The complexity of the establishment of research and related discourses into the field of performing arts has taken the course of an avalanche. From the product and image intensive period of the 1980s, following a period of politically orientated work, the 1990s and early 2000s will most probably be remembered as the era of research.

Overnight, research was established around 1997 and already consolidated with the now legendary exhibition “Laboratorium” in 1999, which also included a small number of contributions from the performing arts. The reasons for this development would need a thorough analysis addressing the phenomena also from perspectives of economy, ownership and social/political justification, as it is my belief that the actual interest in the community of makers and programmers was and is rather exaggerated.
It is fascinating to return to the mid-late 1990s and experience how dancers, choreographers, set designers and even the production manager in a microsecond grew an obsessive passion for research. Artists who had never shown interest in process orientated investigatory strategies transformed into first-rate researchers and with production phases of more or less a year the laboratorial rat had found its place in the performing arts. With the introduction of the r-word, a truckload of firmly established terminology exited the stage. Somebody defining his work as experimental was looked upon as the plague, and even only a vague hint towards avant-garde equalled immediate banishment from the entire scene. As much as research caught performing arts with the intensity of a hurricane, it was – and is also far too often – superficial in content and consistency. The lack of frames made whatever one called research into research.

The difficulty however is to what extent this is a positive or negative quality? Any field of research carries out the research it deserves, and it is always necessary with a super-contextual shift to manifest a change in a field of research. Epistemologists have examined how paradigms emerge, consolidate and dissolve as regularly as the sun rises, but since we know this we must conclude that, e.g., performing arts executes the research it desires. But it is also possible that what performing arts consider research in fact is something entirely different, something that will become apparent within the next few years when the flood of research turns tide and another current is building up. To initiate a crusade against the inconsistency of research in the field would therefore be to shoot one’s own leg, independently of the ambitions of the field. The engaged believes in research and will continue to do so until he doesn’t believe anymore, and at that moment it will seem as impossible to have believed, as it is natural today. A critique configured in this manner would inevitably position itself outside the field, which would propose a new or other fundament, or institution, which in its turn would need a thorough investigation.
Addressing the field through negotiations vis-à-vis governmentality however could offer interesting observations about what research, so to say, has done, or produced in respect of the performing arts.

Before starting, a brief detour into the state of the belief in research. Ten years after I first heard the word in the performing arts context, it is clear that the believers are already doubting, if for no other reason than the very fact that research today is as trendy as Dixieland jazz or t-shirts manufactured in sweatshops. What once was a close to hysterical migration into has over the last couple of years turned into a slow but unstoppable stream of defectors returning to more classical templates of production. Moreover, the belief structure has changed; it is no longer the creators or programmers that praise research, but rather a mixed group of theoreticians, who in addition are late converts who have moved in rather than initiated the field’s topology. The high-end ambitions of research platforms have too often, in accord with academic writing on the development of a field of research, turned into a retreat for individuals that either can’t reach or are prohibited a position in a conventional frame of production, or are considered a threat to a common frame of production.
The orientation of research in performing arts initiated an expansion through a series of politically correct tactics that emphasised inter-disciplinarity and culturalism, quite in the same way as performance studies, and it didn’t take long before research was hijacked by enthusiasts with the only mission to find themselves a place to belong to. The third step in the development of research in performing arts, after establishment and expansion, implies redefining the field and rehabilitating its symbolic value. This process is inevitably painful as it implies exclusion and closing doors; but it is necessary in order to define, not only a territory, but most of all topological and methodological consistency.
What research in this sense has done to the field of performing arts is in fact not an auxiliary elaboration of its intra- or inter-relationships, but has rather undermined its status and exclusivity in general.

The field’s resistance and even aversion against methodology is strong evidence to the state of research being considerably weak, similar to the phenomenon that anti-intellectualism normally indicates stasis or the decline of a field. Research in performing arts has yet to establish an accurate set of tools and a thorough methodological protocol in order not to perish in the climate of late capitalist research production. Tools and protocols that cannot be appropriated from other fields but neither can be autonomously produced from within the field, as both would result in a corrupt discipline due to personal, relational, economical and image reasons. Tools and methodology should be created in consensus with well-established ethical checkpoints combined with a thorough analysis of the field’s specific conditions, in this case, e.g., notions of temporality and the impossibility of, or not, repetition.

