The “artistic researcher”—at times used interchangeably with “practice-based researcher”—tracks their research inquiries along continuum that spans a range of artistic, design, scholarly and scientific research. The transdisciplinary blending together of art and research, or practice and theory in another lexicon, fosters a type of continuously folding and unfolding of the creative and critical, the conceptual and the material. This hybrid approach, as it emphasizes the co-production of knowledge, often highlights emergent ways of understanding each other and how we make meaning in the world.
In the “Manifesto of Performance Research,” Brad Haseman notes: “[M]any practice-led researchers do not commence a research project with a sense of ‘a problem’. Indeed they may be led by what is best described as ‘an enthusiasm of practice’: something which is exciting, something which may be unruly, or indeed something which may be just becoming possible as new technology or networks allow (but of which they cannot be certain). Practice-led researchers construct experiential starting points from which practice follows. They tend to ‘dive in’, to commence practising to see what emerges.”
This “enthusiasm of practice”—as we build our capacities to be responsive to, in, and with the material matters of artistic world-making—helps us forge pathways needed for thinking about and practicing dynamic forms of engagement with each other. We can then connect across the fractured spaces in our local, global, and mostly importantly, translocal contexts—that is in ways that highlight the connective business of us working across both the local and global at the same time.
Folded Paper Dance and Theatre aims to build a network with artists, scholars, and museum and heritage producers within respective communities and across Hong Kong as well as in both a trans-Asia and international context, with a vested interest in new approaches to forums for generating new forums for cross-arts, cross-abilities, and cross-cultural arts and research production.
