Executive summary

Report from ‘Observation, interpretation, decision’- a working session about improvisation and performance.

February 4th 2009, 9 – 16 pm., at Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens vej 1, 2300 København S, bygning 21, lokale 21.0.54.

Faculty: Assistant professor Michael Eigtved, Department of Arts and Cultural
Studies; Mogens Holm, Taastrup Teater.

Moderators: Mogens Holm; Henriette
Pathare; Judith Rothenborg; Nina Christrup.

Agenda:
• Introduction
• Performance
• Presentation of vocabulary and theoretical framework
• Discussion: How can stage-art profit from scientific perspectives and research?
• Master-class: Demonstration of professional working-methods
• Discussion: The function of the actors and the audience in the creative process: Who decides on creativity?
• Lunch and networking
• Groupwork and improvisations
• Discussion: What are the implications for management and for the identity of the organization of incorporating artistic concepts?
• Conclusion

Background
Today’s organizations embrace the arts. The discourse of ‘experience-economy’ hypes creativity and similar concepts, which were earlier on marginalized by the industrial economy. But what do organizations observe when they perceive creativity? In an attempt to answer this question the working session pursues a theoretical framework aimed at capturing the particularities of creativity and communication about creativity. The session is rooted in the arts, in the creative and cultural industries. But focus is directed towards the areas of experience- and transformation-economy, where the process of production and process of consumption are intermingling. Where the consumer (the audience / the observer) is part of the product; and the product is in part constructed by the consumer. Where the product is not fully unfolded until the final consumption (perception), and where - in many instances - the product transforms into a process. At this point creativity seems to become a key-ingredient in the process.

The session should make the attendants familiar with theatrical practise as well as some of the main theories of dramaturgy. Further, the session should provide an overview of the complications related to the definition and study of the concept(s) of creativity. Finally, the session should reach conclusions on how artistic perspectives may be incorporated in management and organizational development. The aim of the session was to explore how and to what extent academic concepts and perspectives may advance artistic work. Besides investigating the potentials of theoretical work for the arts, there was a special focus on how to employ artistic working sequences in management and organizational development.

Evaluation
During the day creativity was document and analysed as it emerged in the interaction between the actors and audience. The focus was on the process of observing improvisation as the smallest component in the creative process, and viewing the finished performance as the ‘end-structure’. Performance-analysis was then the tool with which the structure was identified.

Key questions that were addressed in the session included:
• What is creativity? (What does it do?)
• How can stage-art profit from scientific perspectives and research?
• What are the implications for management and organizational identity of incorporating artistic concepts?

The working language was Danish, and there were no special prerequisites for participating, since in order to establish normal working conditions the focal theatreperformance the session was open to the general public, thus participants ranged from actors to audience, and from scholars to first-year students. The session took an actual theatre performance as a point of departure. The performance
‘Spejlvendt’ (‘Mirrored’) was originally created through improvisation, and at the session it was followed by a master class involving professional actors and directors. The participants were offered the possibility to participate in the work verbally as well as physically – and indeed they did. The agenda, which is shown below, was altered during the day as the participants strayed from path of scientific observation and began to take part in the actual creation. Thus the session can be said to have broken its own boundaries as it turned from a scientific laboratory into an artistic stage.

The laboratory-workshop - a methodological contribution

In doing so, however, the session lived up to the concept of action research, which may be defined as an interactive inquiry process that balances problem solving actions implemented in a collaborative context with data-driven collaborative analysis or research. Thus the laboratory because it was an open joint session succeeded in not merely gathering data, but in generating data. This method is action research oriented in the sense that it processes the empirical data in ‘staged’ surroundings. Within these surroundings the empirical data is challenged into collaborating in the diagnostic process, firstly in devising methods for recognizing discourses and structures, secondly in identifying occurrences and defining (i.e. deciding) their causality, and thirdly in developing plans for coping and conserving (possibly improving and exporting) the creative processes to other environments.

The data of the laboratory are fed back ‘live’ (and captured on video), and the documentation and measuring of these results is off course an integral part of the process, as is the forming and testing of hypotheses. The researchers job, however, is not just to sample variables, but to involve with the data in an active moment-to-moment theorizing. 

In this way the research moves beyond reflective knowledge created by an outside researcher. It is devised to leave the researcher with an emergent and self-maintaining system of creative processes, and leave the field of research with new possibilities for selfdescription (i.e. analysis and renewal).

The session was concerned with creativity as it emerges in the communication, as it is conceived on the artistic stage, and enacted in the business-organization. How do we decide what is creative. We ask: What new possibilities does the spreading discourse of creativity present t o the organization? How does it effect for example aims and objects, subject-positions, identities, steering technologies or strategizing?

Theoretical framework and analytical strategy
The paradigmatic approach to the project is epistemological rather than ontological. It was less concerned with what the world is made out of - and more concerned with how knowledge is constructed and how cognition is possible. The session was based on an analytic strategy aimed at recognizing creativity both within the art-system, where the term originates, and within the other functional systems, for example the economic system, where the term is currently high-ranking.

The working session and laboratory aimed at observing ‘art as defined by the audience’, and it demonstrated the difficulty of a method which allows communication to communicate - without controlling parameters. The basic question: ‘What does creativity do?’ tended to motivate sensemaking rather than decision, and action rather than thinking. The session, being composed of participants from different spheres (art, science, education, business), negotiated creativity and leaped to contradictory conclusions. And this generated a ‘machine of creativity’ which manifested itself as a duality of freedom and constraints, a ‘creative space’, which appeared as an unstable and changing phenomenon, but which proved in fact to be a stabilizing factor when kept it in a steady state of conflict. Thus the creative process multiplied like a virus, so that the object (the art) and the backdrop (the audience) changed places, and the whole laboratory – so to speak - turned into a test-tube. The moving of the minds of the participants from this ‘orderly disorder’ resulted in plenty of recorded aterial, which called for more methodological coding, categorization, classification, and segmentation. The deduction of creativity from the abstract systems theoretical ‘observation-principle’ created the need for more empirical data from which verification could be induced. Thus this first laboratory experiment accumulated more questions than answers, and set forth an investigation of artistic
expressions as alternative ways of documenting and disseminating academic findings.

The idea of employing art in the dissemination of scientific knowledge is not new. At University of Southern Denmark the Centre for Art and Science focuses its work on communicating science. The centre uses art for new modes of expression, including theatre, installations, movies, concerts and debate events1. Still most members of the academic society writhe in agony when presented with the question: ‘Is there any room for artistic expressions in social science?’ Contrary to what one might think, it seems that quite a number of scientists have from time to time experienced artistic performances at conferences or PhD-defenses.