Qualitative Inquiry

Beyond “an Aesthetic of Objectivity”: 16(10) 883­–893

© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1077800410383119

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Dani Snyder-Young1

Abstract
This article is about the ways in which a dominant “aesthetic of objectivity” (Denzin, 2003, p. 73) pervades much
contemporary performance ethnography and scholarly performance text, subverting many scholars’ stated desires to use
aesthetic forms to critique hegemonic discourses and democratize scholarship. First, I will define the dominant “aesthetic
of objectivity” as it applies to performance ethnography and performance texts and trace its origins to mainstream
documentary theatre performances. I will then examine how these conventions play out in an example of an explicitly
scholarly performance project, and argue the significance of liveness in the scholarly performance act. Finally, I will offer
a few examples of arts-based research performance projects operating in alternate aesthetic paradigms rupturing the
“aesthetic of objectivity” and offer recommendations and further questions for arts-based researchers and scholars
interested in experimenting with performance forms.

Keywords
Performance ethnography, performance text, liveness, aesthetics

This article is about the ways in which a dominant “aes-
thetic of objectivity” (Denzin, 2003, p. 73) pervades much
contemporary performance ethnography and scholarly per-
formance text, subverting many scholars’ stated desires to
use aesthetic forms to critique hegemonic discourses and
democratize scholarship. First, I will define the dominant
“aesthetic of objectivity” as it applies to performance eth-
nography and performance texts and trace its origins to
mainstream documentary theatre performances. I will then
examine how these conventions play out in an example of
an explicitly scholarly performance project and argue the
significance of liveness in the scholarly performance act.
Finally, I will offer a few examples of arts-based research
performance projects operating in alternate aesthetic para-
digms rupturing the “aesthetic of objectivity” and offer
recommendations and further questions for arts-based
researchers and scholars interested in experimenting with
performance forms.
Prologue: A Sampler of
Performance Aesthetics
This sampler provides three examples of dominant aesthetic
conventions from qualitative research-based performances.
Notice the ways research participants are represented or
invoked, space is used, and relationships are built between
performer and audience:
Four male actors in neutral base costumes pose in
frozen images, each isolated in his own acting area.
Each adds a prop or a costume piece—a phone, a
pair of glasses, a hat—to designate shifts from char-
acter to character. Their texts have been directly
transcribed from interviews, complete with ums,
likes, and yeahs. Actors sometimes speak to each
other, when embodying characters interviewed in
pairs, but mostly, they speak directly to the audience.
(Salvatore, 2009)
Or
Ten teenage performers in street clothes stand with
their backs to the audience in a brightly lit classroom.
A row of folding chairs faces this audience, who sit at
student desks. One by one, each performer comes for-
ward to use the chairs as a bench, a bed, the edge of a
subway platform. Each speaks directly to the audi-
ence. Their monologues have been compiled from the
1
Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington
Corresponding Author:
Dani Snyder-Young, School of Theatre Arts, Illinois Wesleyan University,
Bloomington, IL 61701
Email: dsnyder@iwu.edu
884 Qualitative Inquiry 16(10)
texts of multiple interview transcripts into composite
characters. (WLTD Seniors, 2009)
Or
A single performer wearing a jacket and tie sits
behind a desk in a brightly lit conference room. He
speaks directly to his audience, punctuating his text
with classical music he plays from a boom box. He
mostly plays himself but occasionally transforms his
stance to evoke another character. His text is autoeth-
nographic and recounts his own experiences; the
words of other characters are compiled from his
memory. (Vanover, 2006)
Barone and Eisner (2006) write, “Arts-based research is
defined by the presence of certain aesthetic qualities or
design elements that infuse the inquiry process and the
research ‘text’” (p. 95). Arts-based researchers agree their
work has aesthetic qualities, but not so much attention has
been paid to ways in which arts-based research can conform
to dominant aesthetic paradigms.
This article is about the ways in which a dominant “aes-
thetic of objectivity” (Denzin, 2003, p. 73) pervades much
contemporary performance ethnography and scholarly per-
formance text, subverting many scholars’ stated desires to
use aesthetic forms to critique hegemonic discourses and
democratize scholarship. Many arts-based researchers write
of performance’s radical potential for transforming both the
academy (Conquergood, 1991; Park-Fuller, 2003; Pelias,
1999; Spry, 2001) and the larger world (Alexander, 2005b;
Denzin, 2006; Dolan, 2005, Olomo, 2006, Park-Fuller, 2003;
Soyini Madison, 2006b). This article argues that the domi-
nant aesthetic conventions frequently used in scholarly
performance-based work can operate to reinforce the very
positivistic paradigms we aim to rupture, and that, as a field,
we must look “beyond” these conventions, finding project
and audience-specific aesthetic forms to actualize our desires
for progressive and radical performance.
