How to make a performance lecture? Exploring metaphor as embodied practice in performative research

Abstract

This article reports a study on the process of creating three performance lectures. Anchored in arts-based research and using collaborative autoethnography as a methodological approach, the study describes the process of interpreting texts through improvisation, embodiment, and metaphorical concepts. The study aims to challenge reductionist epistemology in higher education by illuminating the possibilities of diversity encouraged by improvisation, embodiment, and metaphors. The following questions guided this study: What pedagogical and artistic patterns of diversity emerge in our process of creating the three performance lectures? And what metaphorical, bodily, and improvisational qualities are formulated in this process, and how can they contribute to an educational context? The results show that the pedagogical and artistic patterns of diversity emerge through the oscillation between textual content, improvisation, embodiment, metaphorical thinking, and theoretical analysis. The qualities being formulated are that metaphor emerges as a terrain where knowledge, experience, body, and language can meet and negotiate via improvisation, which are all elements contributing to an educational context. Investigating the hybridity of performance and lecture makes tensions and gaps visible and therefore possible to process and negotiate. It also creates a possibility to bridge the pedagogical-self, artist-self and researcher-self.