4. Digging Deep: A dialogue on practice-based research – Jenny Hughes and

Carran Waterfield

This dialogue is an edited version of a series of conversations that took place between

the two researchers following performances of The House in late 2015 and early 2016.

Our aim in these conversations was to reflect on the research findings and to describe

the challenges – artistic, research-related, as well as political and economic – involved

in our collaboration. Whilst exploring these challenges we repeatedly returned to the

political economies – the systems of resource management and the networks of value

and authority – surrounding practice-based research in a contemporary British

university. To make sense of this, we were drawn to the substantive content of the

research and to features of the performance itself: the relationship between

performance and poverty, and the conditions placed on those in receipt of public

subsidy to perform self as a unit of potential productivity, as well as broader themes

of access, care, accountability and work.

Two overarching threads run through the dialogue. First, the challenge of

performing the value of research, especially research that takes time and space, and

where the knowledge generated cannot be readily translated into the managerial and

economised discourses of excellence and impact that define the research culture of the

contemporary British university. As part of this, we reflect on how the process was

shaped by accounting practices inside university environments relating to the costing

of space, time and labour. Second, we explore the politics of collaboration between a

university researcher and working artist, especially in the context of a piece of

research that ‘digs deep’ into family history and autobiographical experience. We

reflect on our respective working lives as a university researcher and a freelance artist,

the first defined by a degree of independence and security but also institutional

constraint, and the second characterised by freedom from institutional constraint, but

also by an unsettling amount of economic insecurity and professional uncertainty.

These sections are underpinned by our awareness of how practice-based research may

both replicate and contest conditions of precarity and the exploitation of subjectivity

concomitant with contemporary contexts of capital, labour and productivity (see for

example Lazzarato 1996; Standing 2011).

The dialogue is presented in four parts. Following a description of how our

collaboration unfolded, we focus on themes of work, play and time. This leads to a

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shorter section where we describe our struggle to account for the value of the

research, and finally, a joint speculation on what ideal artist-researcher collaborations

in universities might look like. The dialogue is supported by audio-visual clips

relating to key moments of the research process.

The working process

J - I saw your role as taking the idea of poverty and responding as a performer

and theatre-maker. At the outset I envisaged you creating snippets of

performance that would provide new perspectives on the material coming out

of the broader research, and on the questions I had set out to explore. We

would learn together from your imagined, improvised, embodied responses to

this material and to the research questions. In the end, this became a 75-minute

solo performance called The House, which was great, but from my point of

view you did not have to work towards making a performance.

C - Yes and I wonder if this might be - aside from my professional desire to make

a new work - something to do with being grateful and trying to sing a ‘big

song for my supper’. I am a mid/late career artist and I have a powerful sense

of facing ‘last chance scenario’ as I move towards pensionable age. I am not

quite there yet because the pension age for me in this country has risen to 66

years, so I am entitled to six years more attention! It is interesting to note the

number of veteran artists moving into academia. It seems artists are now

finding within academic contexts a chance to work in an alternative way

because the independent route is not so easily available with the arts funding

climate. So, your expectation might not have been as big as my ambition to

take advantage of a chance to make ‘one more’ solo work, a form I really love

but – as arts funding priorities have shifted – one that I have not had the

opportunity to explore to completion for some time.

J - I wanted to work with a skilled performer – a virtuoso performer, someone

with a depth of skill and technique to draw on. I also knew that we had a

shared experience in terms of growing up in families that did not have very

much to get by, and that you had made work from those experiences before. I

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wanted to see what happens when we put ourselves into the picture as

researchers with regards to the themes of poverty and economic insecurity. I

liked the ethics of exploring research questions from inside that kind of

intimate relationship and shared experience. Perhaps this would give us a good

‘handle’ on the research questions, where we wouldn’t let ourselves get away

with easy answers. From this relationship and shared experience, I wanted to

explore - with you – whether and how there were opportunities for subversion,

through performance, of the visual and discursive regimes that capture ‘the

poor’? If the ‘poor’ are impelled to navigate social support systems via a series

of performances, of demands to appear (respectable, job-ready, thrifty, a

productive subject ‘in the making’ et cetera) – what new perspectives arise

when a performer explores these kinds of specular relations with sensitivity,

intimate knowledge, and skills in performance? I was also interested in

working with a female performer, because the poor female historically has

been the repository for a complex network of coercive, moralistic and

emancipatory rhetoric in welfare initiatives – seen at once as the cause of

poverty, an emblem of the undeserving poor, and a force for self help and

community transformation.

You didn’t have to create a performance and you definitely didn’t have to

create a ‘good’ show, whatever that means. I wanted to see what we could

make - via a research process that drew on your skills in devising, body-based

performance and your ability to ‘read’ an experience imaginatively - of a

range of evidence drawn from your own family history, and from the material

coming out of the broader research into how ‘the poor’ have had to perform in

order to access food, shelter, social support.

C - From the beginning, you gave me lots of reading to do and then arranged for

me to come in to the ‘workhouse’, which is what the rehearsal room came to

mean to me. You visited me in the workhouse and saw for yourself what I was

doing. You were my first audience. The work between us was a two-way

investigation where you gave responsive feedback and that would make me

think, ask more questions and try to find ways to excavate more deeply,

pushing me on to the next phase. Later your role became focused on additional

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factors like the constraints of time as we moved towards the performance. You

became more like a ‘producer’ and on occasion script editor, making cuts, not

too much, but enough for me to feel the pinch.