The common consideration is that methodology is an obstacle to creative and artistic potentiality, or with another wording: freedom. But if that is the argumentation, we have made a fundamental mistake in making artistic work or processes synonymous with research, when in fact those protocols are oppositional, and in so being to no extent competitive. It is urgent that the field make distinctions between engaging in artistic processes and research, hence a thorough apparatus of definition also would clear up any hierarchical misunderstandings. There is no higher or lower value in engagement in research processes; it is simply another practice whose aim is to produce other kinds of knowledge and artifacts. Without methodological accuracy and consistency, it is impossible to evaluate the quality and importance of a certain work and keep processing outside the domains of taste and individual desire, which in the case of research implies that its knowledge economy remains passive and consolidating instead of active and potential.
Instead of producing restriction, a thorough methodological framework would enable the field to validate work for what it is, and moreover produce a platform for an active criticality that would grant a critical reciprocity between providers of research platforms, economical frames and researchers, creators and users of research results. It is important, too, that methodology under no circumstances here is related to science or academia but simply is a set tool and protocols that offers opportunities to identify, compare and differentiate a territory of research and hence produce autonomy based on production rather than heritage or charisma.
The lack of accurate methodological protocols manifests power in the provider of research and platforms to the extent where research, instead of expanding and emancipating the field’s knowledge production, consolidates it and furthermore places an unacceptable emphasis on success, especially in respect of representation and efficiency. Only through the establishment of an accurate methodological frame can research free itself from the superficial demands of capitalist economy.
What research has produced relative to the field up until today, instead of a surplus and hence a lateralisation of knowledge, is a hierarchisation of processes and practices that in a larger perspective homogenises the momentum of the field’s endeavours.

At the time when research first appeared, it was due to a need to change the strong product orientation of the market and its subsidy systems. Questions were asked to what extent, e.g., a choreographer could, so to say, update his or her practice when there were no economical or physical frames for other kinds of work than production. Only in rare educational frames could research activity be considered, and a dominant part of workshop opportunities were at that time directed towards the passing on of established skills such as release technique, or a choreographer’s individual perspective into dance and performance. Research related activity at that moment appeared as a means to shortcut those manifestations especially in relation to result and representation. A number of projects and processes were initiated by individuals or small communities on an often idealistic basis, but with the institutionalisation of research in performing arts an opposing momentum occurred. Everybody engaged in research practices at that time was of course enthusiastic to all expansive opportunities that appeared, as the formulation of a field is precisely when and where active and vivid knowledge production is most potential. The field’s territory also stakes out a grid for what kind of research and activity it can muster, but as the distance between creators and managers is distinct in the field of performing arts, this development was rather soon appropriated by venues and festivals and taken out of the hands of the researchers.
Instead of releasing performing art practices, the introduction of institutional research frames resulted in further consolidation, and today it is clear that rather than an emancipating movement, research has institutionalised the practice even more.

When an autonomous artist in the performing arts field today receives a research grant, he or she actually is not at all free to engage in an open process but is instead inscribed to the extent where individual creativity is being institutionalised. Prior to the institutionalisation of research every individual was free to engage in whatever process of thinking, practicing and experimenting, whilst today those activities have also been mapped and applied to a, however vague, protocol of authorisation.
In this respect what research has done to the field of performing arts is not to emancipate it from the circulation of exchangeable commodities, but has instead also commodified work, understood as engagement in some kind of research process.
Research was implemented in a mode of production due to proprietary licensing which stratified its discourses and immobilised its capacity of any deterritorialising radical knowledge production.

It is telling to return briefly to the recent history of performing arts in Europe. The circulation of what is conventionally called contemporary dance, performance and theatre takes place in institutions and venues that, at least as a model, were established around and just after 1980. At that time, a young generation of artists and managers detected and worked for a new system for presentations of a new kind of work. For a period of 10 to 15 years, these venues were established and consolidated as sustainable economies. Systems of exchange, networking and production were elaborated, and often quite clear hierarchies of circulation grew strong, something which a ‘general’ audience reacted to and favored in respect of expectations and reliability. When research appeared in the mid-1990s, it could generally be understood as a counter-reaction to known of frames, initially as a creator- and doer-based initiative. A heterogeneous group of independent new players appeared on the market with new needs and desires, players that to a higher or lesser degree did not wish to be inscribed in the established market or simply were not welcome. Process orientation, research and a kind of ad hoc production basis appeared to be an attractive mode of production, but with the incorporation of the mentioned modes of work in venues and festivals modeled in the 1980s, research instantaneously turned into precisely the opposite. Instead of opening for a new platform of circulation and ownership, research-based work became inscribed as a means of maintaining the power of established venues, festivals, companies and makers. A choreographer or group identified with research was – instead of being a potential, and I would argue, positive threat, or opportunity ¬ disarmed and classified in a way where it could never grow out of the, so to speak, small format. There certainly are exceptions but it is easy to detect what kind of artists is identified with research – and it certainly aren’t those who are engaged in larger institutional frames, even though these are perhaps the ones that most of all could need a break from the obsession of production.
What research has done to the field of performing arts is not to open for the elaboration of new and alternative modes of production, of new and alternative kinds of work. It has actually made it largely impossible for young and progressive initiatives to elaborate and obtain sustainable economies and audiences. In other word, research has been incorporated in "conventional" models of the performing arts field in order to maintain the hierarchies created already in the 1980s. This consolidation of power has increased the identity of the artist over a romantic set of protocols purporting individuality, oeuvre and calling on the one hand, and precariousness on the other.

