Performative Publishing: Critical Ways of Making Public is a two-year research-creation project that explores new ways of sharing and making public research in the performing arts. Performance is often based on live experiences, bodies, movement, sound, materials, and relationships. However, when this work is shared through traditional forms of publishing, such as academic articles or documentation, much of what makes the work meaningful can be lost. This project asks: What could it mean to publish performance without reducing it to a record of something that has already happened? It explores performative publishing not simply as a way of presenting finished research, but as an active part of the research process itself.
The project develops publishing as a way of creating encounters, relationships, and new forms of knowledge. It seeks accessible, ethical, and sustainable ways of sharing research that recognize knowledge produced through bodies, artistic practices, lived experiences, communities, and relationships with the environment. Rather than treating knowledge as something to be extracted and brought into academic institutions, the project explores ways of creating and sharing knowledge collaboratively and from multiple perspectives, including Indigenous, Black, queer, disabled, and other community-based forms of knowledge. This research is particularly timely as it contributes to the development of Concordia University’s new School of Performance and the proposed graduate program in Interdisciplinary Performance Practices, creating opportunities to rethink how research in dance, theatre, music, scenography, electroacoustic practice, and other forms of performance can be developed and made public.