Much has been written on the problems of representation
in ethnographic research (Atkinson, 1992; Denzin & Lincoln,
2005; Ely et al., 1997; Park-Fuller, 2003; Pelias, 1999;
Pollock, 2006; Spry, 2001). Many arts-based researchers
aim to rupture a positivistic paradigm in which “experts”
make privileged narratives appear natural and impenetrable
(Alexander, 2005b; Denzin, 2003; Saldaña, 2005). Carl
Bagley (2008) posits arts-based research presentations:
. . . seek to displace/disrupt the dominant mono-logical,
mono-vocal narrative and analytical voice frequently
embodied in traditional ethnographic print-based texts.
The data’s evocation through artistic (re)presentation
propagates a discernment of multiple meanings, inter-
pretations and voices, which evocatively engage the
reader/viewer in recognition of lived diversity and
complexity. (pp. 55-56)
Our aims, as arts-based researchers, are often to rupture a
dominant research paradigm privileging works in which a
scholar, like me, writes a text-based article, like this one,
making an argument for a limited audience of other scholars.
Arts-based researchers can use aesthetic modes to open up
data and analysis for wider audiences, to use art-making as a
method of inquiry and analytical tool, and to make transparent
their analytical process (Alexander, 2005b; Barone & Eisner,
2006; Conquergood, 1991; Cho & Trent, 2009; Denzin, 2003,
2006; Olomo, 2006; Park-Fuller, 2003; Pelias, 1999; Pollock,
2006; Saldaña, 2005; Spry, 2001; Soyini Madison, 1998).
First, I will define the dominant “aesthetic of objectivity”
as it applies to performance ethnography and performance
texts and trace its origins to mainstream documentary theatre
performances. I will then examine how these conventions
play out in an example of an explicitly scholarly perfor-
mance project and argue the significance of liveness in the
scholarly performance act. Next, I will offer a few exam-
ples of arts-based research performance projects operating
in alternate aesthetic paradigms rupturing the “aesthetic of
objectivity” and offer recommendations and further ques-
tions for arts-based researchers and scholars interested in
experimenting with performance forms. I am a theatre artist
and scholar. As a result, I focus in this article on perfor-
mance ethnography and performance texts.
“An Aesthetic of Objectivity”
Denzin (2003) describes “an aesthetic of objectivity” (p. 73)
used in cinematic and televised representations of interviews.
He cites filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s (1991) analysis of
elements central to this aesthetic:
•• The relentless pursuit of naturalism, which
requires a connection between the moving image
and the spoken word
•• Authenticity—the use of people who appear to be
real, and locating these people in “real” situations
•• The filmmaker/interviewer presented as an observer,
not as a person who creates what is seen, heard,
and read
•• The capture only of events unaffected by the record-
ing eye
•• The capture of objective reality
•• The dramatization of truth
•• The presentation of actual facts in a credible way,
with people telling them (as cited in Denzin,
2003, p. 74).
This “documentary interview style” (Denzin, 2003, p. 74)
has become the norm in many scholarly performance
Snyder-Young 885
projects. It became popular in the 1990s, with the mainstream
success of interview-based theatre pieces like Anna Deavere
Smith’s (1993, 1994) Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los
Angeles, 1992, Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre
Project’s (2001) The Laramie Project, and Eve Ensler’s
(2001) The Vagina Monologues. These theatre pieces were
originally created and performed by professional theatre
artists for mainstream theatre audiences.1 All heavily, if not
exclusively, use the aesthetic convention of the interview—
actors perform the words of actual interview participants,
often directly addressing the audience as if the audience were
the interviewer-as-observer. Many of these performances
intentionally rely heavily on monologue form, using extended
sections of interview texts representing the richness and
complexity of participants’ language and lived experience.
This style of interview-based performance mirrors Trinh
T. Minh-ha’s (1991) “aesthetic of objectivity.” Characters
are presented speaking in a naturalistic manner to an audi-
ence as if that audience were physically present in a live
interview. Interview participants are real people, represented
with every “um,” “yeah,” “like,” and overextended pause as
a way of highlighting their authenticity and catching, as
D. Soyini Madison (1998) puts it, “the depth inherent in the
indigenous performance” (p. 323) of live speech. The inter-
viewer, when represented onstage (as in The Laramie
Project), is presented as an observer who may comment on
but does not alter the testimony of the interviewee, who is
the principal character. In some performances (as in the
work of Anna Deavere Smith), the interviewer is the solo
actor whose body physically transforms to represent each
interview participant. This interviewer is not represented as
herself, but as a sequence of characters, and her role in con-
structing each interview event is not emphasized. Many
performance texts are edited to a comfortably watchable
length of 90 to 120 min, perhaps to be performed with an
intermission. Artists certainly select what material to include
and how to assemble it, but this process is not often empha-
sized in performance. In all, these mainstream performances
create a sense that objective reality has been captured, truth
is dramatized onstage, and facts are presented credibly.
I do not mean to intimate that these mainstream perfor-
mances did not meet Barone and Eisner’s (2006) criteria
for evaluating arts-based research. Their success, in many
ways, came from their ability to reveal what had not been
noticed, raise questions, focus attention for a prolonged
period, and make connections to larger social phenomena
(p. 102).