If I really wanted to get to the heart of the relationship we had making The

House, I think it was this sense that whilst you came to the ‘workhouse’ - the

playing arena - with a research agenda, you were also able to approach my

working practice with an attitude of openness and curiosity. This was very

different from working with a director who from the beginning is making

interventions to shape the work in a particular direction. This allowed you to

be ‘hands off’ as well as very accepting of the material I was showing you

initially and that allowed me to be more daring. You were in a position of ‘not

knowing’, which is also a fundamental requirement for making new work. As

we became more familiar with each other’s working processes you found

multiple roles to occupy, from informed audience member to a confident

reader of the work. As the ‘output’ day dawned you operated as an efficient

producer with a good hold on the work I had made. I don’t think we can

underestimate the complexity of what was going on between us. You

witnessed and participated in the process and it seems to me that you almost

had a tacit effect on the work. The work also came about through the

dialogues we had in between practical sessions, where I was working very

much on my own.

Overall what was really important was that we were both coming from those

backgrounds, and we knew what it was like to be on the edge a little bit. I

remember that early on there were questions about our right to speak on behalf

of the poor, but I believe we had the right because we had been there. It’s our

ancestry, not just a bit of social history, that we are commenting on, and thank

god we were part of a system that allowed us free education, otherwise we

would never have got a look in.

J – I also think there was a complementarity of distinctive ways of researching. I

enjoy research when I can approach material – including the material you were

developing – from a position of openness and curiosity, and I try to hold the

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attitude of scepticism needed later in a research process at bay, especially at

the start of a process. With our collaboration, I know that I don’t have the

performance skills that you have and so, without you, I could not research this

topic in a way that I wanted to. I was also pleased to work with a researcher

who did not quite fit the model of ‘practice-based research’ as it exists in

universities at the moment, which predominantly feature those who are

undertaking or have been awarded advanced research degrees.

C - Yes, you are not a performer researcher, you are a researcher of drama and

theatre. You seem at home in the university. Somehow I have found temporary

accommodation within the university but I really don’t belong there.

Although, I suppose since my first employment was in education as a school

teacher maybe I do. I secretly think I am educated to an advanced level – self-

educated, following the autodidactic method of my performance tradition – I

just don’t have the paperwork and I don’t articulate with the longhand

vocabulary maybe. I am certainly not a ‘Master of the House’ in the academic

world but I think I have the applicable thought processes without the

‘publishable scholarly writing’ language.

I feel the same as you do about me - about not having the same skill set as

you, and about how our research skills complemented each other. When I read

what you write, I think well, bloody hell that’s a clever way of putting it. Then

I think well that’s a good match isn’t it? It’s a good meeting, a good balance.

I always felt quite chuffed when I’d discovered something you hadn’t

discovered, like telling the teacher something. I don’t think you can get away

from those ‘small p’ power relationships in this context. If we are working in a

university it is researcher then practitioner. It becomes more equal I suppose

when you say ‘well, I couldn’t do that’. That is interesting because the

hierarchy of knowledge is upset.

J - You’ve talked before about reading in the early stages of the research – can

you say something about that here?

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C - You did all the reading. I did some reading, in fact, I read everything I could

manage and allowed myself reading days as opposed to improvisation or

performance days and I also allowed myself writing sessions. This was

different to other projects where the reading would have to fit in and around

rehearsal time, something for evenings and weekends or undertaken prior to

the actual paid work. The research project was your idea and you invited me to

work on it and this required me to engage with some of the research reading.

Having said that it was with a light touch because you were beavering away

and that gave me permission to do what I’m quite good at, if I’m given the

time and space. This was such a relief to some extent because the academic, in

my view, does the donkey work!

You read, and I pursued experience. That’s why I went to places of family

history, to ‘walk in the steps of’, trying to get into the imaginary world of the

material. Through the imaginary I was accessing the historical world. I

immersed myself in the ‘being’ of it. So my reading would be things like the

church noticeboards, political leaflets or booklets about the places I went to or

revisiting materials I had worked on before and discovering new ideas and

new gossip. I was looking for the micro, the personal - reading from cover to

cover the index books in the archives, for example. I would trawl through the

workhouse ledgers, searching all the columns to see who was there. There’s an

excitement and sense of discovery about that kind of reading and those

experiences became a rich source of knowledge in the creative work. I

particularly enjoyed the work on building my own family tree, building my

identity.

I set myself reading tasks and I would even perform reading in the rehearsal

room. I’d think, right, I’m going to perform reading today, and some of that

ended up in the final performance. When it’s body-based practice, it’s not just

about words. It is about words, but words are visceral, they’re full of body.

Clip 4 – Matron reading from A Handy Book for Guardians of the Poor (1876)

J – Early on, I read the New Poor Law of 1834 and a range of historical texts

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around that, so I learnt the big historical narrative and tried to pass that on in

some of the conversations we were having. I gave you documents that

described the ways ‘the poor’ were processed through the workhouse system,

and any autobiographical material I found that described actual experiences of

the poor law system. I also looked at theories of liberal and neoliberal

economy and I talked to you about some of that …

C – When it comes to the philosophical reading I knew you were doing, I wanted

to do a bit of nosey parkering, so I would go to You Tube and listen to the

people you were reading giving lectures. I like to hear people speak because to

me there’s a performance in it and the internet allows you to see them in the

flesh and read their actions and expressions. I read the books you gave me

where ‘inmates’ and others described experiences of the workhouse

environment, all really useful, because they started to open up an imaginary

world. I’m not thinking theoretically, I’m thinking imaginatively, and it’s

about what I remember from that reading when I’m in the space. That remnant

is what is important when forming the work.

