Performance Research and the Epistemological Fracture

Abstract

The tendency to integrate artistic production into the body of academic research, although in different ways and with variable pertinence, has grown considerably. This has happened, in many cases, due to circumstantial factors conditioned by the “new” condition of artists as university teachers. The artists/researchers now devote themselves to studying their own artistic work, that is: how they prepare themselves (at musical, technical and/or psychological level), how they rehearse, how they produce sense, how they create their emotional narratives, how they perform them, or how they are perceived and/or appreciated by the audiences. In this way, these studies contribute to the understanding of the creative processes and of the performance ritual and are classified within the framework of a sub discipline of musicology called “Performance Studies”. Some artists/researchers, however, when focusing on the inextricable aspects of the esthetic experience –poiesis, aesthesis, catharsis- assume a research in which the performance practice is an essential component both of the process and of the result of the research. This new paradigm, which we can denominate “Performance Research”, thus results from a fracture of the epistemological model of the “Performance Studies” and has great affinity with the equally emerging area of Artistic Research, obliging us to rethink such concepts as those of “knowledge”, “research” and “validation”. Within this theoretical framework, the notion of embodied meaning becomes crucial.