Jill Dolan (2005) considers both Smith and the Tectonic
Theatre Project’s performances to be “utopian,” offering
transcendent moments in which “social discourse articu-
lates the possible, rather than the insurmountable obstacles
to human potential” (p. 2). There are many reasons these
pieces have been so lauded and their aesthetics so imitated.
Kamran Afany (2009) highlights the ambiguity of Smith’s
multicharacter performance, of her physical embodiment of
characters of different races, ethnic backgrounds, genders,
and class positioning in rapid succession. Her virtuosity as
an actress—a combination of talent, training, and meticu-
lous attention to detail—enables her to embody and invoke
these characters to create polyvocal solo performances. Her
work, like that of Tectonic Theatre Project, “creates a con-
versation among people who might not otherwise have
spoken to each other” (Dolan, 2005, p. 113). Both Smith
and Tectonic Theatre Project work with professional direc-
tors and designers and teams of dramaturgs to craft their
performances, and the professionalism and artistic quality
of their work cannot be ignored when discussing their suc-
cess. And in New York City in the 1990s, these works
appeared in stark aesthetic contrast to a mainstream theatri-
cal landscape dominated by mega-musicals and revivals of
classic plays. Their aesthetic simplicity and immediate con-
nection to real-world events seemed a breath of fresh air in
a sea of escapist entertainment. These mainstream theatre
successes established a dominant aesthetic to which perfor-
mance ethnography and scholarly performance text could
conform.
Scholarly Performances
The performance text is no longer the province of profes-
sional artists alone. We scholars have gotten in on the act
(Alexander, 2005a; Cho & Trent, 2009; Conquergood, 1991;
Denzin, 2006, Goffman, 1959; Turner 1982, 1986). Perfor-
mativity (Butler, 1988), performance metaphors (Dolan,
2001), and performance theory (Alexander, 2005a) pervade a
wide variety of disciplines.
Norman Denzin’s (2007) performance text Sacagawea’s
nickname, or the Sacagawea problem, is one example of a
published scholarly performance text.2 In its published
form, it is unclear if it has ever been performed for a live
audience, and if so, who that live audience might have been.
It appears in written form in a scholarly journal as an alter-
native to a traditional article. Denzin critiques the cultural
politics surrounding the intertwining roles of gender and
race in the mythic American West by focusing on the figure
of Sacagawea, the Native American woman who acted as a
guide for Louis and Clark on their westward journey. I cite
an extended excerpt from the beginning of this play:
VOICE 2: (off stage): An Aside:
If the woman named Sacagawea had not appeared in
front of Lewis and Clark in November of 1804, she
would have to have been invented. The Corps needed a
gendered presence that would define proper, civilized,
White, American male [and female] conduct—conduct
that was not Indian-like, and not French, or British, or
half-breed. She served this function and served it well.
886 Qualitative Inquiry 16(10)
She is central to the Lewis and Clark narrative. In her
telling, writers have created the proper place for the
fully assimilated native American woman and her
family.
***
VOICE 3: Donna Kessler and James Rhonda:
paraphrase:
There are multiple versions of Sacagawea as she appears
in legend and myth, versions which have undergone
successive revisions since her original presence in the
Journal diaries (Kessler, 1996, pp. 98, 104, 109).
Three questions have preoccupied Sacagawea scholars:
The spelling of her name;
Whether or not she was
An indispensable guide
For the Expedition;
And the date and place of her death. (Ronda, 1984,
pp. 256-258)
VOICE 4: Narrator:
From the moment she joins the Corps, November 4,
1804, until August 17, 1806 when she is set back
ashore at the Mandan villages in North Dakato,
Sacagawea is a hovering presence in the journals.
There are more than 125 references to her (Slaughter,
2003, p. 102). Of course, there are multiple spellings
of her name: Sacajawea, Sacagawea, Sakakawea, Sah
ca gah we ah, and nicknames: Janey, the squaw, “Bird
woman,” “boat launcher” interpretress, Wife of Sha-
bano, the Indian woman, remarkable little woman.
(Ronda, 1984, pp. 256-257)
Sacagawea has no voice in this text and is not repre-
sented physically onstage (Denzin, 2007, p. 4). Her
absence and her silence highlights the absence of her per-
spective from the historic record as Denzin focuses on the
problematic ways in which her story has been constructed
by White men. Denzin uses a convention of “voices” in
which the voice of the “Narrator” stands separate from
that of the “Narrator-as-Interpreter,” which is also distinct
from that of the “Narrator who Summarizes History.”
These voices stand apart from the voices of the scholars
Denzin paraphrases and/or quotes.