J - And what happens in that process?

C - Playing. All I did was play and then formalise the playing. For me, playing is a

method of performance-making. There’s a hierarchy here isn’t there, which we

need to fight against, you know, between work and play. The academic

research can be seen as the ‘proper work’ driven by outputs, deliverables,

evidence, and play as a waste of time. With The House, I was given

permission to inhabit the materials and play with them. A lot of the time, I was

able to play without a feeling that there had to be an end point. The most

important thing was that there was no pressure to deliver.

J - I was often amazed at how your work sometimes prefigured rather than simply

responded to what I was reading and thinking about. Your work created an

overarching picture of the forms that were appearing elsewhere in the research

- it filtered, condensed, summarised, focused, intensified, clarified, illuminated

what I was learning elsewhere. For example, there was one week where I had

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read something about the sacrificial logic of neoliberal economic regimes

(Brown 2015, 215-16). I came into the rehearsal room and saw an early

version of the Fun-raiser describing the three-step programme of improvement

that the paupers in the house have to undergo, followed by an early version of

the fairy grandmother singing ‘Nobody Loves a Fairy when she’s Forty’,

falling off the top step, and showing us her ‘level 3’. This had me in tears

when I first saw you do it. We hadn’t spoken about those ideas specifically,

and it was like you had been reading my mind all week …

Clip 5 – the Fun-raiser describing the programme of improvement, leading into Fairy

Grandmother falling off the step

C - At some point I started to realise what you were looking for and when you

started to read back to me my imagery of performing poverty I thought ‘oh

right, we are on the same page.’ So that theory you were grappling with, I saw

the words but the penny didn’t drop until you had fed back to me how the

practical work was becoming embedded in your research.

J – You create research-driven performance, having trained with Odin Teatret, but

how was our collaboration different from what you normally do?

C – I was doing research-driven performance before I trained with Odin. The Odin

experience for me captured a ‘life as work, work as life’ ethic which is about

thinking deeply about what you do and living the work. Thinking deeply

requires enquiry and articulated reflection. Because I am not a ‘qualified’

performer I have had to accumulate knowledge ‘off the record’. I have had to

learn my own performance lineage. This is knowledge that I might have

gained doing more formal qualifications or training and it supports my

constantly shifting performance practice. With The House I didn’t use any

different techniques from normal in that regard.

So, making The House felt familiar as a practice but I think the main

difference was that it didn’t have a load of people hanging over it with a

vested interest. There was you close up and the research funder in the distance,

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but nobody was demanding anything, it was a genuine enquiry that would

deliver something when it was ready to. This is a process I aspire to but it has

not happened so fully in anything I have been involved before. The absence of

pressure allowed me to keep a cooler head than usual.

J – What language can you find to describe the knowledge-making process that

we were engaged in? How does what we did add up to ‘knowledge’?

C – For me it’s just gossip! It’s the lowest level of conversation. I suppose gossip

is a form of knowledge, but it’s tacit isn’t it? You can’t lock it down, whereas,

if you can lock knowledge down in the word, you can sell it. If you only lock

it down in doing, it’s passed and gone. The difference between you and I

resides in our different relationships to the printed word. Our reflection here is

an attempt to salvage, lock down, put in print. That can never be done for live

performance, and that’s why I have a desire to keep the moment alive by

touring the performance. The writing it down is just not enough. I am not

satiated by this process, even though it does give me tremendous sustenance in

some ways. Why does writing about performance take precedence over doing

it? It seems to me that research in universities, with its privileging of written

academic publication, has to concede to the supposed superior ability of the

written word to convey knowledge. But here we are suggesting an alternative

way, where performance could have an equal place, more like the oral

tradition.

The other key moments in the process were the trips that we had. That’s when

we had some good gossips about the work.

J - The trips were more extended periods of time, as opposed to our time at the

university, which often felt like me dashing into the rehearsal room for an hour

here and there, brief visits squeezed in between other commitments.

C - The intermittent recorded conversations we had about the process as we went

along were really valuable. This was often where I did my learning and

reflection and I would often write something afterwards. There were talks that

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we gave together too, dotted into that. In all, I think it was a carefully

navigated route to collaborating. I felt nourished by the collaboration. The

constraints on your time sometimes worked for me and sometimes bothered

me. When we had those moments of talking I would sometimes feel like

Oliver Twist, asking for more.

J - Your point about playing is interesting because from my point of view, I was

keen to protect this part of the research as a freer, more open-ended

exploration, in contrast to other parts where I was more conscious of the

milestones that had to be achieved. You were doing it all through a body-

based exploration, and watching you work was constantly enriching for me. I

was always impressed by how courageous your work was. I was amazed at

how you threw your body after an idea, and followed where your body led,

sometimes before my eyes. It was a real privilege to see you work.

C - It was raw sometimes, it’s a raw process, because we were dealing with a raw

subject, so you couldn’t dress it up as historical drama with mop caps and

buckets. You are stripped bare when you are destitute and you’ve got nothing.

When you enter the workhouse you literally strip off, get hosed down,

fumigated. I was constantly trying to get as near to a raw energy, that

vulnerability. And those moments when you and others came in to see ‘the

work’ were quite scary.

J - Yes, there were moments when it felt really fragile. You were struggling. Is

that what you mean by raw? Can you give me an example?

C - Stripped away, so that all that is there is the body and voice, no frippery. The

day that I decided to eat bread for the day, and drink water, and talk to camera,

off the cuff, located some memories for me. It was quite a hard day that one.

