triads and alliterations of mimesis, poesis, kinesis with aspects of imagination, inquery, intervention; artistry, analysis, activism and creativity, critique, citizenship. In order to exemplify the multiple
performative ways of knowing and working within design research, I further provided an overview of Constructive Design Research and pointed to different positions of constructing design research in relation to Lab, Field and Gallery and a program-experiment dialectics. I ended by exemplifying a performative worldmaking praxis linked to Ingold’s different perspectives of how we are able to perceive ourselves within the environment around us, e.g. engaging in dialogues by making globe views, sphere views and dome views, by ex-habitating the fractiverse of world versions, in-habitating the one world weather-world and by habitating the multiverse. In general, I argue that Everyday Theatres are constructed through generative ways of co-producing different ways of knowing.
In the following three chapters I will present the main empirical accounts and analyses.
The first, Rehearsing, is about evoking multiple globe views and ex-habiting different locations and situations, where a future performance could take place and also exploring what the future could then be like. Rehearsals are situated in a backstage space that easily allows actors to ‘jump’ into a subjunctive mood such as choosing or discarding different behaviours of their roles and alter the imagined spaces and temporal situations of their acts. Let us now embark on a journey diving into the initial mode and embodied practices of Rehearsing by gathering partners to co-design an Everyday Theatre.