Denzin’s Sacagawea performance text takes “text” a step
further. It highlights both the constructed nature of the narra-
tive surrounding Sacagawea and the constructed nature of the
academic article by standing each secondary source and each
narrative mode on its own. Mostly, these voices “talk” to the
audience—the scholarly reader—directly. Every once in a
while, a voice will address the presence of another voice, as
when, in Scene Four: Miscegenation, Voice 11: Reading
Sexual Politics: Childbirth and Mixed Breeds says, “The racial
politics and miscegenation message are clear. The races cannot
successfully mix” (p. 108). To which Voice 12: Shirley Chris-
tian (paraphrase) responds, “Hold on here. Louis and Clark
and Guthrie were operating with only one model of racial and
sexual politics. There was another model, the one the French
followed” (p. 108). These voices highlight the contested nature
of the historic record and the ways in which multiple scholars
read it in contrasting ways. If good performance ethnography,
according to Bryan Keith Alexander (2005b), articulates
human behavior as performative, “as socially constructed,
enacted, emergent, repeatable, and subversive” (p. 414), this
performance text articulates scholarly labor as constructed,
enacted, repeatable, and critical.
Sacagawea’s nickname, or the Sacagawea problem in
many ways mirrors “the aesthetic of objectivity” used in
mainstream multiactor documentary theatre pieces such as
The Laramie Project (Kaufman & the Tectonic Theatre
Project, 2001). While Denzin (2007) does not build his per-
formance text from interviews, his primary and secondary
texts operate in much the way interview texts might in a
mainstream documentary theatre piece. Each character, be
they historic figures or contemporary scholars, is framed as
a “real” expert, speaking text (or paraphrasing ideas) from
an “authentic” source they have authored. These texts are,
at times, broken into verse on the page into what Monica
Prendergast (2006) might call “found poetry,” but when
spoken aloud, even the verse sections scan as naturalistic, if
scholarly, speech. Actual facts are presented in a credible
way, backed up with multiple citations; these facts counter
dominant narratives like that of a happy Thanksgiving in
Plymouth. Ronald Pelias (1999) suggests “[Performative
writing] fears the declarative (‘it is’); it lives in the subjunc-
tive (‘as if’)” (p. x). This use of expert voices emphasizes
the declarative, leading the reader to a stable understanding
of the reasons for the absence of Sacagawea’s own perspec-
tive in the historic record. Denzin’s project is a successful
critical reading of history; he uses an “aesthetic of objectiv-
ity” to convincingly build his argument and dramatize
truths so often cloaked by myths of the American West.
Yet Denzin departs from “the aesthetic of objectivity”
by consciously situating himself within the story, rather
than presenting himself as an observer living apart from the
action. The author’s own voice is present as “Voice 18:
Author as Squanto” recounts his participation in a child-
hood Thanksgiving pageant (p. 109). Denzin, in this
moment, situates himself as an avatar for a scholarly audi-
ence who, like him, perhaps “grew up inside a white
imaginary” (p. 109) but looks back on these childhood
experiences with a bit of embarrassment and as an adult
now knows better than his elementary school teacher who
“Never Met Howard Zinn” (p. 110).3
Snyder-Young 887
There are hints Denzin does not intend his performance
text to be read exclusively as one would read a scholarly
article. His introduction begins with that of Voice 1, labeled
Narrator-as-dramatist (p. 104). In an endnote, he includes
a note on performance:
This play can be performed on a simple set, around a
seminar table, or from a stage in front of an audience.
A series of images, and photographs, accompanied by
period music, should be projected against a full-size
screen, necessitating the presence of audio and video
equipment. To the side of the stage, stands a large
roving spot-light, called the “Camera Eye” which
moves from speaker to speaker, returning always to
the narrator. (p. 128)
In calling the performance text “a play” and himself a
“dramatist,” Denzin sets up his expectation that his piece,
while published for a scholarly, reading audience, is intended
for a live one.
Live performance “provides space for the living, experi-
encing, and researching body to be seen and felt” (Spry, 2001,
p. 720) critiquing and contradicting, as Tami Spry puts it,
The myth of the researcher as a detached head—the
object of Thought, Rationality, and Reason—floating
from research site to research site thinking and speak-
ing, while its profane counterpart, the Body, lurks
unseen, unruly and uncomfortable in the shadows of
the Great Halls of the Academy. (p. 720)
Denzin (2003) himself writes,
Performances deconstruct, or at least challenge, the
scholarly article as the form of preferred presentation
and representation. A performance authorizes itself
not through the citation of scholarly texts, but through
its ability to evoke and invoke shared emotional
experience and understanding between performer and
audience. (p. 13)
Yet Denzin’s (2007) performance text runs thick with
scholarly citations; his reference list runs over fifty sources.
Many of the “voices” Denzin invokes are those of scholars
and those of the narrator in his multiple narrative modes.
This theatrical convention of “voices” reinforces the value
of the spoken/written word over the unmentioned body.
Operating from the historic record, the only traditional
“characters” he repeatedly returns to are those of Lewis and
Clark, and as their texts are often taken from their journals,
their voices operate in a mode more narrative than dramatic,
again, privileging text over body.
Johnny Saldaña (2006) cries, “This is not a performance
text” (p. 1091). He goes on to clarify:
These are words printed on paper
(or projected on a monitor
depending on your subscription format)
in poetic form
published in a journal. (p. 1091)
Erving Goffman (1959) defines the performance of self
in everyday life as “the way in which the individual in
ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to
others” (p. xi). Just as J. L. Austin (1962/1975) posits that
an utterance is, in itself, an action, and that the speech act
can be an act of doing something, the act of writing a text
in a nontraditional format and publishing it in a peer-
reviewed scholarly journal can be read as an action—a
representation of scholarly identity.