I’m not good at froth. Odd as it may seem I’m really interested in and easier

with that more difficult side of life – suffering, pain, loss, regret, grief. When

the improvisation is really hot, there is almost an ecstatic sense of playing. I

think it’s akin to a temporary madness. I don’t think this kind of work is

experienced much in the UK and maybe that’s why some people wonder if I

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am all right when I’m performing. Well, I am all right. Professionally I know

what I am doing even though I am attempting the feeling of utter despair. I am

trying to find ways of ‘going there’. I know how to keep myself safe.

J - Tell me more about ‘Bread’ – it is a moment that we have often returned to in

order to understand what was emerging from the research.

C - I knew that paupers in the workhouse were given bread to eat and water to

drink, and so I did that for a day. It was partly me not wanting to waste time in

the room, so my breaks would be quite short. I had a working lunch and just

talked to camera. I’d been working with Les Misérables, and so with music in

the background, I started telling my story of mum. The thing about bread is

that it’s a fundamental and ‘bread stories’ are stories of a community’s

survival. It’s interesting to think how close people lived to their food years

ago, where if you are destitute your dole is bread. That is what bread is, the

dole - all that for me was so important. I was talking to the camera about my

work as well, and attitudes to money. It was about being bereft, being empty,

you’ve got this opportunity to do this thing, lucky you, but are you really

going to be able to ‘sing for your supper’, is it going to work? What we have

come to call ‘Bread’ was a microcosm of the entire show.

Clip 6 - Bread

To the workhouse – work, play and time

J – On the one hand, we’ve described the research as a time and space of play, but

on the other hand, we both know that this was a space in which you felt

vulnerable, both in terms of the creative structures you set up to play in but

also in terms of other pressures that infiltrated the rehearsal room. For

example, the pressure not to waste time, to come up with a high quality

performance, to meet the deadlines I was introducing. There were also

pressures coming from the university environment, around access to space.

This reflects my overall experience of leading the research project – the

research grant offered time and space away from teaching and administrative

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commitments, but during the research I was juggling just as many competing

demands and disruptions of concentration as in my everyday life as a

university teacher and researcher.

I am conscious that freelance artists work project by project, often with high

levels of self-exploitation and diminished working conditions, and I am

conscious that these things were also a factor in our collaboration. I am a full-

time well-paid university employee with a permanent contract and good

pension. You work freelance for insecure wages with a small teacher’s

pension to come, surviving in a highly competitive arts funding environment.

You’ve told me that this can mean that there are some months of the year

where you have no income, and that you have never earned enough to pay tax

at more than the lowest rate. There are inevitable questions about inequality

and exploitation here, not least the potential exploitation of your family history

in our research. How can we talk about this?

One of the things I was concerned about was paying you properly for your

work, and we carefully calculated the fee when putting together the grant

application. However, I became aware that you were using the fee, paid in

instalments, to eke out more time in the space to work, stretching out the

resource. You worked the budget in the manner of a manager of a household

economy who is used to making a lot from a little, to the extent that you

worked far more hours than you were paid a good rate for.

Perhaps start by telling me how you came to set up the rehearsal space as a

workhouse, framing the researcher as workhouse visitor, and audience as

visitor or inmate?

C - It happened out of fear and terror at the enormity of the job I had to do. I

remember walking to the university with my bags and thinking ‘oh my god

I’ve got to do this thing, and how am I going to do it?’ I was working on my

own rather than with a director, dramaturg, designer. I’d got nobody and it felt

like I was on my way to the workhouse - ‘I’ve got to go to the house, the

workhouse, I'm going to be working, I've got to work for my bread’ - I’ve got

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to prove myself. I put myself in the position, as much as I could, of someone

entering a workhouse and I did feel, at times, completely alone. I’ve never

been destitute, so I was trying to find the performance equivalent of that. Also,

at my age, having not done that kind of thing for a long time, thinking, would I

be able to do it again?

The idea of time being rationed like a commodity like money is really

important – time is bread is money and the timescales on work are

unreasonable and counterproductive often. This piece was very different from

a normal Arts Council funded production because I took longer to make it.

There were milestones but you were good at managing those without them

feeling like they were outputs. It would be ‘by this time shall we do this?’ Or,

‘shall I come in then?’ To be honest, I thought ‘here’s an opportunity for me

that I’ve felt bereft of all my creative life’.

J - What kind of opportunity? Relating to time?

C - Time, a room to work in, to be on it everyday, big chunks of time in the

rehearsal room to do the work. You need that as a performance-maker, that

regular training, that regular practice. I’ve argued for it throughout my career,

and it is a source of real difficulty that you get to a point physically, where

you’re doing work, where you have the space to work in, you are keeping fit

physically, imaginatively and intellectually - things that are incredibly

important for a body-based performer - and you then have to give it up after a

three or four week funded period of making, which is the norm here in the

UK. A performance-maker is more like a dancer. You’ve got to keep it going

or you can’t do it. You have to have a discipline of going into the room,

getting to a certain state, where you are ready, your voice is ready, your body

is ready and you are psychologically ready to do the work that you’ve come to

do. And that takes a lot of time. You need time!

J - This is really important.

C - Energy, power, you need the time, the room, the freedom to just do. And you

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need permission to do. And it’s not good enough that it is only the dancers and

visual artists who get studio time, because it’s absolutely crucial for drama.

