Working on the Middle Ground: A Case Study of Institutional Inter-Action about Practice as Research

Abstract

Along with much writing alongside (my preposition of choice) practice as research [PaR], I have tended to the extremes: either the dizzying heights of theorizing,¹ or the nitty-gritty self-reflexive explicating of particular practices, especially my own with Bodies in Flight.² This verticality of writing, as it were from the two ends of the scale — macro—micro — inevitably leaps over the middle. This is odd given the heightened significance of the necessary pragmatics of how one actually gets to the point of making a work, of becoming a practitioner-researcher. So, at the risk of being mundane, I want to write a short story, or rather — let others now involved in the same story speak it on all our behalves, about the middle ground of PaR: the horizontal plane or “ground level”³ of funding and networks, places and persons, opportunities and risks. Without theorizing too much, I want to make an account of the de-Certeaudian tactics of the non-teleological, Deleuzian rhizomatic assemblage that has come to happen between the University of Bristol’s Department of Drama: theatre, film, television, and Arnolfini: the one being the first university drama department in the UK [established 1947] up on the hill and the other being a leading contemporary visual and performing arts venue [established 1961] down by the harborside of this small West-Country city.⁴