The on-paper-only performance text can create private,
individualized relationships between author and audience as
each reader individually navigates the work in the act of read-
ing it. When Linda Park-Fuller (2003) uses thick, sensory,
anecdotal “performative” writing to describe her experiences
participating in Playback Theatre events, she invites the solo
reader in to develop a relationship with her descriptions of
moments in which she, as an audience member, a facilitator,
and as a participant, felt uncomfortable, lost, and confused.
When Tami Spry (2001) critiques,
monologues about what should be endorsed,
authenticated,
and marked
as scholarship. (p. 708)
in poetic form, she critiques in form and content alike. Spry
represents her dissonance on the page by structuring essays,
complete with citations, as poetry—thus representing her
own identity as a radical, “academically heretical” (p. 708)
scholar.
But these on-paper-only representations do not do the
same thing and cannot claim to do the same thing as live
performance. Performance ethnographer Joni Jones (2002)
writes, “Performance offers a new authenticity, based on
body knowledge, on what audiences and performers share
together, on what they mutually construct” (p. 14). The live,
embodied, collaborative experience of the performance
event can provide a platform for knowledge construction.
Body knowledge can be built in collaboration and in rela-
tionship with performance events, but it is fundamentally
individualized, and individual audience members and par-
ticipants in performance events have agency in how they
interpret live performance (Hall, 1980). Kinesthetic knowl-
edge, experienced in the gut, can provide the possibility of
radical transformation—of real changes of perspective and
real shifts in understanding.
As qualitative researchers, kinesthetic learning and per-
sonal transformation are part of our experiences in the field.
888 Qualitative Inquiry 16(10)
D. Soyini Madison (2006b) writes, “Ethnography is as
much, or more, about bodily attention—performing in and
against circumscribed space—as it is about what is told to
you in an interview” (p. 401). Our methodologies require
crossing boundaries, learning through experience, and then
attempting to communicate our individualized, visceral
learnings for others. Many of us are drawn to performance
for its radical potential to share these learnings in an
engaged and embodied way (Alexander, 2005b; Cho &
Trent, 2009; Goldman, 2006; Olomo, 2006; Soyini Madison,
2006b), and for our communication of our research to trans-
form, just as we are transformed in the process of doing it.
We want “to stir up feeling and provoke audiences to a
social realization and possible response” (Alexander, 2005b,
pp. 411-412). So many of us look to live performance, for
as Jill Dolan (2005) argues, “live performance provides
a place for people to come together, embodied and pas-
sionate, to share experiences of meaning making and
imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intima-
tions of a better world” (p. 2).
Visual Metaphor and the Rupture
of an “Aesthetic of Objectivity”
I stand frozen on a hospital gurney in a blue tinted spotlight,
wearing a blank white mask. I am performing in Philip Tay-
lor’s (2006) ethnotheatre piece Beautiful Menaced Child at
New York University’s 2006 Forum on Ethnotheatre and
Social Justice. My mouth is open wide, my hands placed on
either side of my face, in an imitation of Edvard Munch’s 1893
painting “The Scream” as I do scream, sending an elongated
“aaaaaaaaaaah” echoing through the historic Provincetown
Playhouse. This representation of rage and frustration has been
developed in a rehearsal process by a team of arts-based
researchers looking at the phenomenon of teenage suicide on
the campus of a large, elite, private university. Though in our
research process, we encountered no interviewee who stood on
a table, held her head in her hands and screamed, this moment
of metaphor perfectly summed up, to us, a frustration, rage,
and powerlessness expressed by our participants. Soyini Madi-
son (2006a) writes, “The body breathes and listens inside the
temporal space with affect and emotion as theory and polemic
conjoin and deepen these feelings even more.” (p. 348). This
simple theatrical moment represents, in an expressionistic and
body-based fashion, a key emotional impulse we found run-
ning through our research data.
In a different scene in Beautiful Menaced Child, two
actors in white masks poke and prod a patient, prone on a
hospital gurney, spouting symptom after symptom directly
at the audience:
Sadness, anxiety, or “empty” feelings
Decreased energy, fatigue, being “slowed down”
Loss of interest or pleasure in usual activities
Sleep disturbances (insomnia, oversleeping, or
waking much earlier than usual)
Appetite and weight changes (either loss or gain)
Feelings of hopelessness, guilt, and worthlessness
Thoughts of death or suicide, or suicide attempts
Difficulty concentrating, making decisions, or
remembering
Irritability or excessive crying
Chronic aches and pains not explained by another
physical condition. (Taylor, 2006)
The words cease to have meaning as the list continues.
Each item elicits a robotic movement from the patient, as
she, isolated limb by isolated limb, attempts to assert some
agency in her examination and physically manipulate
herself into a standing position on the gurney. The doctors
continue to speak at the audience, listing symptom after
symptom of depression. They never look at the patient.