The unique opportunity and complexity of performing arts that the expressed and the expressing often, if not as a rule, coincide, offers a minimal distance between invention and expression. The choreographer dancing has always been a hands-on researcher, or in other words, his/her own guinea pig, his own frame of experience and sensation. Such relations, implementing their own, individual and common-sense methodologies which to the same extent intensify regressive strands, which enter realms of execution for the simple sake of pleasure or economical winning and inventive capacities that, often using intuition as methodology, encourage differentiation in the field. A strong example is Alexander technique, but these inventive practices more often take place in informal settings over years of hard work, and rarely in unorthodox circumstances. With the introduction of research, the relation between creator and executor has changed where the formal awareness of the process has been institutionalised. Research has, spoken with a light hand, made it difficult simply to go and dance, to use one’s imagination and make it happen. Research proposes certain hierarchies of process and production, individual and group processes and work, and most of all formalises relations between the validity of a process and work-relative sets of discourses active in the contexts at a certain moment. With the introduction of research, performing arts has not been offered enlarged opportunities for inefficiency or processes dealing with extreme topics; on the contrary – what research has done to the performing arts is to make it trend- (who today would make an image-based work with an extremely elaborated light design?), format- (collaboration is everything and a pseudo-lateral working process imperative), discourse- (bring some books without pictures like S, M, L, XL to the studio and work as you always did), media- (show a video at the end of the piece where you are instructed in doing something you can’t really manage and speak about knowledge production on a personal level) sensitive, and hence has homogenised its expressions.

This litany could go on forever engaging in what we thought was doing well but turned out to be doing exactly the opposite. But has research then only been negative to performing arts? Certainly not. On the contrary, the expansion of the field of performing arts with the realm of research has been imperative for the field’s survival and as performance and performativity in the 1990s became a buzzword for any intellectual with dignity, it is rather encouraging how open the field has been to the engagement of, and in, other kinds of knowledge production.
In fact, initially there are only two issues that need to be raised in respect of how to change a possibly negative development. But there is of course a slight problem with those two – which is that they both demand the format of a PhD to be thoroughly discussed. What follows here is in a sense comprehensive but tries to formulate, in brief, some perspectives.

1. What adjustments are necessary to approach after ten years of working under the criteria of research?

2. With the institutionalisation of research, what has occurred in respect of distribution of responsibility?

It is today ten years ago since Hotmail was globally released. In 2006, Hotmail has approximately one billion hits a month. It is also ten years since SMS appeared in conventional private-user mobile phones. The world-wide volume of SMS was in 2005 estimated to be more than three hundred billion messages. Amazon and Ebay similarly were created in 1995. Google was released in September 1999 from a garage in Palo Alto. In the Spring of 2006, Google CEO's mention 150 million queries per day, or more than 50 billion per year. Skype was registered as a domain name exactly three years ago, on April 23, 2003. At this very moment there are 5.5 million users on line, out of more than a 100 million downloads.
Considering that research in the performing arts has the same ten years long history, and that Skype was invented two-thirds into that brief history, it is quite easy to conclude that adjustments might be small in perspective but enormous in proliferation. There is of course the danger of rushing to the next base while forgetting the kids in the shopping mall, but new modes of communication and production do not imply a homogenisation of results nor an arrogant relation to the history of research; but there certainly are no reasons to evaluate research that jump over classical resources as less prominent. On the contrary, if research in the performing arts nourishes a desire to be something more than a tiny field for the already engaged, it is obvious that all opportunities must be explored.

