Roland Kelemen: „Why Is Research in Theatre Solitary When Theatre Itself Is a Collaborative Form?” A conversation with Duška Radosavljević

A conversation with Duška Radosavljević, dramaturg and scholar, on the occasion of the “Conversation as a Research Method in Artistic Research” workshop. Photos: Evelin Vén.

The Hungarian version of this interview can be found here.

In the contemporary landscape of theatre and performance studies, the methodology of research is often as contested as the subject matter itself. How do we generate knowledge? Is the solitary scholar a relic of the past? Recently, the University of Arts in Târgu Mureș hosted an international workshop facilitated by Duška Radosavljević, Professorial Research Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. The workshop, dedicated to conversation as a research method, brought together PhD students and scholars from across Europe and beyond. Following three days of intense dialogue, embodied practice, and “future gazing”, we sat down to discuss the implications of the workshop, the crisis of the university, and the potential for a new transnational alliance of researchers.

This is a rather „meta” situation we find ourselves in right now. The journal Játéktér asked me to conduct an interview with you, and I realized that although I haven’t accepted such requests in recent years, this specific occasion demands it. The workshop you led was about conversation, so I thought: I will learn something new about conversation as a method during the workshop, and then we shall have another conversation about the conversations that happened during the workshop.

It is indeed very meta.

This interview aims to present the reader – specifically the Hungarian professional community – with an insight into what happened during those three days at the workshop entitled “Conversation as a Research Method in Artistic Research,” organised by the University of Arts in Târgu Mureș. To begin, I would like to return to a fundamental question you posed in the workshop description, which I found striking in its simplicity and self-evidence: why is research in theatre solitary when theatre itself is a collaborative form? It’s something we perhaps discuss informally, but it is essential to say it out loud. Could you elaborate on what this proposed „conversation methodology” is fundamentally about?

Simply put, it begins with exactly what we are doing right now: with an interview. The way in which interviews have been utilised in the social sciences versus the arts and humanities has been slightly different. In social sciences, the interview is often strictly a means of collecting data – data that is subsequently aggregated, analysed, and from which insights are drawn.

In the arts and humanities, and especially in our field of theatre and performance, there has been a blurrier line. We often see the „journalistic interview”, which is frequently based merely on feeding the curiosity of the reader by focusing on a celebrity or a star. This approach doesn’t necessarily possess inherent epistemological value, because it simply caters to general interest rather than contributing rigorously to the pool of knowledge. First of all, the question that arises – and this is something we grapple with – is how we use the insights gained from the interview to support some sort of genuine knowledge inquiry. I think interviews haven’t necessarily been taken particularly seriously in the history of research within the field of arts and humanities, yet that historical oversight does not exclude them as a possible epistemological tool.

To return to your point about the solitary versus the collaborative: I wanted to take the basic tool of the interview and push it forward into other forms of interpersonal relations between researchers. We’re not talking about the slightly unequal setup of a traditional interview – where one person asks and the other answers – we’re talking potentially and ideally about a situation where two people take turns illuminating a particular issue. Ideally, this creates a space where connections are established. I have to say, the way we did these conversations during the workshop, specifically on day two, didn’t lead us in that direction either. And it’s fine, because I think that the value lies in trying and establishing connections in the first place. That was the focus, or that was the way in which that exercise went. It was a necessary step toward the final day, where we brought groups of individuals – who had met over the previous two days – together into a shared task of generating a collaborative discussion in relation to a question. So, there is a lot here to unpack. 

And why did I ask the question of why research in the arts and humanities is solitary when theatre is ultimately a collaborative activity? I think it is partly motivated by the fact that the history of our field abounds in sole-author studies – books and articles written by individuals. We work with the assumption that it is only an individual scholar who can generate meaningful knowledge in relation to a particular research question. Yet, we know that in the sciences, they work collaboratively. In the sciences, you need a lab and several people working together to generate new knowledge about a specific problem. I think the underlying question here is really about ego. What are the assumptions underlying the pursuit of knowledge in our field? Of course, it is not a rigid rule; there have been collaborations and co-authored books in our field. I am currently editing an issue on „coalitions” for Performance Research, and we have received several articles co-authored by more than two people. However, it still feels like a relatively new and experimental academic endeavour. Asking questions about how we can formalise conversation as a research method is very useful. That’s another part of the question that I was asking in the workshop. I wasn’t hoping we would get a definitive answer to that – it’s an open question that will take time for us to answer.

Do you see specific advantages to this collaborative approach over the more traditional, lonely research method? Can you pinpoint the benefits?

