Featuring the Frame

As researchers we have a responsibility to query the spaces of work, and the frames that function to construct our work and our lives. As theatre researchers we construct conversation from the ephemera of performance – the residue and the things that are left behind from impermanence.

Distorting the Frame

Image Source: ZebrowskiPhotography

However, this leads us to question whether performance is *actually* transient. In Western societies we value the primacy of the text and the written word as a physical manifestation. However, bodies are just as physical as text: performance, and performativity, is inscribed on the body just as words as inscribed onto the page. The act of writing is, itself, movement.

Thinking the frame implies the recognition of the institutions, and institutional mechanisms, which structure our interpretations and understanding of events; for example, these could be social norms, or academic establishments. The role of critique is to look deeper into fissures of thought, in order to understand how we are governed by these frames; we read the historicity, the discourse, and the ontology of the data. We can’t not be in the system, so we find ways in which we may exercise agency and intentionality within the frame.

Within the frame of society, we place material value on the new: value created through novelty is a false freedom. Consumer choice creates cultural cache, associated with brand association: we operate on the level of phantasm. The ideals of the sensual realm (taste, colour, texture, sound), is repackaged and sold to us as fashion and food. We buy into the phenomenological through physicality – by re-placing the frame we can understand the structures at play which inform and dictate our apparent choices.

Sound, colour, and texture - the sensual made visible

Image Source: ZebrowskiPhotography

Researchers seek to define – not in an effort to arrive at fixity, but to allow us to open up and see the messiness that orders our existence. We create concepts to capture a fluid reality: words are like photographs that create and reflect a moment in time. Language reflects a society and culture, but society, culture, and therefore language, is fluid. There is a space of misunderstanding between a word, and the thing it seeks to define: i.e. ‘theatre’, ‘art’ - Language is not enough.