You’ve got to have the time, space and the facility to do the training. The old

schools, Grotowski’s laboratory and 1960s, early 1970s practitioners created

the conditions to do that work. For body-based devised work, you know, it

isn’t about sitting around a table, it’s about being in a warm room, with a good

floor, a sound source and no interruptions apart from occasional visits from

someone who will help you out.

J – This research happened under time constraints to some extent though?

C – Yes, of course, but in those funded situations in the arts you’ve usually had to

provide your marketing materials way before you’ve done the piece. Your

funding application outlines what you are going to do, who you are going to

do it with and for, and there are massive amounts of conditions, judgments and

assessments attached. It’s a very competitive environment to work in.

Working on The House didn’t feel like that.

J - In many ways, I also need that daily practice of thinking, reflecting, reading,

hands on work with groups, archives, materials, as a researcher. I tried to some

extent to switch off the clock when I came in to see you and, as I’ve said, I

was keen to protect this part of the research from the pressures of delivery I

felt with other parts. I had created ‘time out’ for research by raising money,

but in responding to the criteria for the Arts and Humanities Research

Fellowship scheme, I had come up with a research project where holding onto

time for the daily practice of scholarship became challenging. The scheme

asks applicants to demonstrate the direct and indirect social and economic

impact of research. It also asks applicants to show how their research proposal

develops researchers as leaders – shaping research agendas, stimulating

creativity and innovation, inspiring other researchers, engaging broader

publics. All fine, perhaps, but taken together these criteria and my own innate

drive to ‘sing for my supper’, to draw on your phrase, led to a period of

research that felt weighted towards my development as a research manager,

rather than as a researcher, which was frustrating to say the least.

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C - Arts funders make similar demands and that’s why I’ve said ‘fuck off I’ll do it

my way’. There is an overly coercive effort to turn creative young artists and

companies into managers and professionalised systems. It leads artists away

from the rehearsal room and into the boardroom.

J - You mention the importance of space as well as time for research. There was a

struggle to get you access to space in the university for the kind of studio

practice you describe, and it’s a frustration shared by many students who want

to create work outside of the limits of formal curriculum time. At our

university, space is managed in accordance with an economic cost model, with

use of space carefully monitored via systems that are time-consuming to

navigate, making access very difficult. There is also an effort to ‘income-

generate’ - to market space for use by conferences and other events. This

creates a powerful sense that space does not belong to those responsible for

delivering and engaging with the core teaching and research mission of the

university. It also creates a sense of scarcity which is concerning, not least

because it is completely made up! Our sense that space was a scarce

commodity during the research was the outcome of a series of decisions about

resource distribution that are value-based, and to which there are clear

alternatives.

C - We got round the space issues, and I have learnt that I don’t have to be

precious about that. I reminded myself how lucky I was and I’ve learnt I can

do it any which way. I got around it.

J - You got around it because you were willing to work successive weekends, and

this was less than ideal, especially in terms of working hours and conditions of

employment. You got around it because we ‘creatively’ interpreted University

of Manchester health and safety guidance that advises that people do not work

on their own in the studio, especially out of working hours. Although we

should point out that there was a porter in the building and that you weren’t

totally on your own.

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C - If we had adhered to those guidelines, we’d have been up the creek without a

paddle.

J - So, we can work together in a great collaboration where we have mutual

respect for each others’ knowledge and expertise but only if we ignore the

need to care for each other as collaborators, and the normal rights that accrue

when employed in a place of work?

C But I wasn’t employed. I was a freelancer so I make my own rules. It’s a

choice that I made, to be without those rights in order to be free.

J You and I are also not in the same position economically. How do you make

sense of that?

C It’s my choice. I chose to leave teaching in the late 1980s because I didn’t like

the rules that they were introducing. I thought, this is going to drive me mad

because I just want to teach drama, and I can see from the way they are re-

prioritising the curriculum that I won’t have a meaningful job soon anyway. I

was a creative teacher with a frustrated desire to make and perform work, and

when I decided to go part-time, I carefully managed that. Of course artists

could sign on – access welfare benefits - at the time. I’ve been good at

fundraising over the years. What I’ve neglected to do is pay myself properly.

I’ve made mistakes when I’ve contracted people and I’m not good at business

in that sense and I don’t like being managed by people. I don’t like

committees telling me what to do. I’m quite bloody-minded. I’ve had ups and

downs but I never get destitute because I’ll always go and do a job, you know,

I work, I’ll always work. I suppose I have got used to the temporary. I have

always made work in temporary spaces. I started out teaching on a temporary

contract in the 1980s, I worked as a movement tutor on a zero hours contract

in the 2010s, I’ve squatted in a church hall, a university and a museum. I have

never had a performing house to call home. I am used to it. It’s what happens

when you take the right to work without fighting for the rights of the worker

and you pursue project over capital and pleasing yourself over pleasing the

institution.

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J - You managed this project in a way that resisted the colonisation of time and

space by an economic agenda – or any other unwelcome agenda – so as to

make the work you wanted to make. But this led to a kind of impoverishment

in terms of rates of pay for hours worked. How do you think about this?

C - I have learned to accept my lot and do my best in a solo sort of way. I do make

projects for people if I am invited and I think that is where I’m happy,

matching my creative ideas with someone else’s. They tend to be projects

other people have commissioned now. It’s hard these days to get your own

idea funded. I have given up dreaming up my own projects, seeking the

funding, doing all the fundraising, planning, contracting and all the stuff which

has so often led me to think ‘I am going to be pushing up the daisies before I

realise this project!’ My current approach to creativity makes me happier

because it puts the work first rather than the administration of it.