Good question. Let me find a way in. I have enjoyed collaborating with people both as a dramaturg and as a scholar. However, we must acknowledge that it’s often a scary thing to do. There are deep anxieties about collaboration, especially because we don’t know the people involved. When there has been no spontaneous collaboration before, we don’t know how it might pan out. We don’t know how we might manage the balance of individual input, ensuring every person finds a meaningful role, or if our agendas will align.

In a way, it’s probably safer to work alone. Probably, you are secure in the knowledge, in the views that nobody will challenge, therefore you can pursue an argument and an agenda on your own, bringing it to completion exactly as you envisioned. But I think that approach may not necessarily go as far. I genuinely believe that we get further when we have an exchange with someone else, when we actually put more than one thing together. A lot of this comes from my research into the collaborative and ensemble way of working, which was present at the beginning of my career as both dramaturg and scholar. There was this metaphor people used about ensemble work: working together in a group is greater than the sum of its parts. You might consider the individual parts and put them into an equation, but what you get from group work is qualitatively different and greater than those individual contributions. This implies that you have to remove the desire to be seen strictly as an individual, or to have your input measured in very concrete terms. It’s a choice one has to make. Are you more interested in having your own individual platform and all the credit, or are you interested in getting further in your pursuit of knowledge? Do you want an outcome that you haven’t predicted, or do you want an outcome where you’re fully in control? That’s the basic question at the core of it.

I’m not suggesting that everyone must adopt one way of working over another. And perhaps there are other methodologies that I haven’t accounted for in this particular outline. Personally, I might also be interested in working alone sometimes. You are free to make that choice as a scholar. It’s not a choice you make once and then have to stick to it for the rest of your career. There are different modes of inquiry. You can have a mode where you work on your own. Then you might have a mode where you work in a group, prepared to have your personal input subsumed into a result that is greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes, of course, the result is not greater than the sum of its parts, and that is the risk of that particular adventure. There is also perhaps a third model, which some scholars in our field are using: a constellation where you have a more experienced principal investigator overlooking a number of post-docs and PhDs. It’s a more hierarchical setup, but they are working under the same umbrella towards similar objectives. In that case, you still have individual scholars visible, but you’re creating something bigger than the sum of the individual parts. This is not about advocating a single way, but asking: what happens if we get into a conversation, and if that conversation results in an epistemological inquiry that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise?

Regarding individuals getting into a conversation and moving forward, it was quite interesting to observe the composition of this workshop. We had PhD students primarily from universities in Romania, Hungary, the UK, and Sweden, but also from Denmark, Serbia, Slovakia, even from Brazil and Chile. The workshop was based on the format you developed for the Auralia.Space project. As I understood, that project involved conversations between academics, aiming to show new formats for knowledge production. How did you feel about this specific transnational group involving itself in these conversations? In your description, you explicitly mentioned a desire to establish new methods for collaborative knowledge production across borders and languages.

It was slightly complicated, but in a good way. It was an interesting challenge to have this international meeting of people from very different places. Some of us are displaced – being from one country but living and working in another – and therefore bringing various kinds of „baggage” as individuals and scholars. Creating a space where all these differences somehow meet was a very different contextual challenge from the one we had in Auralia.Space.

For context, regarding Auralia.Space: as I mentioned on day one, we set out with a particular research design I had created in the safety of my individual turret when I was writing the project. But when the work actually started, we were confronted with the global crisis of COVID-19. Suddenly, I had to redesign the whole project. Originally, we wanted to engage in rehearsal ethnography – watching people work and having conversations, and drawing insights from that –, but because of the lockdowns, we had to transfer all our research onto Zoom.

The notion of the „Salon Conversation” was born out of those circumstances. I have to credit my collaborator, Flora Pitrolo, as it was actually her proposition to try conferencing with this format: inviting two people into a conversation, holding space for two scholars to talk to each other. It was linked to the fact that in my original proposal, I was already thinking about how conferences could be re-envisioned as spaces for spoken exchange rather than reading papers. We had the opportunity to host a space for two scholars to have a conversation. As this took place during the COVID pandemic, people had more time, and many responded positively to the invitation. We invited people to have these conversations with specific restrictions: it had to be limited in time, it would be for one hour, and we didn’t want to moderate the conversation. We wanted to see what happens if you put two people in a Zoom room and just hold the space for the conversation. Of course, the participants were often colleagues who were already acquainted. There were some exceptions where we paired them up, but usually, it was two people who already wanted to talk – whether due to familiarity with each other’s work or personal connection. Another factor we introduced was the use of sound cues as a way of organising the time and always ensuring a prompt to respond to if they got stuck.

