Research as Chreography - A little gem of wisdom

This little gem has made my Saturday night. The essay found in the link below has backed up what we have learnt in Module 1 about applying our practice to different things and helped bring relevance to what I am doing now in Module 2.

The essay was written by a dance scholar so resonated with me immediately but no matter what your practice is, is there a formula that you use that you can transpose into the idea research?

 After listening to most of us in Module 2 question if we are on the right path or how do we know if we are doing the right thing, I felt that I had to share this with you all.

"It seems important at this point to speak more about the kind of research I do and its relationship to other kinds of research. Some researchers are interested in pursuing questions of ‘Truth,’ or as close as they can get to it. For example, what kinds of dances were done by 15th century Italians? What are the effects of certain traditional dance warm‐up exercises? Other researchers, including myself, pursue questions of ‘Meaning,’ such as, how do different individuals perceive different kinds of dance? How do they perceive its value in their lives? The answers to this second set of questions do not exist as facts to be uncovered by diligent researchers, but are constantly in the process of being created. What we learned about reliability in 8th grade science does not apply, because the answers change over time. As different as these types of research are, all researchers, even those seeking objective truths, are involved in interpretation. We pay attention to things, select from our observations those which appear to be significant, perceive relationships between/among them, think about what these might mean, and make something out of the whole process. And what we as researchers, and thus interpreters, bring to our work is different because of who we are. One difference is that we as artist/researchers often choose to investigate phenomena of little interest to those outside the field. Despite desires for objectivity, we bring our passions, which determine what parts of the world we look at and the lenses we use to look at them. Both are shaped by our experiences as dancers." (Stinson, S.W, 2007)

The full essay can be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/14647890601029618

Bibliography - 

Stinson, S.W (2007) Research as Choreography [online] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14647890601029618 (accessed Feb 2018)