There’s common ground in our desire for creative endeavours and irritation

with systems, and I got lucky on this project because you did all the

institutional shit. You got the shit job, so you deserve a bigger dinner, I guess?

J - Do you ever want to give in and get a ‘proper job’?

C - I don’t think I’d be any good at that, I don’t think I’d like it. I make sacrifices

by doing it this way, but I wouldn’t choose to be fully employed. I have

thought about it but if I did that I couldn’t go into this other carefree and

careless arena. I see that I have created my own austerity over time and I

understand how keeping yourself on a low income is driven by forces outside

of yourself. You end up making working life almost the same as your leisure

life. Is it worth it? There was a moment when I went back to the ‘proper job’

of teaching but the creative consequences were painful. I’d rather be thinking

and doing creatively than taking loads of bank holidays just because someone

says I have to.

J – One of the things that keeps me wading through ‘institutional shit’ is that I am

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doing this shoulder to shoulder with brilliant students, artists and colleagues

inside my own institution as well as in other academic institutions. How do

you keep feeding yourself if you are outside of that collective framework that

an institution or a discipline at its best can bring?

C - I have those moments, like the ones we share. There are networks and people

whom I’ve worked with before. I have this lovely space and time in my

current residency at Heron Corn Mill in Beetham in Cumbria. Sustenance

doesn’t come from the conventional arts world or directly from the funders’

coffers. It comes indirectly, by me learning to sit with and hold faith in the

idea of slowly developing something over time rather than grabbing something

off the shelf. I am now comfortable with seeking out like-minded people

rather than thinking that a three-week run in London is the be all and end all.

J - Because of the way you work, you asked for as much time as possible in the

space, and disregarded any realistic costing of your time. I worried over this

quite a bit.

C – I wasn’t worried because I had a couple of other small jobs that meant I would

be all right financially. And also, the fee to me felt like a lot of money, in

terms of making a piece. I had the security of a fee that was more than I’ve

ever had for a project for my own salary. This project enabled me to sort

myself out financially first, which I did, and then I could luxuriate in the time

this would give me.

J – What specifically did it enable you to do?

C – It meant that I could spend time doing the family history research - I might

have done that before but not for that amount of time. I didn’t have to make

anything till a certain time, and so I could let the ideas flow. It gave me an

opportunity to put into practice sources of inspiration from recent training with

Margaret Pikes on my voice for example, and with Sandra Reeve on

movement work. So this was about being given a chance to sit back and just

‘oh, let’s try this out’. But you have to remember that the final outcome as far

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as it went might not go anywhere else afterwards - that’s the worst part of it.

Now the funded part of the research is over, what happens to the performance?

Clip 7 - Reflections on a research trip

Wheeling out the pauper chorus

J – What was the value of this research? Systems of evaluation inside universities

tend to be numerical - every piece of research I do gets graded on an annual

basis, and researchers that do not get the right grades are offered ‘mentoring’!

My sense is that this ‘perform or else’ culture is embedded in the same

economic dogmas that we examined in our research. Those in which people

who do not ‘work’, are processed as productive human-beings ‘in the making’

and subjected to a regime that aims to improve their performance. This dogma

can lead to diminished time and space for planning, thinking, reflecting,

imagining and dreaming – time and space for unproductive work – that we’ve

stated are important for good research.

The House took as its central motif the pauper concert. The audience were cast

as either visitors or inmates, and both were engaged in a process of witnessing

the ‘programme of improvement’ in the workhouse whereby paupers perform

their achievement of steps towards independence. Can you describe how this

motif in the performance developed?

Clip 8 – Jobseeker

C – When I researched contemporary job centres I discovered ‘the steps’. If you

apply for benefits now there are so many hoops you have to jump through, and

performing badly at any stage means the threat of having your benefits

removed, which is terrifying if you are relying on them. There were also my

own feelings about jumping through hoops for the Arts Council, trying to

prove myself. Also it was about the pecking order you get in care systems, the

idea of the top dog and all those levels, level one, level two, level three, in

education. It is within the star system operated by theatre reviewers in

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newspapers. It also comes from A B C D E, good, not so good, average, poor.

The three levels of the programme that the paupers had to complete involved

tasks with cling-film. The ravelling, unravelling and recycling of the cling-

film evoked oakum picking in the Victorian workhouse, and connected these

with the ‘shit jobs’ of today. All those things you have to do to make the mark,

which cause people to have nervous breakdowns because it’s just too much.

That superficial attitude of care that is actually very damaging. That idea of

‘helping’ people to achieve, and then demonstrating the success of your ‘help’

by wheeling out successful cases. All those areas in life where you have to be

grateful for what you’ve been given.

J – Your work here evokes my experience of researching in applied and social

theatre, which we talked about quite a bit, where work with vulnerable groups

can sometimes lead to a performance outcome for funders and policy-makers

that appears to evidence ‘progression’ - successful achievement of personal

development aims of participants or socio-economic aims of funders. But,

there is a sense that the evidencing we are going through now also reflects that

motif. We are singing for our supper again, and in doing so we risk

reproducing hierarchies and inequalities that we reacted against during the

research. So for example, was the performance ‘level one’, conference paper

‘level two’, and publication ‘level three’? Are we putting everything into a

pecking order?

C – Well yes, we are, and at the bottom of the pecking order is the performance,

because it doesn’t get performed again unless I find a way of doing that, and

of proving that it’s worthy enough. I’m always surprised how much

performance is created and consumed by universities. With the plethora of

practice-based research it feels like anybody does it these days and can pass it

off as anything. There is so much going on that important things get lost – and

I’m bound to say this aren’t I - but The House was special and it has to have a

chance to say, ‘I’m here’, not just through the written word, but on its own

terms. We don’t have more paid time to devote to it, so how do we assert its

significance? We are trying to do that here by publishing the script and other

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documentation, but why isn’t the performance enough? The research in its best

form exists as live action.

