Project Description.
We produce scholarly and artistic content about performance,
and we do so in a digital format. We want to use the
multi-media convergence made possible by web technologies
in order to graphically and textually document, discuss,
and imagine performances. After all, the practice
of "performance" has always been "multi-media."
DeeP Research
Since "performance" is usually "ephemeral,"
"live," and "on-the-body," it
raises particular challenges for allowing one to conceptualize
it. How can one document, let alone analyze, an "object"
which is constantly fleeing its own objecthood, that
constantly escapes a seemingly solid-state certainty
as it moves forward in time to the always coming moment?
Rather than eschew such conceptualization, we want
to embrace it, while also acknowledging its difficulty.
By asking performance scholars to bring more graphic
material into their research, we hope to bring performance
research nearer to the temporal, embodied forms of
performance itself. At the same time, we want to allow
for some distance between the two (between document
and source), because we think that the process of
conceptualizing and assessing performances critically
is also an important stage in the ongoing production
of new kinds of performance. dpResearch projects should
be "deep research" in the sense that they
entail thick descriptions of performances; scholars
working in rehearsal with artists, and not just after
a product has been created; artists working with scholars
to find a useful critical distance in the process
of their own creativity, as well as to obtain good
documents of their work; humanists working with technologists
to re-imagine what a scholarly work might look like;
and so on.
DeePeR e-search
As the internet has grown, the amount of unverifiable,
uncreditable, uncited, unsourced information has also
grown, with both positive and negative consequences.
dpResearch is aimed primarily at performance scholars
and professional artists - but also at students and
amateurs of performance - with the desire to create
an open vehicle for performance research that also
carries the authority of diligent, documented intellectual
work. In that sense, we hope to provide performance
practitioners and thinkers a "deeper" form
of electronic search into performance than is currently
available.
dpResearch is published three times a year. Initial
publication is slated to begin this fall. Current
projects include research into the electronic-text
installations of Jenny Holzer; the performance techniques
and culture of Cantonese Opera in the San Francisco
Area; the collaborative and creative techniques of
Chicago performance troupe Goat Island; and a project
called "Blackness and Beauty" on the relationship
between skin color, culture, and choreography in different
parts of the Americas.
Core Personnel:
- Rebecca Groves
- Ehren Fordyce
- Harry Elam
Graduate Fellow:
Undergraduate Assistant:
dpResearch contact: Kathryn Syssoyeva <syssoyeva @ stanford.edu>
Visit the
dpResearch website (in development).
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