They never ask the patient how she feels or what she thinks.
Instead, they announce to the audience what they, in their
superior expert knowledge, know she is feeling.
The text for this segment was taken directly from a web-
site run by university health services. In working on this
piece of Beautiful Menaced Child, we used performance as
a method of document analysis as we searched for mean-
ings hidden in the university’s responses to suicides on
campus. By deconstructing the text aesthetically, we were
not only able to present it in a heightened way but learn
about the power structures embedded in it in the process.
Philip Taylor referred to the work of Bertholt Brecht and
Samuel Beckett as aesthetic models for the devising of
Beautiful Menaced Child. The resulting expressionistic per-
formance utilized absurdist forms to denaturalize a story of
powerlessness and depression and draw attention to the
ambiguity and contested nature of the relationships between
students and the bureaucracy of a large university’s mental
health services. Taylor costumed all performers in mask,
disconnecting the moving image and the spoken word in
moments like the one described above. Characters and sit-
uations were symbolic rather than realistic. Facts were
presented in such a way as to draw attention to the power
structures declaring them to be “true.” The “aesthetic of
objectivity” was replaced with what dramatic theorist
Marvin Esslin (1965) defines as an absurdist aesthetic,
“striv(ing) to express its sense of the senselessness of the
human condition and the inadequacy of the rational
approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and
discursive thought” (p. 16). This form was central to the
critique of a dominant narrative told by and about univer-
sity mental health services.
Taylor and his team of researchers are trained theatre art-
ists. What can an arts-based researcher with a less extensive
theatre background do? Carl Bagley (2008) suggests research-
ers collaborate with artists. Invited to give a keynote address at
Snyder-Young 889
a conference on arts-based educational research, Bagley
handed his research data off to an ensemble of performance
artists, who pulled their own meanings and metaphors out of
the ten interviews they were given. The piece they and Bagley
created began with an introduction by Bagley in “a space to
explain” (p. 60) outside the doors of the theater and concluded
with a reflection session in one of the theater’s rehearsal stu-
dios. Inside this frame lay the multimedia performance piece
the artists made of Bagley’s data set. The artists created an
interactive installation of everyday objects and ushered the
audience through different areas of the space to witness expres-
sionistic moments reflecting themes and attitudes the artists
found running through the data set. A performer makes an
audience member a cup of tea; the entire audience waits in
silence while the kettle boils (pp. 61-63). A man and a woman
unload a washing machine, performing a stylized tug of war to
a heavy drumbeat as they wrestle for control over the act of
folding the laundry (p. 64). Performers set up at a starting line
as if to begin a race and the race is put on hold; this image
repeats throughout the performance, and the piece closes with
the performers finally taking off at a sprint to begin the race
(pp. 61, 63, 64).
These expressionistic moments represent themes from
Bagley’s interview-based data set rather than attempt to
recreate or imitate moments from the interviews themselves
for an audience. As the collaborating artists neither struc-
tured the research project nor conducted the interviews,
they create meaning out of the context of the larger project
and are free to find avant-garde forms to communicate
concepts and feelings they pull out of the interview texts.
The work they ultimately devise frames the audience as
participant-observers of a nonnaturalistic world thick with
recognizable symbols they, themselves must negotiate.
Just as the artists did not participate in the design of the
research project and the collection of ethnographic data,
Bagley did not participate in the process of creating the per-
formance piece. From his description of the project, it
sounds as though he had limited input into the ways in
which his data were ultimately analyzed and presented.
This model of collaboration in absentia may prove dissat-
isfying for many arts-based researchers, who may want
input into or a degree of control over the analysis and pre-
sentation of their data.
Yet Bagley’s model of interdisciplinary collaboration
offers possibilities for experimentation with form and the
rupture of the “aesthetic of objectivity” by, as Tami Spry
(2001) puts it, “reveal[ing] the fractures, sutures, and
seams” (p. 712) of human understanding and scholarly
labor and battling the positivist agenda in
the work of
academic colonizers
who still purport a realist agenda
for direct access to Reality. (p. 712)
In this passage, Spry critiques the dominant paradigm of
realism in form and content alike, following Brecht
(1949/1964) and Boal (1979) in highlighting the connections
between realism and the ways in which it can make dominant
power relations appear natural. Bagley’s performance art
piece defies the realistic modes of performance discussed
earlier in this article—the privileging of text over image,
the naturalistic imitation of interview participants during
the interview act, and the direct address of text to audience-as
witness. His act of collaborating with performance artists
ruptures dominant modes of data analysis by inviting
others into what is often a solo act of sifting through data,
finding themes, and making decisions about representation.
As scholars are often trained in and rewarded for creating
text-based work, we often focus on data analysis and
reporting as text-based tasks. Bagley invited performance
artists into this process—artists trained in and rewarded
for creating image-based work—and they used their
professional skills to find visual and physically performative
metaphors in his data set. These metaphors rupture an
“aesthetic of objectivity” in which Truth is performed by
representing “real” research participants in naturalistic
ways.