Generally speaking, the field can choose to confirm research as it is established in and through strong and historically prominent fields, or bring forth the specificity of the field and explore it as something that other fields could gain momentum from. Good examples are Doris Humphrey’s book “The Art of Making Dances” that largely is a defense of dance in regard of the classical treatise producing an expression as specific due to its universality, and on the other hand Yvonne Rainer’s No-manifesto and adjoining texts, where instead the art of making dances dissociates itself from expressions constituting sustainable artifacts. Humphrey is easy to cancel out and to be asked to get a grip on and start painting or writing poetry, as she also necessarily confirms classical, male representational orders. Yvonne Rainer instead differentiates and potentialises dance in respect of all other expressions, and in this act, at least announces that dance and performance only can be “inscribed” in representational orders we are familiar with, but, precisely in this “forced” translation produces itself as ontologically critical.

The setup of research in performing arts is based on modes of distribution and circulation that today are largely outdated. Ten years ago is basically closer to J.S. Bach walking to Lübeck to listen to Buxtehude in 1705 than to the ease with which we move over Europe today. So why is it still important to work on research on the basis of discussion, exchange and same-room-organisation, when time and economy allow us to meet in the sushi bar of the Ryan air terminal somewhere? – And that’s only for those of us who don’t communicate over digital platforms or group chats.
The communicational tools that the field utilises naturally influence the result of its endeavours, and it is precisely in producing distance between, e.g., new communicational tools and the position of the body and movement that conventional dialectics are maintained and further consolidated. If the body and its movement are in one or another way fundamental to human life and consciousness, it is not likely that Skype, PDF or P2P (peer-to-peer networks) will affect it any more than central perspective, combustion engines or moving images, but on the contrary could offer the potentiality to understand and utilise the body and its movements in new and alternative ways. These are certainly issues that directly concern research in the field; also this publication which I hope will be available on the net to download for free, so that interested persons who have different opportunities of accessibility can take part of our research and thinking.
Is it a good or a bad sign that there are almost no video clips of contemporary dance and performance work available on the internet, when on the other end of the line it is obligatory to send videos to venues and festivals? It is surprising that however the performing arts has been engaged in collaboration, collectivity, processes of orientation and research, that material is not made available on the Internet, as it is a platform that would increase, e.g., the possibilities for visibility in a decentralised way, give individuals and groups living and functioning outside urban contexts the opportunity to familiarise with contemporary dance, and open the quite homogeneous formats especially of dance performances. And most of all, give a larger group of researchers access to material produced here and now: not only performances, but interviews, lectures, presentations, rehearsals which would not only be extremely vital for the scene, but furthermore would increase mobility and a decentralised, lateralised, user-innovative climate. As Erik von Hippel has shown in his recent “Democratizing Innovation” (Cambridge, 2005) economies that stimulate user innovation obtain significantly enhanced heterogeneity and versatility in product development. It is not as often believed that users are keen on keeping their innovations to themselves but an allowing climate where sharing is stimulated instead creates responsibility for the situation’s or product’s quality, status and place on its market. Open source like licensing increases a client’s identification with a product; responsibility increases and abuse decreases. When Ebay experienced a need for prohibition due to abuse of the platform the company, instead of creating complex sets of legislation turned to the community of users that subsequently innovated self-regulatory monitoring systems.

The common mode of engaging in research in performing arts is behind a closed door and without an attached web page, live streaming, wiki or blog. Why does research in performing arts that wishes to place itself inside the contemporary urban mosaic desire to be closed off, locked away instead of in the middle where it happens and where today’s movement practices are communicated and produced?

The body always moves. Blood pumps through the veins, stimuli flow into the brain and responses shoot back to keep whatever is going on, going on. At some moment, quite often, the body starts moving through space, or its spatio-temporal co-ordination changes. Sometimes we recognise these changes as dance, at other times as walking or being hit by a car. Still, these movements are recognisable precisely as movements framed by a context which is continuous. Is the body actually moving, or does it remain immobile? Its domain has been enlarged but it is still under control.
With a glance back into the 20th century we might find that the body perhaps only moved a handful of times. That it passed out of co-ordination without anybody noticing, and moved into the light, into the recognisable again with – for those who were willing to see and sense – an enormous power, and on second thought had always been there, always already. Only when expanding or exterritorialising itself and its conditioning has the body really moved. It is not the exterritorialisation that is the movement but the reterritorialisation, recoordination or recoding. One could say that the body moves without traces, imperceptibly, and that movement is representation catching up. Those movements that are moments, however always on the move, are the rare instances when the body is truly mobile.