The setup in Târgu Mureș was different. Here, I was invited to talk to a group of students and bring students from elsewhere to create an encounter. It was a very interesting invitation, but it was with a group of people where one had to assume people did not know each other, and they had never met before. Some people had, because you, from Târgu Mureș, know each other very well, but we had people from Budapest who didn’t know each other, and then we had people who live in Denmark, but they work in Sweden, people from London who were actually from other places themselves, too. People from disparate backgrounds, research cultures and projects. We could have paired people based on research interests, but that might have felt forced or left people out – for instance, the one person interested in puppetry. So, it made more sense to pair people up randomly to allow for connections across the board.

We used storytelling in the warm-up to simply meet one another, break the ice, and spark conversations that might continue even outside the formal workshop time. As a facilitator, my focus was on managing the group and generating meaningful conversations, while also testing this specific format in an embodied way. I had never done it this way before; we had only done it on Zoom, and I was curious to see what would happen and what new possibilities might emerge when we workshop this format in a physical space.

So, this was the first time you tried out this format, not just in an embodied way but with a transnational group?

Yes. I had one conversation previously where I used the format in an embodied way with just one other person – an artist named Kate Hunter, featured on the Auralia.Space website. She was visiting Copenhagen, and initially, she asked to interview me, but we decided to try the salon conversation in person. It was interesting to compare that experience to the Zoom salons I had done with Flora. I could sense that the conversation I had with Kate in person was different in nature from the ones we held on Zoom. However, the structure – having someone hold space and time for you, and having sound cues to organise the conversation – was something I thought would be interesting to try as part of this encounter.

I found that the structure of two people holding space and time for someone else made it easier for us. Whether we knew each other or not, it was less difficult to jump into the dialogue and follow through to deeper conversations. Moving to the end of the workshop, the third day was entitled „Future Gazing”, and we engaged in preparations for open space conferencing. What conclusions did you draw from it? You were acting as both a facilitator and an observer.

It was interesting to see the open space conferencing format work in such a small group. Usually, an open space conference is held for a random gathering of individuals who come together to address a particular subject, while people may or may not know each other. But here, we had a group that had already been together for two days, so there was already a group psychology emerging.

We started by letting every person in the room propose one or two questions of their own, and we put them all up on the board. There were many interesting ideas in the room, but what was fascinating was that, out of the topics that arose, the ones that bubbled to the surface were largely about well-being. Not so much about the research, but about how we, as researchers, ensure we have some sort of structure and support network. 

We didn’t have much time, so we had to prioritise: we ended up with three questions. One was about objectivity and subjectivity, which many people initially wanted to tackle. Another question concerned burnout. The third was: How do we build a transnational network that might help us hold conversations as and when we need to? Interestingly, the people who proposed the objectivity/subjectivity topic decided they actually wanted to join the well-being group. So, we ended up with two key groups: one focused on preventing burnout, and one focused on the transnational network.

I’m very glad because I feel like the ownership was taken by the group itself, which is the point of open space conferencing. For me, whether acting as a visiting professor, speaker, or facilitator, the focus had to be on how the participants could take the work forward. It has to be for the benefit of the people present. I was interested in how the group could benefit from the encounter itself, rather than just what I had to impart. If I had just come to give a lecture to a group who already knew each other, the dynamic would have been completely different, and I might have designed the session differently. But the challenge here was: how do we make this disparate group gel very quickly, in a limited time period and work productively together? The open space conferencing format seemed like a useful tool in that context.

I am very pleased with the outcome, specifically that Tanja Hylling Diers and Iury Salustiano Trojaborg, PhD students at Lund University, came up with a concrete invitation to take this forward into a journal they are editing. Perhaps at some point, there could be a reciprocal invitation. You have already done one invitation by hosting this workshop, and I must mention, we are all extremely grateful for your amazing hospitality, it’s something unique to this part of the world. In Sweden or the UK, we would not necessarily have the resources to offer accommodation, food, and a bespoke theatre program for a group like this.

This brings me back to the importance of working together as a community of researchers in the arts and humanities. Our field is under threat internationally, and we need to protect it. Universities are facing different pressures at the moment; the university as an institution is in crisis. I have just read a post today about Peter Fleming’s book, Dark Academia: How Universities Die, whose basic premise is about how corporatism has invaded universities: in some ways, it is hollowing them out, removing the curiosity-driven work we’ve been doing for centuries. This is a concern! I think we need to conserve the values and resources that we have at our disposal in different contexts, and then pull these resources together as part of this alliance. That feels really valuable to me.