J – This reminds me of the figure of the Data Protector/Accountant in The House.

She emerged from your exploration of the pressure to perform value inside a

system that is squeezing the life out of you. The figure of the Data

Protector/Accountant echoes my experiences of trying to support social theatre

practice in various ways as an evaluator by providing ‘evidence’ of impact,

performing value in a way that resonates with Data Protectors/Accountants,

but that also tries to present a more complex, diverse, critical and challenging

view of the value of theatre practice. The Data Protector/Accountant, for me,

also emerged from between the lines of the incredibly precise and detailed

bureaucratic documents that were produced as part of the administration of the

New Poor Law of 1834, which determined every last detail of life in the

workhouse by means of ledgers, committees, minutes, tables, budgets,

including the weighing out of amounts of food. Can you tell me more about

her?

C - She was also inspired by the archivists I encountered during the research.

They are part of a bureaucratic army that collates, classifies, preserves and

recycles. They are threatened now because of cuts to public funding so they

are charging for their services. Because family history is big business as

people search for a sense of security and identity, this formerly free service is

very lucrative. And so here personal and public life become data, which then

becomes pounds, shillings and pence. In the workhouse the Master kept the

accounts, which were checked by local authorities and fees were payable for

certain services offered by professionals such as doctors. This system of

accounting so loved by the Victorians caught my imagination. The Data

Protectors/Accountants are the black and white people – magpies – they get

stuff from people, parcel it up and act as if it belongs to them. I encountered an

example of this when seeking my mum’s adoption information. They are

lovely and helpful, occasionally careless, and they ensure that every penny

gets added to the photocopying bill that accrues from the discovery of your

own history. They enforce rules on access to data, even if it’s your own story.

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So, the Data Protector/Accountant comes in place of the absent Master. A

business opportunity filled by an administratively constipated quango that

keeps a check on what we are all doing, how we are all doing it, and whether

it’s up to the standard.

Clip 9 – Data Protector/Accountant

J – How does the process of capturing and reflecting on the value of The House as

a piece of research compare to this? The written outcome perhaps does not

fully reflect the performance itself, as you say. But I’m also struck that our

written outcomes to date are dialogic in format. Is there a sense here that we

are trying to carry on the ‘gossip’ of the performance research itself?

C – It is gossiping and it is going out there and that’s great and you hope that in

the gossip something will happen. But we are also subjecting the performance

to ‘the steps’ when we write about it.

J – I’ve got to try and make sure it reaches the top step, to satisfy my own Data

Protectors/Accountants! So, you’re saying what practice-based researchers

often say which is that the practice loses its voice as part of the process of

validating research.

C – From your point of view this published outcome is good because it’s the

medium you work in, but to me it feels like the performance is at the mercy of

the Data Protector/Accountant here.

J - So, what we write about does not capture the layers of meaning in the

performance better – more powerfully, more effectively, emotionally and

critically - than the performance itself.

C - Yes, and this will not be experienced if the performance never sees the light of

day again.

J - We are engaged in a process of ‘complementary writing’ as Robin Nelson

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calls it – complementary, not compensatory (Nelson 2015). I could have

created a series of articles about The House, I suppose. But for me, our

dialogues and the reflections of others on the work capture what the

performance was doing really vividly, although this mode of presentation

perhaps requires more time and labour from the reader.

I sound quite confident about how performance related to the research now but

throughout the process I did have this nagging feeling of, ‘what is Carran

doing? What does it mean? What are we finding out?’ Also, ‘is it good

research?’

C - I think this not knowing is really important because it is the exact state one

needs to be in to create work. It is exactly what I require from students when

teaching devising, for example. Makers of any kind will be able to relate to

this idea.

J - So, what did we find out about the relationships between theatre, performance

and poverty?

C - Well, for me, all those different characters delineated some of the problems

there are with the system. Not that the characters themselves or the people

themselves are problems, but I discovered, through them, about the idea of

‘the book’, and you know, that ‘this has to balance with that’. I learnt about

not being a victim, I learnt about permission to be angry, I learnt from the

direction that some of the broader research was taking about being in

common, having things in common. Some things I think I knew before, but the

process helped to articulate it, or helped me think about it.

J - The idea of the common became very important – the idea that contemporary

forms of poverty - those forms of poverty that emerged with industrial society

and extend into the post-industrial period - are created by enclosures of the

‘common’. That is, by enclosures of time, space, work, resource, imagination,

identity, relationship, bodies, practices. Performance is a cultural practice that

plays a part in how those mechanisms of enclosure might be enforced, but

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perhaps also opened up (see Hughes 2017).

I agree that the answer to the question ‘what did we find out?’ is in the range

of figures that appear in The House in response to the demand to perform in

the pauper concert. Those are our research findings.

Only love can break your heart – dreaming of an ideal practice-research practice

J - Early in The House, the Matron contributes her own short ‘turn’ in the pauper

concert that starts with her reading from ‘the book’, very properly, and then

collapses into an ecstatic song about a more equitable world. If we allowed

ourselves to sing ecstatically, what would we dream up to better support

practice-based research in universities?

Clip 10: Matron’s ecstatic song

C – All the artists will flock to the universities if they think they can make a piece

of work in this way. I was really lucky to have the job you gave me to do.