Conclusion: Beyond an
“Aesthetic of Objectivity”
There are concrete things arts-based researchers can do to
move beyond an “aesthetic of objectivity.” In this section, I
offer suggestions based on a variety of practices: focus on
audiences, create participatory performances, collaborate
across disciplinary lines, take aesthetic cues from partici-
pants, and look to a wider range of professional performances
for aesthetic inspiration.
Arts-based researchers and practitioners of performance
ethnography often articulate a desire to democratize our
scholarship (Alexander, 2005b; Denzin, 2003, 2006) and
make our work accessible to audiences beyond the acad-
emy. Yet a continuing challenge performance-based work
faces is that live performance is by definition time and site-
specific. These qualities make it particularly useful for
community building, dialogue, and local advocacy, but they
make it a less than efficient way to widely disseminate
research findings in an academy that continues to be text-
centric twenty years after Conquergood (1991) began
advocating for the legitimacy of performance as scholarly
representation. Performance may leave archival records of
its existence in the form of scripts, marketing materials, and
video documentation, but in its liveness it is fleeting. The
material conditions of academic life still encourage us to
perform our work as one-off performances at scholarly con-
ferences or in short runs on our campuses or in our local
communities. Both Beautiful Menaced Child (2006) and the
multimedia performance art piece the artists created out of
890 Qualitative Inquiry 16(10)
Bagley’s (2007) interview data were presented only once,
at conferences for scholarly audiences.
Given this, it would serve us well to focus attention on
who our audiences are. Different works speak to different
audiences, and we use different performances for different
purposes. Arts-based researchers, like most artists, have our
own individual aesthetic biases—I, as you may have
guessed, am drawn to expressionistic work. But in many
contexts, my personal aesthetic should not overpower the
needs of my participants and the goals of my particular
project. As Judith Malina, coartistic director of The Living
Theatre and veteran theatrical activist, suggests, “We need
to ask, first of all, ‘What do we want to say to which
people?’” (Malina, Reznikov, & Josbeck, 2001, p. 154).
A performance intended to train preservice teachers in
classroom management might require a different form than
one advocating educational policy to legislators, which
might require a different form from one inciting public
audiences to write to congress. While this article has
focused on nonrealistic artistic forms, there are certainly
contexts in which realism’s ability to represent brutal
inequality might be appropriate, and in which tools such as
irony and juxtaposition might be used to critique dominant
power structures. An increased focus on the specificity of
our audiences can aid us in finding right aesthetic forms to
fit the concrete contexts and aims of our actual scholarly
performances.
But is this really enough? Many of us want to use our
research to create, as Olomo (2006) writes, “citizenship,
community, active participation, and pluralism” (p. 344),
and engage in radical acts of social change (Denzin, 2006;
Pollack, 2006). Alexander (2005b) calls, “Performance eth-
nography as an academic construct cannot sit in the ivory
tower and invite audiences to come to it. It must go to those
places and spaces where such critical performance inter-
vention is needed . . .” (p. 433). Conference performances
communicate to particular scholarly audiences; campus
performances communicate to particular local audiences of
students, faculty, staff, and friends; and performances in
specific community sites communicate to particular local
audiences. Bruce McConachie (1998) and Daniel Goldman
(2006) highlight the significance of the location of per-
formances in engaging potential audiences, as college
campuses and campus theatre buildings embody particular
power formations some audience members may find hos-
tile, intimidating, or simply “other.” To fulfill the promise
of democratized scholarship, we need to cross as many
boundaries in the performance of our research as we do its
collection.
Participatory forms can be used to actively include audi-
ences in making meaning from our performances. Arts-based
researchers often explicitly choose performance as a medium
for data reporting out of a desire to invite audiences of our
research into the process of co-constructing knowledge (Cho
& Trent, 2009; Park-Fuller, 2003; Pollock, 2006). Participa-
tory performance forms such as Theatre of the Oppressed
(Boal, 1979) and Playback Theatre (Park-Fuller, 2003) can
rupture the “aesthetic of objectivity” by taking artistic deci-
sion-making power away from performers and giving it to
audience members and by posing problems rather than offer-
ing stable solutions.
Collaboration, as I suggest earlier in this article, can aid
arts-based researchers in working with artistic forms in
which we may not be professionally trained or skilled. Most
qualitative researchers are accustomed to thinking of data
collection as a collaborative act—we collaborate with “par-
ticipants” rather than conducting research on “subjects.”
The suggestion we collaborate with visual, musical, and/or
performance artists at the data analysis stage is a radical
proposition—it challenges our own authority as expert ana-
lyzers and reporters of data. But we cannot all have the
artistic skills of professional musicians, poets, actors, visual
artists, playwrights, choreographers, directors, composers,
and theatre designers along, with being professional
researchers, scholarly writers, and teachers. Theatre is a
collaborative art bringing together artists with different dis-
ciplinary skills in the act of creating performance. As
arts-based researchers, we can take more cues from the the-
atre, and by collaborating with professional artists expand
our range of aesthetic options beyond the skills we, person-
ally, may bring to a project.
