#PERFORMINGRESEARCH

#PerformingResearch is a series of events curated by Laura Risk and Nic Gareiss that seeks to more fully integrate the performance and research sides of NAFCo 2018: to bring together the poetic and the practical.

This project brings performance into the research spaces at NAFCo and researchers into the performance spaces, with the goal of spurring dialogue of all kinds—spoken, musical, and danced. In the process, we hope to interrogate the roles that performers and researchers often replicate in music and dance scholarship.

The morning research conference at NAFCo includes panels with “performer respondents.” For these panels, two researchers will present their work and then a performer will respond, through performance, to their papers. 

In the afternoons, performers and researchers will meet in conversation. Their dialogues may be through words, through music, through dance, or all three!

In addition, researchers will “perform” their current research projects at evening concerts during NAFCo: again, they have the option to do so in any way that they choose, including words, music, movement, images, or in a way we don’t even have words for yet.

Many NAFCo participants, including some who have agreed to participate in this project, are already both researchers and performers. We hope that this project will encourage them to bring together these facets of their musical lives and promote creative reflection on both sides of the performance+practice equation, maybe even collapsing these processes into one.

The series will culminate with a collaborative performance at the Gala Concert, directed by Sophie Motley, bringing together #PerformingResearch participants and creative elements from throughout the week. How exactly the participants will map out the space between performance and research remains to be seen, and we look forward to exploring it with you!