Research functions in quite the same way: intrinsically it is always moving, or better yet is remixed and re-recorded. Sometimes, it is set in motion, shifting its co-ordination, but it is still a matter or repetition, or better seriality. The known moves, but how often is it that the unknown moves into the known? Always – however imperceptibly. It is only in those instances when the known catches up that the unknown appears. Those moments are the rare cases when research is truly mobile.

Space is striated. Its continuity is dividable, and its parts are consistent. It is this consistency that provides us with the opportunity for orientation in time and space. The striation of space, literally and metaphorically, produces a sensation of security but when enhanced turns into some or other kind of prison.

In an early film by George Lucas, THX 1138 (1971), a futuristic world is shown in which the humans are inscribed in an absolute control society. Their lives and environments have been turned into an inescapable striation. A small number of individuals however rebel against the situation and are imprisoned; but instead of putting the prisoner behind steel bars, George Lucas offers a brilliant solution: the prison is represented as an endless absolutely white space, without beginning or end. Space has become smooth, without horizon and therefore deprived of co-ordination or orientation. Simplified, one could say that striated space equals knowledge or reproduction and that smooth space constitutes the unknown, i.e., territorial and exterritorialised, respectively.

In the extremes of both versions, one is imprisoned.

Brian Massumi developed the concept of phasespace, which is a space composed by incompatible entities. It is discontinuous but undivided, i.e., it consists of incompatible superimposed phenomena that offer an orientation, however unreliable. Or better yet, a multiplicity of becoming orientation. Phasespace is those instances of true mobility where knowledge appears and the body really moves.

Translated into frames of research, striated space equals a set-up where the co-ordination between research and institution or production is static and immobile. Smooth space, on the other hand, could be identified as a situation where the division between researcher and institution or production has been completely abandoned. What the two set-ups have in common is that neither research nor the body can move. On an abstract level, a research set-up aiming to make knowledge move is one that offers itself as phasespace. Such research frames thus are those where the engaged is continuously shifting from being a researcher and representing an institution or product, a receiver and producer, a staff member and guest. Where a multiplicity of orientation is possible as long as the engaged is willing to negotiate the validity and ontology of each and every decision and its process of emergence, i.e., according to what mode of production a decision can be taken. Therefore, the question is not if we need positions such as researcher and institution or product, but how it is possible to produce a frame in which engagement in any position is the result of a particular negotiation.
Needless to say, the downside of a phasespaced research platform is one of sustainability and initiative, but on the other hand, the upside is the opportunity for a radical heterogenisation of knowledge, ability and desire.

Is it possible to rethink research not in the sense of what it needs but, on the contrary, through what it doesn’t need? What are the fundamental needs of research in performing arts?
Secured needs and allocated resources inevitably produce striation and decrease the opportunity for the mobility of knowledge and its agents. Research in performing arts is not in need of further stability, grants, institutions, structures and labs, but of mobility and versatility. It is in the cracks between the implicit striation of methodology and epistemological accuracy, and the smooth terrain of radical mobility that research can intensify prosperity in the field.

How does research in performing arts identify its user? Does the field itself actually need users, and if so, how can it be its own client without becoming a self-indulgent territory which produces closer and closer family relations? Since there are very few traces in respect of publications, video material and ongoing discussions (I have, e.g., not found any blogs related to the field) it is not evident whether the field wants to have users at all. It is not easy in this field to detect the user – but thorough methodological consistency will certainly give the opportunity to clarify who he or she can be, which when the basis of research is individual and, in a negative sense, project-to-project based, will be far more complex, and it will therefore be difficult and energy intensive to create a community of interest. If the field identifies the user as already initiated and active in the field, the current climate is quite effective and productive in the sense of creating a clan-like circle, or better a small number of competing circles whose opposition is based on negative critique and exclusion which in the long run only can create a vicious circle.
If research projects would be evaluated not only due to the topic but perhaps also due to what presentation format in respect of which user group, it would be possible to measure the success of a research project from a multiplicity of perspectives. In contrast to how today it often is connected with how “cool” the topic is estimated to be, and how inspiring, i.e., successful and understandable the presentation of the project is with regard to a general user who is always supposed to be satisfied within ninety minutes.
Such an approach could also open opportunities for complex and mature research into a wider field of performing arts practices, such as work related to children, reception, learning processes or disability, and for more conventional approaches it would similarly expand the capacities to relate to larger frames than what has been made popular by other fields of research in relation to different performatives such as gender, colonialism or identity politics.