Researchers who want to investigate something through the mode of

performance are a gift to the artist who has an empathy with a research

environment.

J - Universities could open up and become places where collaborations can

happen, feeding student work as well as staff research. We need to find ways

of including a more diverse set of practitioners in research. I wonder whether

the way practice-based research has developed inside universities has created

unhelpful barriers between researchers inside and those working outside

universities. At present there is a risk that the researcher-practitioners in a

position to conceive research projects are limited to those who have

successfully navigated a research degree. This can make research inaccessible

to research-minded professionals and creates an environment where the kinds

of questions being explored become evermore limited and paradigmatic. My

suspicion is that more frequent collaborations between industry professionals,

researchers and teachers, would lead to more exciting, diverse and wide-

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ranging research enquiries. I would like universities to become a hub for

anyone interested in the relationship between making theatre and discovering

something through theatre, from a school drama pupil to an experienced

theatre director. And I would include amateurs and community experts as well

as professionals here – all knowledge-makers, in different kinds of ways. The

current contexts of academic research also create unhelpful distinctions

between teachers and researchers, technical and theory-led research, research

activity and socially-engaged, impact-driven activity. The research commons

that we are dreaming up here would allow time and space for coexistence,

equitability and constant exchange across these distinct domains.

C – I suppose there’s something in the freedom of not being assessed, the artist’s

right to fail, that would be really important. But I think you’ve got to be

careful who you pick to play with, because there could be a real problem with

artists getting on a new kind of funding bandwagon. There’s also something

that mid and late career artists can offer that new and emerging practitioners

can’t, I think, or is that just another pecking order? Everyone wants security,

but the arts economy, like other economies, is selective, and promotes anxiety

and competition. There are big players with institutional clout and there are

little players with their caps in their hands scavenging about the streets trying

to get something for nothing. Literally, artists selling themselves short.

J – So, there is a need to negotiate collaborations carefully, guarding against the

emergence of new pecking orders …

C – One part of our research-teaching utopia might be mentoring students on their

own projects, helping them get to the next stage. The other part of the utopia

would be for the performer to have a working environment that is more like

the impossible dream of European processes or Asian processes – a regular

studio practice.

Should the academy always be the ‘host’? What about the researcher being

invited into the artist’s workplace by an artist who is looking for someone with

the ability to interrogate a theme, feeling, hunch?

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Academics and artists should be paid the same for the job – but both would

need a track record of research in their own practice, an interest in

disseminating practice, an interest in teaching and learning. The academic

must have a genuine curiosity about performance, some knowledge of the

artist and a sense of not-knowing at the outset. The artist might not have a

‘question’ but might have an ‘itch’. The artist gets a budget. The academic

gets a budget. A third person who is training up as an artist-researcher comes

in as a research assistant. All areas need to be covered: accounting, well-being,

championing, doing creative actions, doing thinking actions, feeling deeply

about stuff, not being wasteful when it’s inappropriate, but not being so stingy

that you can’t move.

The academic gets experience working in a different framework as well as a

legacy through publication – articles written on their own in their own

language and writings in collaboration. This happens via a separate output

framework with time, space and money allocated. The artist gets a legacy

through performances.

I find I can only really answer this poetically.

If we are earning our bread then we need to understand the process that goes

into making the ingredients for the bread. We find that this is a collaborative

process that requires grain, machinery, energy and people. Some bread is less

good for you than others. Some bread is shit because the people who are

making it are trying to get more out of less so they put more air into it. The

best bread is hand-baked with non-processed yeast. It tends to be more

expensive. But if we understand that we only want to eat bread to do our work

and need time to digest it while we are not working, the best bread does not

seem so expensive.

Chewing on the bread and talking to yourself on a ‘working lunch break’ is a

celebration of time-off that allows for reflection, tears, laughter, gossip and

creativity – an output. It wouldn’t go down well with the trade union but it sits

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very comfortably in the world of reading, thinking and acting out.

You have something that I want and I have something that you want.

On leisure days we want to swap and exchange what we know. So we

exchange it in a kind of marketplace without money. Some people are dancing

under the elm trees, some people are talking under the stars, and some people

are reading by the lily pond.

Lurking in the temporary toilets is someone with a big idea who thinks ‘I

could make something just for me out of this leisure time swapping time’. I

am going to exploit those people who are doing it and sell their wares to those

who don’t know about it yet, and then ask the leisure swappers to pay £5 for a

sneaky look.

It is no coincidence that we journey to the world of fairy tale to navigate this

place called utopia. The fairy tale in its original form, before it was hijacked

by Walt Disney, was the place of gossip and oral storytelling. The woman’s

place, as I have read: a place where working spinners gathered, sharing yarns.

The fairy tale exists in the land of the imagination, the land of self-

determination, the land of the once upon a time and the ‘what if?’, the land of

the dream of plenty. The time before the enclosures, the time before the rules

came and those with the most power and the most money decided write off

and write out the little people.

References

Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New

York: Zone Books.

Hughes, Jenny. 2017. ‘Notes on a theatre commons: Common Wealth Theatre’s The

Deal Versus the People’ RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance,

22(1): forthcoming.

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Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1996. ‘Immaterial Labour’. In Radical thought in Italy: A

potential politics, ed. by P. Virno & M. Hardt, 133-147. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Kunst, Bojana. 2015. Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism. Hants: Zero

Books.

Nelson, Robin. 2013 Practice as research in the arts: Principles, protocols,

pedagogies and resistances. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London:

Bloomsbury.

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