Just as an arts-based researcher selects performance as
the medium for communicating her research findings to her
intended audience, she needs to select the aesthetic form to
most clearly communicate her findings. The form emerges
from the data, illuminating and reflecting its themes, as the
process of creating theatre from a data set becomes, in and
of itself, a process of data analysis. I do not argue for nov-
elty for novelty’s sake but offer some recommendations for
arts-based researchers to think about as they search for the
performance form to fit the story of their research.
One way to rupture the “aesthetic of objectivity” might
be for arts-based researchers to take more aesthetic cues
from the artistic forms made and consumed by our partici-
pants. Soyini Madison (1998) writes of gospel rhythms
found in the speech patterns of an African American inter-
view participant. The theatre ensemble The Civilians
(Cosson et al., 2009) create a Christian rock musical taking
cues from culture created and consumed by the evangelical
communities under study. These forms made and consumed
by participants might be musical, rhythmic, or visual,
moving the focus of scholarly performances from the text to
the visual, aural, and/or physical.
If the default models for many scholarly performances
have been the mainstream documentary theatre perfor-
mances of the 1990s, we can look for alternate models in
Snyder-Young 891
the annals of theatre history and on contemporary stages.
Taylor (2006) chose an absurdist aesthetic for Beautiful
Menaced Child to highlight the primary theme of bureau-
cratic absurdity emerging from his data. He took the plays
of Samuel Beckett as models, as they shared his primary
theme. Scholars might look to playwrights and/or perfor-
mance artists whose work shares themes with their data set
and use preexisting forms as aesthetic models.4
Regardless of the aesthetic forms we choose to use to
represent our data, performance quality matters. If a live
performance is just plain old bad, it achieves few of its
goals to democratize scholarship and engage broader
audiences.
This article has focused exclusively on dominant aes-
thetics in a few select examples of arts-based research
performances. There is a need for further analysis of domi-
nant aesthetics in other forms of arts-based research,
including poetry and narrative writing. Arts-based research
has the power to disrupt positivistic, hegemonic discourses
by opening up collaborative spaces of kinesthetic, emo-
tional, and intellectual inquiry, yet the arts are not a panacea
in and of themselves. A dominant “aesthetic of objectivity”
(Denzin, 2003, p. 73) pervades much contemporary perfor-
mance ethnography and scholarly performance text,
subverting many scholars’ stated desires to use aesthetic
forms to critique hegemonic discourses and democratize
scholarship.
Performance can reiterate as many stereotypes, domi-
nant discourses, and hegemonic norms as it critiques. As
theatre theorist and activist Augusto Boal (1979) writes,
“Theater is a weapon” (p. ix); its power comes from its
form as well as its content. Live performance holds all this
radical potential and all this hope. But it also holds just as
much power to reinforce dominant power structures (Boal,
1979). An “aesthetic of objectivity” can reinforce the
impenetrable authority of the scholarly expert, offering
right answers rather than really good questions, leaving
little room for radical transformation.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the reviewers for their clear and insightful com-
ments on an earlier version of this article. She would also like to
thank Christina Marín and Philip Taylor for their ongoing support
and mentorship, and Johnny Saldaña for encouraging her to
develop these ideas from an interactive workshop into an article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or
authorship of this article.
Notes
1. These are by no means the only examples of professional
theatre and performance artists staging performances using
ethnographic methods. For additional examples, see the per-
formance work of Emily Mann, Rhodessa Jones, Danny Hoch,
Nilaja Sun, Sarah Jones, Jessica Blank, and Eric Jensen, just to
name a few.
2. For some additional examples of scholarly performance texts,
see J. Saldaña’s (2005) Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality
Theatre and D. Soyini Madison and J. Hamera’s (2006) The
SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies.
3. Denzin uses this phrase ironically.
4. Because theatre and performance art are live mediums, the best
way to explore their aesthetic possibilities is to go see them
live. Many cities host fringe festivals featuring a wide variety
of inexpensive, often aesthetically adventurous performances
that might serve as models for low-budget and portable projects.
Scholars looking to explore a wide range of solo performance
forms might want to look at Jo Bonney’s (2000) Extreme Expo-
sure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts From the Twen-
tieth Century; those looking to explore aesthetic possibilities of
ensemble, community-based work might want to look at Robert
H. Leonard and Anne Kilkelly’s (2006) Performing Commu-
nities: Grassroots Ensemble Theatres Deeply Rooted in Eight
US Communities; those looking for models from the annals of
theatre history might want to look at an anthology like W. B.
Worthen’s (2007) The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama.
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Bio
Dani Snyder-Young is assistant professor of Theatre Arts at Illi-
nois Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on applied theatre;
her dissertation The Rules That Rule Their Worlds: Urban youth
deconstruct their antagonists through Theatre of the Oppressed
examines the sense teenagers make of their relationships with the
authorities in their lives through their engagement with antagonis-
tic characters they create in original interactive theatre pieces. Her
current project, American Antagonisms, uses community-based
performance to examine social antagonism in contemporary North
American contexts.