In the initial phase when research in the performing arts was first established, it was important to make many and different individuals participate. Research, as we have seen earlier, needed to grow as a field and it soon became connected to participatory activities especially in relation to inter-disciplinary and cultural practices. But however much somebody participates – it implies that one leave one position and engage in another. When participation, when the research period was over – in our field normally spanning from a couple up to 20–30 days but very rarely longer –, it was easy to change the costume and forget about research. It is not the activity of researching that is important but how processes activate individuals, and how many. An example from history could be Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, who in 1847 through empirical research found out that it was a good idea to wash one’s hands after handling dead bodies. The factors were many but Semmelweis, even though he managed to convince other doctors to participate in his experiments, did not manage to activate in them the results of his research. Consequently, Semmelweis’ research was forgotten and he died in a mental hospital at the age of 47. In the same year, Joseph Lister started a series of related experiments, and it was through his research that medics were first activated to start disinfecting hands and instruments when passing from department to department.
This anecdote brought together with the communication technology we today can use easily and at a cheap price, can perhaps assist research in performing arts instead of working on participation to emphasise how its research is distributed, circulated, and to activate individuals and groups to be involved and use research results in their daily practices.

In order to activate a larger group of users and doers, it is also important to look further into how research results are being licensed, something which is complex in our field as most creators earn their living by transforming their research into circulating products. However, it is clear that proprietary interests often, on a long-term basis, tend to create much less feedback and innovation, as well as responsibility. Open-source-like licensing instead tends to increase responsibility and grass-root initiatives.
Internet publishing, e.g., will not only create activation but also a faster and cheaper mode of publishing where material output is less stable and therefore can be rewritten and updated continuously.

Furthermore, open-source-like licensing is an opportunity for not striating the field of research but can – instead of how research conventionally has functioned via permanent membership, often via an oath – allow for more fluctuant concepts of ad hoc association where a differentiation of expertise can lead to higher specification rather than suffer under the concessional regime of inter- disciplinary practices.

I would like to mention a related issue in respect of institutional organisation connected to research. In any academic, medical or other public research it is unconditional that the head of an institution has merits in research. A professor is assessed on the basis of his/her research rather than on the basis of being a good boss, even though that isn’t a bad thing. This construction places the head of an institution in a healthy paradox where the research and the infrastructure, or economical basis balance each other as the head of institution has to keep up negotiation in two directions. Corporate research, on the other hand, is naturally dependant on economic expansion, placing the researcher under the oath of efficiency.
Looking into the performing arts field there exists an unclear framing in respect of leadership. It is not the current situation that directors of research platforms are themselves engaged in research or have the necessary knowledge in the field to evaluate the projects together with the research teams. In scientific research it is also common that a research project should be further evaluated by, e.g., an ethical board. The lack of such procedures can easily lead to confusion of interest and consequently to less accurate research projects.

This leads over to our second question concerning responsibility. It is very easy to blame institutional frames and their inherent inefficiency, but we also know that no institution is better than its researchers and it is only when the two resonate together that the result can be innovative. In the case of research in performing arts it is my experience that researchers rely to a large degree on the capacities of institutions and platforms, and often act in passive and demanding ways. As research has no market outside itself, has no or very few engaged users, it is often understood as something doers and creators engage in between production periods. If this would be the case in, e.g., medical research, doctors would be surgeons during the week and do research in the weekends. It is clear that such a division will not win anybody a Nobel Prize, nor innovate medicine. If an executing doctor takes an interest in engaging in his work also in the weekends, this is all positive – but we shall perhaps, also in our field, make a difference between being interested and proper research processes.
When it come to research in performing arts, this problem is not easy to solve due to the market share for research being relatively small. But it is only if the researchers produce a demand and argumentation for its share in the budget that it can grow. It is, however, also interesting to consider that in corporate business the conventional amount of money spent on research is approximately 3.5 % of the total budget, and in high-end fields up to 7–8 %. Since performing arts considers itself a high-end field, it is surprising to notice how few the institutions, venues and festivals are that allocate any budget at all to research and development. It is therefore my belief that only if the researchers themselves devote time and economy to research we can experience a renaissance in quality. In short: it is today, and in the near future, time to look into what responsibility the field’s creators and researchers claim.

Only through a collective engagement in a consistent methodology and specific epistemology, a thorough and ongoing analysis of what research has produced in respect of the field both when it comes to its aims and its users (and due to that, elaborate proper licenses), in combination with an individual responsibility with regard to what processes we are actually engaged in that we can look forward to a research climate that will enable the field to expand and create research, as well as performances that add something radically different to our expression and the world.

Mårten Spångberg