It is powerful how you speak about us having to protect ourselves and our field. I find it important to mention that one of the concrete results of the workshop is the „seed” for an alliance, the Transnational Alliance of Artist Researchers in Theatre and Performing Arts. How do you feel about this? What were the roots of this idea during the workshop?

I think it emerged directly out of the open space conferencing on the final day. It came as a suggestion in response to those two key questions: how do we preserve well-being, and how do we work transnationally? This alliance is a way of saying: okay, we will formalise this. We will call ourselves an Alliance, and we will work together to uphold these values that are important to us – values that can potentially be important to others, too.

I don’t know what the future of this Alliance holds – whether it will open out to others or how it will grow. It depends on us as a group. But certainly, for now, it feels like we have something to hold onto after we have left Târgu Mureș. Even though we leave and you stay, we still have you, and you have us, and we can carry on our conversations.

Circling back to the workshop for a second: I noticed that you were taking notes throughout the workshop – not standing in front as a professor delivering a lecture, as you mentioned, but actively engaging, observing, and learning. Does this mean that this format or workshop is also in a „work-in-progress” state for you?

Oh, yes, absolutely. As I said, it’s the first time I have done this workshop in this format. It’s a learning experience for me as well. I’m reflecting on the process, and trying to improve the way I would do it if I were to run it again. Even though the outcome was positive, and I’ve been reassured by the participants that it was great, I would certainly make some adjustments. I’m curious what would have happened if we had held the open space conference on the first day and then worked in a more focused way? But one never knows. This is the thing with both research and teaching, and it is something I deeply believe: both research and teaching are improvisation. They have to be improvised in order to work. I don’t want to diminish other methods – personally, I have been known to just turn up, deliver a lecture, and leave. That is an option, and I fall back on it sometimes. But for something meaningful to happen, you must allow for improvisation.

Research is improvisation because you start with a question to which you don’t have an answer. If you have the answer at the beginning, there would be no point in doing the research. You must have a hypothesis to begin with, but be prepared to change your mind because the result will always be something you discovered along the way. Similarly, in teaching, even if you deliver a lecture, you might face a question that forces you to think of an answer on the spot. Then there is the kind of teaching where you go in with just an outline, you have to see what comes up in the room and direct it so everyone gets something out of it. I tried both in this workshop. It’s much harder work than doing a lecture, but I believe it leads to something greater than the sum of its parts.

As a PhD student and teaching assistant, I have only conducted seminars yet, and I agree – it is harder than just talking while they listen. But finally, this event wasn’t just a workshop; you had fully packed days: you saw performances, you gave a lecture on your research work: “Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age”. What were your main observations during these days, not just about the workshop but about your visit to the University of Arts in Târgu Mureș?

It’s a really interesting question, and I must admit it was hard to relax into observing because the schedule was so intense. I felt like I didn’t have the time to just reflect on what was going on. I’m really glad we’re having this conversation now, with a bit of distance, because that space is necessary for the ability to observe and reflect. It would be interesting to ask other participants about their observations, particularly regarding cultural differences. For me, that aspect wasn’t as dominant because I am originally from Serbia, so there was a sense of recognition and familiarity with the Southeastern European context. I would be curious to hear the perspectives of the participants who were perhaps encountering this culture for the first time.

An important revelation for me was the actual historical and cultural significance of the University of Arts in Târgu Mureș – the fact that during the communist years it was the only theatre academy outside Bucharest and that it has been able to grow and develop its own notable identity as an institution beyond the confines of historical constraints. One thing that perhaps puzzled me – and this may be due to the academic tone of the encounter and the tight schedule – was that I didn’t actually get to talk to you as much as I would have liked. You were fantastic hosts, lining everything up and holding the space for us, receiving all these perspectives. But I feel I haven’t really had the chance to hear enough from you about your own concerns, expectations, and needs in this context.

That is important feedback. We had discussions after the performances, but that wasn’t really the space dedicated just for us, especially with you coming from abroad. But I am incredibly thankful for your time and for this initiative. Let us continue what we started!

I just need to reiterate my thanks to you, Roland, for your meticulous care, and to everyone else in Târgu Mureș, especially Ildikó Ungvári Zrínyi, for initiating and realising this idea in the first place, and to Erzsébet B. Fülöp for sweetening up the whole experience for us with her personal magic.